True Story

by Kate Reed Petty

  I didn’t understand this world, I thought, where everyone just wants someone to blame, when all of us have enough to deal with as it is.

  The crazy thing was, the girl didn’t even want to get Richard and Max in trouble. It was her mother, Coach said. She did the whole cry-for-help thing because people wouldn’t stop teasing her. So really, we’re all on the same page. We want the same thing the girl wants. We all just want this to settle down.

  Right, I said. I leaned forward and put my fist on the desk. I wanted Coach to know that I was serious. I wanted him to see my commitment. I wanted to do the right thing.

  I felt like a man. I said, What do you need me to do?

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, Haley called and asked if I’d give her a ride to the mall. She had to buy a birthday present for her dad.

  And I was thinking maybe we could talk a bit, she said.

  Sure, I said. I was so nervous I worried my voice was going to crack. I hadn’t talked to Haley in weeks, and I thought she didn’t like me anymore. Yeah, I was going to the mall today anyway, I said. I was thinking about seeing a movie.

  Oh, cool. Yeah, Scream 3 just came out, she said. I’m dying to see it.

  That’s so awesome, I said. Amazing. Yes.

  I could barely speak to her on the drive there. She looked out the window. A song came on the radio that I liked. I like this song, I said, but Haley just kind of said mm-hmm. I was sure I was fucked.

  But in the mall, it was a little easier. We walked by racks of T-shirts and flip-flops. We went to the bookstore and to a store that sold only teapots. I saw guys look at Haley, then at me, then away. I made myself look them in the eyes. Yeah. She’s with me, I said to them, in my mind.

  We had a good time. Haley was a good time. She made fun of this stupid T-shirt and the kind of person who would wear it. I made a joke about a teapot, I did the I’m-a-little-teapot arms, it made her laugh. She bought a book for her dad about the Civil War. Does your dad love the Civil War? she said. My dad is crazy about the Civil War.

  Yeah, I said, but only to keep her talking.

  In line at the movies I asked what the first Scream was about. Is there anything I need to know before I see this one? I said.

  Haley stared at me. “You haven’t seen Scream?” she said.

  So I laughed and said I was joking. Of course I saw Scream, I said. I saw it twice.

  Haley laughed and kind of punched my shoulder. God, Nick, you fooled me. For a second I don’t know what I thought, she said.

  Ha ha, I said. Yup. There’s no way this one will be good as the first, I said.

  They’re all good, Haley said. She kind of punched me on the shoulder again, in a way that let me know we were all good. She even let me buy her a Mountain Dew.

  So you like scary movies, huh? I asked her.

  Yeah, I love them, she said, and I loved the way she shrugged when she said it. I loved how she drank soda, she wasn’t one of these girls who always make a big deal about calories. She was easy to be around. She was so pretty.

  I’ve been wanting to ask you something, she said. Our elbows were almost touching on the armrest between us. An ad on the screen was trying to sell us another Mountain Dew.

  I want to ask you something, too.

  Oh, okay. You go first.

  I panicked. For a wild second I thought she was about to say that she was falling in love with me. I thought about saying something emotional first, maybe that’s what she really wanted. Something like I really like you. But I chickened out. No, you go first.

  No, you. Then she laughed. I’m just kidding. I’ll go first. It’s this whole thing with Max and Richard. I’ve been really wanting to talk to you about it. I know Max is a jerk, but what about Richard?

  The lights in the theater went off and a trailer started playing. I leaned closer to her, smelled strawberries. Yeah, I whispered. Richard is a good guy.

  So he didn’t really . . .

  Didn’t really what?

  She was looking at me, but it was dark, so I couldn’t read her expression. Richard is my oldest friend, I said.

  She didn’t say anything. I thought she just needed me to explain. It’s not like everyone is saying, I said. That’s just a dumb story. You just can’t understand the pressure he’s under, that we’re all under.

  She laughed. I decided that maybe, yes, okay, what I said could have been a joke. I forced a laugh, too, but then her eyes were wide. It had been a sarcastic laugh, I realized.

  You think I don’t understand pressure?

  Yeah, you know how it is. I turned to face her. I thought about taking her hand but didn’t. I know you do. We’re scrutinized for every little thing. Every little thing gets all blown out of proportion.

  What do you mean?

  I just mean, people are coming out of the woods for Max and Richard.

  Wait. She looked away. She pushed her hair out of her face. Wait.

  She was quiet for so long I wasn’t sure she was going to continue, and then she said, in a different voice, really agitated now, “What you’re saying is, you’re saying they’re allowed to rape a girl because of pressure?”

  “What?” I sat up straight. “No. Haley, you can’t just throw that word around.”

  “She tried to kill herself.”

  She was sitting up stick straight. I remembered what Coach had said: that I couldn’t talk about it, that I shouldn’t say anything, except that nothing had happened. I tried to think of what to say to Haley that would fit the bill.

  “But the rape thing. Where did you hear that? Who said that to you?” I felt myself getting agitated.

  “Max and Richard said it. At Denny’s. You were there.”

  “They didn’t say that.” I was surprised how nice it felt to be angry.

  “They said they fingered her while she was passed out.”

  I asked how she had heard that.

  “Alan told me,” she said.

  The idea that she’d been talking to Alan made me furious. What if she was the one who told everybody? I hated Alan. I hated her. I imagined him telling her, betraying Richard and Max and all of us—I’d always known he was a liar—and it felt right to be angry, it was like finally finishing a run and drinking an entire bottle of water in one go. Haley didn’t understand that we were just trying to have a good time while we could. We had to be able to run three miles in twenty-five minutes. We had both legs and nothing to write about in our college application essays. When we broke our arms, we couldn’t even take the Oxy because our teammates might need it to give to girls. I didn’t even want a blow job from Haley. Not if I had to feel this way to get it.

  I stared at the screen. I was so angry I couldn’t look at her. But I didn’t have to put up with her anymore because the movie started. I couldn’t decide if the timing was perfect or terrible. On the screen, a guy was careening through Los Angeles trying to get home in time to save his girlfriend from a murderer. I looked over at Haley once and she was looking away from me, toward the door. Just when the girlfriend got out of the shower—and the killer was right there, ready to strike—Haley got up and walked out.

  I went back and forth but finally decided to follow her out. Even then she wouldn’t let me drive her home.

  “I need some time alone,” she said. “I’ll get a ride with Georgia when she gets off work.”

  Her arms were crossed. Behind her, kids were blowing up plastic grocery bags and setting them in a shallow fountain, giving them a little push, watching them float. I realized I would have to tell the team about this. I would have to tell Coach. Who else was Haley talking to?

  I touched her for the first time since the party. It was just my hand on her elbow. I was surprised she let me keep it there. You can’t tell anyone what you said in there, I said. That bullshit a
bout Richard and the girl. You can’t say that to anyone.

  My hand was still on her arm. Her eyes softened, and her mouth opened just a little bit, and for a second I thought that I had cracked through. She was sorry, she was going to apologize. She uncrossed her arms and took the smallest step backward, just enough to step out of my reach.

  “Everyone knows, Nick,” she said, and walked away.

  * * *

  • • •

  COACH WASN’T WRONG: they started coming out of the woods for us, and hard. The second week in January was the worst. It was my first experience with injustice. We were no longer individuals, talented young men with hopes and dreams. We were the lacrosse team that had raped that girl.

  On Monday they had a moment of silence over the loudspeaker for suicide awareness. Some sophomore did it during morning announcements. But the loudspeaker stayed on the whole time, you could hear the kid breathing. It wasn’t a moment of silence. It was a moment of spittle in the corner of some mouth breather’s mouth. I watched the second hand on the clock, and the “moment” only lasted thirty seconds, which seemed cheap to me.

  Also that day we missed fifth period for a special presentation about suicide. A bunch of people were wearing black on Tuesday. By Wednesday it was almost everyone. Then on Thursday some girl got up during lunch and shouted that she was organizing a boycott of lacrosse games and asked people to come over and sign up. Dave wanted to go over and rip her sheets into shreds, but I told him to stop. I felt myself standing tall even as I said it. I told him what Coach had told me: that we had to keep our cool. And I was right, because then some random guy yelled suck my dick! and the girl got all red in the face and ran out of the lunchroom and no one signed her stupid boycott anyway.

  Richard had stopped coming to school the day before. When I called his house, his mother said he was sick and that she’d have him call me soon. Over lunch Max said they had both talked to the police. The police had treated him like shit, he said. They kept asking the same questions, like I was an idiot. And none of us said, You are an idiot, because things were different now, we weren’t joking around anymore.

  One of the cops said they talked to this other girl. This random girl told them I pushed her on a bed last summer. At some party. Max looked at us as he said this, like he was daring us to agree with the girl. She said I made her uncomfortable.

  We couldn’t look at Max. We weren’t sure what to say. So the ladies’ man gets rough, Dave finally said, and sort of laughed, then stopped. None of us were laughing.

  Anyway, it was months ago, Max said. What does it matter.

  And we all agreed: They’re coming out of the woods for us, is all.

  On Friday, Ms. Lomax gave us the whole class just to write about our feelings. “I know a lot of you are probably feeling upset, maybe confused, maybe even afraid. Writing can help. It’s not graded, and you don’t have to share.”

  Dave folded his arms and refused, said he didn’t have anything to say about recent events. “This is calculus,” he said.

  “You kids’ lives are more important than calculus,” she said. “But if you don’t want to write, you can excuse yourself and go sit in the library.”

  I was the only lacrosse player left in the room but I wasn’t going to bail. We spent a silent half hour bent over our papers. The sound of everyone’s pens going was like ants chewing up a man buried alive to his neck. I stared at the blue lines in my blank notebook and wrote nothing. When thirty minutes were up, Ms. Lomax asked if anyone wanted to share. Haley volunteered. She walked by my desk without looking at me and stood up in front of the class.

  What is a boxing ring for? Climb the velvet rope. Shrug off your robe. You can’t complain about getting hit. What did you expect, we might say, when you climbed into the ring, wearing those gloves? When you heard the bell? If you get hit on the street, one-two, by a stranger in silk shorts? Okay, we might say, not your fault. Or maybe we’ll bring out a coil of velvet rope, to wrap and wrap around you, so that when you wake up, hit and upset, we can explain what a boxing ring is for.

  I didn’t totally get what she was trying to say, but I knew it was good. She sounded good reading it. Confident and smug. I hated her. She hadn’t looked at me all week. She walked by my desk and still didn’t look.

  Dave threw a party that Friday. No one came but us. We sat in the basement together and got drunk, except for Richard, who we still hadn’t seen. We slept over, splayed out on the floor. I couldn’t sleep, and I got up and drank the last two beers by myself. I stood looking out of the sliding glass door that went out onto Dave’s deck. There was a spotlight on, and I watched the moths flutter around it.

  The next morning we went out for egg-and-cheese bagels. There was a group of private school girls at the bagel place when we got there. They must have seen us before we saw them. They were sitting there silently, staring at us. We thought that we should probably leave, but no one made the move. The girls all stood up at once. I heard one of them say, “Two, three,” and then they screamed, “Rapists!” in unison. We backed out, trying to act like we’d just decided to go somewhere else. We went out to the parking lot and sat silently in my car, each of us looking out our own windows, hungry, with nothing to combat our hangovers. Eventually Max said, Bitches.

  All week, I just tried not to think too hard about it. I tried to focus on playing well. I was waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings anyway, so I would go to the track and run twice as far as we were supposed to during the off season. It was dark and cold, and my breath would puff out ahead of me as I ran. I’d get to the showers first and stand in the hot water, alone. After school I ran more. If I wasn’t running I was drinking. So I ran as late as I could, because I wanted to play well, and to play well I couldn’t drink too much. So I ran for hours. I ran farther than I’d ever gone before. I tried not to think about Haley when I ran. She was wrong. It wasn’t peaceful.

  * * *

  • • •

  RICHARD SHOWED UP at my house on Sunday morning. I ran downstairs when the doorbell rang, because I didn’t want my mom to wake up. I hadn’t told her anything about Richard and Max. I didn’t want her to hear it for the first time from a cop.

  But it was just Richard. I hadn’t seen him since lunch on Tuesday. His hands were folded behind his neck like he was stretching. He looked tired. There was a spray of pimples on his chin, and he’d missed a couple of hairs shaving. Poor guy, I thought.

  We went to the basement to play video games. Neither of us wanted to think about anything for a while. But when I turned on the system, Richard said, Wait.

  He was sitting on his knees, looking at the ground. The theme music for the game played on a loop; behind him, the screen asked us to choose between one player or two.

  Nick, we made the whole thing up.

  What whole thing?

  The thing with the girl.

  The thing with the girl?

  Nick, quit it. You know what I mean when I fucking say the thing with the girl.

  Richard had never talked to me like that before. I reminded myself of what Coach had said: no matter what, we couldn’t turn on each other, we would make it through as long as we stayed loyal to each other. So I said nothing.

  The private school girl. All we did was drive her home. We didn’t touch her, we didn’t finger her, we didn’t jizz on her tits.

  I thought you said you jizzed on her stomach.

  Well, not that, either. I’m telling you, nothing happened.

  The music from the video game system was making me crazy. I grabbed the controller. I selected TWO PLAYERS. Richard picked up the other controller. We started playing. I was trying to think. Mostly I was just shocked because I realized I’d never heard Richard actually say it before. I’d heard the story from Alan, from Dave. Richard almost sounded like he was Mr. Kaminsky or something when he said the words finger her, like the words
disgusted him. I wondered again if Richard could be gay.

  Tell me the whole thing, I said, finally.

  I was glad to have the screen to watch as he talked. Max was in the back seat, basically passed out with her. If he even put an arm around her, I didn’t see it. She was more awake than he was, actually. She told me where she lived. But then by the time we got to her house Max woke up, and she had mostly passed out. We drove straight from the party to her house. Ten minutes. I never touched her.

  But you carried her up the lawn.

  Well, except for then.

  But you guys were gone like an hour.

  We went to the Giant parking lot after so Max could get high. Then he spent like an hour trying to talk this slutty girl behind the counter at 7-Eleven into locking the doors and taking him up on the roof. Richard was mashing the controller. Aliens died in splatters of blood. Which she didn’t. I don’t think Max gets half the girls he says he does.

  But, what about the thing about the toilet paper. You said there was toilet paper in her pubes.

  Because then in Denny’s Max starts shitting on me. The way Max always shits on me. His guy had died. I thought about how it wasn’t just Max, it was all of us who gave Richard a hard time, but only because Richard never hooked up with anyone. I kept playing. Richard kept talking. So I started agreeing with him: Yeah I pulled the car over. Yeah I got in the back seat. Yeah we’re basically porn stars. Richard shook his head. I didn’t think it would get around like that.