The four-letter word has been lobbed.
Like a bomb waiting to go off, it ticks, ticks, ticks. Louder, a siren screaming closer, a wail starting to surround me. It pierces my eardrums and the word rattles in my skull. It’s a buzzing now, like construction on a New York street and you can’t hear yourself talk or even think. Finally the bomb explodes, blasting the four letters apart, shredding them to pieces, leaving behind silence, cold silence, and…
“What’s it called that a bomb leaves behind?” I direct the question to Casey.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Residue,” T.S. offers quickly.
“It’s not residue,” I insist. “What’s the word for it? It’s not collateral damage. It’s not residue. What is it?”
“Shrapnel. It’s shrapnel,” T.S. says.
“Yes!” I say, snapping two fingers. “Shrapnel. That’s what I was thinking of.”
Then I clasp my palms together and say, “What should we do now? It’s too early for lunch.” Before they can answer, I smack my forehead with my palm. “Oh, I forgot! You guys have your game! You should get to your game, right? I don’t want to hold you up. Maybe I’ll even come to it for once. Cheer you. But who should I root for?”
Casey stands up and puts her hands firmly on my shoulders. “Alex,” she says, cutting me off. I look down at the floor. “Alex,” she says again. I start counting the number of lines in the floorboards. “Alex,” she says one more time. A knot rises up in my throat. I swallow, but it’s still there.
“How did this happen to me?” I whisper.
She pulls me close. I close my eyes, collapse into her, my arms limp at my side. We stay like that for a minute, an hour, maybe all day. Then Casey says, “Alex, I know it doesn’t make it better, but it happens to a lot of girls.”
I untangle myself from my sister, collect my voice, and say, “No. I really don’t understand how this happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how did this happen?” I direct this question to T.S. “You were there. How did this happen? How did this happen to me?”
“I was there at the concert, but I left before the drinking game started. I don’t know how drunk you were.” I wince when she says that. I barely drink. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. I’m the girl at parties who doesn’t care about booze. How did I become the girl who got that drunk? T.S. continues, “You should talk to Sandeep. He was there until you left.”
I recoil. “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want everyone knowing my business.”
“Sandeep was there the whole time. He knows you left with Carter. He knows you spent the night—” She stops, corrects herself. “He knows you wound up in Carter’s room. He won’t judge. You know he’s not like that. He would never judge you.”
I look away, focusing on a framed photo of a golden blond boy holding a lacrosse stick and smiling wide, way too chipper for my taste.
I turn back to Casey and T.S. “Isn’t it entirely possible we just had bad sex, like it was just a mistake? You know, I slept with him and I just…” I grasp for the words. “Isn’t it possible I just—I don’t know—blocked it out?”
“Alex, there is a reason you don’t remember. I don’t think you were ever in a position to say yes. And I also think you need to do your best to figure out what happened. For your own peace of mind,” Casey says.
I close my eyes, sigh heavily. “Sandeep. Natalie Moretti. The whole girls’ track team. We might as well hire a skywriter at this rate.”
But I also know I’ll go to Sandeep. This is like homework and I have never backed down from an assignment.
“Let’s find out how messed up I was,” I say.
“I’m going with you,” T.S. says. “I’m going to skip the game.”
“You never skip games.”
“Well, I am today,” T.S. says.
“And listen, Alex,” Casey begins. “You have options. You could go to the police.”
I whip around. “Are you joking?” I ask, but I don’t wait for her to answer. “Because I would never go to the police. Not for something like this.”
“Why not?” Casey asks.
“Because then Mom and Dad would know, and they’d have a collective meltdown that would burn a hole in the solar system. Not to mention they wouldn’t approve of that whole underage drinking thing. And there’s that little fact of my having to recount the whole experience to the cops, who would insist on a rape kit like on TV, and I can’t imagine anything I’d want to do less than that.”
“Then, what about the Mockingbirds? They can help you.”
“You want me to be a poster child or something?”
“I want what’s right.”
“The Mockingbirds are your project, not mine,” I say.
Casey holds up her hands. “It’s totally up to you. You don’t have to go to the Mockingbirds. If you want to move on, pretend this never happened—”
Yes, God, yes.
“—Then I respect that,” she adds. “It’s your choice.”
But was it really my choice? Was it ever my choice last night? Did I choose? Could I choose?
I have to know.
I tip my chin to the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
Casey locks the door behind us and we walk silently down the long hallway. There’s no banter this time, no joking like on the way here. We leave the athletic complex and T.S. texts Sandeep as Casey unlocks her bike. Casey says she’ll call later, come by later too. Then she rides off, and T.S. and I head for Brooks Hall.
It looks like a miniature castle with little turrets, curved windows, and a big set of stone steps leading up to its dark brown double wood doors. I know this much—Carter lives in a different dorm than Sandeep. This is a small victory for me today, both the memory and the luck.
Once inside, T.S. knocks on Sandeep’s door. He opens it, flashes T.S. a smile, and gives her a kiss on the lips. My stomach curls and I look away because I’m not a public kisser. Daniel and I made out in the basement, the music hall, the deserted stacks on the third floor of Pryor Library. Never in the quad, never in the caf, and never in front of friends. But evidently I was quite a public kisser last night. I was exactly the person I’m not.
“Hey, guys,” Martin says, giving us a quick nod. He’s Sandeep’s roommate and he’s busy stuffing a biology textbook the size of an encyclopedia set into his backpack. He was at the concert last night. He saw me drinking; he probably knows I left with Carter. I focus on the window at the end of the room so I don’t have to meet his eyes. “I’m heading over to Pryor,” Martin adds. He’ll soon be eye-deep in that textbook. Martin is insanely driven to be a biologist. Everyone at Themis is insanely driven about something.
“Did you know a recent study found that the western scrub-jay can plan for the future?” Martin says randomly, perhaps the biggest non sequitur I’ve heard in my life.
“Where do you come up with this stuff, Martin?” T.S. asks.
“Google News,” he says as if the answer were obvious. “Yeah, these birds stored food in different rooms for the next day and they could remember what food they stored, when they stored it, and where they stored it, even when the other birds were watching.”
“Was that a hard test for the birds, Martin? Being able to remember shit when their buddies were watching?” Sandeep teases.
“It gives new meaning to the term birdbrain, doesn’t it?” Martin says with a glint in his eyes as he hoists his book-laden backpack onto his shoulder. “There’s a lot going on in those tiny little heads.”
Despite myself I laugh a little, then notice T.S. and Sandeep both are rolling their eyes. “See, Alex thought it was funny,” Martin points out.
“I did,” I manage to say. The least I can do is talk like a normal person, react like a normal person. I’m not going to be that person who goes mute, who writes on Post-it Notes because she can’t deal.
“Get out of here,” T.S. says playfully.
“Someday, when the world is run by ornithologists, you won’t be so quick to dispatch me.”
He leaves and I sit down at Martin’s vacated desk chair. T.S. makes herself comfortable, sitting cross-legged on Sandeep’s bed. The room is sparse, like most boys’ rooms, though Sandeep has managed to slather his half of the walls with felt pennants for the Baltimore Orioles. He’s from Maryland and possesses an unholy zeal for the home team. Signs of Martin’s personality and his slavish devotion to science are more meager. The only evidence lies in a dartboard above his desk. On the bull’s-eye he’s written Nobel Prize.
“This is weird,” I blurt out.
Sandeep sits down next to T.S. I look away from them, from him mostly. I don’t want to meet his eyes. I don’t want to have that moment where I know and he knows and we both know I was easy and drunk and stupid. But Sandeep was the last one standing. He was there the whole time, there until I left with Carter.
Sandeep was sober. He doesn’t drink. He just supplies. I think he likes supplying because it makes him cool, but he likes not drinking because it preserves his brain cells. He plans to be a hand surgeon, the best hand surgeon there has ever been. So he doesn’t want to risk losing even one particle of gray matter to booze, he has said.
I steel myself for what I’ll learn, then begin. “So what happened last night? The details are kind of fuzzy to me and I want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Sandeep’s a good guy and a good-looking guy. His skin is brown and his eyes are light green and he has close-cropped and, I’m told, very soft black hair. It’s his eyes, though, that melted T.S. They’re pretty much unnervingly beautiful. He doesn’t know about the pregnancy scare. T.S. got her period that afternoon and never told him she’d taken a test; she never told anyone but me.
“Well, you know we went to Artful Rage, right?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, I remember that. We met in the quad—Martin, you, me, T.S., Maia, Cleo, Julie from down the hall, and Julie’s boyfriend, Sam, from town.” I motion with my hands for him to speed up because I know what happened next. We made up songs about our new Friday Night Out privileges as we walked the mile or so to Salem Jim’s. They stamped our hands with the no-drinking sign—a baby bottle, so emasculating—and we went inside. The band played, we sang and screamed and made our voices go hoarse. Then things got fuzzier.
“Is Artful Rage where…,” I stop, take a breath. “Where we met Carter?”
Sandeep nods. “He was with another group from the school, the water polo guys.”
“What were we doing even talking to water polo guys?” I ask. “We never hang out with them.”
“Everyone was kind of talking to everyone,” Sandeep recounts. “All the juniors were psyched about finally having Friday Night Out privileges, so it was one of those nights, you know. About twenty-two people from Themis at the concert.”
“My, aren’t we precise,” T.S. says to Sandeep.
He raises his eyebrows at her as if his precision is no big deal. Because to him, it isn’t a big deal.
“I remember the band,” I offer.
Sandeep nods. “Yeah, they were pretty good. I don’t think you were totally smashed until later on.”
I don’t like the way he says that, even though it’s true. I don’t like being the girl who was totally smashed, or even just “tipsy” or “buzzed.” I should be more like Sandeep and T.S., more in control. I’ll just drink grape soda from now on.
“Anyway, so everyone starts talking to each other and—”
“Wait, wait, wait!” T.S. interjects, waving her hand frantically. “That’s when I said just because we don’t usually like water polo boys doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to them.” She says this excitedly at first, then clasps a hand to her mouth and her eyes go wide. “Alex, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.”
I give her a look. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you to talk to him.”
“Actually, you said it to everyone, to the group, not to Alex,” Sandeep corrects.
She ignores him, keeps her eyes on me. “Alex, I’m sorry.”
“T.S., that is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said in your entire life, or at the least the entire part of your life I’ve known you. So I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say it, since obviously it has no bearing whatsoever.”
I turn back to Sandeep. “So we’re all going kumbaya and talking at the show. I remember that mostly. Then the show ends….”
“Right, then we all came back to the common room here. And you’d had one shot at the concert.”
He says it so clinically, so medically; he’s not judging me, just giving his residents the report on his patient, teaching them how to do rounds. I see him wearing dark blue surgeon scrubs, a cap for his hair. He still has hair when he’s thirty-five, I decide, and practicing medicine at some leading hospital. He doesn’t even have to look at the patient’s chart. He knows it all by heart, everything about the patient.
“So I poured some more for everyone,” he says, rattling off names next. “T.S. and Maia had already left, Martin was long gone after the concert, so it was Cleo, Julie, Sam, Carter.”
I put my head in my hands. Cleo, Julie, Sam, and Carter. Natalie, the track team, and on and on and on…
“And then you suggested Circle of Death,” Sandeep says.
“How much more did I drink?” I ask, looking up again.
“You had two and a half more shots with your orange juice.”
T.S. raises her eyebrows. “Two and a half?”
“Yes. She didn’t finish the third shot.”
He doesn’t falter as he informs his charges. The residents seize their notebooks and write this down in their doctorly scrawls, two and a half more shots, translating the amount perfectly into milliliters or cc or whatever doctor language they write in.
“Three and a half total is a lot of vodka on an empty stomach,” T.S. says sympathetically. “It would be hard for anyone to remember what happened.”
“You weigh about one hundred and ten pounds,” Sandeep instructs. “So three and a half drinks in three hours would make your blood alcohol content point zero eight. Which is considered legally drunk. At your size, on an empty stomach, you’re dealing with slowed reaction times, emotional swings, impaired judgment.”
Impaired judgment.
There it is again, a word, a phrase, hanging in the middle of the room, having legs, arms, and a life form of its own. Just like when Casey said, “That’s the only thing that matters,” back in the Captains’ Room an hour or so ago.
“And he kissed you, in front of everyone,” Sandeep adds.
Because I would never kiss a water polo boy, I would never make the first move, I would never get it on with a soon-to-be frat boy. He started it, he started it all.
“And you guys were kind of going at it on the couch, making out, but the game kept going on and then Carter just pulls you up and leads you out of there.”
Out of there. To the place where I can’t rely on anyone else’s account, anyone else’s unassailable recollection. Just my own splotchy one.
“Thank you.” I stand up.
“Where are you going?” T.S. asks.
“Back,” I say.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“I want to. We want to.” She speaks for him as if she’s his representative or something. Maybe she is, because he rises and the three of us head out together, down the hall, down the stairs, and out into the cold and far-too-sunny January day. They walk me all the way back to Taft-Hay Hall.
“You going to be okay?” T.S. asks.
“I want to take a nap.”
“Call me if you need anything. We’ll talk more later, okay? Promise?”
I nod, head inside, up the stairs, and back into my room. Maia’s here, listening to The Clash, drinking afternoon tea and reading a book.
“Good afternoon. And in case you’re wondering
, I’ve decided to forgive you for dashing off this morning without giving me the goods,” Maia says, half chiding, but she never really sounds annoyed. I suspect that’s because of the British accent. Maia’s parents are from Singapore, but they have lived in London her whole life, so she’s this amazing mix of Asian and British. She’s wearing her sleek black hair in a high ponytail, as she does most days. She has that kind of gorgeous long hair that would probably stop traffic if she wore it down. Maybe she wears it up as a courtesy, as traffic accident prevention. The hair, the accent—she was given the gifts that only make her better at what she was born to do: debate.
“Thanks, but there aren’t any goods,” I say, then kick off my Vans into the closet.
She waves a hand in the air dismissively, her other hand holding a mug of Earl Grey, which she drinks pretty much every afternoon. You can take the girl out of Britain….
“I bet you told T.S. what you did last night,” she says quietly.
Any other day the words would be a sharp knife. Because they’re true. We might look like a threesome, but we’re really a pair plus one. Maia and I were matched up last year in English lit to give a presentation we called Great Sidekicks in Literary History. We chose Falstaff from Henry V, Jim from Huck Finn, and Watson from Sherlock Holmes. Then Maia tossed in the Nurse from Romeo and Juliet and launched into her very own soliloquy on how English literature scholars should expand the definition of a sidekick to include the very impressive curriculum vitae of several female supporting characters. She was brilliant and the whole class gave her a standing ovation.
“You are a goddess of words,” I told her afterward. “Like Zeus or something.”
“Athena,” Maia corrected. She stopped, reconsidered. “Scratch that. I’m Wonder Woman. She doesn’t even need a sidekick.”
“Want to go to lunch with me, Wonder Woman?” I asked.
She said yes and we became fast friends. Then Maia’s roommate got kicked out at the end of last year. It was our very own Themis scandal since the only thing that gets you kicked out is failing, and her roommate was so addicted to painkillers she spent most of her days too loopy to finish a sentence, let alone a homework assignment. So we asked Maia to room with us junior year. The three of us are super close, but T.S. is still the one I turn to first.
The Mockingbirds Page 4