I want to apologize, but I’m not sure how, or even what to say.
West doesn’t wait around for me to figure it out. He takes his cart, checks the spine of the next book in line, and begins rolling down the aisle away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I call to his back. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Don’t worry about it, princess,” he says without turning around. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“Okay.” I wrap my arms around my stomach. “Thank you.”
He doesn’t answer me. I guess we’re finished, and I’m relieved. Sort of.
I’m also shaky and weak. It seems possible I might puke.
West pauses, right in the middle of turning from our row to the next one. He leans over the cart, balancing his forearms on the books, staring down at them for a long, awkward minute that feels like a year.
He lifts his head and looks right at me. “This wasn’t a good day for us to have this talk.”
“No,” I agree. “Probably not.”
He blows out a breath. “I shouldn’t have hit him. It was a dumb-ass thing to do, and I’m still pretty wired from it. Sorry I …” He waves his hand at me. “Sorry for all that.”
I don’t know what to say, so I nod.
“Is your nose okay?”
“It’s fine.”
“It hurt?”
“A little. But it’s not a big deal.”
He flexes and releases his swollen hand a few times, staring down at it. It’s his left.
“What about your hand?” I ask.
“It’ll heal.”
The floor falls silent. I wonder if anyone is up here. If there’s a girl around the corner, sitting in silence, listening to this whole thing.
Maybe she’s like me. Scared and stuck, frozen in place.
“You know,” West says, “you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah. That’s what Bridget tells me.”
But she only says it because it’s what she’s supposed to say. I know what she really thinks. It’s the same as what I think—what everyone thinks.
I did do something wrong. I trusted the wrong person. I made a stupid mistake. I made it possible for Nate to take advantage of me, and it’s my responsibility to own up to it.
West shakes his head, as though he can hear all these thoughts, but he doesn’t buy it. “You took some sexy pictures with your guy. Lots of girls do it. If some girl gave me pictures like that, I’d never fucking stick them on the Internet, no matter how pissed at her I was.”
“You saw them?”
“Everybody saw them.”
I close my eyes against a stinging pressure in my sinuses and behind my eyes.
Crying isn’t on my schedule.
“He says he didn’t do it,” I whisper.
“That’s because he’s a douchebag. Douchebags lie.”
“Can we not talk about this?”
His head drops, his gaze falling back to the books. “All I wanted to say was, I don’t think you can make it go away. Not the way you’re doing it.”
I have no reply. It hurts too much to hear him articulate it—my worst fear—and for the second time today I feel as if he’s the one who hurt me, even though both times I did it to myself.
I’ve just run into his elbow all over again.
“Caroline.”
The way he says my name forces me to look up.
“You know what?” he asks.
“What?”
He starts wheeling his cart away. Turning his head toward me, he smiles the tiniest bit and says, “Except for that gap between your teeth, you looked fucking hot.”
He turns the corner. The wheels squeak as he moves into the next aisle.
He’s a pig.
I won’t think about what it means that I’m not disgusted with him.
Or that I’m standing here, arms wrapped around my torso, smiling at my feet.
It’s too screwed up, so I just won’t think about it.
I won’t wonder if he’s right and I’m wrong—if everything I’ve done to try to rescue my future is pointless and really I should be doing something different. Fighting for myself, somehow.
Right now I can’t handle it. I can only breathe in deep and try to make myself remember what’s next on my schedule. Where I have to be. What I have to do to get through the rest of this day.
This is my fight. The only thing I know how to do to get my life back the way it was. Bury the pictures, rebuild my reputation.
This is my fight, and I’m not giving up.
Two weeks later, a nightmare wakes me.
It happens a lot.
I roll out of bed and slide my feet over the cool floor until I’ve found my flip-flops in the dark. Grab my keys from the dresser. Cup them against my palm so they won’t jangle.
When I pull a sweatshirt over my head, holding my breath because I want to be quiet, Bridget’s comforter heaves on the top bunk. Her head pokes out from beneath the covers.
“Where are you going?”
“Just out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
I feel guilty for waking her up, but I can’t really help it. It’s hard to be an insomniac when you have a roommate.
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
She rolls over, and even though she’s awake, I ease the door shut slowly until it latches and locks with a quiet snick.
I’m always careful.
I walk to my car with my keys gripped in my fist, looking left to right across the parking lot, listening for anything, anyone. I had parked under the security light. From ten feet away I unlock my doors with the remote, and my heart beats so fast, so fast. The gasping sound of relief when I shut the door behind me is too loud in the clean, safe interior of my Taurus.
I turn on the stereo and crank up the volume and drive.
I have a series of loops that I do. First I go in a circle around the college, which is four blocks long and three blocks wide. Then I do widening circles around the surrounding college-owned buildings, the downtown, the fast-food strip and box stores, the Little League diamond and Frost-E-Freeze shack. I pass fields of cornstalks starting to break ranks and turn brown. My high beams spotlight the blank landscape of my home state.
One of these loops used to be my evening run, but I had to stop. After my naked body and my location became public information, being alone outdoors lost its charm.
I make only right turns, because I hate turning left, and my dad isn’t here to tell me I need to get over that.
I don’t know how to talk to my dad anymore. When I call him, I can’t figure out what words I would have said before, when I never had to think about it. I knew just how to make him laugh and love me. Now when we talk, it’s like I’m acting, only I don’t know my lines, and I suck at improv.
I can’t remember how to be the Caroline Piasecki who graduated from Ankeny High with her smile white and perfect, wearing her graduation cap and gown, walking onstage to give the valedictorian speech with her two sisters and her father in the front row of the bleachers, beaming with pride.
I haven’t told him about the pictures. I can’t.
I’m a mouth with a boy’s dick in it, a body to look at, legs to spread.
I spin the wheel, turning my car to the right. To the right. Always to the right.
I haven’t seen West for thirteen days, but I think about him. I walk myself through that afternoon at the library, trying to follow all the twists and turns of our conversation. Why did he push me back against the shelves? What was he thinking when he told that guy to leave? What was he trying to accomplish?
I think about him asking me if everything I do is about accomplishing something.
I pick over my relationship with Nate, trying to answer all the unanswerable questions.
Was he always bad and I just didn’t notice? Did he turn bad?
How could I have trusted him?
I think about West saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I remember the way his thigh felt, pressing between mine.
One time last year, I was writing a paper at my desk, and I heard shouting and laughter in the hallway, periodic smacking thumps that made me flinch. Nate was lying on my bed, reading his Intro to Econ textbook. Bridget went out to see what was going on and didn’t come back. Then I heard her laughing and West’s raised voice.
“What are they doing out there?”
I tried to sound like I didn’t care. Like I was slightly annoyed and I didn’t feel this tug in my chest. This pressure to find out, join in, become part of it.
Nate shrugged. “Go see.”
I can still remember exactly how I felt when I stood up and headed out there. Balanced on a knife’s edge between good and bad, unsure which way I might tip—but aware, deep in my bones, in my tight lungs and tense shoulders, that something was about to happen.
In the hall that night, I found Bridget and Krishna, bowling with rubber chickens.
Yeah. It took me a minute to get it sorted out, too.
I don’t know where Krishna came by the chickens—probably he stole them from somewhere—but whoever had owned them before couldn’t possibly have enjoyed them as much. Krishna and the chickens were famous last year. The chickens showed up all over—occupying toilets, hanging from the rafters in the dining hall, perched on top of the big phallic metal sculpture in the middle of the campus, or dangling from the party keg.
But this time Krishna was standing at one end of the hall, twenty feet from a neat arrangement of pins, and winding his chicken through several tight arm revolutions. As I watched, he let go, an underhand throw that whipped the chicken through the air with surprising speed. It hit the pins, and they exploded, scattering all over the hall. Bridget shrieked, then bent over, laughing.
It was totally juvenile—the game, Bridget’s girlish reaction, Krishna’s red eyes and his stoned grin. I had a paper due in the morning and a lot of polishing still to do. I had Latin homework to get through, and if I had to go to the library because of these guys, I’d—
Suddenly the door right across from mine opened. West came out with a chicken in each hand and a two-liter bottle of soda under one arm. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about chicken rockets,” he said, before he caught sight of me and stopped.
We looked at each other. Probably not for ten entire minutes, but that’s how it felt. Like an indecently long time spent staring at his face, when I almost never allowed myself more than a glance. A day of watching his mouth twitch. His nostrils flare. His too-pale blue-green eyes lit up with mischief.
I got all tangled up in those eyes of his, mentally tripped and fell, and then couldn’t untangle myself.
West arched an eyebrow. “Want to play?”
He didn’t mean anything by it. I’m almost sure.
Or, I mean, he did, but all he meant was, if I said yes, I’d get a chicken of my own and a free pass to indulge in this silliness, blow off my homework, act like a different girl.
He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.
But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.
This isn’t for me.
You’re not for me.
The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.
In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”
A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.
“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.
“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”