by TE Carter
I looked at him, at his eyes, at the way he was smiling even when he wasn’t. “I love you,” I whispered.
“Play along,” he told me. I let him make me a joke. I let him humiliate me, because I thought it was a game. Something he had to do so Gina Lynn wouldn’t know that he’d made a mistake. That he had to be with me instead. After I ran away crying, I waited on the lawn. By the side of the house. In the cold, dark night where I was invisible.
“All right, talk,” he said when he came around the house.
“I miss you.”
“We’ve been over this. It’s not you. We just don’t work. You can’t just show up here. You can’t keep doing this, Ellie. You have to move on.”
I started to cry. Drunk tears over my costume. The wind came and knocked off my hat. Instead of being the confident and beautiful girl he shouldn’t have broken up with, I was a sad, pathetic mess in clothes that didn’t fit right, chasing her hat down a hill while everyone else laughed about how poor I was. I fell at the bottom of the hill, although I caught the hat and hugged it to myself.
“Ellie,” Caleb said, and he came toward me, sitting beside me. “What are you doing?”
“I thought you liked me,” I said.
“I did. But you didn’t think this was forever, did you? It was fun, right? Isn’t that enough?”
I turned and kissed him. I wanted him to put his arms around me again, wanted to feel him against me. “I love you, Caleb.”
“You don’t want this,” he said.
“I do,” I told him. “I’ll do anything.”
“Let me take you home.”
“No. Let’s go to the lake. To one of the houses. Somewhere. Please?”
He looked up at his house and paused. There were people standing out front and I could hear the music from the bottom of the hill. “Let me get my keys.”
I don’t know what he told Gina Lynn. I don’t know how he got away, but it was a few minutes and then we were in his car. I felt nauseous from the alcohol, but happy to be with Caleb. I thought I’d won.
“I missed you,” I told him again as we drove. I figured if I kept saying it, he would remember he felt the same way.
“You’re something else, Ellie.”
“Did you miss me? Do you still like me?” I asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
He brought me to the lake and we spent an hour in the back of his car. My costume ended up on the floor. I let him back into the places he’d been. His hands were on me … in me …
I wanted him to remember. I needed him to remember that he’d found me beautiful.
“I want to, Caleb,” I said. “I’m ready.” He was on top of me and I knew it would only take a word. “I want you to.”
“It wouldn’t be right,” he said, but he kept touching me.
“Why not?”
He kissed me, and I let him touch me, remembering what it felt like to be wanted. To be special. I knew I wasn’t being good, but good would have to come later. Once he remembered, too.
“I’m still with Gina Lynn,” he said as I lifted his shirt. Unbuttoned his pants.
“Don’t you think I’m pretty?” I asked when he kissed down my body. He was talking about another girl, saying it wasn’t right, but he was still with me. He’d undressed me. He was kissing me.
He tugged his shirt off and I felt him naked against my skin. I reached for him, ready.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Now, come here. Want to do me a favor?”
It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was something I could do and he would remember. I told myself the whole time that he had to remember. He said my name that night and he kissed me while I did what he wanted. His hands got tangled in my hair and he kept whispering my name.
After I was done, I asked him again. “I want to,” I insisted. “I want you to be first.”
“It’s late, Ellie,” he said. “I have to get back. Gina Lynn’s going to wonder.”
He kept touching me, kissing me. His words didn’t make sense.
“Please?” I asked. “I want you, Caleb. Don’t you want me?”
“So badly. What if I call you tomorrow? Are you around tomorrow?” he asked. “Can you wait?”
I nodded and he smiled, kissing me again and helping me get dressed. I could wait, because it would be different now.
“Damn, Ellie,” he said when were back in the front seats. “You’re killing me. I can’t wait until tomorrow. I bet you’ll be amazing.” He leaned over and kissed me, his hands rough against my throat. Nearly choking me. “God, I want you.”
“We can just … I don’t have to go home,” I said.
He pulled away from me. “No, not here,” he said. “I’ve got plans for you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After I did his favor, after I let him touch me, after he told me how much he wanted me and that he would call me the next day, he drove me to the gas station near my house. He didn’t even say good-bye. And then he didn’t call all day Sunday. On Monday, at school, he looked right through me like it had never happened.
That was when I realized how easy pretty words can be.
I didn’t go to school for another week after that. He didn’t post any pictures on the Internet. There was no cliché high school humiliation. Gina Lynn deleted the video. But it wasn’t about that. I didn’t care if people remembered what he’d said at his party. I just couldn’t bear to see him. To remember what we’d done. How I’d begged him to stay with me.
I told myself to get over it. I tried to get over it. I didn’t e-mail Kate. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, because I didn’t know what to say. Not that there was anyone to tell.
I cried and felt stupid and ashamed. I hated myself, but none of that made it go away. None of that made it better. I skipped school, but that wasn’t fixing it, so I got dressed one Tuesday, went to school, and just tried to stop looking backward.
I ate my lunch in the hallway when I went back. A granola bar or crackers or whatever I could dig up in the house and toss in my bag. I’d sit on the stairs and listen to music and write in my diary. I wrote about things that happened to other girls. To girls as I imagined them. I wrote about wanting to visit New York again, about how awesomely successful I imagined my mom was, about being a singer. I didn’t sing. I was in chorus class, but mostly to fill my schedule. I didn’t know my mom. I wrote these things because if someone found my diary, I’d be far more interesting than I was. Even I didn’t want to read about a girl eating a sleeve of Ritz crackers in a dirty stairwell at her high school in a hopeless town.
“This is one thrilling stairway.”
I kept writing. I didn’t want to hear his voice. Didn’t want to talk to him. I knew as soon as he smiled I’d do the wrong thing and I’d forget that I was trying to move on.
He sat beside me and put his hand over mine. I tried to move my pen, but he pushed down. Not hard. Just enough to stop the words.
“I missed you,” he said. His other hand stroked my knee.
You’d think I would’ve learned. You’d think I would’ve stayed away. Wouldn’t have gone there that night. You’d think, after the party, after how used I felt when he abandoned me at the gas station and didn’t call, after avoiding him and school for a week, I would have known better.
It’s easy now. It’s easy to look at that moment, to see what he was doing. It’s easy to yell at myself and tell myself I was better than that. But all of that came later. It came with knowing who he really was.
You have to understand: I just wanted him to care like I did. I just wanted someone to love me that much. To be enough for someone. I was so afraid of losing the little I had that I was willing to do whatever it took to hold on to it.
“You haven’t called or texted or talked to me,” I reminded him. “You were supposed to call.”
“I was busy. But I’ve been thinking about you. Come on. Look at me, Ellie.”
Do you know how much I wish I c
ould say there was something he did that was special? That I could defend it or rationalize it because there was a side of him only I knew?
There wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t. He was a teenage boy. He had too coarse hair and gray eyes and he walked like the ceiling was too low for him and he smiled crooked. He wasn’t even very nice. But he was the one who found me sitting in the stairwell, and I thought that meant something. He kept coming back, and I believed he was hurting, too.
“I wish you’d called,” I said.
“I know. But hey, listen, I wanted to see what you were up to. Want to get together Saturday night?”
“What for?”
He moved his hand off mine and reached behind my head, his fingers curling against the back of my skull.
“I was thinking maybe we could finish what we started,” he said. “After my party. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.” His other hand slid up my side from my knee, under my shirt, his fingertips on my rib cage. “I can’t believe I had that kind of willpower. You’re really sexy. Do you have any idea what you do to me? I was hoping we’d get a chance to see each other. You haven’t been around.”
“You never called,” I reminded him again. “You were going to call. You were supposed to. Almost two weeks ago.”
He kissed me and pressed his fingers into my neck. “My dad had me working a ton. But you know I’ve been thinking about you, right?” I didn’t say anything. “Oh, Ellie, don’t be like this.” He moved a hand back down to my leg, up my thigh. “You want this, remember?”
“You have a girlfriend. Remember?”
“Gina Lynn? No, that’s over. I just haven’t told her yet. Meet me Saturday night. It’ll be just us. Come on, Ellie. You said you were ready.”
“Caleb, I—” I pushed his hand down my leg, away from me.
“Shhh,” he said, holding me against him, kissing me into silence. I hated how my body responded to it. I hated that I wanted to say no, to tell him he should have called. But he was right. I’d told him I was ready. That I’d wanted this. That I wanted him. And the worst is that, despite being angry, despite how much he’d hurt me, I still did.
“Ellie, come on. What can it hurt? I love you. You’re beautiful. Let me show you, all right?”
I went. Of course I did. I was barreling down a road of mistakes and I couldn’t figure out how to get back. I thought it would be special. I thought it would change something.
And it did. It changed everything.
He met me at the park and drove me to the house. He told me that it was quiet there, that he knew a secret place for just us. I wanted to believe him. I went there with purple silk under my jeans, hoping he meant it when he called me beautiful.
It was the last place I ever went. The last choice I made. I can’t hate myself more for it.
* * *
FIRST, THERE WAS Caleb. Just us, like he’d said. It wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t what I wanted, but it was still just us. That part was true.
It didn’t happen like it had in his car. He hurt me. He held me down. His hands weren’t soft but demanding. He didn’t undress me; he tore the clothes off like an animal. I cried and he laughed, but it was just us, and I thought this was the worst it could get. I figured I would take my clothes and he’d tell everyone whatever he’d planned to tell them and I’d go to school and see him with Gina Lynn and they’d whisper when I walked by. Talk about how pathetic I was but how I knew my place now. Knew my worth.
I realized it had been a game. I didn’t know when he’d changed his mind, but I realized as he did this to me that he didn’t want me. Not like I’d hoped. He wanted to hurt me. To make me go away.
When he got up after the second time, when he left me crying on the carpet and walked out of the room, I thought he was getting a towel or something. That he’d be back and he’d bring me home. I crawled over to my clothes, to my jeans and underwear. Hands shaking, I laid them out and tried to stand. I just needed to get dressed.
“What are you doing?”
I’d never met him. I’d seen him, heard about him, but we’d never spoken. I didn’t know that voice. Not yet.
Caleb closed the door behind him and sat on the bed as Noah pushed me back down. I could smell the alcohol on him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I tried to say it, snot building in my throat and the gargle coming out in cracks. He hit me, smacking me hard across the face. They learned from me. Never go for the face. After, they stopped hitting where someone could see it. They learned to work harder to cover up what they were.
“I asked you your name,” he said.
“Ellie.”
I was a canvas, a blank slate, until Caleb had begun to write out his need on me. He’d claimed what was his, but it wasn’t everything. He and Noah found all the hidden parts of me. Passed between them, my body was their playground, and they bent me to their wills. They each were there and then, they made me do it at the same time.
They took off my sweater, and I was on my hands and knees, on my back, against the wall, while they shared. They ignored all the things I asked. All the ways I begged.
After they had ruined me, after they’d made their mess, they left me sobbing on the floor.
And I still thought it was over.
Caleb had said he wanted something that was just his. He didn’t want to be where they’d both already been. He wanted something only for him. Something else that he could take from me.
I screamed. That was my mistake, but I couldn’t help it. I was torn apart and I couldn’t stop. I screamed. And then he hit me. Harder and harder while he continued, still laying claim to the last part of my body.
The anger made him more excited somehow, turned him into an animal, and he slammed my face down. Noah helped, holding me while Caleb kept going.
I don’t remember when I stopped breathing. I remember the dying and I remember being dead, but nothing changed. I was on the floor, screaming, my head throbbing and the blood spilling from my nose. He was in me. Then he wasn’t, and he flipped me over, his hands around my throat, the ecstasy of power in his face.
“Dude, you’re going to kill her,” Noah said, but he was laughing.
I tried to look at Caleb. Tried to reach the boy I’d fallen for as the air went out of me. I couldn’t see him anymore. Couldn’t see who he’d been or the monster he was. Couldn’t find anything in the wavy room, the world spinning toward darkness. Nothing but the brown walls and the memory of a boy who’d told me he loved me in summer.
And then I was there, but his hands weren’t on my throat. I saw how he stood over me. I could breathe, but I realized I was doing it out of habit.
“Shit. We need to get something. We need to hide her,” Noah said.
Caleb tossed my sweater over my body. “Call Dad.”
chapter thirty-five
Kate’s parents’ kitchen is too bright. Painted yellow. A border with chickens runs along the ceiling’s edge. Everything is in shades of sunlight. But they don’t have any of the same light on them. They droop where they sit, heavy under something.
Cassie sits across from them. Gus isn’t with her. This is information gathering. I don’t know what led her here. How she’s connected me to Kate or to the other girls, but she’s here to ask the questions others forgot to ask, or asked and never followed up on.
“Your daughter and Ellie Frias were friends?” she asks.
Kate’s father is older than my dad. A lot older. She was an only child, too, but she was planned. Her parents welcomed her into their lives. They were ready and had a crib and a whole room picked out. I was an accident.
I’d only ever seen Kate’s parents in passing. We’d never talked. Nothing more than a grunted greeting or a wave. When I was with her, we were alone. In her room. Her backyard. We never brought each other into the other parts of our lives. Our friendship was something we each kept apart from us. Something we were still trying to figure out.
Kate’s fa
ther drums his fingers on the table and tries to find the words. “They knew each other. I don’t know if they were really friends. They weren’t that close.”
Cassie writes, capturing the way they speak, how they’re reluctant to talk about me.
“She was home right after Ellie went missing, right?” she asks.
Kate’s mom shakes her head. “It was about a month later. During her break from school. She’s in Ohio, you know?”
“Right, for school,” Cassie confirms.
“She took the year off after she graduated. She had to, and we didn’t want her going too far. It was that year, that summer. She and that girl spent a lot of time together. But they were never friends.”
“You’re insistent on that. Why?” Cassie asks.
“Our daughter had nothing to do with what happened,” Kate’s father says. “It isn’t right. She just wanted to go to school, and she came home and … Last summer, Katie never mentioned that girl. We saw her a few times, but they weren’t close. She didn’t spend a lot of time here. We only found out they were anything more than friendly neighbors after she went missing. Katie was home for the holidays and she said she’d worried about that girl.”
I notice they call her Katie. It’s deliberate. Kate never referred to herself that way. She’d never said it bothered her, but I knew her as Kate. She signed things as Kate. Yet her parents know her as Katie. It’s weird how our parents know us as separate and different people from who we actually are.
Kate’s father looks outside, through the window, up the hill to my house. To my kitchen. “I don’t know what kinds of things that girl was or wasn’t involved in, but it wasn’t something Katie needed to be a part of.”
“You worry about your daughter?” Cassie asks.
“Of course. She’s our daughter,” he says. He doesn’t continue. He feels that should explain everything.
Cassie nods. “I assume Kate spoke with the police. You all did, I imagine?”
Mr. Prince—Kate’s father—shakes his head. “They asked a lot of people in town for tips, but we were never called in to speak to anyone. Not officially. Although Katie went once. After Christmas. She told us she was worried. She mentioned that girl had some trouble with boys. Katie said she was afraid something had happened. We suggested she go to see them, tell them what she knew, and leave it at that. I don’t know what came of it. They never followed up, and we didn’t ask about it again. It wasn’t good for her to be thinking about all that. That girl wasn’t Katie’s responsibility. Whatever happened to her had nothing to do with our daughter. We didn’t need her worrying about those sorts of things.”