by Zack Smedley
Finally, for once, I knock a beat of silence into the sparring match. And there we stand—staring at each other, stunned. Panting even though we’ve barely moved.
“That is not what happened,” she says.
“What, so I’m lying?”
“You’re … confused.”
“I’m …” I work my mouth once, twice. Switches flying back and forth in my brain, blowing circuit breakers and sending mixed signals every which way. “You can’t be serious. You’re upset that I didn’t talk to you about it, and now that I’m trying to, you’re shitting all over this.”
“Can I say something?”
“Is that not what you’re doing right now?”
“Saying something?”
“Shitting all over this.”
“Can I say something?”
“No!” I start to pace now … circling her. Trembling with vindication. I only realize now how much I was counting on her sympathy—for her to be completely broken up over this, begging to help take this pain away now that it was out in the open. I didn’t expect a knife fight over the facts.
“You were nervous,” she insists. “I’m not trying to upset you. But what if you’re wrong about this?”
“What if I had a dick growing out of my forehead?”
“Do you?”
“Way to take this seriously.”
“You started it.”
“You raped me.”
“What if I didn’t?”
“You did.”
“No. Owen.”
“Yes. Lily.”
She grabs at the air. “Okay. Stop and think about this—”
“I’m going to blow your mind and tell you I’ve done that a time or two already.”
“—think about this; listen to me and think. You were nervous, and … I love you, but you know how you get when you’re nervous—”
“Assaulted?”
“Finicky. I thought you were okay with it—we were making out!”
“That happens all the time.” “You were hard!”
“That happens all the time too. Do you have a point?”
“You’re being unfair.” Lily repeats the line from before. “You’ve already made up your mind, and instead of hearing me out so we can sort through what happened, you’re just yelling at me.”
“What is there to go over? I said no, and you did it anyway.”
I blink hard, beating back a pile of dark images. “Jesus Christ, did you need to have sex with me right then? We could’ve done it the next day—I said that! You could’ve had it any other time—”
“Whoooa.” She bursts out laughing, but her face is filled with a scowl. She holds up a hand like a traffic cop. “First of all, bud, let’s not talk about your dick like it’s some gift from God—”
“You know that’s not how I meant it.”
“Second of all, you’re missing the point!”
“Yeah? I think I’m a lot fucking closer to it than you are!”
“The point is, I didn’t know you had an issue with us having sex that night. If I was aware of that, I wouldn’t have done it; but I wasn’t, so I did. What part of that doesn’t track with you?”
“WHAT PART OF ‘STOP’ DOESN’T TRACK WITH YOU?”
“It was you and me!” She stomps her foot. “Dude! It was you and me.”
“Who cares?”
“We’ve had sex a hundred times before.”
“Who cares?”
“Me!” She raises her arm, glaring. “Am I supposed—you want to get into this? Fine. Am I supposed to believe that we’ve had sex without issue a hundred times, but that time on March ninth, it was rape? O—come on. This is murky. At best. I know you know that.”
“Why?”
“Why what, dude?” “Why is it murky?”
“Because it’s you and me, and we clearly have different definitions of some of these terms. Given all that, who’s to say if anything … wrong … even happened?”
“On March ninth, I did.”
“You said it was rape?”
“I SAID NO!” Everything is pouring out of me: all my anger,
all my bitterness, all my stress, all my sanity. “I said stop; I said, ‘Hey, Lily, get the fuck off me.’ This isn’t complicated. I’m so sick of this—”
“Okay, let’s just take a minute—”
“Let’s not!” I squeeze my arms, my voice tightening. “Do you seriously think you can spin this in a way that’s going to make me go, ‘Well, you’re right, I guess this didn’t happen to me’?”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Because you can’t.”
“—but if me explaining this can help you, O, then I want to do that! That’s what I’m saying!”
“You can’t! That’s what I’m saying!”
We stare at each other, both out of breath again. There’s nowhere left for either of us to go, and we can both feel it.
The rain comes down, down, down, down.
Lily sniffles. Then she looks at the ground and says to it, almost offhand, “Well. This relationship is over.”
“Yeah.” I say it to the ground too. I don’t know what to feel about any of it … all I know is how much invigoration I get out of saying that. Out of taking the plunge, cutting the cord that’s been wrapped around my neck for months now—feeling that festering urgency finally reach its tipping point.
Lily takes a step back from me.
I wait for her to apologize.
I wait for her to say she’ll miss this.
I wait for her to tell me to go to hell.
But all she says is, “I can’t believe this. I really can’t.”
Then, “I’m going to go now.”
And she does.
TWENTY-FIVE
March 10th—Senior Year cont.
Journal:
I don’t know if I can remember
I remember her telling me to relax as she pulled my jeans and boxers down.
“Not right now. Come on.” My irritation gave way to mild panic—not because I cared about being exposed in front of her, but because she wasn’t stopping. Why wasn’t she stopping? I was about to tell her we could do it tomorrow, that I’d make it up to her; but then she was back on top of me, covering my mouth with kisses every time I tried to open it. I twisted my head away, but she got upset and asked me why I was being so weird. Except she didn’t say it like a question. She wasn’t really asking.
“Let’s just do this,” she whispered in my ear.
“Stop—come on. Lily, seriously. Get off. Li-ly.” My voice climbed as I started to squirm under her. Saying her name like it was someone else’s. Feeling like I was in a car barreling toward a brick wall, and the harder I pressed on the brakes, the more panicked I got when I realized they didn’t work. The horrified realization that this is happening, I am about to crash into this, and there’s no stopping it.
“Shh!” Lily covered my mouth between whisper-giggles. “O, you are so loud.”
My breath came in fast through my nose, and when I tried to sit up, she slid up my chest and whispered R-rated things in my ear and cooed at how my body responded. She was naked now, grinning wickedly and kissing me and on top of me and kissing me and on top of me.
Cut to:
Cut to:
Cut to:
I was going to have to shove her off.
I raised my arm—except it didn’t move. Why didn’t it move? Had I been drugged? No, this was all me … my body was going numb the same way it did when I fell asleep: poisoning its own defenses when I needed them the most.
The room was smothering me on all sides, locking my limbs in place as my muscles shut down. I heard Lily say, “Come on, stop being dumb,” as she moved and held my dead wrists against the bed frame. And now I was having sex I didn’t want to have and kissing someone I didn’t want to kiss; my body was made of cinderblocks, and everything was wrong.
Please get off, I said—it was more urgent than before, but my voice was softer instead of lou
der. Meek. A polite request.
“Come on, you want to do this,” Lily said.
(I don’t want to do this.)
“LTL,” she whispered.
All I could do was latch onto the light from the window and whisper one thing over and over until it got smaller and smaller; down, down, down, down.
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
I STAY UNDER THE BLEACHERS UNTIL THE RAINWATER finds its way into my shoes, soaking my socks. At first I flinch, then I wince and step into the downpour—one leg, the other, then my whole body.
It’s that unwanted validation: the thing you dreaded happening has finally happened. And now it’s done with, and the fallout is exactly as ugly as you were expecting.
I take the late bus with all the freshmen.
When it lets me off at the neighborhood gate, I rocket through the rain to the playground and lay down flat on the slide. My arms and legs hang over the edge. The metal is cold, my clothes are soaked, my head is stuffy, my body is numb. I keep opening my eyes every few seconds, waiting for Lily to appear … to break down and tell me how sorry she is for everything. And the reality leaves me drained and disgusting.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fucking disgusting. Look at us.
Oh my God, look at us!
Stop it.
Disgusting.
Us.
LOOK AT IT!
Oh my God.
Stop it.
Stop Us.
You.
Stop.
STOP.
Me.
Disgusting!
Disgusting
me.
NAIL BY NAIL
ONE
LIMBO.
That’s what everyone at school is calling it. It starts with the fact that our teachers tend to schedule senior final exams for the first week of May, since the AP tests on that material are the following week. The backwards result is that, while we’re required to keep showing up for another three weeks, the senior-level classes have no cirriculum left to learn and no exams left to take.
So: Limbo.
I’ll give props to my classmates for one thing—they may be nosy and worship at the altar of rumor, but the majority of them aren’t downright dicks. In a lot of places with your run-of-the-mill teenagers, videos of Dad’s tantrum would’ve gone viral, and I’d be the subject of twice as much gossip as before. But it had this weird opposite effect—once everyone had a face to pin to the Lanham incident and the interrogations ended, people stopped giving a shit and went back to their lives.
(Limbo.)
In the immediate aftermath of my breakup with Lily a few weeks back, I started out in rough shape: I’d lay in bed for long stretches, tight-chested and saying to myself, “You’re healing from an injury. This is going to hurt until it’s better, so here’s how we soothe the symptoms.” Music. TV. Porn. Sleep.
But then I’d start distracting myself by zoning in the Studio, and I did research on everything we’d argued about—the fact that one out of three rapes are committed by a partner, and 15 percent of culprits are minors. After a few days, I found myself thinking, good riddance. She did this and she knows it.
But I miss the group.
They don’t know why Lily and I broke up, but they know that it happened. She probably told them. In the days that followed, all three of them sent me some version of, “Hey dude, just wanted to let you know I’m sorry for all the shit you’re going through.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply. Thanks? Appreciate it? Anything longer would have felt like I was trying to talk about it, which I wasn’t. Eventually I got tired of thinking about it and just didn’t respond. I haven’t hung out with them since the fallout, because I don’t want to see Lily if she’s there, and I don’t want to deal with their questions if she’s not.
That’s the part that kills me: For three years, I dreamed of this as being the fairytale era of my life … the part where I could kick back at grad parties, go to senior week with my girlfriend, and ride the high of graduation. A summer full of beach trips with my crew before we all hug in the rain and say our tearful goodbyes.
I watch a lot of TV.
Mom lets me wallow for a week, then takes matters into her own hands one Monday morning.
“Hey,” she says, peeking her head in my room. “Sleep in.”
“Huh? What about school?”
“You’re home sick today. Purple cramps.”
Purple cramps isn’t an actual illness. It’s a code phrase Mom and I came up with when I was younger: Every now and then, she’d take off work and keep me home from school so the two of us could have a mental health day together. It started during one of Dad’s deployments and has since become a whole fixed routine: After sleeping in as late as we want, we go to the family diner in the plaza and split the Number 3 breakfast platter. Then we go to the department store and each get one thing we want. I was obsessed with collecting Tic Tacs when I was younger, so it was usually mega packs of those. But today it’s a personal coffee maker for my college dorm.
“Which of these do you think you’d like best?” Mom asks, sweeping her arm out in front of the aisle.
I pull my spreadsheet comparing models out of my pocket—I always do my research in advance of shopping trips. “We’re looking for the … K238 model. I think it’s that one up top.”
“How about this one instead?” she asks, pointing to the box below it. “Ooh, it looks fancier.”
“And twice as expensive. It’s because that one has brew strength control and stuff.”
“Well, if it has brew strength control—”
“And stuff.”
“—and stuff! I think now we have to get it.” “Mom, you don’t need to spend that kind of money on me.” But she’s already setting it in the cart. “You’ve earned it, college boy. College man.”
(I haven’t, but I don’t argue.)
“How’re you holding up with the Lily stuff?” she asks, pretending to read the label on a shelf unit. I’d told her that Lily and I broke up, but I said it was because Lily needed some time to process what happened to me. Not quite total bullshit.
“Not great.”
“I’m sorry, bud.”
“Thanks. Kind of sucks.”
“Well, you know what? Sometimes, looking back, we’re thankful that we didn’t end up with what we thought we wanted at the time.”
“I guess.” As we head for the next aisle, I ask, “What about you and Dad?”
She stiffens a little at the mention of him. I’m not sure whether she threw him out or he left by choice, but all I know is when I got back to the house after my fight with Lily, he was gone. Left to stay up at his cabin for a few weeks, Mom said. As far as I know, he’s still there, and as far as I care, it’s where he belongs.
“When I met him?” Mom purses her lips. “Talk about jumping through hoops. Well, the first few times I talked to him, it was just to figure out when he’d be done with the treadmill—we went to the same gym.”
“You guys met at the gym?”
“I never told you that? Yep. And one day we both got there and someone else was using our treadmill.”
I smile a little. I have a special treadmill at the neighborhood gym too. Maybe I inherited that tendency from them.
“So we got talking during the wait, and that was that. But then, those first few dates—Good Lord. It was like I was being vetted. Your dad has a lifetime of trust issues, O. A lifetime. He views everything through the lens of the danger it could present. He’s so sure that everything in the world is out there to let him down. If it hasn’t yet, it will. So he tries to plan accordingly.
Which means he feels even more upset when things still go wrong. Yeah, not a great system.”
I don’t tell her what I’m thinking: that that’s exactly how I feel about the world sometimes.
“A couple years into the relationship,” Mom continues, “this is around when I was expecting a ring … I had him do a month of inpati
ent treatment for his PTSD. Well, talk about a letdown … that didn’t do anything for him. He tried pot—”
“Dad smoked weed?”
“Ohhh yeah.” She closes her eyes and nods, blowing a raspberry. “Total pothead. I’m talking, contact high if you looked at the guy too hard, know what I’m saying?”
“Did it help?”
“Not how he wanted it to. It was only for a few months. Counseling was a non-starter, too. I tried to get him to look into prescription meds, but he got spooked when a buddy of his tried that and wound up dead by suicide. Obviously that wasn’t the cause, but again … all possible dangers.”
I wait for her to add something to that, but she doesn’t.
“What’s going to happen when he gets back?” I ask.
Mom stops the cart, thinking on it.
“We’ll have to see,” she says. “He still wants to find the person who—you know. That’s really important to him.”
“Important enough to throw a tantrum in front of half the school? Like a petulant fucking child?”
She studies the cart handle quietly.
“Sometimes I think he’s a sociopath,” I say.
“No, sweetheart, he’s your dad.”
“That’s not the opposite of a sociopath.”
“I get it. But with Dad, responding with equal aggression only turns the temperature up and makes it worse for everyone.”
“But why?” I huff. I’m so sick of this shit. Why does Dad always get to be the one who explodes but no one else can set a toe out of line? Why can’t I ever be the one who’s allowed to blow up at him, and he can find a way to deal with it?
I snap at my bracelet. “I wish no one ever found out.”
“I know.” Mom’s voice tightens. “Have you reconsidered therapy?”
I shake my head. Mom’s been on my back to see a therapist since I was twelve, but the closest guy is an hour north and I couldn’t tolerate doing it over the phone. With everything that’s gone on recently, the argument has resurfaced.
“Okay,” she says. “But I really want you to consider it for college.”
“I don’t need to talk about it.”