“Look at me.” My voice cracked in the middle, a sob escaping my throat. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
She sat perfectly still, like I hadn’t even spoken to her. What was she thinking? Was she lost in horrific memories or was the murkiness too thick?
“When I woke up I was soaked. They’d left me outside, in the grass behind the bushes by the house. They didn’t even put my pants back on.”
I had just enough time to get to the sink before the vomit forced its way out of my throat. I retched and retched and when I was done, my throat burned and the sound of it rang in my ears.
I turned to Charly.
She’d swung her feet around to the ground now and was sitting upright, still staring out the window.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. With a thousand words screaming to be first, how could I say nothing? I wanted to beg for forgiveness and promise to protect her and scream at her all at the same time.
Instead, I turned on the faucet to rinse the vomit down.
I tried again, but this time barely a whisper came out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Finally she looked at me, the answer, an accusation, glimmering her eyes: If I was a different type of person, a different type of sister, she could have.
She didn’t say it though. She bit her lip and looked away. “At first? I didn’t tell because it was so disgusting. And so humiliating, waking up like that and not really knowing, except knowing what they . . . ” She shook her head. “If nobody knew, then I could pretend it didn’t even happen. I mean, I had bruises and some scratches and a bad headache and a few disgusting half-dream-half-memories, but I could hide all that. Plus, everyone was so mad at me for being gone so long and not calling.”
Everyone? I’d been so mad, worse than mad, and meaner than I’d ever been to anyone in my entire life. To Charly.
I turned back to the sink, wanting to retch again, the taste of vomit still burning my throat and mouth, but I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and saw the faces of the losers, with their slimy grins that’d made my skin crawl from day one, with their skinny faces and greasy hair and dirty fingernails. They’d touched her with those hands and she hadn’t even been awake. That was enough. I threw up again.
“What about them?” I said once I was finished. “Those pigs need to be in jail. Rape is a crime, Charly. You were a victim of a crime.”
“You sound like Ms. Lee,” she said. “Like them going to jail would make something better for me. It wouldn’t. I don’t even know who or how many or . . . I can’t prove anything.”
“Look at yourself!” My voice was too loud, but I couldn’t control it now. “You’ve got DNA evidence growing inside you!”
“Evidence of what? They’ll say sex. Whoever the father is, and all his friends, they’ll say I got drunk and had sex.”
“But if you can’t even remember it and you only had one drink—”
“Yeah, but nobody’s going to believe me. Especially now, months later. You honestly think I haven’t thought this through?”
I had a whole lifetime of Charly not thinking things through to point to, but I didn’t. I hated everything she was saying, but I knew, between the pounding of my pulse in my skull, that she was right. They’d never be convicted of rape. Or not Charly’s rape. I shuddered, picturing them still out there, doing the same disgusting thing to other girls, no thought to what they were breaking and the lives they were ruining. People’s sisters and friends and daughters.
“See?” she asked. Her eyes were on my face, and I realized she’d been watching my reaction. The vomiting, the shuddering, the anger and revulsion. “I didn’t want people thinking about it and me like you are right now.”
“But I’m not thinking about you like you did something wrong, I’m just thinking about how evil and disgusting they are.”
“It would all be the same in people’s heads though. For the rest of my life, people would hear my name and think, Oh, the wild pastor’s daughter who got drunk and screamed rape after she woke up half-naked in the bushes.”
Again, I wanted to tell her she was wrong. But she wasn’t. She knew, like I knew, because Tremonton was both of our tiny worlds. Maybe a big-city girl could get lost, be anonymous, but Charly would be the victim of small-mindedness forever.
“Still,” I said softly, “I didn’t need proof.”
“I know. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to be different to you.”
I dropped my hands to my head. She’d been afraid I’d judge her for being raped? How could she think that?
“It was just easier.” She paused and stared at her stomach like it didn’t belong to her, somebody else’s skin stretched over somebody else’s horrible mistake. “Then when I realized I was pregnant and it was too late to prove anything, I thought you might not believe me—”
“What? Of course I would’ve believed you!”
“—but if you hadn’t, it would’ve been the worst thing in the world.” She stopped, her voice faltering. It looked for a moment like her eyes might fill with tears, but she blinked them away.
“No,” I groaned, pushing off from the sink. I felt my own tears streaming down my cheeks as I moved toward her. I wanted to pull her up and hug her so hard she’d feel how wrong that was, but something stopped me. She looked so injured and untouchable at the same time, like a wounded wild animal. Instead, I sank to the floor beside her chair. “I’m sorry,” I said, through my own sobbing. “I’m sorry that you thought that, and that I was so cruel. But how was I supposed to know?”
“You weren’t.” Her voice was calm but distant. “It’s not your fault. And for the longest time I thought it was my fault.” She held up her palm to stop me before I could start. “You don’t have to tell me it doesn’t make sense. I’ve already heard it. It’s Ms. Lee’s mantra—not your fault, Charly, not your fault!—but it doesn’t help that I know if I’d listened to you about those guys, and if I hadn’t gone to the party, none of it would’ve happened.”
I choked back tears, trying to muster enough composure to talk. “That doesn’t make it your fault, though.”
“No, but regret and guilt don’t feel all that different.”
It was true. My brain raced through memories of the last few months, tripping over every mean word I’d said to her, every scornful look. I’d been so unforgivably vicious. Why? Not just once either, but again and again and again. Each memory felt like a pinprick. Did it matter whether it was regret or guilt? Collectively, they felt like fire either way.
A much older memory pushed its way to the surface. I was seven and I’d stepped in an anthill at a church picnic. I will always remember looking down and seeing hundreds of fire ants pouring through the cracks between my toes, over the straps of my sandal, swirling up my calf, and over my kneecap. I was too mesmerized to save myself. But I’d been lucky. Grandma had picked me up and sprinted for the lake, throwing me in before I could think to hold my breath. Altogether, I’d had sixty-seven bites, but when the pain set in, I couldn’t feel the individual stings. Just the burning of dozens.
I looked up at Charly. Her hand hung limply over the arm of the chair. I pressed my forehead against the back of it, feeling the coolness of her skin. I was burning up.
But she took her hand away, and I pulled back, ashamed. This wasn’t about me.
Charly pushed her shoulders back and straightened her spine, like a marionette being called to attention. “Ms. Lee says that it will take a while, but that I’ll feel better if I tell people.”
“People?” I asked. Grandma? Dad? Bree?
Bree. Had she already been told? Before me? I couldn’t say the words without seething jealousy.
“People,” she repeated. “But I don’t know if she’s right. You’re the first person I’ve told.”
A sigh of relief escaped before I could stop it. “Are you going to tell Grandma?”
A long pause followed, so long I assumed she wasn’t going to answer. O
utside the wind picked up, the howls becoming more like whines.
“Would you?”
What was she asking? If I were her, would I tell Grandma? Or was she asking me to tell Grandma for her? I was trapped either way. There was so much I owed her now. “I don’t know,” I said. It was true for both questions.
If we told Grandma, she might insist we tell Dad, and there was no predicting what he would do. He’d be devastated and furious and everything in between. He didn’t even know she was pregnant. I inadvertently looked to Charly’s belly. We’d already come so far. If we just stuck it out, we’d never have to experience the small-mindedness and cruelty waiting for us back home.
I took a measured breath and began. “I think we should—”
“Stop!”
The venom in her voice stung.
“But you asked—”
“I know,” she said, quieter now, but just as firm. “I shouldn’t have. I forgot. It’s not we. I need to decide on my own, and then I need to do it on my own.”
I felt winded, like she’d kicked me in the stomach. Our whole lives had been we. “Is that Ms. Lee talking?” I asked, noticing the bile from round two of throwing up still sour in my mouth.
“No, that’s Charly talking. From now on it’s going to be all Charly talking.”
Fine. That sounded right. It just felt wrong.
Suddenly exhausted, I rested my head against the brushed suede of the chair. I knew better than to try to touch her again, so I just listened to her breathe. It was so shallow. The panting of squished lungs. I tried syncing mine to hers, but the pregnant-girl pant left me breathless and on the verge of hyperventilating.
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know.”
What if she decided to tell Grandma and Dad? Dread and relief twisted themselves together inside me. Would that mean we’d be going home?
“What if I can’t do it?” she continued. “I mean, I know I will, because I can’t keep the baby and be a mother right now. I know I can’t, but I think about actually giving her away and I feel so sad, I can’t . . . Too sad to explain. I think it might break me.”
It took a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about surviving the telling. It was the losing. I hadn’t even considered it. I had no insight to offer, no possible way of understanding how she could feel that kind of love for something she’d had forced on her. It was too illogical.
But she was wrong. “It won’t break you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Charly, you got drugged, raped, treated like trash by the people who love you most, kicked out of your home, and exiled to the coldest hell on earth. You would’ve already broken.”
She didn’t answer. But then I felt her hand resting on the top of my head, gently, like she wasn’t so sure she wanted it there.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the inadequacy of the words burning my ears. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Shhh,” she said. “I know.”
• • •
Bree came home to a quiet apartment. Charly was asleep upstairs and I was in front of the computer trying to read the latest email from Savannah.
“What’d I miss?” she asked, biting the fingers of her glove and yanking her hand out. “Did you guys even leave the apartment once today?”
I looked up at her from the screen. “No.”
“Aren’t you going stir crazy?” She rifled through the mail on the table, chucking an armload of junk mail into the recycling.
I didn’t answer, just let my eyes gloss over Savannah’s words for the third time. Their meanings weren’t getting any less slippery, which was unfortunate because I didn’t have a fourth attempt in me.
“Did Charly send that stuff to the Paysons?”
Bree’s voice sounded less nasal than it usually did too. Had the entire world become less? Less vibrant, less annoying, less sharp? I clicked reply, and wrote hey and then deleted it.
“Earth to Amelia.”
“I don’t know who the Paysons are.”
“The couple she met with. She told them she was choosing them and everything. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Did I? I stared at the blinking cursor. No. But I’d assumed it, the way Charly had talked about them the other night. Even the gravity of that decision seemed lighter.
My little sister had been raped. I’d missed it. All the signs were screaming at me now, but I’d been too busy feeling wounded and punishing her because I’d missed a field hockey game. And a dance.
Bree just absorbed my silence like it wasn’t rude. Why did she do that? Why had she put up with my brat routine for the last two months and why hadn’t I noticed before?
“You look tired,” she mumbled.
“I am.” I closed out my email, unwritten and unsent. Savannah wasn’t sitting around waiting for me to reply.
Bree started humming that annoying song from Hairspray, and I suddenly wondered how many times she’d seen me roll my eyes at her.
And then, with all the force of a slap to the face, I got it. She had to hate having me here. I was sullen, uncooperative, sarcastic. Pretty much the worst guest ever.
“Tea?” she asked, waving a packet of something undoubtedly herbal—ginger seaweed, or lemon dirt, or whatever.
“Sure. Thanks.”
To her credit, the wide-eyed astonishment only lasted a second. “Orange spice or honey mint?”
“Honey mint, please.”
Chapter 19
Ms. Lee had specifically said her door was always open. I remembered the conversation clearly. But she was either lying or speaking figuratively, because her actual door was never open.
I walked by the closed door every day for the next week, which was risky because Dr. Ashton’s door was right beside it and never closed. One day she’d be offering chocolate-covered espresso beans to passersby, the next day she’d be threatening expulsion to the next juvenile who tracked snow into her office. Powder keg.
Finally I just knocked.
“Come in,” Ms. Lee called.
I did it quickly, closing her door behind me.
“Amelia.”
“Hi.”
“Something going on in the hall?” she asked, frowning.
Apparently I’d come in too quickly. “No, Dr. Ashton is just talking with the UPS guy and I . . . didn’t want to get in her way.” Actually, she’d been feeling the biceps of the UPS guy while twirling her necklace, and I was grateful for the diversion. She’d taken my lunch twice this week already.
“UPS guy,” Ms. Lee said, and punctured the skin of her orange with her thumbnail.
The smell of citrus hit me like a splash of cold water. I wondered if Dad’s trees were actually growing fruit this year.
“The young one?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sit down.”
I did, taking in her desk. She had the remnants of her meal—an empty soup bowl, crumbs on a plate, a Diet Coke can (Coke-Diéte facing me)—plus a boring-looking novel with a withering flower on the cover, and the cactuses. Or was it cacti? My terra-cotta pot still sat at the end of the perfect line, looking ridiculous.
“So did you want to talk to me about something?”
“Yeah.”
She finished peeling her orange and offered me a section.
I took it. “My dad has a few citrus trees in our backyard. Oranges and limes mostly. A few tangerines.”
“Seriously?” she asked.
A snottier Amelia would have asked if people often told her lies about citrus. “Yeah.”
“You know, I’ve never actually seen an orange on a tree,” she admitted. “I mean, I’ve seen pictures. And the Minute Maid carton probably isn’t lying to me, so I believe that’s how they grow. That must sound crazy to you.”
“About as crazy as never having seen snow would sound to you.”
She grinned and I understood why Charly could talk t
o her. She was the perfect blend of quiet and open.
“Charly told me,” I blurted out.
She put her orange down. Apparently she wasn’t a multitasker.
“Good.” Her pause was long enough for me to consider leaving. “And how are you feeling about it?”
“I . . . ” I had no words.
Ms. Lee nodded and waited for more.
“Why couldn’t she tell me?”
“She did tell you.”
“I mean right after it happened. Or when she found out she was pregnant. Or anytime before now.”
“Did you ask her that?”
“Yeah, and she said a bunch of things that made no sense. Like she didn’t want me to see her differently, and she felt guilty, and I was so mad, and she was worried I wouldn’t believe her. I can’t . . . I can’t . . . ”
I put my palm to my forehead and held it there, hoping I didn’t look as pitiful as I felt.
“I can’t believe she thought I wouldn’t believe her. We’re talking about rape. We’re talking about my sister. How could she think that?”
Ms. Lee looked out her window and then back to me. “You may not understand her reaction to what happened, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine. She’s not you. She’s going to react to things differently than you would, and there are things about being a victim of sexual assault that you just don’t understand.”
“Like feeling guilty.”
“Exactly. It’s irrational. I know that, she knows that, you know that. But sometimes understanding logically that something isn’t your fault isn’t the same thing as feeling it. It takes time and hard work.”
I sat perfectly still. I couldn’t tell if she was talking about Charly or about me.
“Amelia, what do you want?”
I stared at her. Was she kicking me out?
“What do you want most right now?” she clarified.
That had to be the stupidest question I’d ever been asked. “I want this never to have happened.”
She shook her head. “No time travel. What do you want now?”
I didn’t hesitate this time. “I want her to forgive me. And I want to be a better sister.”
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