Professor Weiss holds the Super Soaker in silence. Then she places it on the desk and removes a miniature water gun from her bag.
“When I have power,” Professor Weiss says, circling the table, ultimately handing the gun to Luna, “I choose who else can have power.” She looks down at Luna. “If I told you to spray your classmates, would you?”
Luna’s mouth curls as she sprays a girl across the table, right on the boob.
Professor Weiss continues to lecture about how consistent acts of violence are embedded into the social structures of power and privilege that uphold the white cisheteropatriarchy, before distributing the paper assignment and reminding us that she doesn’t remember names.
She glances up at the clock.
“Class dismissed. If you have a water gun please return it to me.”
I wait for Professor Weiss after class; when she ignores me and heads for the door, I block her way.
“Professor Weiss, excuse me? I just want to double check that there isn’t anything else I can do to ensure entrance into the course.”
She frowns. “What’s your name again?”
“Leisl Davis.”
“Are you German?”
“Distantly. My mom is a tremendous fan of The Sound of Music, though.”
“Ah.” Professor Weiss coughs into her elbow. “I don’t like musicals.”
She skirts past me and leaves without a word.
I amble into the hall, my feet lumbering and slow. I grab my sunglasses and slam them over my face, sure Professor Weiss hates me, that my paper will be terrible, that Luna was only talking to me because she’s particularly charitable. The truth is no one ever wants to interact with me unless they’re planning to use my body like disconnected parts of a machine, unless they want to make my throat burn, trap me under the covers, shaking, and convince me never to leave.
On the way back to my room I pass Chapin’s lawn, where Smithies Against Sexual Violence are setting up the T-shirt exhibition (because they couldn’t get permission to take over the entire Quad). A bunch of folks from the other night are handing out flyers. I scan the crowd, but I don’t see Luna.
The Bieber-imitator moderator adjusts her snapback and greets me. “Leisl, right?” I’m floored she remembers my name. “Do you want to make a T-shirt?”
I clench my jaw, try to hold back the lump in my throat. “Sure.”
I take a blank white shirt, a couple of Sharpies—metallic, red—and wonder how I could sum up the distinct sensation of the post-traumatic ninth circle in one T-shirt-worthy phrase.
FUCK, I write, unsure whether to follow up with MEN, THE SYSTEM, JOHN DIGBY WHITAKER III, or MY LIFE.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, fingers digging into the crevice of my collarbone.
My stomach drops like I’m strapped inside a roller coaster that lied about how safe it is, that’s just about to crumble to the ground.
Tripp stands over me wearing a T-shirt with NO MEANS NO handwritten in red block letters, grinning, his teeth large and bright.
“Hello, Leisl,” he says, arm stretching out to seize me, and I run, I run as fast as I can, across the lawn, past Chapin, past the Quad, as far as campus goes, until my knees hit a patch of putrid yellow late-summer grass and I watch cars cruise down the road and, phone in hand, my face wet, eyes stinging and bleary, I find the number, make the call, because even though I have so little energy, no motivation, I can’t see him again, not in hell or purgatory or on random Friday nights; there has to be something I can do, something to keep him away from me.
I tell the salt-and-pepper-bearded Campus Police officer, badge tinted a blinding gold under the fluorescent lights of his office, what happened, and he responds with a gruff, fatherly “I’m sorry, miss,” immediately rattling off questions: Have you been examined at Cooley Dickinson, where they have the special sexual assault nurse? No, this happened five days ago. Why didn’t you report it earlier? I didn’t really remember what happened to me, and I didn’t know it was rape. Can you tell me what happened? I was raped, and the perpetrator came to Smith and met me outside my dorm. Do you have evidence of the rape or the stalking incident? No, sir. Is the perpetrator part of the Smith community? No, he’s an Amherst student, and, oh, yes, I assumed you couldn’t really help me with Amherst students.
You say you know him, the alleged perpetrator? You could point out his face?
“Of course I know him. Of course I know his face.”
The officer, chin encased in his interlocked hands, tries to give me advice, but all I hear is It’s a shame you don’t have evidence, without proof there’s not much we can do.
The worst is when he tries to get more details about the crime: the date, the time, the location. And, of course, the million-dollar question: Was it rape? Was it really rape?
Does he want me to say, I’m pretty sure John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, forced his dick down my throat?
When I start to cry, the officer hands me tissues. He says he’s genuinely sorry, but he can’t do anything about Amherst students. He elaborates on my options, how I could get a civil no-contact order, but I’d have to go to court. If the stalking continues, I might want to do this.
When I’m ready to leave, he gives me the name of the Title IX coordinator on campus, and wishes me luck. But doesn’t he understand how I woke up this morning, my stomach in yacht-tight sailor knots, how I couldn’t eat, got a bunch of questions wrong in class, had diarrhea for hours? Doesn’t he understand what this conversation alone has already cost?
I pace back down the urine-colored basement hall, where a young janitor mops the floor. I sidestep the soapy puddle expanding across the linoleum, keep my head down, try to keep the tears in, at least until I’m completely alone.
The janitor turns.
“Hello, Leisl,” says John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp.
I run. He drops the mop and follows me. I sprint, as fast as I can, but the hall seems to grow longer the farther I go.
“Leisl,” Tripp shouts, voice parched from running. “Leisl, can we talk?”
The fluorescent lights flicker on and off.
I start, in vain, to scream, as loud as I can, still running, still possessing the will to save myself, even in the dark.
The lights come back, steady.
He stands in front of me.
“Leisl,” he says. I swear he’s wearing a different shirt than when he was mopping. “Can we talk?” He steps forward. I step back, throat-to-tailbone seizing, freezing like Arctic water, like bathroom tile. “I’m sorry. I’m really, truly, sorry.” He grins. “You know, when you don’t have a lot of experience with guys, it’s easy to get confused. But there’s no reason to be so overdramatic and report me, just because you feel you made a mistake. Do you know how naive you sound, going to Campus Police because you went a little further than you did at Catholic high school dances? God, Leisl, I thought you were a much cooler girl than that.”
I can’t fucking move. He loosens his collar, revealing the same crystal necklace—one of those cheap quartz points from a quasi-Buddhist New Age store where the shopgirl talks about bangs blocking your third eye. It catches the fluorescent light, glowing.
“We were just having some fun,” he says, stepping forward again. “Let me take you out again. I promise, I’ll make it up to you.”
Tripp steps closer, closer, and I can’t move, I can’t fucking move. His hands are outstretched and he’s coming for me, I can see the whites of his eyes, I’m going to die, I absolutely swear I’m going to die, and I want to die, I want to go away, I want him to disappear, I need him to go away, I need to go away, whatever it takes, just make him go away, I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll do anything, anything.
I stretch my arms out—a last resort, a plea, a prayer, as if my hands are a real weapon against him and not a rotten fence easily scaled. My neck, my chest, my face is hot, sweat collects in the aching underwire of my bra, and at least I’ll be asleep, at least
I’m going to pass out before he can touch me, so I can pretend it never happened.
I hear a snap, a crack, like backyard fireworks.
My eyes burst open. He’s not there. I turn, see him at the other end of the hall, crumpled on the floor.
He raises his head, a blue-red bruise blooming over his left eye.
He starts to speak, and I run, I run as fast as I can.
I get worse, not better. Every time I close my eyes, I swear I hear his voice, his breath, feel the frigid tile, the country-pop (I need you like waaaaaaaa-ter), taste the sake burn my tongue, the back of my throat.
I keep waking up in the middle of the night to check the lock. Some nights I take the flashlight from under my bed and search my closet, the corridors, the stairs, before settling into Chapin’s basement, where I watch infomercials and wonder how long this can go on—sleeping two, maybe three hours at a time—before I get sick, before I get hit by a car I didn’t see (which would perhaps be a blessing).
When Rachel leaves one morning for an eight A.M. lab and doesn’t lock the door, I send her a stream of texts so angry that our brief interactions diminish from cold daily hellos to biweekly requests to turn off the lights. I feel bad, but I also start to worry. Now that my roommate hates me, maybe she’ll let him come into the room while I’m sleeping, maybe she’ll hold me down for him.
Even when Rachel is out of the room, nowhere is safe; even with the door locked, windows closed, curtains drawn, my bed feels infested with danger, and it’s only sheer exhaustion that halts the suffering, never for long enough.
I try Internet suggestions, like cold showers and unusual breathing exercises. I even try running, because I remember Gianna from high school saying that running keeps her mind off that cousin who repeatedly molested her when she was eight years old. But every time I double-knot my sneakers and pound my feet on concrete, I just feel like he’s chasing me.
I try to go to class, because if I survive long enough, I’m going to want to get into a top law school, which will make me a semi-worthwhile human being. But I end up asking for extensions on nearly every assignment, because every time I go to the library and open my laptop, I become convinced that he’s hiding behind the vending machine, or waiting in the bathroom (he’ll lock me in, he’ll knock my head against the tiles again, again, again, again), so I run back to my bed, only I can’t focus there either. I can’t focus anywhere.
Most of my professors are sympathetic. My biology professor—a tiny birdlike woman with a wardrobe eerily reminiscent of that science teacher I had in high school (the one who said evolution was true but it had stopped for humans because we were God’s perfect image, right here right now, school shootings and inequality and environmental destruction and all)—gives me the greatest comfort of all, at the tail end of her Thursday office hours when I ask for an extension on the lab write-up.
I haven’t slept enough to care, so I come out and say it: “I’m trying to get help for a sexual assault case.”
She goes quiet, interlacing her hands and drumming them on the edge of her laptop, and starts talking about sharks, how if you turn a shark over on its back (good luck with that) it goes into this state called tonic immobility, and you can poke it, prod it all you like, and no matter how much it wants to bite your hands off, the shark can’t move, it’s petrified. There’s all this research about how tonic immobility affects people too, particularly women, particularly women who are assaulted, how women who don’t fight back are stunned, sharks on their backs, victims of inconvenient evolutionary mechanisms in addition to rape culture and patriarchy. Not fighting back, in scientific terms, is evidence.
She tells me to just hand in the write-up when I can.
I do meet with the Title IX coordinator, halfway through September, who reminds me that I can’t get a campus no-contact order because he doesn’t go to the same school, but I could go to court and try to get a civil no-contact order. The idea of putting on a suit, bought just for the occasion, and standing before a judge, surrounded by lawyers and all sorts of people who want to know every last detail, like we’re going to film it, induces me to say, against all judgment, You know, I don’t really remember what happened and whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t that serious.
Call me crazy, but I swear—just as the coordinator’s inoffensive pink lips are forming the words no evidence—the light shifts, the shadow lifts, and I see his face, freckles and nostrils and hazel sneer, inside the arched brown outline of her schoolmarm bob, his pointed chin jutting out over her sagging neck.
I race from the office with a desert-dry mouth, hands trembling and slippery, run to the other side of campus, where there are people around, in case he comes after me and I need a witness. It’s sunset, light stretched over the low point of the horizon like rope. I sit down on a bench, wipe my tears with my sleeve, and call my mom. She asks me how I am, sounds surprised to hear from me; I bet she’s at the golf club, or out with friends.
I try my best, my absolute best, to sound happy. “Hey, Mom, would it be okay if I came home?”
“What?” The connection sizzles. “Sorry, honey, I couldn’t hear you, what was that?”
“I want to come home,” I say.
She pauses. “Okay, honey, what do you need? You can use the credit card.”
“No, Mom, I want to come home. Tonight. I’ll take the bus, and Uber from the bus station so you don’t have to pick me up.”
“Your father will have a heart attack,” my mom says, low and dark.
I hold the phone slightly away from my face so it doesn’t get wet. “I didn’t necessarily mean permanently, I just want to come home for a little while.”
“Don’t you have class? Honey, you know there’s an adjustment period—”
“Mom, if I could come home tonight, just for tonight, I’ll take the bus back tomorrow, please, just let me—”
“Honey, I think you’ll be over this in a couple of hours, why don’t you go find a friend—”
My tears mix with colossal tsunami rage, and I throw the phone onto the pavement.
I hear her, shouting through the receiver: “Leisl? Honey?”
I pick up my phone, throw it again, and again, even let myself scream, which I know is totally pointless and will only bring me negative attention, but I don’t care, I just want to go away from here and not have this body, not have this life, fuck my phone, fuck my mom, fuck college, fuck me, fuck whatever Gnostic demiurge created this world and all these people but doesn’t actually give a shit about their well-being.
“Are you okay?”
People come up to me once I’m seated, cracked phone in hand; I wave them off. I do text my mom, dismissing our chat as a poor reaction to a bad grade. My phone still works, well enough.
Night falls, and even though I haven’t been outside at night since, well, that night, I don’t feel any worse than usual, I just feel the same, which is pretty fucking intolerable.
“Hey, Lee?”
I lift my face from my arms, see thigh-highs and red lips. It’s Luna.
She asks the same question: “Are you okay? I haven’t seen you in class. Professor Weiss keeps asking if someone can find out where you are.”
I intend to tell her that yes, I’m fine, but she swings her backpack over one shoulder and sits down next to me anyway.
“You know, he technically can’t go inside Chapin. The RA down the hall, she has a no-contact order,” Luna says. “He’s not supposed to be on Smith’s campus at all, actually, but even a court order isn’t going to be terribly effective, with a guy like that.”
She takes out a small tin of mints, offers me one. “You know, there was a time when I didn’t believe people like him existed. They tell us everyone is three-dimensional, even criminals love their mothers, have sisters, get married, but the truth is there are monsters in this world who are beyond our scope of understanding. And he’s one of them.”
I sob again; she leans closer.
“Can I touch you?�
�� she says.
I nod. She puts her hand on my back, keeps it there, steady and warm.
“I hate seeing you like this,” Luna continues. “I’d do anything to make sure another girl didn’t go through what I did.” She pauses, breath still, cheeks red, her voice as small as her worst secret. “Fucking gut him with chopsticks, you know?”
“That’s a good idea,” I say through the tears, and with her smile, and our mutual laugh, we become friends, and the night feels a bit more welcoming.
“I wanted to stop you, as soon as I saw you with him,” Luna confesses as we’re walking back to Chapin. “When I saw you and him at SASV. I wanted to tell you the truth. But I figured you’re an adult, you can make your own choices. Maybe after he went to court a couple of times, he wouldn’t try again. But I was wrong. If you can’t forgive me, I get it.”
“I forgive you,” I assure her. “It’s not your fault. We didn’t know each other. And I could have just been having a conversation with him, that one time.”
“That’s what I thought. Which was naive.”
We go back to her room, spend the night talking and drinking chrysanthemum tea from Chinatown. She sits under her moon phase chart, explains that her real name is Lorraine, that she started going by Luna during her freshman year of high school, when she got really obsessed with the moon. I glow with the ultimate awe, realizing her moon chart probably comes from an authentic Seattle thrift store, that she’s the type of tastemaker who inspires Urban Outfitters to start selling moon charts in the first place. Until midnight, we keep the conversation light; she talks about missing her ex, a five-foot-ten dishwater blonde with tiny spritelike hands, and she fantasizes about red-blooded, Route 66 twenty-four-hour diners—mediocre burgers, soggy fries, milkshakes from a packet. “I want to wash up in a big booth at two A.M. after a show and stay there all night.”
Only after the seniors upstairs stop playing ABBA do we talk about John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp. Luna met him when she was a first-year (she’s a sophomore). Same thing: Orientation week, faux-feminist act, took her for sushi.
Consensual Hex Page 4