We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  “Gwinnett is definitely sexy,” I said, acknowledging Dean’s dig on the unfashionable suburb where he lived. But in my head I was thinking, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I was going to go to breakfast with Dean. I was going to eat an egg and cheese sandwich with him! I couldn’t wait to tell Anna, though I had a feeling she would disapprove of me leaving prom with someone other than my date. But it wasn’t as if George and I were a couple.

  I returned to the basement where she and I had been sitting, but she was no longer there. Chip was slumped on the couch with his eyes closed, bow tie in hand.

  “Hey, Chip,” I said, but he didn’t respond. I put my hand on his forearm and shook it. He opened his eyes, blinked.

  “Huh?” he mumbled.

  “Do you know where Anna is?”

  He yawned, shook his head. “I think she went to lie down? Or maybe she went outside. Some guys are smoking a joint out there.”

  Anna might have an occasional wine cooler, but there was no way she would smoke a joint. I left Chip and went to the bathroom to see if Anna was in there. The door was locked, and no one answered when I knocked. I knocked again, and I heard Sake call, “Just a minute!” And then she and Lizzie stumbled out, the straps of Lizzie’s yellow dress haphazardly placed. “Are you okay?” I asked, thinking that maybe Lizzie had gotten sick.

  “I’m fine. Just too much tequila,” said Lizzie.

  “Have you seen Anna?” I asked.

  “I think she went to lay down,” said Sake.

  “Lie,” corrected Lizzie. “Lie down.”

  “Oh my God, you’re so annoying!” said Sake, but she said it in a gushing, flirty way. “Let’s go see if Robert has another joint.”

  I had a strange sense as I watched them walk off, something about the way they were interacting with each other. It reminded me of Dean and Zoe, how he casually placed his hand on her waist, his knowledge of her body a foregone conclusion. And then it dawned on me, quickly and without warning: They had been making out in the bathroom. Oh God. Were they lovers? Did that mean they were gay? Did people think I was gay for hanging out with them? Or was I their camouflage, let into their friendship for the sake of optics, so people wouldn’t suspect them of being a couple? But no. Sake and Lizzie loved me. I was sure of that. But they probably loved each other more.

  I stood alone for a moment, feeling an odd sense of abandonment, but then I remembered that I was supposed to be going to breakfast with Dean—Dean!—that is, unless he had already left. I contemplated leaving right then, maybe scribbling a note and leaving it on Chip’s chest for Anna to find whenever she returned from wherever she was. There was a short hallway off the bathroom that led to several doors, which I presumed were bedrooms. I would check in each of them to see if Anna had fallen asleep on one of the beds, and if I still didn’t find her I would go. I opened the first door. No Anna, just a neatly made bed. I pushed open the second door. There was George, bent over the foot of the bed. He turned to look at me, the whites of his eyes visible in the dark. He looked panicked. It took me a moment to realize why. It took me a moment to realize anything, to make sense of the scene I had stumbled upon.

  Anna was on the bed, on her back, her legs hanging off the end. Her eyes were closed and her cheek was turned to the side, as if she were sleeping. Her pink sequined dress was hiked around her waist and she didn’t have on any underwear, a fact I could deduce even in the unlit room.

  “What are you doing?” I asked dumbly.

  “I was just looking,” George said.

  “She’s passed out,” I said slowly, still uncertain of what I was witnessing.

  “It just happened. We were kissing and then she passed out—like, just now.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “I swear to God, Sarah, I wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t even realize she’d passed out, I swear.”

  He was standing upright now, in his tuxedo pants, cummerbund, and white shirt. Did he pull up his pants in between my opening the door and this moment? I did not know. I could not make sense of anything. He was so tall. He was so much taller than either Anna or me. He was looking at me plaintively, his eyes huge and scared. “Don’t say anything, okay? You can’t say anything. We’d all get in trouble for drinking. We’d all get kicked out.”

  I couldn’t think. I couldn’t think with Anna half-dressed and passed out and George towering above me in his tuxedo, begging me not to say anything. What was it, exactly, that I wasn’t supposed to say? I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I had walked in on. I didn’t know what had happened before I walked in. All I knew was that I needed a minute. I needed to catch my breath.

  “Just leave me alone with Anna for a minute, okay? It’s going to be all right. I just need to be alone with Anna.”

  “You’re the best, Sarah,” he said before slipping out of the room, leaving me with Anna, who had not yet stirred.

  I sat on the bed beside her. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room, lit only by the glow of a streetlight coming in through the window. I stared at the window. The blinds were open. This seemed important. If George had intended to rape her, wouldn’t he have closed the blinds?

  I put my hand on Anna’s shoulder, bare except for the thin pink strap of her dress. How was she this drunk? I had never seen Anna this drunk. She rarely drank, and when she did she would have one or two wine coolers and then dance wildly to Madonna.

  I turned on the overhead light, hoping it would rouse her. It did not. I found Anna’s panties crumpled on the floor. They were bright pink, to match her outfit. Her bra was bright pink, too. On the same day that Aunt Eve had bought both of our prom dresses, we had gone to Victoria’s Secret to look for coordinating underwear, not to be sexy, but because southern girls match at every level. I hadn’t purchased anything, saying that I already had black underwear at home.

  When Aunt Eve was handing her credit card to the cashier at Victoria’s Secret, did she have any notion that a boy might see the bra and panties she was purchasing for her daughter? My own mother’s advice had certainly acknowledged the possibility of sex on prom night, and I had laughed away the suggestion, knowing that I was not going to have prom night sex with George Simmons. But George might have had sex with Anna, while she was passed out. Did I walk in on a rape? I had the sudden thought to bend down and sniff her vagina, to see if it smelled of semen, which I had heard smelled of bleach. But what if someone were to walk in? What if someone were to think I was doing the same things with Anna that Lizzie and Sake were probably doing with each other in the bathroom? I mean, I knew it was okay to be a lesbian—Mom had certainly schooled me on “the beautiful diversity of sexual desire” during our sex talks—but it wouldn’t fly at Coventry, at least not with Anna’s more mainstream crowd. I pushed the button on the door handle to lock it and then shook Anna’s shoulders again, less gently this time, determined to wake her. It took a fair amount of jostling, but finally her eyes flickered and she looked at me, only half there.

  “Where are we?” she finally asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Someone’s house. Will’s, maybe? Listen, Anna, do you remember anything that happened with George tonight?”

  “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “Can you get me a glass of water?”

  “I will. In a minute. I promise. But first we have to figure something out. Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I came in here a few minutes ago and George, well, George was in here and your underwear was on the floor and your dress was pulled up around your waist.”

  “What?”

  “Your underwear was off. He said he was just ‘looking.’ He said he was just curious.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He had your underwear off, Anna. He said he was just looking down there, but I don’t actually know what he did.”

  “Looking at what?”

  “Down there. Your . . . you know.” Mom had used the word “vagina” with me ever since I was little, but I was having a hard t
ime saying it to Anna, as if she would think I was being crude. Or maybe it was just that to say it would make the situation real.

  “Wait, my rhymes with Carolina?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was trying not to cry, but it was all so awful. We were all so drunk. And Lizzie and Sake might be some sort of a couple—a couple without me. And something horrible had happened to Anna with my prom date, in the home of someone I didn’t even know, in some crappy basement. And Anna had no memory of what happened. George could have done anything.

  I thought again of how semen was supposed to smell of bleach.

  “Do you think you could put your finger in your—in your vagina and let me smell it?”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, Anna. Trust me.”

  “You’re weird,” she murmured, but then she sighed and did as I asked, and I remember thinking, Compliant. Anna was always compliant. When I smelled her finger, I did not pick up on any bleachy smell, thank God, but I did see a small spot of blood. Oh God. What did it mean that I saw blood?

  Did it mean he jammed a finger inside her with enough force to make her bleed? Did it mean he jammed his penis inside her but didn’t ejaculate?

  “Are you sore?” I asked. “Do you hurt?”

  Wasn’t it supposed to hurt the first time you had sex?

  “I’m just really thirsty.”

  There was a bathroom connected to the room. I found some paper cups in the medicine cabinet, filled one, and ran warm water on a washcloth. I brought both to Anna, who was sitting up on the edge of the bed, her dress now properly on. She took a sip from the cup, then put the cloth against her head. I had been thinking she would use it to clean herself.

  “I can’t believe I passed out.”

  “How much did you drink?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Um, the wine coolers in the limo, then something at the casino party, and then whatever was in George’s flask.”

  “Bourbon,” I said. Unless he had given her something else.

  “Oh my God,” Anna said, looking stricken. “I must have cheated on Stuart.”

  “Jesus, Anna, you did not cheat on Stuart. You were passed-out drunk. George took advantage of you. God, he assaulted you.”

  “I’ve known George Simmons forever. He didn’t assault me.”

  “Anna, listen to me. George hiked up your dress and took off your underwear. And we don’t actually know what he did then.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she mumbled.

  And then she leaned over and threw up on the floor.

  • • •

  Later, after I got Anna and the carpet relatively cleaned up and after we both sobered up a little, we attended the breakfast. I did not know what else to do. George had left whoever’s house we were at, and so had Dean, Sake, and Lizzie, but someone had a car that Chip, Anna, and I piled into. I stayed by Anna’s side the whole time. Pale and shaky, she drank Sprite after Sprite but only nibbled on a little fruit, whereas I gorged on Aunt Eve’s French toast casserole, brioche soaked in custard, then baked with blueberries and served with maple syrup. Aunt Eve, who was there helping to serve, smiled at us from across the room and gave a little wave but kept her distance, not wanting to catch us with alcohol on our breath, I imagine. Eventually, a girl Anna knew from Young Life offered to give us a ride home. Before Anna got out of the car, I hugged her.

  “Call me tonight,” I whispered. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Chapter 19

  WILDERNESS ADVENTURE

  Atlanta, 1990

  Anna did not call that weekend, and I didn’t call her, either, thinking that she needed a little time to process what had happened. But the Monday after prom, after Mom and I ate Stouffer’s French bread pizzas in front of the PBS NewsHour, I borrowed Mom’s car and drove to Anna’s house. Not that she was expecting me. Uncle Bob answered the door with a surprised grin, proclaimed that I looked just as pretty as I had on prom night, and said that Anna was upstairs studying. Once upstairs I turned right at the hall, which took me to Anna’s room. Her door was closed, and on the handle hung a small sign that read: “Un peu d’intimité, s’il vous plaît,” which had surely been picked up in Paris, where Anna and her parents had gone for spring break.

  I knocked just to let her know I was coming in, and then pushed open the door. Anna was sitting on her bed, leaning against an oversized pillow covered in a floral sham. The duvet on her bed was in the same floral pattern. On the wall across from her bed was a corkboard pinned with hundreds of photos of Anna laughing with friends. I was only in a few of the pictures, which stung, even though I had been the one to drift away from her group and attach myself to Lizzie and Sake.

  “Move over, bacon,” I said.

  Anna did not acknowledge my reference to the old Sizzlean commercial, only wordlessly moved over a few inches as I kicked off my shoes and climbed up onto her antique wrought-iron bed, a family heirloom given to her on her sixteenth birthday, along with an opal and diamond ring that had once been her mother’s, and a new Honda Civic. It had been a while since I had last spent the night at Anna’s, but I imagined the sheets were still soft and clean and smelled subtly of lavender. And her pillows—at least the non-decorative ones—were packed tight with goose down.

  I sat so close to Anna that our arms touched. Her skin was tanner than mine.

  “How are you?” I asked, trying to sound concerned but not pitying.

  “Busy. Trying to figure out something to say about Elizabeth Bennet.” She held a clicker pen in one hand and a notebook in the other. Pride and Prejudice lay facedown on the comforter. Like me, Anna was a top student, but she was in a different section of honors English than I was and my class had already completed its unit on Jane Austen. I had received an A on my paper, in which I argued that in Austen’s world a woman’s single moment of power was when she chose a husband. Get tripped up by lust or impulse and your life was, if not ruined, limited.

  “Can we talk about what happened on Friday?”

  She turned and looked at me with a blank face. “I don’t know what happened on Friday. I don’t remember anything. I’m just glad it’s no longer Friday and we can put it behind us.”

  “Look, I think we should turn George in. I don’t think they’ll kick us out for drinking in light of the circumstances, and even if they did . . . well, it would suck, but we would deal with it. We could write our college application essays on choosing justice over our own self-interest, you know?”

  Anna clicked the top of her pen over and over, making the tip pop out, then recede.

  “I can’t believe you would even consider using this experience for your college essay. Wow. That’s just . . . that’s just rotten.”

  She was crying, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Oh my God, that’s not what I meant! I just meant if we got kicked out, we’d figure out a way to make things okay. That’s all.”

  She turned to face me straight on and I turned to face her, too, so that now my knees grazed against hers. She had a bright red pimple on her cheek, rare for Anna, or at least rare for Anna to show herself without any makeup on to cover it. “Listen,” she said. “You have got to promise me, swear to me, that you won’t tell anyone about this. Not anyone at school, not Lizzie, not your mom. You have to promise.”

  “And just let George get away with it?”

  “Don’t you understand that he’s going to get away with it no matter what? Think about it: If we turned him in, at most he would get kicked out of Coventry for drinking. He’s not going to face any other punishment. It’s not like we have a criminal case against him. He was in the room with me with my underwear off. That’s all you saw, and anyway, he could just deny it, say that it wasn’t true.”

  “You were passed out on the bed and he was bent over you.”

  She didn’t respond. I tried again. “UVA might rescind their offer of admission.”

  “Yeah, and all of his friends would hate me if that happened, and so
would his mom, who I’ve known my whole life. The truth is, we were all drunk, and I don’t even remember any of it. The only thing I know for sure is that if we turned him in, I would be the one who got punished. I would be humiliated—again—and we would probably get kicked out. And Sarah, I know you’ve only been at Coventry since sophomore year, but I’ve been going there since I was five years old, and damn it, I am not going to get kicked out because of something George Simmons may or may not have done! You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone. You have to promise.”

  She was gripping my forearms tightly, her face a mess of tears and snot. There was a box of tissues on her bedside table. I wanted to get one for her, but I didn’t want to pull away while she was holding on to me.

  “Can I get you a Kleenex?” I finally asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, between choking little sobs.

  I reached toward the box and handed one to her. She blew her nose, folded up the tissue, and then blew into it again. “Can I have another?” she asked.

  I handed her another one. She wrapped it around her index finger and used the dressed finger to dig out a huge booger. She held it up for me to see. “I picked something special just for you,” she said, alluding to a birthday card I gave her when she turned thirteen, which showed a little boy with a booger on his finger.

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, sniffing.

  “Anna,” I said. “I promise I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. But I really want you to think about this some more.”

  “Do you think I’ve thought about anything else? Sarah, I hate that this happened. But I’m not going to let George ruin the rest of my time at Coventry. We’re seniors next year and there’s so much to look forward to and I just refuse to be dragged down by all of this during my final year of school. Can’t you understand that?”

  I could. And I admit there was a part of me that was relieved that Anna didn’t want me to tell anyone at Coventry about what I had witnessed on prom night. Anna’s determination to keep everything under wraps kept me safe, too.