by Kelly Yang
She hands me the pill at school the next day, along with a heavy dose of guilt. “If this is going to happen again, you need to tell Jay. He deserves to know.” She’s right. I know she’s right. As I twist open my water bottle and pop the pill in my mouth, I wonder, Is it going to happen again?
I find the answer in the form of a red rose inside my locker.
Can’t stop thinking about you. Meet me after school.
—Zach
I smile.
“Where are we going?” I ask Zach. He holds out the passenger-side door of his Honda Civic for me. As I get in, I’m reminded of a Chinese saying my mother used to say when I was a kid.
I’d rather cry in a Mercedes than smile on a bike.
“You’ll see,” Zach says. He leans over and kisses me.
As Zach drives, I roll down the windows, something Jay never let me do in his Lambo. He didn’t want the fumes getting in from other cars. I prefer Zach’s Honda. For one thing, it’s quieter. You can actually have a conversation.
We talk about the SATs, which we’re both planning to take in October in time for college apps, and swim tryouts early next year. He tells me next year the team’s going to get a new coach.
Zach parks at Peter F. Schabarum Regional County Park and says we’re going hiking. I reach for my pollution mask. I don’t usually wear it, but it’s 3:30 p.m. and the midday sun is roasting.
“What are you doing?” Zach asks when we get out of the car. He points to the gray mask on my face.
“It’s just to protect against the sun,” I tell him.
Zach rummages through his backpack and fishes out a tube of sunscreen. He tosses it to me.
“Put this on, and you’ll be fine,” he says.
I slather some sunscreen on my neck and arms but don’t take off my mask.
“C’mon, you’re not seriously going to hike with that on, are you?” he asks. “It’s gotta be like a hundred degrees under there!”
I shrug and keep walking. Overheating is a small price for beauty. But Zach won’t let it go. Every few steps, he looks over at me and sighs.
“But I want to see your face,” he complains.
“Yeah, well, you’re not going to want to see it when I’m old and covered with aging spots!” I recite almost word for word what my mom always says.
He puts his arms up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a sec, Snow White,” he says. “Where is this coming from?”
I shake my head at him, frustrated he’s giving me such a hard time. Jay never questioned my pollution mask. He wore one himself when we were walking on the beach in Laguna. His was blue and from Japan. Jess, Nancy, and Florence each have one. Even Dani’s mom makes her wear a hat.
I turn to Zach. “Do you have any idea how much money my mother spends on laser treatments? They’re not just expensive, they hurt!” I tell him. “I have to protect my skin now if I want to look good later.”
Zach chuckles when I say this, which only makes me angrier.
“You’re going to look good later,” he assures me. I roll my eyes and keep walking, thinking back to what Teddy once said about white guys, how they can’t tell the difference between a pretty Asian girl and an ugly one.
“Hey, wait up!” Zach calls, running toward me. He reaches for my arm and pulls me aside. “You think I like you because of the color of your skin?” His eyes search mine. “I like you because you’re smart. Because you’re kind. Because you can swim like a fish. And you’re brave. You’re the bravest person I know. You’re here all by yourself in this strange, foreign country.”
A lump forms in my throat.
“So you can put on all the masks you want but it’s not going to matter. I can still see what’s inside you. And that’s why I like you,” he says.
It is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, and as I put my hands around his neck, I want him. Now. I rip the mask from my face and we start kissing. His soft lips nuzzle my neck, and all of a sudden, it’s happening again. Breathlessly, Zach pulls himself away to get a condom out from his backpack this time. He leads me over to a patch of grass underneath a tree and starts peeling off my pants.
As we’re undressing, we hear someone on the trail.
“Shit! Someone’s coming,” he says. He fumbles with his pants as I pull mine back up. We collapse on the grass in each other’s arms, giggling.
Sixty-Two
Dani
There are dirt stains and grass stains on Claire’s shirt and pants when she finally gets home.
“I saw you guys, you know,” I mutter from the couch.
Claire looks at me, puzzled.
“In the pool.” I turn to her. “Why would you do that?”
She gives me a bunch of crap about how she and Zach have been seeing each other for a while, how they’re both swimmers, as she walks toward her room.
I couldn’t care less about their aquatic connection. “Did you even use a condom?” I ask her.
She stops walking. Unbelievable. Of course she didn’t. That would require thinking and being responsible, which she’s clearly not capable of.
“I took care of it,” she informs me. “I’m fine.”
I stand up from the couch. “Well, I’m not fine,” I turn to her and say. My lips quiver. I look away, emotions unknotting inside. All I can think about is the two of them at the pool. I haven’t been able to do anything, not eat or sleep or even get ready for Snider. “Do you have any idea what this year has been like for me?” I cry. “You stole my boyfriend!”
“He’s not your boyfriend,” she says. Claire retreats and hides behind the door in her room. “You guys were just studying together.”
It infuriates me the way she says it.
“Fuck you, Claire!” I scream. “I wish you never moved here!”
Sixty-Three
Claire
“Jay?” I call out as I walk into his house. It’s a little after 8:00 p.m. He had texted me earlier asking me to come over, saying he needed to talk. I was so shaken up after the confrontation with Dani that I said okay. I need to grab some of my stuff anyway.
“Up here,” Jay calls from the master bedroom.
As soon as I walk into the room, I sense it. In his bloodshot eyes. His nostrils. His clenched jaw. He knows.
“How could you do this to me?” he yells. “I thought you were the one!”
I shake my head. But how? How’d he find out? My breath catches in my throat as I realize. Dani must have told him.
“All this time you were telling me you wanted to wait, and I believed you, I never pushed you,” Jay continues, staggering around his room as he blinks back the tears. “Meanwhile, you were taking your clothes off for some piece of white trash!”
He charges at me. I can smell the alcohol on his breath.
“No!” I exclaim. “It wasn’t like that!”
But something in Jay snaps. He grabs me and throws me onto the bed. “You wanna be a whore? I’ll treat you like one,” he says.
“What are you doing?” I ask, my eyes darting as he starts undoing his belt. The air sizzles with the coming violence. Oh my God. What’s he doing?
“Stop!” I yell. My eyes fill with terror. I try to wriggle free, but he’s too strong. He holds me in place, hands pinning my wrists to the bed. I scream, kicking at the sheets. My scream does little to deter Jay.
“Tell me, did he make you come?” he asks. “Your little white boy?”
I feel my heart leave my body. His fingers find my panties, and he yanks them down.
“Stop, Jay, please stop,” I beg.
But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.
Afterward, Jay makes me take a shower. I am filled with the most excruciating shame as I stand under the rain showerhead, the water trickling down my arm to the diamonds glistening on my wrist. I wish I could slide down the drain like the water. I wish I could leave this house without facing him. I stay in the shower long after the water’s gone cold, terrified to come out.
Eventually
, when I do emerge, Jay’s sitting in the living room waiting for me.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, looking up at me. He stands up and walks over as if to give me a hug. I turn away from him, physically repulsed. My heart thuds in my chest. Jay takes the hint and backs off. “Do you need a ride home?”
I shake my head.
We both fall quiet. What do you say to someone after he’s raped you?
I reach for my phone and order an Uber. The driver calls me a minute later, and I tell him where I am. That I’m able to stay so calm in the minutes and hours after both shocks me and gives me hope. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe I’ll get over it.
Later, in the back of the Uber, the tears come.
Sixty-Four
Dani
Claire mopes in her room all weekend. Doesn’t come out. My hands shake as I dial Zach’s number. I tell myself I’m doing the right thing. He deserves to know about Claire and Jay. I’m doing this for transparency and for truth. Deep down inside, I know the real reason.
“Meet me at the library,” I say to Zach when he answers. “There’s something I have to tell you about Claire.”
Zach clenches his fists in his car. We’re in the parking lot of the public library. I can see the whites of his knuckles in the sun.
“How many times?” he asks.
I avoid his gaze. All I can think about is how much it hurt to see him with Claire in the pool.
“How many times did she go over there and sleep with him?” he demands. His blond hair falls over his watery eyes. Is he . . . crying?
“I don’t know, maybe ten? Twenty times?” I hadn’t exactly kept count, but there were a couple of weeks when she was over there nearly every night.
“Twenty times?” He punches the steering wheel, a loud beep erupts from the car. “Jesus Christ.”
I won’t lie. It feels satisfying to be able to hurt him as much as he’s hurt me.
“She told me she broke it off,” he says.
“Well, she didn’t. I saw her go over there after she came back from the pool.”
“After she came back from the pool?” He bites down on his knuckles. “After we—? She told me I was her first!”
He presses his lids with his fingers, and tears drip onto the steering wheel. I look away. I know he’s in pain, but it hurts so much that he has no idea what I’m going through. How I’m feeling in all this.
“I was at the pool too,” I mutter.
Zach opens his eyes, cheeks coloring. “What?” He looks over at me. “You saw us?”
“I came by to tell you something . . .”
Zach blinks in confusion. I debate whether to even say it now. Admitting my feelings seems moot. But not admitting them feels like something I might regret forever.
“I liked you, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I thought maybe you . . .”
Zach shakes his head.
“I just assumed . . . you know, because we were spending so much time together,” I ramble on, justifying my hypothesis. Stop talking. Stop talking.
“Yeah, because we’re good friends,” he says by way of explanation. We sit for a long time in the hot, stifling silence. I feel the burn of the sun on my legs. Zach finally turns to me. “What am I going to do?” he asks.
I want to tell him, Let her go. You deserve better. For me. But I know that’s not what he wants to hear. “You’ll get through this,” I say instead. “And you’ll come out stronger.”
Zach shakes his head. “But I don’t want to come out stronger,” he says.
“Yeah, well, sometimes we don’t have a choice,” I snap, opening the door to the car and getting out.
At the spring concert that night, Zach avoids my gaze as he holds his clarinet stiff in his hands. No sound seems to be coming out of it. I’m not sure if he’s even playing it. I look over at Ming. She looks beautiful in her black concert dress. Her eyes close as she plays, like she’s in her own private world. I hope it went well with her parents today when she told them about Florence.
I peer at the audience. Mr. Connelly is not there, thank goodness, and neither is Claire. Florence and her parents are in the back. Florence is recording Ming’s performance on her phone. So are two Chinese people in the front row. They must be Ming’s parents. I smile at them. I wish my own mother was in the audience. She was supposed to come, but at the last minute Rosa called her in to clean up a VIP client’s house party.
As Ming stands up to play her solo, filling the auditorium with the sound of heaven, Florence puts a hand to her heart.
After the concert, at the cocktail reception, Ming pulls her parents over toward Florence’s parents. Florence’s dad is dressed in an expensive suit and doesn’t seem to be saying much to anyone, while her mom makes small talk with Mrs. Mandalay. I walk over to join them.
“Florence!” Ming calls out. “I want to introduce you to my parents!”
Two reluctant Chinese people inch forward, but Florence’s eyes are glued to her own parents. Her dad is looking down at his watch, frowning. Her mom is scanning the crowd for someone more important to talk to.
As Florence’s parents reluctantly shake hands with Ming’s parents, Florence offers no explanation as to who Ming is and quickly pulls her parents away.
“Let’s go,” she says to her parents.
The look on Ming’s face as she watches Florence walk away from her is devastating. Ming’s dad frowns and scolds his daughter in Chinese. As her parents leave, Ming turns to me and tearfully translates what her dad said.
“He said, ‘That girl has the good sense not to embarrass her family.’”
Sixty-Five
Claire
For days, I don’t get up. Don’t leave the house, don’t switch on my phone, don’t move, except to go to the bathroom. Every time I think about what happened, my stomach twists into a knot so tight, I feel like I am going to hurl. I don’t ever want to go back to school, don’t ever want to see Jay again.
Gently, I massage my wrists. The bruises have mostly gone away. But the bigger wound, the one inside, is just starting. I curl into a ball, crying myself to sleep at night, thinking about my own stupidity. When I wake up, my eyes flit around my room, landing on this shirt and that bag—all the stuff that shithead bought me, that I allowed him to buy, as the bile inches up my throat.
Dani knocks on my door. I turn to my side and hide my head under the covers.
“It’s Wednesday. Are you just not going to go to school?” she asks. She informs me that technically, in California, it’s a crime not to go to school. “It’s called truancy. . . .”
I bunch up my sheets. I’m so tired of her technicallys. Technically, you are a bitch. Tears pool on my pillowcase. “Fuck off, Dani,” I yell, adding under my breath, “You’ll never know what you did to me.”
I wait until I hear Dani’s footsteps leave, then pull down my cover so I can breathe again. When she and her mom are both out of the house, I pick up my phone to call Jess. My phone beeps and dings when I turn it back on, alerting me that I have a million messages and voice mails.
I swipe past my voice mails to go to my iMessages. There are twenty-five from Jay.
Are you ok? 10:30 p.m. Friday
Call me. 11:52 p.m. Friday
I’m worried about you. 9:05 a.m. Saturday
Can we talk? 12:30 p.m. Sunday
I just want to know that you’re ok. 4:32 p.m. Monday
I’m sorry if I hurt you. 6:39 p.m. Tuesday
CLAIRE! I’M FREAKING OUT! TALK TO ME!!! 10:25 p.m. Tuesday
You have to know how I was feeling. 6:38 a.m. Today
The last message makes me want to throw my phone at the wall.
I tap Reply and write, DON’T EVER CALL ME AGAIN.
Then delete it without sending it, because the thought of engaging with him again, even on text, makes me ill.
Instead, I text Jess to come over, telling her it’s an emergency. As I wait, I pick up the dresses and tops and bags he got me and put them in a box. I
write FREE on top of the box and drag it outside. Shielding my eyes from the sun with my hands, I dump the box on the curb. The sun feels so foreign to me, its warmth almost insulting as I cut across the grass in my bare feet.
Jess’s Porsche pulls up. She turns off the car and gets out, carrying coffee and scones from Starbucks. I burst into tears at the sight of her.
“Claire, babe, what’s wrong?” she asks, ushering me inside.
She sets the coffee and scones down on the coffee table. She tries to hand me a pastry, but I shake my head. I can’t keep anything down. I’m an incoherent mess as I try to form the words. In between the hiccups and the sobs, she makes out what happened, and the whites of her eyes grow large.
“He raped you?” she asks, spilling her coffee. She sets it down. “How? When?”
Jess holds me, crying, as I tell her. I show her all the text messages he’s sent me. The first thing she does when she takes my phone in her hands is she blocks him. And just to make sure he really gets the message, she takes her own phone and sends him a text—YOU ARE NEVER TO TEXT, CALL, OR COMMUNICATE WITH CLAIRE AGAIN.
I’m grateful to have her take charge, but what am I going to do when I see Jay on campus? She can’t block the sight of him in real life.
“Who else knows?” Jess asks.
I shake my head. “No one.”
“Good.” Jess nods, strategizing what to do. “I won’t say a word, not even to Florence or Nancy. The good thing is you guys don’t have any classes together. I’ll stay by your side when we’re at school, and if he tries to come up to you, I’ll bitch-slap his ass to China.”
She makes it sound so easy, but the thought of going back to school and seeing him again is like swallowing broken glass.
“I don’t want to go back and see him,” I say.
“So . . . you’re going to switch to another school?”
“No!” I say. Why do I have to switch to another school? He should switch. He should go to jail as far as I’m concerned! I feel the heat of my anger exploding inside me as I hug my chest with my arms.