by Julia Dahl
“I bet it will,” he said.
But it didn’t. The dehydration that had sucked at her brain the day before was quenched, as was the woozy slosh of alcohol in her stomach. But that delicate feeling of a hangover remained. The very air felt aggressive and the missing hours thrashed behind her eyes. The hole in her mind seemed to have its own gravity.
“Are you going anywhere specific?” Trevor asked as they walked toward Broadway.
“The health center,” she said.
“I went once for a flu shot. I bet it won’t be crowded now, since it’s spring break.”
Claudia looked at him. He was imagining her concerns and trying to allay them. He barely knew her and yet he cared enough to consider not just what she might want to eat, but what she might be worried about. Claudia didn’t know many people like that. They walked side by side, not speaking. On the next block, they passed the green-and-pink neon sign for a bubble tea shop, and it ignited a pinprick of light in the darkness of her memory. She saw her hands on the sidewalk, felt an arm around her waist, and the cool night air under her too-short skirt.
“I fell,” she said.
“What?”
Whose arm was it? “Never mind.”
She kept walking. He probably thought she was insane.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Trevor asked. “I’ve just got reading. I can do it there.”
Why did she say yes? Because she trusted him? Because she wanted an audience? Her sister was off social media since getting pregnant and routinely accused Claudia of needing an audience for every moment of her life. I don’t need anything, Claudia protested. It’s just fun.
From outside the glass entrance doors she scanned the waiting room and didn’t see anyone she recognized. She told the receptionist she needed to see a nurse to get some medication and was handed a clipboard.
“Don’t forget to fill out both sides.”
Claudia kept her sunglasses on as she sat beside Trevor in a deep plastic chair. She began filling out the boxes: name, birth date, student ID number, medications. Are you pregnant? Have you ever been pregnant? Do you use alcohol? If so, how much? Do you use other intoxicating substances? She finished the paperwork, signed away her privacy, returned the clipboard to the receptionist, and sat back down. The magazines on the side table next to her were awful. Princess Meghan and Kylie Jenner and Cardi B. Blah Blah Blah. She pushed them aside and picked up yesterday’s copy of the New York Post. SUBWAY SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN screamed the headline, the ink red and the font appropriating a cheesy horror movie poster.
“Did you see this?” she asked Trevor.
He leaned over. “Yeah, I got an alert on my phone this morning.”
“An alert?”
“From the university. I guess it happened at the Astor Place station. My parents are kind of freaking out. I keep telling them I basically never go anywhere except class.”
Claudia put the paper down. It could have been worse, she thought. At least she didn’t get stabbed.
“Ms. Castro?”
A nurse with short blond hair and skinny arms held open a door for her.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” said Trevor.
In exam room 2, the nurse sat on a wheeled stool and pulled a wall-mounted computer monitor toward her.
“What can I help you with today?” she asked, typing.
“I need some Cipro,” said Claudia. The paper on the exam table crunched beneath her. “I have a UTI.”
“You’ve taken it before?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind taking off your sunglasses?”
Claudia hesitated. But what was she going to do, refuse?
“That looks recent,” said the nurse, frowning. She lifted a black flashlight off the wall. “Do you mind if I take a look?”
Claudia didn’t protest. The nurse donned rubber gloves, placed her fingers on Claudia’s face, and shone a thin beam of light into her eye.
“How’s your vision?”
“Fine.”
The nurse put the light back on the wall. Claudia noticed a tattoo on the inside of her left arm: a thin arrow pointing toward her wrist. She’d seen those before. Supposedly they represented forward movement; struggles overcome. Claudia wondered what the tattoo meant to the nurse. What had she gone through before having it inked into her skin? Was it over now?
“When did this happen?” asked the nurse, peering at Claudia’s face.
“The night before last.”
“Same incident as the lip?”
Claudia nodded. She needed to make something up.
“I was drunk. I tripped and fell onto a…” A what? “A coffee table.”
The nurse didn’t laugh, which Claudia appreciated.
“Must have been a hard fall,” she said. “Have you ever injured yourself while intoxicated before?”
“No,” said Claudia.
“Was anyone with you?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Have you spoken with them? If we know exactly what happened it’ll help guide your care.”
“I haven’t,” said Claudia. “I lost my phone.”
The nurse nodded. She was waiting for details, if Claudia wanted to provide them. Would she, if she knew?
“You can get an ice pack at CVS. Wrap it in a towel and hold it over the eye and the lip as often as you can handle. Try not to touch either too much otherwise. You really don’t want the eye to get infected.”
“How long until it goes away?”
“A few days for the lip. Probably a week, maybe a little more, on the eye.”
Edie’s due date was in a week.
“Tell me about your other symptoms,” said the nurse.
“Symptoms?”
“You said you thought you had a UTI.”
“Right.” The reason she was here. “I pretty much always get them after sex.”
“When did you last have intercourse?”
“The night before last.”
The words hung in the air. Claudia diverted her eyes. Did she look as stupid as she felt?
“Would you mind telling me your symptoms?” asked the nurse. “I don’t want to alarm you, but occasionally symptoms of sexually transmitted infections mirror those of UTIs.”
“Oh. Um. It stings when I pee. And I feel like I have to go a lot.” The last part wasn’t true, but it would be if she didn’t get the pill.
“Did your partner use a condom?”
Claudia hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“Would you like to go ahead and do STI testing then? Just in case?”
“Okay.” Her eyes stung. She was not going to cry. But she understood. STI meant STD. Sluts got STDs. She’d seen the scare pictures in sex ed. The sores and the foul smells and the snickers forever behind her back. She was not that girl. She was not that girl.
“It’s a blood test and a urine sample. Shouldn’t take long at all. What about birth control? Would you like Plan B today?”
“Okay.” She was on the Pill, but had she remembered to take it that night? Or the night before? Or last night?
“Do you have any reason to think your partner might be HIV positive?” asked the nurse.
“What?” Sweat popped open the pores on her neck, beneath her arms. Her breath quickened.
“If you think you might be at risk we can get you on PrEP. It’s one pill a day for twenty-eight days. It’s not one hundred percent, but if you start within seventy-two hours of exposure and take it as directed we think it’s very effective.”
“Okay.” Claudia tried to swallow but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The nurse was talking about AIDS. She might have AIDS.
“Is this the first time you’ve had unprotected sex?” asked the nurse.
“Yeah. I guess it is. Was.”
“Was it a new partner?”
“Um…” The nurse waited, but Claudia couldn’t think of what else to say. She felt like she was shrinking.
“Was alcohol involved
?”
Claudia nodded. “I’ve only ever blacked out once before.”
“Do you think that’s what happened? You blacked out from drinking?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“Would you say you think the sex was consensual, then?”
“Consensual?”
“If you were incapacitated, do you think you were the victim of an assault?”
Claudia didn’t answer. She remembered dinner with Lolly and Adrienne Kennedy, the twins she’d gone to prep school with. But after that there was nothing.
“Claudia?”
“I don’t know.” It took everything she had not to scream it.
“Okay. If you’re willing, I recommend the STI tests, and the PrEP, just in case. Have you ever used it before?”
Claudia shook her head.
“The side effects are minimal, but you do have to take it every day for the whole twenty-eight days for it to be effective.”
“Okay.” She sounded like a moron: okay okay okay. She should have questions; she did have questions, but she seemed to have lost the ability to ask them. Nearly lost the ability to speak.
“If you think you might have been assaulted, there are other, more specialized tests that can help us preserve any evidence that may still be available. We can’t do that here, but the Wellness Project has counselors that can meet you at the hospital and make sure you’re supported. I’ll be honest, the test is invasive. But if you think you might want to report what happened, it’s helpful. And I don’t want to pressure you, but the sooner you get it done the better.”
The nurse swiveled on her stool and took a brochure from a plastic bin on the wall.
“Have you showered since the night before last?”
Claudia nodded. Finally, she understood. How many SVU episodes had she seen? What was the mantra for every special victim? Don’t wash the evidence away. But she had.
“What we’d be able to collect might be limited, but if you want to make a report I still recommend it. There might be something there. Either way, if you want to talk, call the hotline. I’ve trained some of the girls myself and it can be really helpful to talk after something … confusing, has happened. You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t be—how many people end up in situations like this. Especially freshman year.”
Claudia took the brochure. It was NYU purple and white. A line drawing of a woman’s profile. A phone number and website. She’d been given the same brochure probably a dozen times in the first few months of school. She imagined them piled inside trash cans across the Village.
“Okay, so we’ll do the blood and urine.” The nurse paused. “We’ve got lots of resources here. And if you want to talk—even if you’re just feeling confused, the Wellness Project is really great.”
Claudia nodded. “Thanks.”
The nurse came back with PrEP, Cipro, a Plan B pack, and a pee cup.
“We keep the popular items stocked,” said the nurse, possibly attempting humor.
She pointed to the bathroom and instructed Claudia to use the Sharpie to label the cup, then leave it on the tray when she was done, and return to the room to have her blood drawn. Claudia took the medication and the cup and nodded, then walked out of the health center.
TREVOR
“Claudia!”
Trevor called from the sidewalk and Claudia stopped abruptly in front of a Chase bank where a man was muttering at the ATM, jamming his card in and out. He turned around and shouted “Back up!” Claudia jumped, scurried forward, stopped again.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
For a second, she seemed not to recognize him.
“Is everything okay?” Stop saying okay, he thought. She is clearly not okay. “I think you left your sunglasses in there.”
Her hand went to her face. “Fuck. Fuck.” Her voice shook, the pitch higher than he remembered. Trevor wondered what they’d told her in the health center. Some of the swelling seemed to have gone down but her eyeball was swimming with cherry-Slurpee-red blood. The skin around it looked painted purple.
“Here,” said Trevor, lifting his sunglasses from where they hung at the neck of his T-shirt.
She put them on. “Thank you.”
They walked in silence toward the dorm. Would she tell him if she wanted to be alone? When they were back in the lobby, the guard stopped Claudia.
“Somebody found a phone in the stairwell,” he said. “What kind of cover does yours have?”
“Silver.”
The guard reached beneath the desk and brought out the latest iPhone model. “Is this it?”
“Yes,” said Claudia. “Thanks.”
“It just rang,” said the guard. “You’ve got a lot of missed calls.”
Claudia unlocked the phone and scrolled. Trevor couldn’t see the reaction in her eyes, but her mouth dropped open and she drew in air.
“My sister had her baby,” she said. “My sister had her baby and I wasn’t there.”
“Shit,” said the guard. “That sucks.”
“Shut up, man,” said Trevor. He put a hand on her shoulder and she let him lead her to the elevator.
“What am I going to tell her?” Claudia asked as the doors closed.
“Just explain what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened. Not really. The nurse asked and I had to make something up.”
They got off the elevator and he followed her to her room.
“You said you fell,” said Trevor.
“I fell, yeah. But that’s not what happened.”
“You lost your phone. She’ll understand. I mean, once she sees you. She’s your sister.”
Even as he said it, he realized he was overstepping. What did he know about her family? Trevor trusted his brother, Mike, even if most people didn’t. If Trevor had gotten into something that ended in his face looking like Claudia’s, he’d have gone to Mike. But not everybody had that with family.
Claudia unlocked the door to her suite and walked straight to the sink. She filled a glass of water then sat on the sofa and laid several sets of pills in front of her on the coffee table. She pushed the pills out of the packets, put them all in her mouth, and swallowed.
“I’m gonna lie down,” she said.
“I’ll be around. Let me know if you need anything.”
Back in his room, Trevor Googled Claudia Castro. She had nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram, and the last time she’d posted was the night before they’d met. The night whatever happened to her happened to her. The photo was a selfie taken from that elevated angle girls use that makes them look vulnerable when they’re actually entirely in control. The caption read: #springbreak #staycation #nyc. There were other selfies in the feed, too, and some weird art. Wikipedia said her dad was a music producer who had worked with Beck and Rihanna and the Strokes and won a bunch of Grammys. Her mom had been a model, the daughter of a senator who died in a plane crash. He followed some links to old gossip items about Claudia’s parents, who apparently: never married but had been together for more than two decades. There were pictures of them with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, Jennifer Lopez and Puffy, and an article about someone in a London hotel calling the police because of their “loud sex.” There were images of Claudia and her sister, Edie or Eden, depending on the captions, posing beneath white tents, in front of banners, on boats; with friends, boyfriends, celebrities. Edie appeared taller than Claudia in most, but they could have been twins with their long brown hair and golden-flecked eyes. Right after the New Year, Claudia was named one of Manhattan magazine’s Most Beautiful New Yorkers under Twenty-five. The magazine called her an “art patron, student” and linked to a six-year-old article from the New York Post:
TEEN HEIRESS TURNS $1K TO $1M
By Ronnie Benson
“She just has an eye.”
That’s what Grammy-winning producer Gabriel Castro says of his now 13-year-old daughter, Claudia, who spotted talent in mixed-media artist Roderick Master
s before most art world insiders had even heard of him.
And now she’s turned that “eye” into an eye-popping windfall.
Claudia was just 12 when she and her father visited Masters’ Ridgewood studio last spring.
“We were studying contemporary art in school and there was an assignment to visit an ‘unknown’ artist’s studio,” explains the precocious prep-school student, whose teacher at Manchester Academy calls Claudia a “budding artist herself.”
Claudia says she’d seen some of Masters’ work at a Brooklyn art fair the Christmas before, and after the studio visit asked her parents if they could buy an intricate bronze piece depicting two men playing chess in a park, surrounded by onlookers.
“We told her if she wanted it, she’d have to use the money she’d saved from gifts,” said Castro’s mother, Michelle Whitehouse.
She did, and a few months later a curator for the New Museum noticed the piece while at the family’s Gramercy town house for a dinner party.
“It stopped me cold,” said Jelissa Homan. “I made Claudia tell me everything about the artist.”
Within days, Homan arranged for Masters to be included in an exhibition at the New Museum, and acquired two sculptures for the museum’s permanent collection and one for herself.
“Claudia has a genuine gift for spotting artistic talent,” said Homan. “If I could hire her, I would.”
Asked why she decided now was the time to sell Chess, Claudia told the Post that when the offer came in—from a private collector the family declined to name—she knew it would be stupid to turn it down.
“It’s really good for the artist to have a sale like that,” she said.
As for what she plans to do with her more than one million dollars in profit, Claudia didn’t hesitate to answer: “Buy more art.”
The most recent links were nastier. A couple weeks ago, Claudia apparently appeared on an episode of a reality show that had filmed last summer. Trevor clicked on a clip of Rich Kids: The Hamptons and saw her jumping into a swimming pool at a party. A boy jumped in after her and they batted at each other, her face gleeful, animated with an energy she didn’t seem to possess now. The camera cut to another girl narrating the scene, telling the audience that the boy in the pool was her boyfriend and that Claudia “threw herself at him.” The show cut back to the party, but a different scene. The camera appeared hidden in some bushes, and the image, while not as sharp, was clear: Claudia was making out with the boy from the pool. She was wet and loose, obviously enjoying the encounter. Trevor felt himself get hard. He clicked out of the video.