Ican’tbreathe Ican’tbreathe Ican’tbreathe
Valerie’s at my side, eyes wide, grabbing my hands and pulling them away. Breathe, she mouths. Breathe.
I shake my head furiously, nausea returning and spots of light popping in my vision. I can’t. I can’t. She exaggerates a huge inhale and exhale, eyes locked on mine.
It’s in this moment of zero oxygen that realization hits. I finally understand what’s been living inside me alongside the mold, like a dark, cancerous growth—the feeling that’s hovered over me ever since I woke in Zac’s room, my skirt missing, underwear inside out. Since hearing Ricky and Zac talk about my breasts while Thomas just listened. It’s how I feel for failing to realize earlier that there were Zacs and Rickys and Stallions and Forests and Thomases in the world who would do that to someone. Or Tinas who’d joyfully record the whole thing. For having to endure every snicker or shitty rumor or evil comment on my posts. For poisoning myself. For making my mom stay up for longer than a body can stand, trying to watch over me, making sure I didn’t leave her alone in this world so she wouldn’t have to bury her only daughter. For being in this hospital. For pushing away people like Valerie, who care, and trusting people like Thomas, who don’t.
The emotion burns white-hot through me:
O shame!
I am ashamed, so ashamed.
A blur of blue. A nurse rushing in.
Mom.
Her face is frantic, scrubs wrinkled, hair frazzled.
Valerie has stepped back, and Mom’s hugging me tight. She smells of stale sweat and cheap strawberry shampoo. My head spins, but I can’t breathe her in enough.
It’s a hug I know I don’t deserve, but also a hug that breaks loose the piece of shame lodged deep in my chest so that I can finally breathe. Then I’m coughing and choking and spitting, dry heaving into the basin. My chest rises and falls as Mom holds on to me. Her tears mix into mine. And we cry together. For everything.
I cry and cry until there’s nothing left in me but a raw, empty space—a hollow that remains.
WEDNESDAY
THOMAS
“FIRST OFF, I WANT TO thank everyone for coming. I can’t stress how important this meeting is.” My father stands at the head of the table, hands gripping the chair in front of him. The wall behind him is emblazoned with MCMURRAY AND ASSOCIATES in giant gold letters. Always the lawyer, he scans the table, pausing on each face like we’re members of his jury instead of everyone implicated by Erica’s posts—Forest, Stallion, Zac, Ricky, Tina, and Caylee—sitting next to their parents. We’re a chair short of filling the twenty-person table.
Seated next to my father is Zac’s dad, a balding man in jeans and a neon orange Syracuse windbreaker—by far the most underdressed person in the room. Beside him sits his new wife, who’s probably closer to my age than his and looks more Barbie than human. On her other side sits Ricky’s father, a widow, his tanned skin and hair both a little too dark to be natural. Ricky just looks nervous, burrowed into his blazer like a scared rabbit.
An empty chair separates them from Tina’s mom. I’ve never heard mention of Tina’s dad, but Mrs. Marcus would give my father a run for his money when it comes to business attire with her stiff suit and mini briefcase. Tina looks near tears, arms crossed, the face of someone who’s suffered a serious injustice. No doubt that’s how she views this whole thing. I can see her split lip from here, but she’s pointedly not looking at me. Beside them, Forest’s hippie parents keep tossing disappointed looks at their son. His head is bowed, this subdued version the complete opposite of Saturday’s pool-jumping shark.
Mom’s not here. My father told her not to come even though she’d asked to, so Michael’s to my right, wearing an expression I can’t read.
Stallion’s parents are to my left, by far the richest parents in the room with stakes in some foreign resource or another. They peer around them with disapproval and something bordering on disgust in their eyes. Stallion sits perfectly upright next to them in a button-up and new haircut. His eyes are bloodshot like he’s been crying. I heard he and Jasmine are truly done for good, even though he begged her to take him back.
Sitting beside her dazed parents, Caylee’s white as a ghost, clinging to Zac’s good arm like she’ll fall off her chair if she lets go. Zac tries his best to look unfazed, but I can tell he’s shaken too. He catches me looking and stares me down over a swollen nose the color of raspberry jam. I turn away, remembering the blood in his teeth from two days back.
My father’s gaze skips past me and lands on Michael as he continues. “We all need to have the same story going into tomorrow’s deposition to shut this thing down.” He paces up front like it’s his stage. “I’ll present you with questions that the police will be sure to ask, and you’ll want to write them down. We’ll go over them, one by one, then you can practice your answers at home. So long as we’re all on the same page, tomorrow should go smoothly. We’re playing along, voluntarily, but I can’t stress enough the importance of adhering to our collective narrative.”
“Hold up,” Ricky’s dad interjects, craning around to face my father. “You mean we don’t have to participate in this deposition thing? So, wouldn’t that be sticking our boys’ necks out further?”
My father shows no emotion, but the slight pause in his pacing tells me he’s annoyed at being interrupted. “While your concern is certainly valid, Jim, what we need to do is align our stories and look cooperative to the police. Show that we’re not the bad guys here. Project a cooperative yet unified front.”
“With all due respect, Tyler,” Ricky’s dad adds, “if we’re not required to do it, then no way is my son going to talk to the police tomorrow. Not if he doesn’t have to. Clearly the authorities are trying to blow this thing out of proportion and turn it into something serious.”
“To be frank with you, Jim,” my father replies, “in the eyes of the law, the charges against these teens are very serious. These include”—he ticks them off on his fingers—“sexual assault of a minor, assault of an intoxicated person, assault of an unconscious person, distribution of child pornography—”
“Child pornography?” Forest’s mom cuts in. She’s thrown out a hand, wrists eaten up by bracelets and beads. “These kids aren’t sixty-seven-year-old pedophiles in windowless rooms sharing naked photos of little girls.” She looks around her. “Now, I know what they did was wrong. Getting drunk and taking the clothes off that poor girl. But child pornography? That’s taking things too far. They’re only boys. And girls,” she adds with a glance in Caylee and Tina’s direction.
Michael shifts in his seat, jaw tightening.
Out of nowhere, a wail silences the room. It’s Tina, clutching her mother’s arm. “I didn’t know she was going to try to kill herself! I didn’t! I just wanted her to go away!” She breaks down sobbing as her mother puts a stiff arm around her.
My father’s eyes bore into Tina. “Now, I know how hard this is on everyone.” To the rest of the room, his expression of sympathy must look sincere. But it’s not sympathy that drives him. My father does not lose cases. “And yet emotional outbursts like this are exactly what we need to avoid during the morning’s proceedings. We mustn’t give the cops anything they could use against us. Guilt is the surest way to sink this ship, so we can’t let them tap into our emotions. Because, if we’re not careful and don’t play our cards right, things could get real ugly real fast. We’re talking felony convictions here. And if the—”
“But, tomorrow, surely we…” Ricky’s dad interrupts.
A few chairs from my father, Zac’s dad rises to his feet, tenting his hands on the table as Ricky’s dad trails off. Even in an orange-and-blue windbreaker, Chuck Boyd commands the room. It’s one of the only times I’ve seen him not in the Panthers’ bleachers wearing one of his old jerseys with BOYD and a worn number six across the back, matching Zac’s on the field. “Let me be clear to everyone in this room.” Chuck speaks softly, not sharp like my father, and he doesn’t loo
k up from the center of the table, but he doesn’t have to. When he talks, everyone listens. “My son can’t afford to have some girl cry ‘rape.’ He’s got a scholarship riding on all this. His whole future’s at stake. So, my boy and I are going to do exactly”—he jabs the table—“what it takes to make this thing go away as quickly as possible. And if you all know what’s good for you, for your sons and daughters, you’ll get in line with Tyler and do precisely what he says tomorrow, down to the letter.”
Down the hall, a phone rings and a printer whirrs as Chuck Boyd takes his seat.
My father nods appreciatively into the silence, though I can tell it irks him to have someone else win his battle for him. “Which is why we’re going to take care of all this, Chuck.” He gives a confident nod before turning to the room at large. “And please remember, everyone: according to statistics, the chances of this thing being pursued, let alone brought to court, are less than three percent—slim to none—so long as we play our cards right.”
“So, what’s our story, then?” Tina’s mom asks, lips pursed and voice clipped. “The one we tell the police?”
The look on my father’s face sends a chill through me, like he already tastes victory. “Only the truth: that the plaintiff is a sad, lonely girl. She’s new to town, doesn’t have a lot of friends.”
Next to Zac, Caylee shifts uncomfortably. There’s not a person in this room who doesn’t know she’s the reason Erica’s blog got leaked. It had only taken her sharing it with Zac for it to go viral and for everyone to know where her loyalties lie, not to mention for the police to glean the whole story once they had a copy of the post—though no one’s exactly sure who tipped them off to the blog’s existence yet.
My father continues, “The plaintiff feels largely ignored. She’s not a bad girl, per se, only… misguided. An attention seeker. So, one night when she gets invited to a party, she decides she’s going to seek out all the attention she’s longed for. She lures these boys up to Zac’s room with the promise of a strip show, and what curious young man would turn that down? She strips for the boys, gets off on them writing on her. We even have a witness”—he gestures to Caylee—“who says the plaintiff went upstairs voluntarily.”
Caylee shrinks into her chair, cheeks blazing.
My father’s gesture swings wide, bringing my classmates into the mix. “Everyone corroborates this, even a girl friendly with the plaintiff.”
Tina’s eyes brim with tears, but her mother nods in earnest.
“And everyone came down at the same time,” my father continues. “No harm, no foul. The point being, we need to make it clear the plaintiff brought this on herself. Not only that, she invited it. The fact that there’s no BAC report—blood alcohol content analysis—will work in our favor. I’ve already managed to get my hands on her blog posts, mostly a bunch of fictionalized cartoons that showcase her immaturity and insecurities.”
I swallow hard, thinking of the unread copy I’d left by my bed.
“As for the photos that were circulated,” my father continues, “they’re not great, but they’re also not too damning. Even the video we can work around, especially if we claim she was conscious and willing. We can spin it as a harmless joke. With the right attack angle, we can make this work.”
A few people nod. Others look uneasy. Michael rubs his thumbs over closed fists, muttering, “Such bullshit.” Michael’s heard it too, then—the conviction in my father’s voice when he speaks. My father really believes Erica’s to blame, and his “story” of how it happened isn’t what matters. Only that he arrives at his version of justice.
“I know this doesn’t make us feel good.” My father’s gaze sweeps around the table. “But above all else, we need to make sure we’re united tomorrow.” The back of the chair he’s hitting for emphasis slides into the table. His gaze locks on me. “We need to fully cooperate with the authorities. Keep our story straight. So long as we do that, everything will be fine.” He moves on, scanning the remaining faces. “Then this will all go away, and we can get on with our lives—careers, lacrosse scholarships, even senior prom. Sound good to everyone?”
No one says anything, their faces filled with the hope that this could all just go away.
Could it?
Taking his seat, my father snaps open the file in front of him and passes papers down the row. “Great. Now, let’s move on to police questions….”
ERICA
“I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.”
It’s the same line Mom’s been repeating all day, the first words I could sort of make out through the ringing fog when my hearing returned a fraction—going from empty, shrill nothing to underwater hum. I overheard Mom say it to Valerie, to herself, but only because she was standing right next to me when she did. And it must be overwhelming her because now she won’t stop saying it in front of me, mouth forming the words I almost can’t hear.
“I should have known.”
As she sits on the edge of my bed, staring off into the distance, shaking her head from time to time, part of me wonders what she thinks she should’ve known. That those guys did what they did? That Caylee dropped me as a friend? That Thomas discarded me? That the whole school saw me naked? That no matter what happens I can never go back to Bay City Prep?
I have no reason to go back. There’s nothing left for me there. Most likely, there never was. Most likely I’d imagined it all—a world within those walls where I could fit in and be myself. Where a girl like Caylee Mermaid would be a real friend. Where a guy like Thomas the Rhymer would be as perfect as he seemed. Somewhere my peers would accept me—the silly girl who re-creates people with paints and rainbow pens so that she can try to understand them.
“I should have known.”
Mom blames herself. She blames herself. She saved my life. I want to ask her what happened after I fell, but I’m too ashamed. I picture her ear pressed to my bedroom door, a hollow silence the only answer to her calls. Her kicking down the door, screaming, dragging me downstairs, or did the paramedics do that? Did she drive or will there be an ambulance bill we can’t afford to pay? What is all of this costing us, costing her?
Earlier, she’d explained the pain in my veins, the weird dreams. “The antidote they gave you, to bind to the medicine. Coupled with side effects of the pills you took.” Mom had tried to state all this as matter-of-factly as possible, though both her hands and voice had shaken. Then she’d repeated her mantra:
“I should have known.”
What should she have known? I’m too afraid to ask.
She’s been by my bed all day. When she gets too fidgety for sitting, Mom checks my vitals, straightens my blankets or readjusts my pillows, checks my IV, medications, the latest batch of lab results. She talks to the doctors and nurses about my progress or future tests to run.
She stood by when my dad called an hour ago, stuck in a snowstorm in Boston but fighting his way here. I mostly listened through the thick cotton in my ears, asking him to repeat himself when I couldn’t make out what he was saying even though he was already full-on shouting into the phone to be heard. I cried as he gushed and cried, saying he was sorry, that he should’ve been there for me more. He told me stories about what a beautiful, chubby baby I was, that he’d bawled in the delivery room, how proud of me he is. It felt weird to have all his attention, something I’ve craved for so long and now have, but for all the wrong reasons.
“I should have known,” Mom says. Right now she’s sitting here, my hand in both of hers, thumbs caressing the back of my knuckles. It would take worlds of crisscrossing ink lines on paper to capture all her worry wrinkles.
As I look at her, it feels like through someone else’s eyes, and I realize it’s incredible. To be able to tell—by the way your mother’s scrubs fall from her shoulders, her face all flat lines, her whole presence radiating sorrow—that she blames herself for what you’ve done to yourself. And you want to shake her by the shoulders and say that none of this is her fault even though you don’t know w
hose fault it is: yours or theirs. And you’re tired. More tired than you’ve ever been, like every crack in your body is filled with cement, and the world is asking you to keep treading quicksand, but all you’re really doing is lying in a hospital bed in so much pain, falling in and out of sleep, not sure yet if you’re glad you didn’t die. These thoughts crush you because, even as you think them, your mother cries softly beside you, thinking you’re asleep.
And you feel so many emotions at the same time that you don’t know how you’re ever going to find a place for them all to live. Guilt—the one in your head. Fear—the one in your chest. Shame—the one in your heart that will stay with you for a long, long time.
They tell me the police are coming to question me in an hour.
“I should have known.”
What part? All of it?
I should have known too.
THOMAS
“VANB. HEY, VANB!”
My father turns to me. “Thomas, I believe someone is trying to get your attention.”
I stop short of the elevators, but only because he and Michael do. Zac’s the last person I want to talk to right now. Even Caylee must’ve felt the same way because, after watching the video again, she’d hurried away with her parents, ignoring Zac’s “Babe. Babe!” as she left. Still, if the past’s any indication, she’ll be back with him before the day’s out.
But Zac’s already caught up with us, and there’s no way to avoid him.
“Mr. VanBrackel. Mikey,” he says, nodding at them. Up close, his face looks even worse, nose dark and ballooned in the center with matching bruises on his temple and lower jaw. His cast looks just as awful, all filthy and stained with blood.
Michael just stares at Zac, though my father gives him a quick return nod. “Zac.”
“Mind if I talk to Thomas?” Zac asks.
My father waves a hand before turning away. “Be my guest.”
After the Ink Dries Page 21