Good Girls

by Laura Ruby

  “You should worry about Dad,” I say. “He’s the one with the high blood pressure.”

  “Which you’ll have before you’re eighteen. You’re just like him.” She smiles at me. “Audrey, I think you can start having a little bit of fun. So you don’t get an A this once. So you get an A minus. Is that really the worst that could happen to you?”

  I can’t look at her when I answer. “No. I guess not.”

  I go up to my room and throw my knapsack on my bed. I feel sort of itchy all over, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. First I go over to the toothpick village. It is what it sounds like it is, a village built out of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. I’ve got houses, a couple of churches, stores, roads, a windmill, whatever—all painted and mounted on a slab of wood. I started building it when I was nine, right around the time I got sick of Barbies. Every once in a while, I work on something new. It’s a totally twisted, pathetic hobby, I know, but I’ve always loved building things. It’s sort of like meditation, except for, you know, the toothpicks.

  But today, the toothpick village isn’t cutting it—I can’t think of a single thing that I’d want to add, and it seems like nothing more than a kindergartner’s art project or a load of firewood. So I sit at my desk. I flick on the computer and the machine hums to life and starts pinging, meaning I’ve got about four thousand instant messages. I don’t even want to read them. I start deleting them, but I can’t help but see a few, mostly from IM names I don’t recognize:

  Instant Message with “sweetyPI567”

  Last message received at: 3:42:10 PM

  sweetyPI567: U R such a ho! your dad should call his store Sluts R Us!

  Instant Message with “69luvvver”

  Last message received at: 4:19:36 PM

  69luvvver: will u marry me? will u at least suck me off????

  Instant Message with “ritechuschik2424”

  Last message received at: 6:10:22 PM

  ritechuschik2424: u do what u want to do and don’t let any one stop u. its ur life. U R not a slut ur just trying to have fun. LDS is HOT!

  I’ve got e-mail, too. A few people helpfully sent me a copy of the picture, just in case I haven’t been humiliated enough. Joelle sends a few ALL-CAPS messages telling me that Ash told her what happened and claiming that she will personally eviscerate Luke DeSalvio (unless, of course, I still like him). Then she says that what I need to do is deny absolutely everything and that she’ll tell everyone she saw Pam Markovitz or Cindy Terlizzi running around in a blond wig. I erase all the messages, even the ones from Jo. I keep pressing the button till there are no more messages in my in-box, and then I press it a few more times, just to make sure.

  My phone rings inside my backpack and I sit there, listening to it buzz. Later, as I’m reworking my paper for Mr. Lambright, it buzzes again. And when I’m doing my calc homework. And again when I’m studying bio. Buzz, buzz, like wasps hitting a window. If they buzz long enough, if they hit hard enough, maybe they’ll all die.

  “Audrey?” My mother’s voice warbles up the stairs. It must be time for dinner—not that I want to eat anything, now or ever. My stomach has shut down, packed up, and left for a vacation. Bye-bye, stomach. It occurs to me that I could actually lose a few pounds by the time I’m ready to eat again, and then I can’t believe I’m thinking what I’m thinking. I must be sick. There’s plenty of evidence. Once, when I was about eleven, my mom was asking me what kinds of words kids use in place of swearwords when teachers are around, because she had a kid in one of her books and wanted to have him swear without actually swearing. I told her we called people jerks, losers, and dorks. And I told her that sometimes we went all British, calling people prats and gits and saying “bloody hell” with accents that made it sound like “bluddy hill.” And then I told her about our very favorite non-swear swearword, one that we recently discovered and said all the time. “What is it?” she said.

  “Cocksucker,” I told her.

  Her jaw dropped open almost to the table, and her eyes popped wide. “Audrey,” she said. “That is most definitely a swearword.”

  “It is?”

  “Absolutely, definitely a swearword. You guys have to try and stop saying it, okay?”

  By then I was blushing so hard that my cheeks sizzled. How could I have been so dumb to not know a swearword when I heard one?

  “Do you know what it means?”

  And I’d told her I did—and I did sort of—but I thought it was more like a kiss, and how bad could a kiss be?

  I go downstairs, where things are more than bad. They are worse. My mom is sitting at the table, which hasn’t been set for dinner. There’s no food on the stove, no pizza box by the sink, and nothing roasting in the oven. My dad stands at the kitchen counter, his jacket still on, as if he can’t decide if he’s coming or going. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and smooths it out on the counter. I don’t need to see it, but I can’t help but see. The picture, again. This time with a message: “Look at Your Little Angel Now.”

  A Beautiful Thing

  Dad does not know what to do with himself. He takes off his jacket and holds it over one arm. Then he switches it to the other arm. Then he throws it on the counter. He pulls it from the counter and hangs it over the back of a chair. As if there were a person inside, he pats the shoulders of the jacket. He doesn’t look at me.

  I am sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, counting the scratches in the wood. There are a lot of scratches. Most of the stuff we have is old or cheap or both. My parents love flea markets and antique stores. Not too long ago, my mom thought about opening her own vintage clothing boutique, until my dad reminded her how much she hated the business end of business.

  “Where did this come from?” my mom asks. Not me, my dad.

  “Someone sent it to the store e-mail address,” he says.

  My mom turns to me. “Is this why you seemed so depressed before?”

  I nod.

  “What happened? Is someone playing a joke on you? Did someone dress up like you?”

  For a minute I think about saying, Yes! A joke! It’s just a big joke! But I shake my head no.

  My mom’s fingers brush the edge of the paper on the table. “So this is you?”

  My eyes on the floor, I nod yes.

  “From Saturday night?”

  More mute nodding.

  My dad’s hands tighten around the shoulder of the jacket. “Did someone force you to—”

  “No, Dad,” I say. “Nobody forced me.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “How could someone take a picture? Did you let them?”

  “No!” I say.

  But my dad doesn’t stop. “Is that what’s going on at parties now?”

  “John…,” my mom says. “Let her talk.”

  My dad snatches up the picture. “Who is this?” he says, jabbing a finger at the naked chest floating above my hair.

  “Nobody you know,” I say.

  My dad’s jaw quivers like I just smacked him. “Nobody?” he says.

  I’m not crying. It’s impossible that I’m not, but I’m not. I feel cold and hard, like marble. An Audrey-shaped statue sitting at the kitchen table. Stevie the marmalade catdog jumps in my statue lap and licks my statue fingers. I barely feel his teeth as he nibbles.

  My mom’s lips are moving, forming words and then biting them back. Finally she says, “Is this your boyfriend?”

  I almost laugh, but my marble mouth just isn’t that mobile. “Sort of,” I say. “Not anymore. I broke up with him.”

  “Christ!” my dad says. He stares at me. “Tell me that you at least used protection.”

  “We didn’t need protection,” I said. “I mean, not for that. I don’t think.” I can’t believe I’m saying it as I’m saying it. This is not embarrassment. It’s not humiliation. It’s something deeper and darker and more awful, like a giant black hole of spinning saw blades.

  He looks like he has a bee caught in his throat. �
�You don’t need…”

  My mom gives him a warning look and he clamps his mouth shut. She says, “So you were…with your boyfriend, and someone took the picture. Do you know who did it?”

  “No,” I say. “I have no idea. Somebody must have snuck up on us.”

  My mom nods again as if she understands, but I can tell that she doesn’t, that she’s completely out of her element, that she’s gearing up to call in the professionals. They didn’t do this in her day, maybe, or they didn’t have the physical evidence. No digital cameras or picture phones. No e-mail or blogs or instant messages. No photographs to send to other people’s dads. “Who else has seen this?”

  “Everyone.”

  She winces. “Oh, honey.”

  My dad says, “What do you mean, everyone?” He’s frowning so hard and so deeply that his dark eyebrows bunch up in folds over his nose.

  “They’ve been sending it from phone to phone at school. All day today.”

  There’s silence. I don’t know how long. We can hear the clock tick. We can hear Stevie’s tongue as he patiently sands away my fingerprints.

  Then my dad says, “I’ll call the phone company.”

  “Why?”

  “To find out who was sending the picture around.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” he said. His mouth was a thin, tight seam. “I’m sure it’s the boy.”

  “Who?” I said.

  He points at the photo. “This one. He probably had some friend take the picture.”

  I sigh. “I don’t think so. He couldn’t have known.”

  “Known what?”

  That I would unbutton his shirt and spread it like a curtain. That I would slide his belt from his belt loops and fling it behind me.

  But then, maybe he did know. Maybe he and everyone else could guess where it was all going and I was the only one who couldn’t.

  “Known what?” my dad says again. “He couldn’t have known what?”

  We used to play a lot of catch when I was little. I can still throw a baseball like a guy and my football pass has a decent, if wobbly, spiral. Good arm, good arm, my dad would tell me, grinning. Now my father is staring at me as if he has no idea who I am or where I came from.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Never mind.” My dad whips his jacket from the back of the chair and stalks out of the room.

  “Audrey,” my mom says. “He’s just upset right now. He’ll get over it.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Right.”

  It’s clear my dad is not going to get over anything until he finds someone to sue. Or shoot. We spend Monday night in virtual silence while my dad does endless Google searches on laws regarding the transmission of photos over cell phones. My mom brings me hot tea and more hot tea and spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, exactly, she should say to me. We try to watch a new cop show—my mom loves cop shows and she got me hooked—but the episode is about these boys who date-rape a girl at some exclusive Manhattan high school. Neither me or my mom can take it. We turn it off and go to bed early. I don’t sleep.

  Tuesday morning and still we’re not over it, won’t be over it for a long long time. My dad leaves before me so that he doesn’t have to look at me. My mom, wearing her usual uniform of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, sits at the kitchen table staring off into space, a cup of coffee cooling in front of her. She looks like I feel. Dark circles, hair puffy and matted. The sun filtering through the cracks in the curtains highlights a web of wrinkles around her eyes.

  “Did you sleep?” she asks me.

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Me neither.”

  She stands, walks to the coffeepot, and pours another cup of coffee. She adds milk and lots of sugar, and hands it to me. I only drink coffee once in a while, but she knows I need it. I grab a yogurt, a napkin, and a spoon and we sit at the kitchen table. We’ve got two minutes before Ash comes to pick me up.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened,” she says.

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t understand how someone could have been so cruel. To take that picture of you and send it around. I can’t stand it. Who could be that mad at you?”

  “It could be someone who doesn’t even know me, Mom.” I open the lid on the yogurt and take a spoonful. It tastes like glue. “It could be a random person who just thinks it’s funny.”

  “Funny?” my mom says. She turns her mug around and around in her hands. “I want to kill whoever did this.”

  “You mean you want to kill me.”

  Her head snaps up. “Of course not!”

  “Dad does.”

  “Stop that,” she says. “Your dad loves you.”

  “He still wants to kill me.”

  “This is hard for him. For any dad. He doesn’t want anyone to take advantage of you.” She takes a deep breath. “Sex is a beautiful thing. If it’s with the right person. Was this…have there…been others?”

  I don’t say anything. I get up, take the container of yo-glue, and go to toss it in the trash. I see that the picture my dad printed at the store has been torn into little pieces and thrown in the garbage, right on top of the cranberry-orange-oatmeal muffins.

  “Audrey, I just want you to be careful,” my mom says.

  I don’t say, Like you were? There’s a honk from outside. “That’s Ash,” I say. “I have to go.”

  At school, anyone who hadn’t seen the picture has now seen it over and over again. I find a copy of it pasted on my locker. I grab it, crumple it to a ball, and throw it on the floor. I haven’t said a word to Ash all the way to school, and she hasn’t asked me to, but now I tell her about my parents.

  She sucks her breath through her teeth so quickly that she whistles. “Scheisse,” she says. “How did they find out?”

  “Someone sent the picture to the store. My dad brought a copy home. They thought that it was someone playing a prank.”

  “How did they take it?”

  “My dad’s mad. At first he thought someone, um…”I lower my voice. “Someone, you know, forced me or whatever, but I told them that no one forced me to do anything.”

  “You should have said someone forced you.”

  “Yeah, right. And have them call the police? I don’t think so.” I stuff my jacket into my locker. “My dad can’t even look at me.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She’s trying, but she doesn’t know what to say. It took her till this morning just to say the word ‘sex.’”

  “Jeez,” says Ash.

  Cindy Terlizzi and Pam Markovitz walk by. Pam grins at me and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

  Ash scowls, then sighs. “It’s bad now, I know. Really bad. But people will forget.”

  “Yeah?” I say. “When?”

  “Soon. They always do.”

  I know they will, someday, but that doesn’t help the frozen spot where my guts should be. That doesn’t stop the stares and snickers and giggles in the hallway. That doesn’t stop Chilly from whispering poison in my ear. That doesn’t keep the more girl-impaired of the male honor students from eyeing me with this strange curiosity, like they want to pin me down to a dissecting tray and prod me with sharp instruments. Even Ron “Valedictorian” Moran, who’s had a girlfriend for the last year, stares. I stare right back. What was Ron doing with his girlfriend when they thought no one was paying attention, when they thought their parents were out for the afternoon? Ron looks away.

  All day, I bury myself in work, in words. I sink into them like a bath. My friends give me my space, but the teachers yammer all around me. Limits, amendments, oxygen cycles, Shakespeare. This is important and that is important and all of it will be on the test. I write, underline, highlight, repeat. I get text messages and delete them. A few people pass me stupid notes that I know say horrible things, and I shove them into my books or backpack without looking at them. At lunch I will go outside and set them all on fire. Ash will throw the ashes out her car window.

&n
bsp; “What I really want to know is, Who took that picture?” Ash says. She’s taken me to the diner to eat. “Do you really think that Luke had nothing to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Ash scoops up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy, what she orders every time we come to the diner, day or night. Her eyes narrow. “What about Chilly? He’s still dogging you like he owns you.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Ash puts down her spoon. “Don’t you want to know who did this? Doesn’t this make you mad?”

  “Well, yeah,” I tell her.

  “Well, yeah?” she says. “I’d be furious! I’d want to kill someone! You got more upset that time Madame Kellogg gave you a B plus on your French report.”

  “I just wish it never happened,” I say. “I wish I’d never done it.”

  She tucks a stray curl behind her ear and sighs. “You love him, right?”

  That seems funny to me. I love my parents. I love Ash and Joelle. I love my cat. Luke is—was—a different story. Luke is like a creature from another planet. Can you ever really love a creature from another planet? Someone who could jump on his spaceship and rocket off to Pluto at any minute? “I don’t know.”

  Ash is getting annoyed with all that I don’t know. “Yes, you did. Isn’t that why you were all weirded out with the friends-with-benefits thing? Weren’t you jealous of all those other girls? Didn’t you want to go out with him?” She eats another spoonful of mashed potatoes.

  I want to tell her the whole story. I should tell her. She’s my best friend and I need her to understand. But I’m not sure if she will. After Jimmy, I’m not sure if she can. So I agree with her. Yes, I was weirded out. Yes, I was jealous. I don’t know what else I was—insane? obsessed?—but I think if I say “I don’t know” one more time, she’ll kill me.

  Luckily, or unluckily, she decides to let me live. Sixth period, and I’ve gotten through most of my classes and even managed to eat two bites of Ash’s potatoes at lunch. Even though I’ve got my eyes pinned to the floor, I see Luke walking down the hallway as I’m trying to get to history. It’s not the blond hair that catches me, it’s the movement—the rolling, easy walk, the walk that says he could run very very fast if there were ever any need to. He’s alone this time, no gaggle of rockheads shoving phones at him. Then he sees me. He never said much more than “hey” to me in public before, but this is a new low. His face stiffens and his eyes narrow, and his lip curls up as if he’s disgusted, as if he can’t even bear to look. He speeds up, passes me, and keeps on rolling, like a wave that jumps the beach and takes you out at the knees.