“Listen,” he continues, fired up, “my mom’s a lawyer and she’s all over this sexual harassment stuff. I could ask her for you.”
“I’ve got enough going on right now without having to deal with police or lawsuits. Plus every one of these cases you hear about—they’re total crap for the women. They get their whole lives picked apart, and they never win.”
“Not never.”
“Almost never.”
“How about I just ask my mom for information?”
How about you ask her what it means when you have sex with someone after they said no?
“I feel bad that I didn’t help. I could see you were having trouble, and I didn’t do anything. I should have told him to lay off, or, even, I could have gone to Perry and been like, ‘Hey back off, she’s mine.’”
“I’m not yours,” I snap, in what is probably an over-the-top reaction.
“No, I mean just to—”
“I’m not!”
“Whoa.” Kyle takes a step back. “I just meant—it might have helped.”
“If you’d said that and it did help, that’s almost as bad. Should I have let you take a pee on me too? Maybe put a sticker on my forehead?”
“Listen, if the positions were reversed—”
I snort.
“If the positions were reversed,” he says, pressing on, “and you said I was yours, in order to protect me or help me out, I wouldn’t have minded. I woulda liked it, to be honest. And actually, I think it’s pretty big of me, considering how you’ve just . . . blown me off.”
“How I’ve blown you off?” I say, gaping at him.
“Yeah,” he says, up in his feelings all of a sudden. “One night together, a pretty good time, I think we can both agree, and I did all the right things after, texting you that I wanted to see you again, not being the typical guy, and you just blew me off. And here I am trying to be a nice guy anyway!”
“Oh, somebody get this boy a medal!” I choke out. “The Trying Nice Guy medal!”
“Fine, fine,” he says, hands up and backing away. “You’re upset. You’ve had a bad night and you’re upset.”
“Yes!”
“Great. I’ll just . . . get your duvet and leave you to it.”
He stalks off to his truck, retrieves the duvet from the back, brings it to me, and drapes it over Betty. This causes me to realize I did not think through how I was going to carry the thing home tonight when I asked him to bring it. Duh.
“You’re welcome,” he says, scowling at me and clearly expecting an apology.
“Just go, okay, Kyle?”
And, unlike the last time I asked him to leave, this time he does.
* * *
—
It’s hard to be inconspicuous while carrying a big, fluffy duvet, but I’m not in the mood to have to explain why, when I told Mom that Emma borrowed it, I appear to be bringing it home from work, so I enter the house as quietly as I can.
It’s been sad, the way the three of us live most of the time like not-very-friendly roommates since the Jack fiasco and worse now since the Airbnb thing, with Dad alternating between total space-out on the couch and frenetic activity on his computer into the wee hours. Tonight, though, I count myself lucky for it as I tiptoe through the house.
I heave a sigh of relief when my bedroom door is closed behind me, then drop my backpack on the floor and shove the duvet into the closet because I really am planning to wash it. A lot. But not tonight.
I pull my phone out of my backpack, read the texts from Kyle, and another few from Nita freaking out about what I just did. Then I check my voicemail, where there is, as I feared, a message from Dev, telling me what a disaster I’ve caused, and how much money the dry cleaning bill for Perry’s clothing is going to cost him, and how disappointed he is at my actions, and then firing me.
I knew it was going to happen, but it still hits me like a kick in the stomach.
Fired.
Determined to get through all the bad news at once, I go on social media to see if the story has spread. Because it will spread—it’s just a matter of time, and a matter of whether it spreads faster by old-school word of mouth, or via the internet. Luckily I don’t see myself tagged anywhere, or any mention of the Goat, or Perry, and none of my school friends have texted me yet, either. I’ll give Emma a heads-up later, but for now I turn the phone off and go to my desk.
It sounds crazy, but maybe I’ll study.
Ever since things started to go downhill in my family life, I’ve found schoolwork to be surprisingly calming. It’s a way I can shut everything out, and of course has the benefit of having made me a much better student than I was before.
But I already worked a ton this weekend in an effort to avoid thinking about my little history of being sexually assaulted (now not quite as little—ha ha!), and when I sit down to read I find my eyes won’t fasten on the words.
I keep thinking of the duvet, jammed into my closet, with Kyle cooties all over it.
That, at least, is something I can do something about.
I grab the duvet and head to the basement.
It’s cool and musty-smelling down here, but in a way I find pleasant. It’s kind of an old book smell, a happier time smell. When my socked feet hit the linoleum tiles, I march purposely across the rec room toward the laundry room, passing Dad’s office door on the way. It’s open a crack, but he doesn’t look up.
In the laundry room I plug the giant sink, stuff the duvet into it, and turn the water on to hot. The washing machine could do a better job but I need to do something physical, and short of wringing my own neck or someone else’s, this is my best option.
Soon hot water is pooling and I add a generous amount of soap, then plunge my hands in. It’s scalding but the burning sensation is clarifying. I stir and pummel and scrub that duvet. I pull it, press it, wrestle with it. I imagine pounding the Kyle germs out of it. I imagine it’s Perry’s smug face.
Finally, after a thorough working-over, I rinse the duvet in water so cold it makes me gasp. I’m sweating and my arms are bright pink past my elbows when I let the third tubful of freezing water out and start the difficult process of trying to squeeze/press/wring enough of the water out of it to put it in the dryer.
“What’d that thing ever do to you?” says a voice from the door.
I let out an undignified shriek.
“Dad, jeez.”
“What are you doing?” he says, leaning bleary-eyed against the doorframe.
“Laundry.”
“By hand?”
“Yes.” In preparation for my future as a laundress, or homesteader, since those are going to be the only options left to me.
“Washing something by hand is usually worse for the environment than putting it through a high-efficiency machine,” Dad points out. “I’ll bet you used more water than the machine would have.”
“Huh.”
“Good night at the restaurant? Or . . .” His gaze sharpens as he seems to notice something in my demeanor. “Bad night? That the reason you’re beating up a poor, innocent duvet?”
“I . . .”
Suddenly the truth is on the tip of my tongue to tell him. He’s not a Perry fan. He might not even be mad. In fact he might be delighted by what I just did.
Maybe even proud.
I suck in a sharp breath.
“What’s wrong?” Dad says. “Talk to me.”
He would be proud because it’s exactly the kind of thing he would do.
“Was someone rude to you? Or stiff you on a tip?”
Stiff me on a tip. Ha.
“You know, even the bad nights are good nights in the end,” Dad continues. “Because you get through it, and you learn something.”
I just stand there. I never know what to do around him anymore, and never know what to e
xpect. Here he is being his old self—what I think of as an almost normal father—sympathetic, caring, a bit dorky, and clueless with advice, but well-meaning. But if I were to tell him, I really have no idea what he’d do. Without my telling him anything at all, I still don’t know what he’ll do, what he’ll be like just five minutes from now. And that hurts. It hurts to love somebody and not be able to trust them, hurts to know you can’t ever let yourself need them. Even when you’re desperately in need and they’re standing right in front of you, willing to be needed.
“This is boots-on-the-ground learning, Lib,” Dad continues, still standing in the laundry room doorway and blocking my exit. “The school of hard knocks. And you’ll learn more useful stuff about life in that place than you ever will in school. That’s what happened to me.”
Sure, Dad. Hard knocks.
“I’m proud of you,” he says, and the words are like a sucker punch.
“I have to go,” I say, and abruptly push past him, and out into the rec room.
“Whoa! Where?”
“Homework,” I mumble, hustling toward the stairs.
“Wait, Lib, honey . . .”
But I’m not stopping. I’m flying up the stairs, then down the hallway to my room, just barely resisting slamming the door and instead shutting it firmly and quietly, and then standing in my room, fists clenched at my sides, legs shaking.
Because the hard fact is that I don’t get to have a crisis.
Not one that anybody knows about, anyway.
Mom and I are the counterbalance to Dad, the anchors. It’s not that we’ve ever talked about it, or planned it out, it just happened—we hold the line of normalcy. We are steady, unruffled, smooth with a force of will that seeks to pull Dad back into a normal orbit.
I still have to relearn the lesson occasionally, though. Like the time in eleventh grade that I came home in tears about the C+ I got on an English essay. Dad, after listening sympathetically, went to the school and freaked on my English teacher, demanded a meeting with the principal, where he freaked again, and then spent the next month and a half writing letters to the school board trying to get both my teacher and the principal fired. All this achieved, of course, was embarrassing me and causing my English teacher to despise me. And, looking back, the C+ was deserved.
The lesson? Any meltdown I might have will cause Dad to melt down too, and melt down more.
It isn’t fair, but I’m not sure he can help it.
Luckily, because of Emma’s panic attacks, I’ve done a bunch of research on how to disrupt fight-or-flight feelings, and I have a lot of helpful apps on my phone. I grab it and pull up a breathing app, plop down on the floor in a cross-legged meditation pose, and breathe along with the expanding and contracting icon until I feel calmer.
If only I’d had this image laser-beamed into my head when I was dealing with Perry.
Finally I get up, go to my desk, and open my laptop so I can start working on some kind of plan, and then of course procrastinate by checking my inbox.
And that’s when I see it—an email from my first-choice college.
Holy cow.
I stare at it for a few long moments, then click to open it. Then I’m reading the words and clapping a hand over my mouth, leaping up out of my chair and feeling a few amazing moments of joy before sitting heavily back down and shaking with silent, mostly hysterical laughter, and then finally texting Emma.
You’re not gonna believe this.
??? she texts back.
Call me?
Give me a minute
K
And so I wait for her, thinking all the while that of course, of course, this would be the day that I would get my first acceptance notice, and from my first-choice school . . . just when I have thoroughly torched my chances of going anywhere at all.
10
SHIELD
Monday morning I get up early to revise and print out more copies of my résumé so I can start applying for jobs again.
It won’t be fun, and neither will school today, but I’ll handle it.
And I’ll find another job. Maybe Lyle at Crawler’s needs someone by now and will consider my recent shit disturbing to be a bonus. Or maybe I could work as a tutor, or do retail. Because I want, more than ever now, to get out of this town, go to college, and make something of myself.
At the front door I put on my combat boots, my biggest sunglasses, lipstick, and my black baseball cap as if I’m some kind of badass celebrity in disguise. None of this will actually disguise me, but it makes me feel better.
Outside, the warm spring air hits me. Yaz is perched on the edge of the porch, grinning her sweet, slightly crooked-toothed grin, and Noah’s striding up the driveway.
“What are you guys doing here?”
“Emma texted us after you talked to her last night,” Yaz says. “Told us what happened.”
“Oh, okay,” I say, relieved I won’t have to tell the whole story to each of them. “Did you, um, have either of you . . . heard it from anywhere else yet?”
Noah, at the base of the steps now, shakes his head and Yaz says, “Not yet.”
“I take it Perry’s the creep you told me about?” Noah asks. “The hugger?”
“Yep,” I say, nodding. “It was a bit of a disaster.”
“A bit of you kicking some righteous ass, you mean,” Noah says.
“Still, a disaster,” I say. “And probably going to get worse.”
“Nah, it’ll just be people talking,” Noah says. “That’s not worse, just more. You’re already fired, right? And you already messed up your chance of getting a good reference, and already pissed off Perry Ackerman. The worst things have already happened.”
“Is this supposed to be a pep talk?” I say, and Yaz gives him a disapproving look.
“It is!” Noah says. “That stuff is over, and it’s all uphill from here.”
“Except the part where everyone hears about it and thinks I’m psycho.”
“So what?” Noah says. “Screw ’em.”
“Noah!” Yaz looks scandalized. “We’re supposed to be supportive!”
“Please recall that nobody comes to me to get sunshine blown up their butts,” Noah says with a cocky grin. “Some people will think she’s psycho. Who cares? They don’t matter.”
“I need a new job, though,” I say. “That matters.”
“Welllll, you might be in a bit of crapola there,” he concedes.
“Never mind that right now,” Yaz says, shooting Noah a look. “The point is that this is just . . . a setback.”
I snort.
“No, really,” she insists. “That’s how you need to think of it—as a setback.”
“Or,” Noah says, “as a personally costly, but very satisfying, dispensation of overdue vigilante justice.”
“Setback is less wordy,” Yaz points out.
“Satisfying dispensation of overdue vigilante justice is better,” he says. “And doesn’t she look like she’s ready to kick some ass in those boots?”
Oh, Noah. If he is ever single and interested in me again, I will jump his bones.
After getting his enthusiastic consent, of course.
“Anyway,” Yaz says, “we’re here to escort you to school.”
“You didn’t need to do that,” I say, throat feeling tight.
“Yes we did,” Yaz says, and at the same time Noah says, joking, “We can go if you don’t want us.”
“No, I want you!” I say way too fast, and then, because I said it while looking right at him, descend into awkwardness and stammer, “Er, to walk me. Both of you. Thank you.”
“You all right?” Yaz asks, looking at me quizzically. “Need a hug? Some quick reiki?”
“Better not,” I say, taking a step back. “The reiki is never actually quick and the hug might make me
cry.”
“How about an arm?” Noah says, offering said arm, bent at the elbow, like an old-fashioned gentleman, and I descend the stairs to where he is, and take it.
Yaz follows me down the step and links elbows with me on the other side, and we head toward the sidewalk arm in arm.
Emma meets us one block later and Boris catches up with us at the crosswalk in front of the school. By the time we go through the doors, I have Emma in front of me, Boris behind, and Noah and Yaz flanking me, like they’re some sort of military force, or a well-disciplined marching band at the very least.
Of course, it’s overkill, particularly since I don’t detect anyone looking at me strangely yet, but I love them for it.
The strange looks finally start midmorning, and it’s almost a relief. I’m coming out of European History when I get a text from Emma, who’s on the other side of the building.
Get ready. It’s on.
Where?
Crotchety Complainers. A video.
Ffffff.
You have study hall?
Yep.
I’m so sorry I have a test! Wait for me to watch it with you at lunch.
Waiting will just make me feel worse. I’m fine, I tell her, and this is mostly true. Of course, I also feel like I’m going to keel over from the suspense, so I head to the nearest bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and go online to get it over with, sure I’ll feel better afterward.
Crotchety Complainers is our nickname for the Pine Ridge Residents group on Facebook, where people are supposed to share information about community events, post about lost dogs, et cetera, but which has turned into a hotbed of controversy. It’s full of un-neighborly spats, people bickering about crosswalks and fence-height bylaws, parent-shaming and counter-shaming, and general bad behavior. It’s like reality TV, but less glamorous, which is the reason half the high school students in Pine Ridge have joined—purely for entertainment purposes. Some have even taken to baiting the grown-ups—some of the more intense helicopter parents, this dude Roland Rickland who’ll go off in spectacular fashion about almost anything, and one or two of my mom’s coworkers who can’t resist a dustup.
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