Dedication
FOR PHIL:
MY BIGGEST, MOST UNEXPECTED, PROUDEST FAN.
THIS ONE IS FOR YOU, DAD.
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This novel discusses sexual assault and sexual violence, and contains depictions of non-sexual violence and PTSD that may be triggering to survivors. Please see here for help and resources for sexual-abuse and assault survivors.
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last, there is nothing: the nothing between sleeping and waking, the not-being, not-feeling, not-knowing of anesthesia with no count-backwards-from-ten-nine-eight—
leftover, a heat too small to warm the sky; instead the sky drinks heat until muscles tighten, fingers stiffen, blood settles. the earth drinks, the river sighs, the trees watch—
one in particular, the half-oak: it closes like the lid of a music box. it folds the girl beneath its shelter; it protects the strange jewel inside from all predators but one—
her eyes are open
she does not sleep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Begin Reading
Author’s Note
Helplines
About the Author
Books by Saundra Mitchell
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Begin Reading
HOW DO I TELL YOU ABOUT THE BODY?
I’m gonna start with the worst thing that ever happened to me.
In summer; I was nine. Flip-flops, jorts, and my favorite green Minecraft T-shirt. I rode my red-white-and-blue bike around and around our apartment complex until I was primed with dirt and sweat—
For the record, I’m going back so far, from then to now, because it’s not a straight line. Life never is; at least, it hasn’t been so far.
So okay. I’d dropped my bike in the grass and sprawled out next to it. Dying in the sun, you know, basically hot-dirty-sweaty, played-out. The grass was cool and sweet and a little bit prickly.
He—tall, like my dad, curly hair like my dad—cast a shadow on me.
“Hey,” he said, “I have something that’ll keep you cool in the summer.”
I negotiated. (Because he was a stranger and Stranger! Danger! But also I’m not supposed to be rude to my elders. So which one is he? A stranger? An elder? Neither? Both?) I said, “I only want to look at it.”
He told me it was down a narrow lane running between the apartments and a strip of trees. It was always cool down there, always a little dark.
After, blood streaked down my cheek. Sweat too, smeared with dirt, sticky with snot. Something else was wet, somewhere else I didn’t want to say. Stranger Danger said this was all my fault, so I slunk home. I had to clean up. I had to hide the cut on my face. I had to peel off my skin and hide so nobody would ever find me again.
Another man followed me home. (Danger! Danger! Danger!) From his upstairs window, he’d seen something. Enough that he managed to get outside in time to trail me to my back door. I tried to make him go away. I tried, I tried, but he wouldn’t leave until I got my mom.
I gave up. I was tired.
He talked to my mom, who talked to the police, who talked to me at the hospital after the doctors talked around me and behind me and over me. The same doctors glued the cut on my face closed, like I was a teacup with a new handle, like I was a glitter project.
The gash streaked through my eyebrow, down my cheek, almost to the corner of my mouth. The doctors worried about it getting infected. (They don’t understand how it happened. It doesn’t make sense the way I explained it. He had a razor blade finger. He just traced it down my cheek and told me to go home.)
After that, I wore pants and extra underpants; I wore a hoodie over my T-shirt even when the thermometer topped ninety degrees. I grew my hair long, and I learned to love the inside.
Trees near buildings became bad places, full of poisonous magic.
I love corners; when you sit in one, there’s no one behind you.
I love walls that stretch to ceilings; not a seam or crack to be seen.
I love windows; they’re where the light comes in.
Only the light.
NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T INTRODUCE THEMSELVES like this, I know. But the scar’s right there. It’s the signpost that whispers with scandal. It says, Guess what happened to her.
These days, I wear one pair of underwear and whatever I feel like over them. I dye my hair into rainbows and cut it into sharp, short angles; the bob edge traces my cheek, the color glimmers. It makes people look away, at least at first, from the scar. But I’m telling you so you don’t have to guess.
What happened was bad enough; the guessers like to embroider. Sickos, seriously.
Also, I’m saying it because I think I have a responsibility: I had a “good” rape. The kind where I was young enough that it was definitely not my fault. I was not sexy enough for people to think I might have secretly wanted it. My rape was committed by a psycho-stranger-bad-man-not-anybody-nice-we-know.
Extremely not my fault.
Of course, it is never anyone’s fault.
I just have a story that liars and cheats and skeptics and haters of girls can’t argue with. There’s no world, no planet, on which a nine-year-old should learn about sex and syphilis in an emergency room while an intern glues her face back together.
I’m obligated to say it out loud for everyone who can’t. For the ones who don’t have bulletproof stories even though we’re all equal: something evil happened, and it happened to us. We didn’t make the evil happen.
Without the scar, maybe I wouldn’t tell my story. It’s not exactly a choice: the scar says I have to. That’s what introduces me. No matter where I go—to school, to camp, no matter how ordinary-average I am or pretend to be—
I’m that what happened to her?! girl.
If we ever have a conversation, I usually get to tell them my name is Ava—after I explain the scar. After.
SO I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT THAT NOW.
You know what everybody wants to know. The scar won’t distract you anymore, so we can move forward.
I’m getting to it. The body. I’m getting there, all right? But first.
When I tell you what happened, sometimes you’re going to want to know, Does she do that because of that? Is fill-in-the-blank behavior directly related to that day when she was nine? And the answer is:
YES
and
NO.
Why did you pick that shirt instead of another one? Why’d you let your friend be a douche-wagger just a little bit longer than you should have?
I have damage, you have damage. Nobody knows what they’re doing while they’re doing it.
Maybe yoga masters do. Or Buddhist monks.
Or maybe they forget too. Maybe they just have the veggie dog with relish even though they hate relish because the vendor seemed really nice and invested in sweet, pickled greenness.
It just is. I just am; you are too. So all of this defensive posturing is basically a way of saying:
What happens later, with the body, is not because.
Maybe it’s in spite of.
And yeah, I’m damaged. Who isn’t broken and bleeding right now, really? We all sing along to the strung-out and screwed-up who-loves-you-because-nobody-loves-me songs on the radio. And I know in those moments that I’m ugly, I’m worthless, nobody’s ever going to look at this and go, Ohhhh yeah, baby, get into my life.
And other times . . . other times I am the world. I am the universe and who wouldn’t want all this? Who’s even good enough for it? Not you and not you and not him and not her. I’m flavor walking; I’m the queen, I’m th
e stars and the sun, and I can fly.
(Sometimes on the same day.)
(Sometimes in the same hour.)
I used to spend a lot of time twisting things up and down and backward, trying to break logic. Or make logic of myself.
Like, here’s a question: Am I a virgin?
Don’t get squirrelly. You don’t have to answer.
My friend Syd, short for Sydney, thinks virginity is stages: mouth virginity, hand virginity—even boyginity and girlginity, with all the subcategories that go with. She says she’s only being linguistically precise. But her eyebrows have connotations.
This is all bull, they say, so let’s take this flawed logic to its most absurd conclusion.
I don’t speak in eyebrows. What I know is that, according to nine-tenths of the population, I’m either chewed bubble gum or absolutely pristine. It depends on the person talking. On the day. The hour. The minute. Who knows for certain?
No one.
I’m Schrödinger’s hymen.
ALL THIS TO SAY, I’M NOT AFRAID OF PEOPLE. I JUST don’t like them.
I mean, they’re fine individually, but I don’t like to be marooned in the middle of an ocean full of them. Too many voices, smells, touches—
So I bet you can guess how much I like school-the-place.
I stay on the edges when I’m there so I can meet my people, one at a time. That way, everything falls into a pattern and it’s just regular. In this class, I talk to her; in that class, to him—their faces fill out fixed places in my universe.
And that lets me notice new things instantly, like the weekend Syd switched her gold cheek stud for silver, or today, when she’s suddenly carrying her bag on her left arm instead of her right.
Her hair won’t be tamed, and the ringlets that used to be blond are a silvery blue. The color makes her blue eyes leap out, like she’s made from lapis and sapphires and wishes. There, on her wrist, she has new ink.
Possessive, I catch her hand so I can examine her skin. She went without me. She picked a design without me. It feels like a barb, but I try to be happy for her, and it comes out sideways. “You didn’t say!”
She shrugs. “It’s better in person.”
I trace my gaze over the permanent lines still tender and scabbed from their application. Three beehives sit on a bench, perfect golden domes. A haze of bees circles them; they swirl, they dip. Everything is touched with color, shades of tea and tan and honey.
Like the rest of Syd’s tattoos, it’s medieval. As in, actually medieval. Images from rare manuscripts illuminate her shoulders and her wrists, her ankles and her hips.
We’ve bonded over many things, and the distant past is one of them. (I like school-the-learning just fine; Syd and I own the history department.)
“Tacuinum,” she says cryptically but not. That’s the name of the manuscript where she found her bees. Every time she gets new ink, she catalogs it for me. Luttrell, Tacuinum, Etymologiae. She wears the history she loves on her skin; I keep mine in my head.
None of my tattoos belong to me; other people wore them first. I have Gaga’s Rilke quote on the inside of my arm and Lana del Rey’s paradise on the side of my foot. Rihanna’s stars cascade across my hip; Cara Delevingne’s wasp stings my shoulder.
These tattoos belong to people who are free and abundantly themselves. When they walk in, they belong, even though they look like they came from the moon or Mars or the Milky Way.
They don’t have scars; they are the scar—the line that separates them from the ordinary is their entire existence.
Their tattoos are my icons, little etched Patronus charms that fly across my body. So when I get ink, I get theirs. I reach for what they have; I cling to it in permanent colors.
“This is my favorite,” I tell Syd, allowing myself one last brushing touch against her wrist. Do I sound wistful? Resentful? I don’t think so; maybe I do. Uncertain, I add, “I like it better than the poppies, even.”
Syd smiles and falls into step with me. “Ooh, better than the poppies? Are you sure? Do you feel okay?”
“Shut up.” I lean into her. Maybe I had gushed about the poppies more than once, but they’re amazing. They grow over the curve of her shoulder and drape along the angle of her collarbone.
They’re perfect and she’s taunting me. I would elbow her, but we’re already pressed together, a needle to thread the crowded school halls.
“I picked it out in June; just now got the money for it.”
“Seriously? June? Shut up!”
A decision made when we were a million miles apart; it figures. We used to spend summers together; now we just miss each other for June and July. I go to my dad’s. She stays and lives a whole nother life, apparently.
I say, “I was stuck listening to dad jokes, and you were picking out tats. You suck.”
“I do,” she replies. “That’s why all the boys like me.”
I snort. The girls like her too . . . as do all the people who are between, or both or neither. Let’s simplify: humans with a pulse. They like Syd, and she likes them back, fearlessly. Maybe I should get one of Syd’s tattoos.
“Heart eyes, every direction,” I say. “Must be nice.”
“People like you,” she says. Then she makes a sound—tch—and shrugs it off.
It’s a conversation we’ve had a million times; it never goes anywhere. It’s contained in a bubble. I like plenty of people—humans with a pulse, actually—as long as they’re far away and, in their distance, untouchable. Syd doesn’t always have the patience for constructed unrequitedness, so she changes the subject.
“Guess what. Stepdork gave me twenty bucks for no reason.”
“You have a job.”
“I know, right? But twenty bucks.”
“So now you can take Meghan to get fondue.”
The fondue is a joke—there’s this pit right outside Caribou with nothing but fondue. Like, nobody goes there; I have literally never seen a car there, but the OPEN sign is always on. So we all joke about how it’s the most romantic restaurant in Maine.
Syd makes a zero with her hand and holds it up between us. That’s her sign that the hooking up with Meghan didn’t quite hook—and won’t ever again.
“I’m sorry,” I say instantly, but I feel off balance and awkward. Syd usually tells me things in the moment; she texts me the second anything good, bad, or indifferent happens.
As her best friend, I’m not supposed to stumble into conversational minefields. I should already know . . . about the ink, about the girl. Even though I feel the heat from her body against mine, she’s just out of reach. And why? What did I do? What have I done?
I rack my brain and try to find some offense that would send Syd off into the atmosphere, away from me. But there’s nothing. I can’t think of anything, not even a text with no punctuation. So I do what I’m supposed to do. I comfort. I sympathize. “That sucks. I know you really liked her.”
“Whatever. It’s all good.”
Syd seems okay—genuinely. (I’m the one who’s off.)
(I usually am.)
See, most of the time, Syd’s a transient when it comes to romance. She doesn’t plan where she’s going, and she doesn’t stay all that long.
The only serious relationship she’s had was with Connor; her boyginity was involved.
The week after, he told her he needed to go out with other people for reasons. Not good reasons or specific reasons; just because. He wouldn’t even take the blame. It wasn’t him, it was her.
And so Syd packed up her heart, learned to hang, and found Amber, who’s willing to tattoo us in her warehouse apartment, underage, if we pay in cash.
When we went for our tattooginity, Syd got a pair of blue demon legs with the devil’s face for the butt on her arm (Luttrell), and I got a swallow etched into my back (Ruby Rose).
Syd always makes herself bigger, scarier, stronger with everything she does. Her hair. Her clothes. Her ink.
People look at me and back away. (T
he scar.)
The more Syd modifies, the more that’s true for her, too.
We share an orbit, spinning and spinning around an unnamed planet—dark side, light side, always in tandem. We fit. We go. We’re safe.
Or we used to be.
Now she’s hiding things from me.
I’LL BE LATE, MY MOTHER TEXTS. USE THE CARD.
My mother is often late. I often use the card to order pizza or Chinese or sandwiches. Emphasis on the order: I’m not supposed to go out without prior authorization.
Actually, that makes it sound like Mom chains me in the house. It’s not like that. It’s a soft expectation. If she doesn’t take me to the place or explicitly give me permission to be in the place, well, I’m not supposed to be at the place.
If I asked to stay the night with Syd, no problem, permission granted. If I asked to go anywhere—well, probably, the answer was yes. She’d take me; Mom and I go to the library, we go bowling, we go swimming.
Just never me on my own. It’s for the best, though.
A couple of years ago, I tried to go to summer camp. I picked it myself: Camp Sweetwater, near the Hirundo Wildlife Refuge. It was supposed to be three weeks of intensive, hands-on history and archaeology, complete with trenches and test pits. (No real archaeology would have been harmed in the making of this trip.)
I bailed in the first week. It was too much. Too many people asking about the scar or, worse, not asking about it and staring. Hands framing mouths don’t keep in the whispers; they just make it obvious that people are whispering, about you.
The whole place was dangerous to my skin. The open bunks felt like threats; the open showers like invasions. We were supposed to huddle in the morning, trust fall in the afternoon, share tools, touch hands, shoulders to shoulders, strangers, strangers, strangers.
I tried for five days, cried every single one of those days, then came home. As I stepped out of my first shower in almost a week, I heard my mom arguing with my dad on speaker.
All the Things We Do in the Dark Page 1