Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf
Page 3
“I’m okay,” I say. But I’m totally not. We should call an Uber, but too much has gone on. I just want to get out of here.
“That girl made a mess of my jacket,” Sean says. I peek in the rearview mirror at a stop sign and see that he’s got his big varsity soccer jacket rolled up in a ball.
“Why do you keep saying that, bro?” Dev asks. “You said that earlier.”
“She had her period, dude. She bled, like, everywhere.”
But I wonder if it was her period at all. I wonder if it was more like her first time.
Sean’s garbly wasted. Talking things that half make sense. He says she was crying and that he didn’t even realize that she was crying until after.
“How am I supposed to know these things? Do you know how many girls hit on me? Do you? What did she think we were going to do up there? And she’s looking at me all sexy. What did she think was going to happen?”
“Aww, all the girls love Nessel, and they’re just crying over you, dude. They love you.” Dev’s smiling, but I can tell it’s not real. He winces when he says it. “She’s young. She’s just freaked out probably. She’ll be fine.”
I’m staring at the black of the road in front of me and thinking about why a girl might cry after she has sex. I think it doesn’t have to do so much with love. I think it has a lot to do with regret.
When I pull up at Sean’s house about ten minutes later, he spits on the curb, saying he’s going to puke. Dev’s already asleep. His hair is muddled up against the window.
Sean puts his head inside my window.
“You have to help me, B.”
“Help you into the house?”
“No. Come on, B. Think. Think!” He raises his voice. He can’t even get his words out. To see a god fall. Have you ever seen a god fall? I don’t want to see it. I can’t bear to look. I nod; it’s a painful blow.
“We’ve been friends for so long, B. You know I would never hurt anyone. But she said I hurt her. And maybe, I don’t know. Maybe I was too intense. You know I wouldn’t do anything to anyone.” Sean’s crying now. He’s a hurricane of emotions. He’s quivering. He’s mumbling about school and how he’ll get kicked out and how he’ll never get into college.
“Sean. Sean. You have to calm down.” I stroke his hair. It’s silk. You know it had to be that way. Silk.
“Of course you didn’t hurt anyone.” The words slip out of me. Somehow, it’s all so clear and I know exactly what to say. Maybe it’s the Ritalin finally working. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her it’s going to be fine. She’ll understand. I’ll fix it for you.”
He cowers in the window, his head now resting on the inside of the door. I stroke his cheek down to his chin. I promise him it’s going to be fine.
4
ALI
I get to my front door, and it’s weird because all the lights are off except for this glow near the kitchen. I’m nervous to walk inside, sweaty. I wonder if this is my life. If this is happening to me.
Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m dead.
The buzzing in my back pocket jolts me. It’s Sammi looking for me. I know it’s awful, but I shut off my phone, shut her out—I just want to get into my house. I know I’m going to have to talk to her.
And then I hear a low humming, a woman’s voice. Is it music that’s playing? Billie Holiday? Some kind of jazz. Then a laughing, a cackle. I walk in farther, and my stomach drops at the sight of flesh.
There is a woman in my living room. She has a T-shirt on and is lying on her back. I can’t see her face, not that I’d know her. Underwear. White granny panties.
The man’s face resting next to her face is for sure . . . for certain . . . my father. With no shirt on. The two of them, whispering and kissing.
Then the woman opens her eyes and screams—and her voice crashes around me and I flinch, because for a second, I think, What now? Did something else horrible happen? And then I realize, no, she’s screaming because of me. Because I walked in. And I look away because, God, it’s my father in some weird postcoital position.
My father, in the fastest move I’ve ever seen in my life, whips his head around to face the doorway toward me, then rolls her away from him, away from my view.
“Holy shit—” my father says, and scrambles for his T-shirt. “You weren’t supposed to be home tonight!”
The woman scurries to the bathroom, tugging her jeans on as she moves.
“Who is she?” I say, my voice garbled. She is no one I’ve ever met before. Not that there have been many. There was one ex-girlfriend that enlightened me, let’s say, and that’s a nice way to put it. If you want to consider enlightenment showing me how to use tampons. My mother was not happy about this. “You could have waited until you saw me so I could teach you,” she had said to me, utterly wounded. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t run away to live in some hippie town, you’d be around when some idiot boy decides to have a pool party two days after I get my period so that you can show me how to use a tampon,” I said and hung up on her.
The woman walks out of the bathroom, jeans on now. She swings her long, curly, blond hair away from her face. Her lips are pink and raw looking.
“Ali, this is Sheila.”
“I’m going to my room. I’m pretending like this isn’t happening.”
I storm off to the steps, but my thighs ache as I walk. My head spins. I’m still drunk.
“Alistair! Stop right there.” My father rarely screams. But his voice bellows now.
“Explain to me what is going on. You were supposed to be sleeping at Sammi’s.”
“I wanted to come home,” I say. “Is that so bad?” My voice is quivering now. I’m going to cry, explode all over the place. It’s all settling in. The vodka. My head pounding. The soreness between my legs.
“Where are your shoes?”
“Who cares about my shoes, Dad? Shoes are so unimportant right now. Trust me. Shoes are so, like, the last thing that any of us should be thinking about.”
“Did you and Sammi get into a fight or something?”
“I don’t want to talk to you about anything,” I say and face the wall because I could break into tears so easily. I could drift right into it. This is the night I need my father most. Sometimes a girl just needs to sit and cry with her dad on the couch. Except tonight, that’s out of the question, because Sheila the She Woman is here. I suck the damp air of the den in through my nostrils and close my eyes.
“Ali, are you drunk?”
“John, I don’t mind leaving,” I hear Sheila the She Woman say. She’s got a super-low voice, like a weird old cow.
“No, no. Just hold on a sec.”
I’m dying to turn around to get another glimpse of her, except I don’t want my father to study my face. I’ve still got traces of eyeliner smudges, I’m sure. There are other things he might notice too. That I’ve been crying. That I’ve been kissed—hard. That a boy strapped his hand across my mouth. My dad is perceptive that way. He’s clued in to my emotions.
I want to blab about the whole night, but what would I say?
Hey, Dad. I got drunk. Oh, and Sean Nessel popped my cherry. We were swigging straight vodka from airplane bottles because I’m absolutely stupid. We lied to Sammi’s parents. And Sammi—she doesn’t even know where I am! Use protection? Ha! What protection?
All those years of my father and his excruciatingly painful monologues about how important it is to protect yourself from HIV, herpes, pregnancy . . . all out the window in one traumatic night with Sean Nessel.
Oh, I’m totally going straight to hell on a roller coaster. I’m, like, on the Space Mountain express to the earth’s flaming pit.
“Can I just please, please, go upstairs and go to bed if I promise to talk to you in the morning?” I say. “It’s been the worst night, and I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
* * *
* * *
In my room, I crawl into bed. My legs are sore and my inner thighs hurt as I pull my knees up to my chest. No matter how badly I want to, I can’t take a shower now. Besides my father questioning why I’m taking a shower at eleven o’clock at night, any residue on my body is the only evidence that this night happened. I want my body to feel this experience. Feel the cracked blood around my vagina, feel my sore back, feel the imprint of Sean Nessel’s hand on my shoulder. This is what being an adult is, right? This is how people become mature. They suffer and move on.
I’ll make a conscious effort not to look different or walk funny in the morning. Because, after tonight, I plan to erase this.
I try to imagine my mother, playing with my hair or tickling my back. But tonight my mother is far away in New Mexico, under the stars, because that’s where she decided to move when I was twelve years old to clean up her act. To sober up. To live in a little low-pressure community in the desert. To take life One Day at a Time, her favorite sober catchphrase, as she always reminds me before we hang up the phone. Little does she know what happened to her baby girl tonight.
I wish she was here to rub the knot out of my spine. Do X Marks the Spot. What would she have said?
Nothing. Nothing that my father can’t say.
That is, if I’d bother to tell him.
And I don’t even know where to begin.
So I curl up in bed, hold my legs tight, and scrunch the cool sheet between my thighs. Alone. I know I’ll stop crying once this night is over. I know I’ll be stronger once I can pull myself together. But in this moment, I want my mother.
5
BLYTHE
After we drop Sean off, after all those tears that he spilled as we practically carried him to his front steps, Dev and I drive home in silence.
“Do you believe him? I think he’s just beyond wasted,” I say when we park.
But I don’t want to know.
Dev and Sean have been tied together since kindergarten. Dev’s always been Sean’s head cheerleader. His hype man. The guy who makes Sean look better than he actually is. Because Dev truly sees Sean as a sweet, vulnerable guy, who, despite the rotation of girls, can still get his heart broken. A guy who still wants to know how to act. Sometimes he asks Dev about sex. What it’s like between us.
“Are her legs supposed to shake like that after?” Sean asked him just two weeks ago.
“Oh my God, what did you tell him?” I said.
“I told him the truth because he looks up to us, B,” Dev said. “‘Yeah, bro, they should shake.’”
It seemed sweet. Like he cared.
I’m no one’s hype man. I have my own team to do that for me. The Core Four. They would lay everything on the line for me. Have I talked to girls for Sean, reassured them, coddled them? Sure. What kind of monster would I be if I just left these girls crying after he decided they weren’t worth his time? But for Sean to beg me to talk to someone like he did tonight? This is new.
Dev places his hand on my thigh, nothing more. He’s as stupefied as I am.
The truth is that I have no memories of my life before Sean Nessel was in it. There was my father always commenting how he handled the soccer ball. We’d watch him from the top of my street when he lived near me, before his parents got divorced. My father would say things like, “Kid has a natural talent.” Or “Kid has a great foot.” We’d walk up there—this was in fourth grade—just so my dad could talk to Mr. Nessel. Just to compliment him on his son’s foot.
Before that, Sean Nessel was the kid who chased me around the playground during recess. I’d be out of breath, hiding from him under the slide, but he’d always come for me. Even when the other boys, boys like Dev, would be throwing a tennis ball against the school wall. They wanted to play Pegs. Sean wanted to chase me. And I let him chase me for at least the first half of recess. I loved it. I loved the thrill of being wanted by him, even though I couldn’t explain that in my little silver leggings and my pink T-shirts and my boots or my high-tops with all the studs on them.
“I’m gonna get you tomorrow, Jensen,” Sean would yell to me with a huge smile, his face streaked with red before he went over to join his friends at the wall.
I didn’t meet Donnie until sixth grade when we got to middle school. Back then it was just me, Cate, and Suki. Cate would say to me, “I can stop him, B. I’m bigger than him.” And she was bigger than him for a while—her round body didn’t get muscular until we got to middle school and all stretched out. Sean was wiry then, lean with popping muscles, but not a monster, before he shot up to whatever tall height he’s at now.
Did I want him to stop chasing me? I lived for him to chase me. But I didn’t know how to say that to Cate. To anyone. So I went home that night and demanded that my father take me to the mall to get running sneakers.
“You have sneakers,” he said, looking down at my high-tops. With their gold glitter laces.
“Not ones like these. Sneakers that’ll make me run fast.”
“Okay, but is there a reason?”
“Because I need to outrun someone.”
My father was concerned. He looked at me, serious. “A bully?”
“Bully, no! Sean Nessel is chasing me all over during recess.”
My father’s face. Like a proud papa. Sean Nessel, the kid with the foot, chasing his baby girl.
“You know what it means when a boy chases a girl, don’t you, Blythe? It means that he likes you.”
When I went to school the next day, I hid my new sneakers in my backpack like a secret weapon. I didn’t want Sean to know what I had. It would be a surprise. A sneak attack. A sneak-ers attack.
In class, during a small break, he walked by my desk on his way to the water fountain. He bent down, whispering to me, “I’m going to get you today, Jensen.”
I gazed up at his face. No hesitation. “I’ll be waiting,” I said.
He smiled so big that I thought his face would explode. I couldn’t even sit in my seat right, I was so excited. Cate turned around, her pudgy face desperate. “What’s going on?” she mouthed.
I shrugged. It was my thing with Sean. Our game of chase. I didn’t want her or anyone else part of it.
Later, when the bell rang, I told Suki and Cate not to wait for me because I had to go to the bathroom. I ran over there, sat in the stall, and changed into my new sneakers. Teal and purple. Shoved my boots in my backpack. Hung it up in my locker, then walked to the school door. My heart racing. My body pounding. I opened the door and stood at the top of the steps, searching for Sean until I found him playing Pegs at the wall.
I strode over slowly, so out of breath already, my body throbbing. I wanted to scream his name, holler for him. Come and get me. But I didn’t have to. Because he spotted me through everyone. His face beamed. Then he looked down at my feet, and his mouth dropped open wide. He laughed, rested his hands on his hips, nodded, and without any warning, rocketed toward me.
I pivoted and ran, faster than I ever had before, zooming between kids, not stopping for a second. I could hear him catching up, behind me, grunting. Then I just felt him all of a sudden, his body tackling me into the mulch near the tire swing. My face skidded across the wood chips and then a thud of both our bodies, together and then hitting the ground. There was a moment or two that the air completely escaped me and maybe the same happened to Sean because he rolled off me and we both wriggled on the ground, gasping.
That’s when the recess teacher sprinted over, grabbed Sean by the hand, and hauled his body up to stand. “I saw you, Sean,” she yelled. “I saw you leap on top of Blythe. I saw you chase her. I saw you attack her. What on ea
rth were you thinking?”
I couldn’t even gulp a breath of air to defend him in the moment. My leggings were torn up at the knee, my face dirty and full of mulch. A bunch of girls, including Suki and Cate, lifted me up. Suki frantically saying over and over in my ear, “Are you okay, B? Are you okay?”
The recess teacher, I can’t even remember her name now, dragged Sean away. His face never left mine until she brought him inside.
Later the principal asked me, “Was this a game you were playing, Blythe? Did you want to be chased by Sean?”
“Yes,” I told her. Yes. Was there any other answer?
6
ALI
You know when you’ve exercised a lot at the gym, or run a few miles or so, or played an intense game of some sport and you’re sore the next day? Everything hurts. Even when you’re not moving, it hurts. Like all your muscles have been crunched between two metal clamps. Well, that’s what I feel like. My vagina, as in my actual vagina, hurts. As if someone tore something out of it. There are muscles, tissue inside there, and it’s shredded.
I slide my T-shirt over my shoulder, where he pressed me down. I can’t even think about it without shaking, without that lightning bolt shivering up through my ribs. Piercing me. There’s a big black mark there. A bruise, a wide bruise that wants to come through. It’ll get more purple. More yellowish. Until it taunts me, reminding me every day what a fraud he turned out to be and how stupid in love I was.
Cute bangs, he had said to me at my locker.
I shake my head. Stupid bangs. I hate these bangs. I yank them. Want to tear them from my skull.
I grab scissors off my desk and cut my hair, shearing my bangs so they look like an awful version of Bettie Page. They’re straggling, and the hairs flick down over my forehead like razor-sharp dental instruments.
I’m nauseous now. My rumbling, sickened belly. That bitter taste in my mouth.
Now I have to destroy my Sean Nessel collage book. It’s just a composition book, the cover, a picture of Sean Nessel from the school newspaper, his hair behind his ears, looking to the left at something in the distance. Hearts and flowers near his eye. Roses and peonies and lilacs and hydrangeas. Purple hearts on his sleeves, hearts and hearts and more hearts, as if they’re growing from his face like some magical creature. Inside the book, more of the same. My obsession with Sean Nessel layered over streaks of a pink and orange sunset, sweeping behind him as he kicks the ball or runs down the field or smiles for the camera, all the colors, bleeding around him, so sweet and infectious. So innocent.