East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “Blue,” Hannah said, her voice soft. “There was blood on you that night. I remembered that on this trip. Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” Maya said. “Why was there blood on you?”

  “What did he do to you?” Renee said.

  Blue laughed bitterly. “Oh now you want to know? Now you’re concerned about what he did? Go to hell, Renee.”

  “Blue, I’m concerned. What did he do?” Maya said.

  “He didn’t...?” Hannah said.

  “Please no,” Renee said.

  Blue knew what they were asking, blinked against the words. Of course they thought it was rape. If she told them the truth, they would probably say she was lucky it wasn’t. Renee might even offer up an infuriating “Thank God!” And it was true—she was lucky, if you could call it that. And that was the worst part in some way, because she sure as hell didn’t feel lucky, and that made her feel guilty and ashamed of her own suffering.

  “You really want to know?” Blue said. They were all watching her. Hannah, Renee, Maya—all of them so still and expectant. Her head felt clear and sober, though she knew she couldn’t possibly be. “Will it make you feel better? Sate your...your...curiosity? Comfort you if I say no he didn’t rape me?”

  “We really want to know,” Hannah said. “And not because we’re curious. Because we care.”

  Blue looked away. Tried to imagine saying the words out loud. But there was so much resistance, like a weighted dumbbell sitting on her chest, asphyxiating the words before they could be spoken. She couldn’t have pushed them out even if she wanted to. She thought back on that night, her mind stumbling into a darkness black as a grave, tripping over moments of that horror still so alive, so vivid.

  “Blue,” Maya said.

  The men chasing Hannah up the walkway. Her friends screaming. Though in Blue’s mind there’s just silence, open mouths and fear-lit eyes, their hands and bodies lunging to grab Hannah, pull her in to safety. Henry shouting for someone to get his dad’s rifle in the closet. And then they were falling backward, the door flying open, the men inside the house.

  Oh God. She could still taste the hot panic. Sour and corrosive.

  Now she forced herself to look at Maya. But instead of being comforted by the new softness she saw in Maya’s eyes, Blue was enraged. Because it was too damn late. It had all come too late and all she wanted was to hurt someone, to stab with words, to discharge all the poison that had been put inside her. All these years she’d held on to the secret, and now what she wanted was to wield it as a weapon. A weapon against Maya for asking her to forgive. A weapon against Renee for deserving no forgiveness. Screw it. Screw them. They wanted her story. Well then, they should get it, they should have to live with it. Renee should have to live with it.

  She looked at Renee, saw those darting eyes. Saw the way her arms were wrapped around herself, defended against what Blue might say. The anger Blue felt in that moment acted as a Heimlich maneuver, suddenly propelling the words out of her. She wasn’t going to let her escape this again.

  “We ran.” She jammed her finger toward Renee. “She was in front of me.” Through Henry’s kitchen and out the back patio door. The night air like freedom. The sleeping neighborhood oblivious to their terror.

  “They were chasing us. One of them at least. I could feel him behind me but I didn’t want to turn. I just kept my eyes on Renee. She jumped the bushes into the neighbor’s yard. I was right behind her. Running so fucking hard. Thinking if I could just get over those bushes. If I could just...like they were some kind of...magic divider he couldn’t cross. I was right there. He grabbed my shirt. I tried to shake him off but I couldn’t. I was screaming, ‘Renee, Renee!’ And she stopped and turned. I saw her stop and turn. He told her to come back. He told her he’d kill me if she didn’t. Remember that, Renee? Remember him saying that?”

  Blue looked away, tears so long unshed, now pooling.

  “She looked right at me. I was so scared, so scared.” Blue paused, the weight of the next memory almost too heavy to speak. “Then she turned around and ran.”

  The air was thick with their silence.

  “Blue,” Renee said, moving toward her now.

  Blue backed away. “I watched you go. I watched you leave me there with that...you left me there to die! How could you...how could you just—” She shook her head against the slimy tentacles of memory. Nauseated with emotion but there was no turning back. “He told me he was going to have some fun with me first.”

  Hannah’s eyes were wet, tears threatening to spill over.

  “Next thing I knew, my face was in the dirt.” Blue could still taste the damp grass when she hit the ground—that familiar smell of childhood play and softball games in center field—only turned dark and wormy as a burial pit. Even now it was the first thing that came to her, that damp green smell, his stale breath, her own rancid fear.

  “He flipped me over, pushed my sweatshirt up to my neck, tore at my bra. I fought.” He hadn’t been terribly strong, only just stronger than her own adrenaline-fueled body. “I kept thinking Renee would come back. That help would be coming.” I just need to stall him. “But then he pinned my arms above my head. I tried to kick him. I was thrashing and kicking, trying to get away. He put a knife to my throat.” She hadn’t remembered seeing him hold it, only felt the poke of the blade against her skin. “I begged him to stop. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to do this.’”

  He’d pressed it into the thin skin of her clavicle, just enough that she could feel the sting, the tickle of blood tracing its way down her breast.

  “Do you know what it felt like to have to say that? To have to beg?” Her voice caught, remembering how she’d loathed the sound of her own whimpering, so meek and cowed, in the face of such revolting evil. “But I had to do it... I had to stall. Because Renee was coming back, right? She wasn’t going to just leave me there. I kept thinking, What’s taking so long? I kept thinking, Hurry! Hurry!” The words looping over and over in her mind, a refrain against his body on top of her, against his sickening odor, his enraging weight. “He pushed up my skirt.” She’d never worn skirts before. But she had that night because she’d dared to believe she could be a pretty girl, had dared to embrace her own femininity in the face of Jack’s attention days before.

  “And then...” He’d been removing his belt when he’d stopped suddenly, froze like a squirrel sensing danger. A million times she’d tried to remember what had made him pause, but her mind was a skipping stone, jumping from one disconnected moment to another. What she remembered next was him looking at her, staring deep into her eyes, into her vulnerability, as she lay utterly helpless and exposed beneath him. “He said...” She stopped. Shook her head. She couldn’t say it. How could she say it?

  “Blue,” Maya said.

  She swallowed. Her body shaking with the force of keeping the words in. “He said, ‘You’re too ugly to fuck anyway,’ and he stood up and ran.”

  She looked at her friends.

  They stared back, mouths hanging open. A hush over the group like a winter.

  “Oh my God,” Maya said.

  Blue breathed. It seemed the first time she had done so since she’d started talking. But she didn’t feel better. She didn’t feel purged. She was still, in some way, trapped there, stuck in time, the old film playing to its inevitable end, only to start over again. She remembered the relief of weight being removed, not just of his body but of a nightmare ending. Or so she had thought. It was only later, after the adrenaline had worn off and the men were captured, after a plea bargain of second-degree attempted murder had been struck to spare the girls from testifying, after the attention around the case had faded and things had gone back to “normal,” that she’d realized he was still on top of her, all that weight crushing her and the disgusting residue he left on her that made her feel as hideous as he said she was, hideous to the core. One
of the worst parts was that it wasn’t even new. He’d just reinforced the belief about herself she’d been raised with.

  She turned to Renee. “I waited for you.” She was trying so hard to fight off sobs, to climb over the lump in her throat, to stand solid and big in her anger, not liquefied and reduced by grief. “I waited for you to help me. I believed that you were coming back. That you were my friend. That you were the one person, the one person in my life...” Tears were bubbling over now, burning as they spilled out of her eyes. She wiped them furiously away. “Well, friend, congratulations! He didn’t rape or kill me. Your conscience is clear.”

  As soon as the words were out, something broke in her, all her defenses crashing in one instant, leaving her with the devastation of having been abandoned by the one person she’d always believed loved her. Her body crumpled as if struck.

  She pressed her palms to her eyes, waiting to hear dumb platitudes. But when she looked up, she saw that not only Hannah but Renee and Maya were crying.

  “No!” Blue said, all of her anger returning in a rush. “You do not get to cry, Renee. Do you hear me? You got away. You went to the neighbors—safe and sound! And you never once apologized. You never once even bothered to ask what happened to me after you left me there!”

  Renee sobbed harder. “I know!”

  Blue scoffed. “You know.”

  “I was too scared to ask. I knew you must hate me. I swear I was just trying to get help. And I did. That should count for something, right? That I got to a phone? That the police came. That that sicko is in jail now? But I know I left you. I can only imagine how that felt. And I have to live with—”

  Blue laughed short and hard like a scrape. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Poor Renee. What you have to live with. Tell us. Go ahead. What do you have to live with, Renee?”

  “That I’m a coward! That I couldn’t be there when you needed me. I know I should have said something. I know I pretended like it didn’t happen. I just didn’t know how else to live with the guilt.”

  “You left me.”

  “It was stupid and selfish and messed up. I get it. I let you down in a way I can never be forgiven for. I failed you. Totally and completely. And I hate myself for that. And I have to live with that.”

  “Good. I hope it keeps you up at night,” Blue said. She felt hijacked by hate, everything ugly around her, in her. And yet she kept amplifying it, justifying her hatred in her mind in the hopes that it might finally find release. Because here she was, thirty years old and incapable of the kind of soft, vulnerable love that didn’t nip in fear, incapable of being loved in her own soft places, of being in a relationship with a man, of loving herself. And as far as she was concerned, it was Renee’s fault just as much as that scumbag’s who ground her into the dirt. If Renee hadn’t left her, Blue wouldn’t be so broken. If she’d just said she was sorry afterward, allowed Blue to confide in her the horror, Blue wouldn’t have felt so abandoned, her ugliness confirmed.

  “It’s always the same with you, Renee, even now as I confess something I’ve been holding inside for twelve years—you have to make this about you. Even now you’re only thinking about yourself.” Blue didn’t even know if this was true but she didn’t care, didn’t give an ounce of concern about anything but unburdening herself.

  Renee’s tears stopped instantly as if she’d been slapped to her senses. Her voice took on a wobbly sort of anger, daring herself to allow it.

  “Really? I only think of myself? Ever? What about everything I ever did for you before that moment? Why can’t you remember anything but that?”

  “Because for me there is no other moment!” Blue screamed. The air seemed to ripple with the force of it. They both stood there in the wake of it, in the shock of all that rage. Then Blue slumped with the exertion. She had hoped to feel better, finally free of it all. Instead she was just empty and dried out. Alone. Ashamed. She turned away from Renee’s gaze.

  Maya stepped between them. “Okay, listen, you two,” she said. She addressed Renee first. “I get why you ran. It was an impossible predicament. But it was weak and uncool that you never talked to Blue about it.”

  “Thanks, I’m aware,” Renee said.

  Maya turned to Blue. “And it’s weak that you have defined a person—your best friend—by one moment, because it’s easier to hate than to accept someone’s different ways of coping and to be powerless to change them. We all fail each other. We fail ourselves.”

  “Great, so you all agree that I’m weak,” Renee said. “Good to know.”

  “At least you’re just weak. I’m weak and ugly,” Blue said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Maya said, throwing her hands up.

  “Wait,” Renee said to Blue. “You know it’s not true—what he said. You know you’re not ugly, right?”

  Blue looked at her, then past her, past the streetlights, the restaurant lights, the summer moon. She hated that she believed it. She knew it meant that that scumbag had won. But no matter what she told herself, no matter how much she didn’t care what some psychopathic dirtbag thought of her, she couldn’t escape the greasy psychic film he’d left on her, the way it made her feel turned inside, like rotten fruit. The way it leaked out and drove people away. “Sometimes I wish he had killed me.”

  “Blue!”

  “I don’t even know why he didn’t.”

  “Maybe he heard the sirens,” Hannah said.

  Blue looked up, surprised. She’d actually never considered that before. But that kind of made sense. The sirens are what stopped him from...well...everything. The sirens that were there because Renee had run to a neighbor’s and they’d called 911. She felt something shift, a piece of missing information altering the narrative. It changed things. Not a lot. But a little. Still. “If it wasn’t true, what he said, I wouldn’t be alone.”

  She sat down on the curb, the weight of that thought too heavy to bear. “It isn’t fair,” she said to Renee. “You have it all and I’m still back there. Alone and scared. I lost my best friend. I lost everything. And now, on top of that, I ruined my one chance with Jack.”

  It was too much. Too much.

  Renee sat down beside her. “Listen to me. Look at me. I need you to hear this. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry I hurt you. It’s the last thing I ever wanted to do. I have missed you every single day for the last twelve years. And hey, if it makes you feel any better, my life’s actually not that great either. If you want to know the truth, I didn’t get pregnant on purpose. And as for my ‘perfect relationship,’ I think Darrin is cheating on me.” She swallowed. “I haven’t been able to admit that out loud until now.”

  “Wait, what?” Maya said.

  Renee laughed, an almost hysterical yelp. “Yep. With the neighbor! I found texts. And my first husband cheated on me too. Two days after our wedding. And I still stayed. He was the one who left me. And you know what? Deep down I think I deserve it. Or at the very least expect it. Because...who could love me? I mean, I don’t even know who ‘me’ is. Like, what are they even loving in the first place? And whatever, so what. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m just saying...”

  Blue stared at her. They all did.

  “I didn’t know that,” Blue said. “Obviously.”

  “That bastard,” Maya added. She sat down beside them and sighed. “Since we’re playing whose life is worse, I’m losing my house because I sort of forgot to pay the property taxes and I can’t get a loan because I’ve blown my credit so bad, and on top of that, I don’t feel like I have you guys either.”

  “Wait. What?” Blue said.

  Maya squeezed her eyes shut against whatever Blue was going to say next.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Blue said.

  “Please do,” Maya said. “And just to be clear, I know you’re not going to give me a loan, so don’t worry, I’m not asking.”

&n
bsp; They all turned to Hannah.

  “I feel pretty good,” she said.

  HANNAH

  A damp mist was settling over the night, wisps of fog slipping off the bay like souls. Cars pulled in and out of the lot, passing treacherously close to them.

  “Let’s go home,” Hannah said. “We can talk about it all tomorrow.”

  Blue flicked her lighter on and off. “I don’t feel so hot,” she said. “I might’ve had one too many.”

  “I know that feeling,” Maya said. “Only with Cheetos.”

  Hannah watched Blue take a last hopeful glance at the restaurant as if Jack might return, saw a dark, sober anguish flash across her face. Poor Blue, she thought. Regret is such a tireless wound.

  “You okay?” Hannah said. “Maybe tomorrow you could send him a text. I bet he’d understand if you apologized.”

  “Maybe,” Blue said, though Hannah could tell she didn’t mean it.

  They climbed into the car and Maya pulled out of the lot.

  The fog was so thick now, rising smoky from the street like the exhale of a winter breath. They pulled over twice to let Blue puke and eventually rolled up to the house and filed out. Blue went straight upstairs and was passed out within minutes. Hannah put an empty bucket on the floor beside Blue’s bed, a glass of water on her nightstand. As the others got ready for sleep, she lingered in the darkness of Blue’s room.

  She wanted to say something about fear and regret. About forgiving yourself for making mistakes born of trauma. About how the more broken you’d been, the more things you were likely to break, like a computer rewired to self-destruction. She wanted to tell Blue it only made it worse to turn on yourself about it, to be without self-compassion. But what were words? She knew they would never reach the place where it mattered. She pulled the blanket over the now snoring Blue. “You went,” she whispered. “Remember that. At least you went to see him. And that was very brave.” She nodded to herself. Knew that even if Blue could hear her, it wouldn’t comfort her, that she wouldn’t be able to see this night as anything but a catastrophe. It was always easier to see small successes when they belonged to someone else.