by TE Carter
The jeans were first. The sweater was merely annoying; the jeans were prevention.
“Someone’s been waiting for this,” he said.
I’d spent more on the underwear than I had on the jeans, but if the jeans weren’t going to protect me, the purple silk had no chance.
Caleb touched me the same way he had before. I couldn’t stop myself, letting his fingers in because he’d been there already. I was angry at my body for not understanding. It never listened to my mind.
“I like that. I knew you’d be good, Ellie.”
Good. Always about being good. I don’t know what that even means anymore.
“Why can’t I turn around?” I asked. “Let me look at you.” I still didn’t know. Didn’t understand. I thought something was wrong, but I also thought this must be normal. This must be what happens, must be how it is. I knew the first time would be strange, and I figured this was what it was like. Still, I couldn’t escape that he didn’t want to see my face.
He kept one hand on my back, pushing me down into the carpet. When I began to cry, the hair spilling from my throat, he whispered, “Shhh,” and put his other hand over my mouth. I could taste myself on him.
I’d imagined having sex with him. We’d gotten closer and closer. That night, I’d planned on it. It had been more than a year since the day we’d met and almost eight months since Gina Lynn’s first party. I spent lots of nights, staying up into the early hours of the morning, wondering. Even practicing, hoping. I’d hear my dad leave for work and feel ashamed, because I was still awake with these thoughts inside me. Picturing Caleb, watching his face in the moment it happened. I wanted to see his eyes in that instant, when he was forever a part of me. Instead, I had to stare at stains on a ruined carpet.
How do I reconcile that I wanted it? It was my darkest secret until I didn’t want it anymore. Not the way it was. But even then, while I spoke unheard pleas against his hand, I felt my body rise to meet him, felt myself welcome him in. I told myself I would get used to it. I thought it would be like our first kiss and that, eventually, we’d find a place where we were both comfortable.
I keep blaming myself, because I don’t know what else to do. I still feel the phantom weight of him bearing down on me. Can remember his fingers pushing against my lips, gagging me while he did this thing to me.
That’s it, though. This was done to me. I blame myself, but it wasn’t something I did. It was nothing I controlled. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be there with him, to be a part of it. I wanted to give something in return for something, a reciprocal moment. That was how I’d pictured it. I didn’t want this, and even while my body tried to make sense of what my mind already knew, I realized this would never be what I had hoped for or imagined.
At first, I was sad and disappointed, but I tried to think it was normal. However, as he grew more violent, as the carpet tore into my skin, as I cried and shook and tried to fight back and he pushed me farther down, I knew that this was nothing like I’d planned.
And then there was what happened after. When the door opened for Noah, it became something so cruel, so unimaginable, so outside the realm of possibility. That’s when I realized it wasn’t a mistake. That Caleb enjoyed this. That he’d always wanted it to be this way. That he liked it more the harder I cried.
When I think of those things, I sometimes think I’m glad I’m dead.
I don’t want to be dead, though, because there are so many things I miss. I miss that chill when winter comes without warning and you don’t have a coat when you walk outside, only to be reminded that the cold isn’t beholden to you to give notice. I miss sitting in the living room and eating cookies that are more sugar than food, worrying about who gets kicked off a pointless reality show competition that’s probably rigged anyhow.
These are the things that make life. This is what a girl is. This is what they took from me.
Where they put me, there’s nothing but dirt. They didn’t even give me a rock or a stick as a remembrance. It’s just me and some dirt.
I watched them do it. Watched them stand out in the night, the moon swimming under clouds, Caleb holding the flashlight and complaining it was too cold.
He was cold. I was dead, but he was cold.
I can see it. Now that the house is cleaned up, the bank will sell it for nothing. The couple who buys it, maybe they’re young. Maybe they think it’s a great deal because they don’t know what kind of place it was. They don’t know the things that happened here. Their kid will play in the backyard. He’ll bring his friends home and they’ll play soccer over where I am. They’ll live and exist and never know that I’m still waiting for someone to see me, right under their feet. When the grass grows in, it’ll be like I never existed at all.
That night, I died slowly.
All the clichés, they lie. I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes. There wasn’t a warm comforting light. It was me, trying to breathe, seeing Caleb over me, remembering his smile in those first days. It was the feeling of my windpipe giving in, the desperate realization that this was it and there was no way out.
I died seeing beige. Beige and the boy I thought I loved.
Dying was my art. It was my achievement. I was a pointless girl in a pointless town with a pointless life. Dying was the point; it made me someone.
They were careless when they got rid of me. They left me with nothing but a tarp, a few ropes, and my clothes, torn, then hastily and poorly replaced. My sweater was inside out and backward when they threw me into the ground. They didn’t bury me. Burying implies care. I was thrown into the dirt, an inconvenience.
They waited only a few days to bring another girl to the room. There was no panic or fear in them. What they did to me didn’t matter. They barely even remembered.
I stopped paying attention to time after that.
How do you kill someone and leave her to rot in the ground, then shower, eat a sandwich, watch TV, brush your teeth, do all the things that are part of life? All the things you took from her? Why do you feel entitled to continue? Because you don’t think she was entitled to these things, too?
That night, I sat and kept guard. I hoped they’d come back. I hoped someone would drive by, would see the dirt, would find me. I waited until they did come back three days later, until they did it again and again.
I watched the snow come, covering where I was, letting the world forget me, too.
Going back there now, I only remember where I am because I spent a lot of time memorizing small details. The way the light hits the branches by the tree on the edge of the property, cutting across the yard like a scythe. I remember the angle of the spot from the back door, a slider into the kitchen, through which they’d dragged me out into the yard. I recognize the shadows that the shed throws across the ground, landing right where my head is, darkening the patched bruising on my face and neck that’s gone now, along with other pieces of my flesh.
After I stopped breathing, I had a hard time making sense of it. There are no guidebooks to being dead but not going anywhere.
Noah left to buy ropes and a tarp. Probably from my dad. I still wonder if he sold them to him, if my father gave Noah the tools to get rid of his own daughter.
By the time Noah returned, Caleb had forced my body back into my clothes. The torn jeans hung on my limp body. My hair was matted and covered my face.
After their dad came and helped them, Caleb walked away, toward the house.
“I’m taking a shower.” The four words my boyfriend said after he and his brother raped and killed me.
I hate that word. I hate it being a part of what I was.
Rape.
It brings with it connotations, assumptions, a whole steamer trunk full of other people’s ideas of it, because other people only know it as a word. A concept that’s discussed, argued, demonized. If you actually know what it is, if you live it and experience it and know what it is beyond a word, you have to carry that word with you. You’re now “rape victim
,” “rape survivor.” Your identity is attached permanently to a word you hate.
I’m also a murder victim, but murder carries with it what it is. People don’t debate what defines murder. Politicians don’t argue the body’s ability to fight off being killed. There’s no talk of a “murder culture.” No one says that you asked for murder. What you wear doesn’t excuse being killed.
Yes, I wanted Caleb. But I also wanted to go home that night and have my dad knock on my door five times in the morning until I woke up, because I stayed up too late playing on my phone. I wanted to go to school and complain about homework, just like I wanted to have sex and wake up the next day happy I did. I didn’t want to be held facedown against dirty carpet. Didn’t want to be passed between them, to have them in the places they went.
I didn’t want anything more than what plenty of girls want. To be loved. To fall in love. To lose my virginity and be happy about it or regret it, but to have been given a choice.
The futility of rage in a dead girl is almost funny. But as I stand over where my body is and wonder if I can slip back inside of it, the way they did with such ease, I don’t want to laugh. I just want someone to find me.
chapter twenty-five
The problem with summer is that it doesn’t last.
Caleb and I sat in the park, two people among the masses. I wasn’t used to sitting with him anywhere in the sun. Our relationship seemed mainly to exist in the hours between twilight and darkness. Borrowed from time in a dying season.
“It’s weird to be the only one going back to school this year,” he said.
“Only one of what?” I asked. “I’m going to school.”
The last day of summer, the day before school starts, always feels both endless and like living on fast-forward. Under me, the metal of the bleachers seared my legs, but I didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to let the day end. Kids played sports on the fields around us and moms worried over grass stains and heatstroke.
“Sorry. I meant in my family. It’s always been Noah first, then me. It’s weird to be in school and have it be all mine. I can’t remember anything that was only mine.”
“It must suck having siblings. I’m too selfish to share with anyone,” I admitted.
Caleb laughed, turning on the bleacher. Sun continued to settle into the sharp ridges on the metal bench, burning the backs of my thighs.
“I don’t think you’re selfish, Ellie.”
“You don’t know me that well.”
He considered it. And in truth, what did we really know? I knew him in the ways he wanted me to know him. I knew the things he shared, and he knew what I did. We knew each other as extensions of ourselves, as ideas of another person. But we only knew what we wanted the other to know. He didn’t even know where I lived.
Caleb and I knew each other as you do when you start to discover love. We knew that this other human being, this other, found the things in ourselves we wanted someone to find. I knew I liked being part of Caleb and Ellie. I liked following an and. I called it love and I believed it, because it made me feel like I belonged somewhere. At the end of Caleb and.
I suppose Caleb could have been anyone, too. Except he wasn’t.
“I know you’re not like anyone else I know,” he said finally. “And I know mostly selfish people.”
It’s hard to remember him. It’s hard to isolate those feelings, to recall him in those days. Caleb before. All my memories of him come through the screen of something else. I know I felt things about him then. I believed the things he said, but now, I don’t know how I did. I think of what Adrien said. About the girl named Kailey. And I don’t know how to remember that day anymore.
I can’t explain him. It aches to think of that afternoon on the bleachers, because I know what came after. I can’t remember loving him without knowing what he did, and that makes me hate myself. Because somehow, I still do love him. Or, at the very least, I love this memory of him. Even when I know what he was. What he was all that time. Even with all the anger, I can’t remove this part of him from my life. I can’t change the way I felt.
“I don’t want to go back to school tomorrow,” I told him. “I like this too much.”
“Me, too. You’re the best part of my summer.”
“Really?”
“Of course.” He leaned forward to kiss me, but I didn’t let him, sliding backward on the bleacher. I wanted him to tell me more. To explain what it was he saw in me that I didn’t. To let me know what was special. Maybe even then I knew it didn’t make sense. That real love feels different. It doesn’t make you ask someone why. They don’t have to tell you, because they show you instead.
“Tell me about Noah. Or about college or about something you haven’t told me,” I said. “Tell me about you, and then you can kiss me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s always been me after my brother. He does everything first. It’s just the way it is with us. Sometimes I feel like the extra kid. The one my parents had in case Noah fails.”
“So make something yours. Make something that he doesn’t have,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t know, but there’s more to life than following Noah into everything. There’s more to life than being a backup.”
His hand, which rested on my knee, tensed. “Is there?”
“There’s college. If you can’t find it now, I’m sure you can find something there.” Something somewhere else, but I didn’t say it. The idea of this coming to an end in a year scared me.
“I don’t even know if I’m going,” he said.
His family had money. Caleb and I never talked about grades, but I knew that he would get wherever he needed—or wanted—to go, because he could pay for it. Noah was no scholar from what I’d heard, but he’d managed to get into the local college just fine.
I was naïve, but not that naïve. I knew what power was.
“I’m sure you’ll go to college,” I told him. “Whatever it is you feel like you’re missing, maybe you’ll figure it out there.”
“You realize, by next summer, we might not be in the same place?” he asked. He had never spoken a more honest statement.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “But you’ll probably be sick of me anyway.” He leaned over to kiss me again. “Will you be?”
I wanted him to argue, to promise he wouldn’t grow tired of me. I wanted him to say something, but all he did was slide closer.
“This is depressing. Let’s talk about something nicer,” he said, and he moved his hand upward, teasing the edges of my shorts with his fingers.
“That’s not talking,” I pointed out.
“Shhh,” he said, and his fingers pushed into the flesh of my thighs as he kissed me. I knew what he was asking, what he was testing.
I stood up. “Not here.”
We walked back to his car, his arm around my waist, his fingers on my skin below my tank top, while the two of us stayed silent.
That night, I almost let it happen. We left the park and let the day die from the back of his car, going further than we had before. I didn’t stop him; I didn’t slow it down. Time did, running out until there wasn’t enough of it, and when he dropped me off on the other side of town, I walked home thinking about what came next for us. Trying to feel the word yes on my lips. Trying to imagine what it would be like.
The next afternoon, I sat at lunch, alone. I didn’t have lunch with anyone I knew, and it was the first day of school. Every year is a new year. Trying to find your place again. The few people you’d held on to the year before have changed. Summer sweeps in and shapes us all, and then September comes and we have to start over.
I was hanging on to the way Caleb had kissed me the night before. The way that he’d undressed me and we’d stopped because we’d run out of time, but how I knew that the next time, all I needed to do was say one word. I thought of all that, but I shouldn’t have believed any of it. Because all of that was part of
summer, too.
“Are you Ellie Frias?” She stood over the table, her hair shining and perfect, like everything else about her.
“Yeah. I went to your party,” I said. “Parties.”
Caleb had invited me to a few more of Gina Lynn’s parties over the spring and summer. She and I had talked. Not about anything important, but he’d introduced us. Several times. Plus, I’d been there with her that night. When they’d filmed my dad.
“I thought you looked familiar,” she said. “So, listen, this may sound random, but are you with Caleb Breward?”
“I am,” I said. She knew this. Or she should have, but she didn’t remember me and I’d seen her several times that summer.
“Like for real?” she asked.
I pushed my yogurt to the side and looked up to respond. “I think so. I guess. I mean, what do you mean?”
She smiled and lifted her hand, waving one of her friends over. The other girl was equally golden, although it was false. She was spray-tan pretty, while Gina Lynn just made the sun chase her. I never caught her friend’s name.
“Did you know Caleb’s got a girlfriend?” Gina Lynn asked her friend.
“Seriously? I thought you guys were—” She stopped with a look. The secret language of girls who can speak secret languages and still make people listen.
“See, the thing is, Ellie … It’s Ellie, right?” Gina Lynn sat down and put her hand on mine.
“Yeah, Ellie.” Even I was caught in her spell. My brain wanted me to remind her that she’d asked me literally seconds earlier. That I’d told her before. But I nodded and said it again, hoping she’d learn it and I’d become a word in her vocabulary.
“Caleb and I go way back, you know? You just moved here, right?”
“No. I mean, I’ve always lived here. I think we talked about this before.”