Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  As weeks passed, Ronnie’s visits started to decrease. She was constantly off to New York or LA or Chicago to tape another TV segment on the dangers of domestic sex trafficking, and to promote a book she had now been commissioned to write on the topic. (She told April that once they came clean, they would write the book together and share the author credit.)

  April tried to occupy her thoughts with other things—counting as high as she could, imagining what the girls were up to in their little corners of the world, translating English sentences into Spanish in an attempt to relearn the language she hadn’t studied since senior year of high school.

  The air down below the floor was stagnant and stale. April’s legs ached from sitting still for so long, and her eyes stung from a lack of light. The waiting felt unbearable at times, and her mind wandered to all the farthest corners of loneliness—is this how housebound old ladies felt? she wondered. Or German shepherds who should be roaming the hills but instead were forced to stay gated up in the pantry all day while their stockbroker owners went to work? She decided that once she got out of there, she would get to know her elderly neighbors and that she’d never ever buy a dog, even if her (possible, as it was yet to be determined whether she wanted them) future children begged for one.

  April could often hear muffled sounds from the room above her, the TV and people talking. Sometimes, even after five, six, seven weeks, the television reports were about her disappearance—she heard police officers discussing the searches they were doing and residents expressing their concern for her. She felt guilty hearing this, and scared, too. She knew there would be legal repercussions when they finally told the truth about where she had been, perhaps even jail time. Ronnie said they would only get slapped with a huge fine, which she herself would pay. April wasn’t so sure, but that hardly mattered anyway, if they could get their message out first. Her only solace was that the girls and her mother knew the truth.

  Each time Ronnie came to visit, April would ask her whether she had heard from them.

  “No,” Ronnie said. “Not a thing.”

  April tried not to let Ronnie hear the disappointment in her voice. “I guess they want to help us by staying quiet,” she said. “Or maybe they’re all just still pissed off about that fight we had.”

  She thought about them often—Sally as a married woman, Bree and Lara perhaps planning a wedding of their own, and Celia, living her big brave scary lonely New York life. April regretted more than anything the way that she had left things with Sally. She wished she could go back to that last night in the King House dining hall and erase all of the stupid, petty words that had passed between them.

  At the same time, she was sad and surprised that none of them had sent word through Ronnie. Maybe it was over, she thought. She remembered a time, all the way back in high school, when she had longed for friends like the King House girls. Now she knew the flip side of real friendship—that when it ended, it could sting you more than even the most bitter kind of loneliness.

  One evening she heard a television ad overhead for a Halloween costume shop downtown, and when she checked with Alexa later that night she was shocked to find that it was early October. She had been down there for two months.

  It was around this time that Ronnie began to get paranoid.

  “I’m afraid the police might be on to us, and we are still generating so much interest,” she said. “We can’t stop now!”

  She insisted that it would only be a little while longer, and she had one final request of April: “No more coming upstairs at night,” she said. “You can use the bedpan and Alexa will bring you wet cloths to wash yourself, but you’ve gotta stay under the floorboards from here on out. It’s just a few more days.”

  April could tell it wasn’t up for debate. And since they had almost reached the end of this, why question Ronnie now?

  · · ·

  Alexa’s parlor was often full of girls who had run away from their pimps and now worked out of small bedrooms in her place for a fee. Sometimes when they chatted above her, April wanted to sit among them on the busted-up sofa, drinking sweet tea and gossiping about boys. (It always amazed her how some of the girls actually still dated and had normal crushes, even as a disgusting violent mockery of sex consumed their everyday lives. How could they look at men, any men, without contempt?)

  April heard terrible things, too, things that she knew she would never be able to forget. The girls would meet their johns in the parlor, and then draw them upstairs.

  “Hey, babycakes,” April heard one of the johns say one night. His voice was booming and raspy. “I want you to wear this.”

  April couldn’t make out the girl’s response, but she could hear her tone—frightened, attempting to sound sweet and light. She wondered what the hell he wanted her to wear.

  “Don’t you like it?” he said. “It’s my little girl’s. I want to fuck you in this. I want you to call me Daddy, and I want you to be my little angel now, okay? You’re gonna be my little girl, and Daddy’s gonna be gentle with you.”

  Another night, right after Alexa brought dinner, a group of college boys in town for a football game came into the room. Their footsteps boomed through the floorboards so that April feared one of them might fall right through and be shocked to find her there, listening to them discuss a trip they’d taken to Mexico to watch a young girl have sex with a donkey onstage.

  After that, April told Ronnie plainly that she could not fucking take this very much longer. It was one thing to be under the floorboards when she knew that she’d be able to come out once a day. But now it was increasingly making her feel sick and scared. “I’m starting to go nuts,” she said. “You have to get me out of here.”

  “I will,” Ronnie said, sounding almost annoyed, as if she herself had had to make the sacrifice. “Just be patient. April, we are doing so much good here, and it’s all because of you.”

  · · ·

  One Thursday night, some of the girls from the corner store had gathered to watch music videos in the parlor. They were laughing, talking over one another, singing along with the TV. Just acting like normal teenagers for once. Among them, April could hear Angelika, one of Redd’s girls, who had the low, seductive voice of an old jazz singer. She had been in the parlor a lot recently, and so April assumed she had left Redd for good.

  After an hour or so, the girls quieted down. They made a comment here or there, laughing at a tampon commercial, moaning over Chris Brown, calling out to a friend in the kitchen to bring more tea and cigarettes. April felt relaxed for the first time in weeks.

  A while later, someone new entered the room. April couldn’t make out who she was from her voice, but she heard the girl say, “Turn on the news. They’re reporting right outside on the street. They’re looking for that missing white chick. You hear about how they found her bones a few days ago?”

  Her body stiffened. She had seen Ronnie just yesterday, and Ronnie had made no mention of any of this. She strained to hear the television, willing the girls to shut up.

  A smooth TV announcer’s voice said, “After the grisly discovery of human remains believed to be those of April Adams, Atlanta police have called on volunteers from around the state and the country to help look for clues.”

  April thought of the girls, and then of her mother: Surely they had heard about this. How had they let it get so far? Or had Ronnie never told them about her in the first place? Were they each in their own little corners of the world right now, assuming her dead?

  Before she could process any of it, there was the sound of a slamming door overhead. The girls screamed. April heard them running out. Her heart sped up. Someone had a gun up there.

  Then she heard his voice. “You fucking snitched,” Redd said.

  Angelika sounded panicked. “No, no, no, baby. It wasn’t me.”

  “Bullshit! The cops say someone told them about that shit in my yard. I know it was you.”

  “I didn’t tell them nothing, I swear,” Angelika said
, trying to sound soothing, though her voice shook.

  “You lying to me now? They’re gonna try to put me away for this shit. I never even touched that white bitch, but because you opened your big, fat fucking mouth—you are nothing,” he screamed. “Remember that.”

  “I know, I know,” Angelika said. “Please, you have to believe me.”

  “Fuck that,” he said. “I saw you talking to her out on the track all the time, kissing her white ass. You even went over to her place. Now she’s gone, and the fucking cops come after me.”

  Angelika sobbed. “They been asking me a lot of questions because some of the other girls told them I was her friend. But I swear, I didn’t tell them nothing. Baby, I love you,” she said.

  “You get down on your fucking knees and you suck me off and maybe I’ll forgive you,” he said.

  She was still crying. “Please put the gun down,” she screamed.

  “Do it!” Redd shouted, and she gave a little moan.

  There was silence for a few moments. April shook. She felt like she might vomit, imagining what was going on above. This was all happening because of her. If she climbed up through the floorboards and into the living room to help, he would probably shoot her. Through those silent moments, April willed the door to slam-either Redd would leave, or someone would come in to help Angelika. The other girls must have gone to call the police, after all. And Alexa had a handgun in the linen closet on the second floor.

  Then she heard the shot.

  Screams and weeping from elsewhere in the house started so quickly that it was as if they already knew what would happen. A few minutes later, she heard a lone siren, and then the paramedics in the living room. The screams did not die down.

  Without seeing, April knew exactly what had passed. Redd had shot the girl dead and then walked out into the Atlanta evening, free as a bird. No one would ever tell the police what they had seen him do, for fear of being next. Hours later, she smelled the harsh, piercing scent of bleach and felt tiny acid drops of it leaking through the holes in the floor. Someone was weeping above her.

  April could not sleep that night. She sat there, wide awake.

  What a coward she had become. She had done nothing for Angellika. She had come here to help these girls, and now one of them was dead because of her. April cried silently into a pillow so no one would hear, remembering the sound of the gunshot, the moaning from inside the house.

  How could anyone bear this? Men had all the power to make the world splendid but chose instead to ruin it, to shit on it, to turn women into their slaves and their punching bags. How could women like Sally marry men and merely hope that they wouldn’t turn rotten someday—running away with their secretaries or, worse, seeking out some child on the city streets for sex they would not remember a week later, though the child would remember it for the rest of her life?

  Men walked around like innocents, but most of them were destroyers of one sort or another. Waging wars or beating women or paying fifty dollars for a lap dance and a blow job after work before returning home to their wives to eat a chicken dinner and watch the evening news. April thought of her father, how he had never cared to see her face or hear her voice. How he had exchanged love and life and honor for sex. She thought of that asshole who had raped Celia in college, changing her forever, and then going forward with his life as if nothing had happened.

  The activists were fighting—here in Atlanta and out in New York and LA and in Sweden and every place else, too. They were women, mostly. The few men involved were there because they had seen women they loved shattered by male violence. But what could these fighters really accomplish? They could pass laws and put up signs and send op-eds to The New York Times until they died. They no doubt would do all of these things. They would improve the world, even if just by inches. But as long as there were so-called upstanding men who believed it was okay to fuck little girls in exchange for cash, as long as there were men who were willing to sell those girls like they were nothing—what could any good person do?

  And plenty of the good people were too caught up in being good anyway. So many of them huddled behind their awards and their TV appearances, feeling virtuous, accomplishing little. They got into squabbles about who would be president or treasurer, who would take notes, who would bring the lemon squares. Christ, even the feminists in their brownstone city apartments couldn’t fight hard enough, because they were terrified of robbing anyone of her precious motherfucking choices, and who knew, maybe some women loved giving blow jobs to total strangers for ten dollars a pop. Meanwhile, miles away, little girls got shot in the head in the parlors of dingy brothels, and other little girls came along and cleaned their guts off the walls with a bottle of Clorox and a mop.

  April knew she could leave anytime she wanted, just climb up the ladder and be done with all of this. She knew, too, that Ronnie would never forgive her, but who the fuck was Ronnie anyway? She was beginning to see that Ronnie had used her, ruined her. She closed her eyes against the darkness. It was simple: She couldn’t do this anymore.

  Hours later, when the house had long since fallen silent, April stole out. It was a struggle just to get up the rope ladder, and she realized with some alarm that her body had changed. The muscles around her upper arms and in her calves were gone. She now had the sagging skin of a much older woman, and her legs were dotted with sores from sitting still for so long. It took her several tries to push the loose floorboards up and climb out. She knew that she could not risk making a sound. She needed to talk to Ronnie before anyone else saw her.

  Out of breath, she sat on the parlor floor for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the light. The room, which she knew to be average size, looked simply enormous. The air was tinged with liquor and cigarette smoke, but it still smelled so fresh that April tried to suck it in by the barrelful.

  She climbed to her feet; her legs wobbled at first, but after a few moments she got her balance. She crept down the hall. Behind one of the bedroom doors she could hear two voices arguing in hushed tones. Behind another, a young girl moaned, “Yes, yes, yes,” in the most bored and sorrowful manner April had ever heard.

  When she reached the front door, she held her breath as she pulled it toward her. A moment later, she was outside. The air smelled crisp. She noticed a tree’s orange leaves in the streetlight and thought about the long walks she and Sally used to take around Paradise Pond in the fall.

  There were a few pumpkins rotting out in the trash. Halloween must have passed now, she thought. It was November.

  The street was empty, and all but silent. She knew that meant it was sometime after 4:00 a.m., because the girls were usually out until then. She wished she had thought to check the clock on Alexa’s cable box.

  When April reached the house, she went to the back door, hoping against hope that Ronnie had left it open, but it was locked.

  April knocked gently at first, then harder. She thought she heard footsteps from inside, but a moment later all was still. She inhaled, trying to steady her mind. She didn’t think she should risk going to the front door and ringing the bell.

  Then the kitchen light switched on, the door opened, and there was Ronnie, standing before her in her old silk bathrobe, a gun in her hand.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, April,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Tears filled April’s eyes. She was happy, relieved, to see Ronnie’s face again, and this made her whole body ache. She hated to be that happy at the sight of someone who had wronged her, but then hadn’t it been that way her whole life—her mother, her father, Gabriel. The only good people who had ever made her happy were Sally, Celia, and Bree.

  “Get inside,” Ronnie hissed. “Did anyone see you?”

  April stepped into the familiar kitchen—the overhead fan rumbled in its flimsy setting, a half-empty bottle of wine and a few dried-up tomato slices sat on the table.

  She began to sob, clutching Ronnie, burying her face in blue silk. Ronnie froze up as she did this, but Apr
il did not pull away.

  “A girl got killed tonight because of me,” April said. “Do you know what they’re saying? They think they found my fucking body.”

  Ronnie didn’t respond.

  “What will happen now?” April said. “The police think Redd killed me. We’re going to get in trouble. We might get killed. Why didn’t you tell me any of this yesterday?”

  Ronnie sighed, breaking apart from April and sitting down in a kitchen chair. She laid the gun on the table and traced the label on the bottle of wine with her fingers.

  “I’ve been trying to decide what we should do next,” Ronnie said. “I wanted to make a plan before I worried you.”

  April kept crying. “Ronnie, this isn’t gonna be like the other times. We’re in real trouble,” she said. “We’re going to have to turn ourselves in.”

  Ronnie shook her head. “I think we need to leave, and start over. Pretend none of this ever happened. In a day or two, they’ll know that body they found wasn’t yours. After a few months, they’ll give up the search altogether.”

  “And what will happen to me?” April said. “You expect me to just run off and start some new life without even telling my friends?”

  “They’re not your friends anymore anyway,” Ronnie said sharply. “Or they won’t be after this.”

  “You never told them, did you?” April said.

  Ronnie was silent.

  “Why?” April said. “Why the fuck did you do this to me?”

  “I couldn’t risk compromising all this,” Ronnie said plainly.

  “All this what?” April shouted. She looked down the hallway that led to the foyer and upstairs. Four suitcases were lined up at the bottom of the staircase.

  “You were going to leave me here to deal by myself,” April said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ronnie said. “I’d never leave you.”

  April started moving down the hall and toward the front door.

  Ronnie’s chair screeched across the floor behind her. She got to her feet and pushed past April, shoving her into the wall as she got in front of the door.