“I haven't got any friends,” I point out.
“That's nobody's fault but yours.”
“What about Professor Delacroix?”
“He's certainly not your friend!” She explodes.
“No, I mean, what are we going to do about him?”
“You should have thought about that before.”
“But he can't just get away with what he did!”
Mom pinches the bridge of her nose. “You shouldn't have let him take those pictures of you. You shouldn't have slept with your professor, period. I thought I taught you better than that, Jessica. I thought I raised you better than that.”
A bolt of fury courses through me, made even more intense by the bitter knowledge that she is right. “So you're saying that it's all my fault?”
“No, that's not what I'm saying. He's a grown man. He should have known better than to take advantage of an emotionally disturbed young girl.”
“So you're saying I'm emotionally disturbed now.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, “did you think Cherry Hill was a summer camp?”
“I don't think even summer camps force you to participate in macrame.”
We were given only the softest of yarns to work with and even then, staff were always in attendance just in case someone got the bright idea of trying to strangulate themselves.
Mom makes a sound of disgust.
“How you can joke about it….”
It's either joke about it, or start screaming and never stop.
While she goes to the car to retrieve her overnight bag I check my email. There's another one from that anonymous address, the one Delacroix always used for our meetings.
Are you all right?
Great. He knows.
But now I don't think that he has the book after all. There is an edge of concern to that email that wouldn't be present if the book was in his possession. He'd be far more self-assured and smug if it were. That means that as long as he thinks I have the book in my possession, I have the upper hand.
Fuck you, I write back. No, I'm not all right.
The response is instantaneous. Let me see you. I'd like to take you to dinner.
Here's a suggestion for the main course, I write. Go eat yourself.
Mom sees me with the laptop and says, “What are you doing?” before I can close and hide it. At my silence, she strides over and takes it from me in spite of my protests. Her eyes flick over the screen, reading the words. A line forms between her eyebrows.
“Is this him?” she asks. “The…teacher you had the affair with?”
“Yes.”
“'Do you have it?'” she says aloud. Delacroix must have sent another message.
“He thinks I have the book,” I tell her. “I thought he'd taken it, but I guess not. Cocksucker.”
Mom is silent, thinking. She looks so tired and disappointed. I hate her for making me care. I hate myself for caring. Love and hate: two sides of the same spectrum.
“He's asking what you want now,” she says, when my laptop pings again.
“His suffering,” I say coldly. “I want him to suffer. I want him to be in hell.”
“Let's talk to the police,” Mom says.
“They can't give me what I want.”
“Put on your shoes,” she says wearily.
There aren't many things that can get a tenured professor fired. Especially not if he is actively publishing, and otherwise generating money for the university. In that case, it's damn near impossible.
Luckily for me, Delacroix has found one of the few political hot buttons left in the world: sexual scandal and debauchery.
People can't stand the idea of other people having sex, especially if they aren't having any themselves.
Throw a double life as a seedy erotic photographer into the mix and, well, you can forget that research grant.
A university is as self-preserving as any living, breathing organism. It rejects the failing part of itself so that the greater whole may survive and thrive.
Delacroix is amputated from his post and left to rot like the filthy, stinking gangrenous appendage that he is.
Is this a satisfactory outcome?
Not nearly as much as seeing him on his knees would be. Begging me to take him back.
Not that I would—probably.
It would depend how hard and convincingly he could beg.
I wonder what will happen to him.
“You shouldn't even care,” Mom says angrily.
My grades are thrown out, chalked up to the psychic distress of being involved with an older, predatory male. Never mind the fact that I was the one who initiated the affair, or that I enjoyed the vast majority of the so-called perversions he inflicted upon me.
No. I'm the simpering pathetic girly-whirl who didn't know what she was getting into. Isn't that just typical. You're either asking for it, or having it forced upon you without your consent. Who decided women always have to be passive in sex?
I know when I'm being offered a good deal, so I take it. And in return, I receive the Victim card to play as I so desire. I'm offered a fresh start with a clean slate, which I refuse—and I think the dean of admissions at Fielder is relieved, although my mom is horrified.
Mom wastes no time starting my detox program.
My stomach refuses to cooperate in the proceedings, naturally. My mother takes the opportunity to point out how skinny I've gotten—it isn't a compliment—and then asks if I am starving myself again, making myself throw up.
I hadn't realized that she'd noticed.
“No,” I snap, trying for outraged and failing.
I can see from her face, the tautly drawn lines around her mouth and eyes, that she does not believe me. Well, fuck her. She'll see.
She makes a gentle soup. I can only manage a few swallows before I am forced to push the bowl back in disgust. For the third time in as many days, I am taken to a doctor. This trip reveals an ulcer in my stomach lining.
“Are you often stressed?”
He is holding a clipboard. A moment ago he was scribbling away but now the pen is poised, ready, as he waits for my response. I look at him like he's crazy.
“What do you think?”
“I don't know,” he says patiently, “that's why I'm asking you. I want to get a second opinion here from the patient herself. So you tell me, Jessica”—it feels so strange having people call me by my first name again—“do you think you're stressed?”
“Yes, I think I'm fucking stressed. I'm about to be checked into a goddamn mental asylum, for God's sake!”
I'm not sure why I tell him this. Shock value, maybe. He blinks, but that could be because I'm shouting at him. “I see,” he says, in a way that doesn't make it clear what his particular revelation is. “May I have your permission to speak to your mother about your health?”
“I don't care,” I say flatly.
He has me sign something on the clipboard. I hear his heavy footfalls fade into the white noise of the hospital corridor. Going to the waiting room. Calling my mother aside into one of the empty rooms. Talking to her about—
My imagination goes blank. I have no idea what the doctor will want to speak to my mother about.
Whatever it is, it isn't good.
Her face is grim as we march to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription. The pamphlet the doctor gave me says the pills are meant to neutralize my stomach’s acidic chemistry. There is also a list of dietary restrictions that I probably won't follow.
My name is called and Mom follows me to the register. I reach out for the bag, but my mother takes it and slips it into her purse.
“What the fuck, Mom?” I say.
“You can't be trusted to take care of yourself.”
“That's bullshit.”
“Is it, Jessica?” For a moment, I think she's going to explode. “Is it? Do you even remember why I'm here?”
Yes. Yes, I remember.
“Fine, you can carry the pills,” I s
ay. “Bitch.”
I'm dragged to the dentist, as well.
It takes a little while to find a place in Fielder that is covered by our HMO. I suppose Mom is trying to get me vaccinated before shipping me back to Cherry Hill. Might come home with fleas, otherwise. After my X-rays, I am told that I have two cavities that need to be filled.
I share this news with my mom, who looks more annoyed than she did earlier, if that's even possible. She and the nurses plan evasive action. Mom explains the necessity of having it done sooner, rather than later, tiptoeing around the real reason why while the other staff and patients try not to eavesdrop too conspicuously. I read a magazine in the waiting room and pretend I don't notice all the stares.
The dentist is the first to cave. Maybe he feels sorry for my mom. Or, more likely, he wants the two of us out of his office, so we will stop distracting people from having their root canals.
“We can try to squeeze you in tomorrow.”
That's what she said.
I lick my finger to turn the page of the magazine I am reading.
Mom shoots me a Look. “Tomorrow would be great.”
Shots in my mouth. My favorite. At least they’ll make me numb. That watered-down general anesthetic is probably going to be the only drugs I'll get for a while. Unless you count antidepressants, which sure as shit aren't miracle pills, so I don't.
Cherry Hill feels like it's supposed to be punishment. But as I listen to little children crying that they're scared it's going to hurt, and the quiet blare of the drill, I think that I've never felt safer than I have when I'm sandwiched between those four padded walls.
The nurses with their pillow-like breasts, as quick to offer words of comfort as they are to brandish their needles loaded with enough muscle relaxants to take out a small pony, let alone an underweight teenager girl. The office where we made our weekly confessionals with the psychiatrist, the one with the tortoise shell glasses who spent most of the session nodding, saying “um-hmm” or “how does that make you feel?” and then smiling and bobbing her head some more. The bland, stomach-friendly food. It is existence at the lowest common denominator.
I suspect minimum security prisons are a lot like Cherry Hill, except there is less stigma about having been in jail than there is about having been in a psych ward. In any case, it'll be a whole lot better than staying at home, under my parents' resentful stares.
Though I'm trading one Gestapo regime for another.
And what about the book?
I'm not sure what happened to it.
Mom spoke to the police, eventually, once she got over the shame and embarrassment at having to request my erotic pictures back.
The cops were sympathetic, and they looked, too (or so they said) but the book seems to have disappeared right along with whomever made the anonymous 911 telephone call.
“If anyone tries to publish it, we'll know,” they assure me. “And then they will be dealt with to the full extent of the law. But I doubt that thing will ever resurface.”
As if this is supposed to make me feel better, knowing that the book is out there, unscathed.
Mocking me.
Taunting me.
Tantalizing me.
I remember that story Delacroix told me, about the man doomed to an eternity in hell without food or drink. Desire without satisfaction.
Is there any better example than an unsuccessful search?
Tomorrow I am being sent back to Cherry Hill.
My father still isn't speaking to me, will hardly even look at me. Once again, he cannot wait to be rid of me.
“He'll come around,” Mom says, very hesitantly.
I whirl around to look at her. “Don't condescend to me,” I snap. “I'm crazy, not stupid.”
“You're not crazy,” she says, alarmed.
I just look at her until she flushes and looks away.
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought.
Beneath my sleeves, my wrist is bleeding. I didn't cut a word this time. I've been slashing the labels on my skin, rendering them illegible. Clearing the slate, so to speak. I doubt I'll have the chance to do it in Cherry Hill and my parents are too stupid to notice.
No, the goddamn page has turned on me yet again.
I've entered a new fucking chapter in my life, as my dad would probably say, if he were on speaking terms with me. Which he isn't, and for all I know, never will be again. I've never seen him so pissed.
Yeah, this is a whole new chapter, all right.
A chapter where Alexander Delacroix is considered a fraud and a lecher.
A chapter where my family is busy consulting with lawyers to sue him in order to cover my psychiatric bills.
A chapter in which a father has had Enough, to the point where he has stopped putting on these pathetic pretenses of love or affection, and when he refers to me at all, he refers to me in the third person to my mother, as if I'm gone—or dead.
A chapter in which Nathan Shivers is doomed to fade into obscurity with other failed artists.
A chapter in which I am alive…for the moment.
I already know how story ends. I die. But whether it's at twenty-seven or one-hundred-and-twenty-seven is anyone's guess.
I suppose it all depends on what happens next.
Ack(!)knowledgements
I'd like to take this time to thank:
Louisa, for her beautiful covers. I think she did an especially nice job with this one.
You, for reading this book.
My friends and family for their support.
My PH whoarcruxes
All the wonderful new people I've had the pleasure of meeting through my books and reviews.
Thank you!!!!!
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