Chapter 37

4:07 p.m.

Mary Elizabeth gagged and choked and felt uplifted once Caz removed his penis from her mouth. It disgusted her. It felt very much to her like suffocation, like being a captive, tortured for information. He pushed into her and she gagged. He pushed into her again and she gagged again. He tried for a third time and again she could not breathe and he pulled it out and said, “What are you, a fucking amateur?”

She didn’t know what to say. She knew the word. Knew how to form it, how it was supposed to sound. She’d used it her whole life. Used it most often when talking to her parents:

No.

But she could not. It was as if Caz had stolen her voice. She was freezing, goose bumps temporarily scarring her entire body. Her arms were shafts, locked at her sides. Caz had turned up the kitchen radio so that loud, hissing heavy metal held her in a kind of noise box. If she sat here long enough, maybe he would just leave, maybe he would get bored with her. That was his reputation, right? Hook up with a girl and then dump her. It was the challenge of holding on to Caz that most attracted the girls, the reputation he carried of getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted from whomever he wanted. The girls loved him because they wanted to fulfill all they’d learned of love from the movies—that is, that it takes one right girl to set straight a wayward boy. One girl who can make a difference, crack his shell, reach his heart. Because teenagers always believe in the One Girl Theory. Twentysomethings believe. Thirtysomethings believe. We all believe in such mythmaking.

Once, at a party, long after Cindy Hamilton had switched schools and the pictures of her stopped making the e-mail rounds, Caz had bet the boys $5 he could get Amber Belonsky to give Jeremy Busch, Jim Vigham, and Carl Lindorph blow jobs in front of everyone. Given what had happened with Cindy a year earlier, few doubted it, but there was something collectively titillating in the expectation. Amber was overweight, but not unattractive. She wore jeans with frayed bottoms and always needed a haircut. Caz had plied her with vodka and Hi-C fruit punch until she was wobbly and giggling. He kissed her in front of everyone, grabbed her breast as her head lolled back, and then asked her to kiss a few of his friends, his very good friends. Amber vomited halfway through Jim Vigham, and the others had gone home with tiny splashes of puke over their black motorcycle boots, but the damage had been done. Caz’d left the party $200 richer and secured his reputation. By the end of the year, Amber had transferred to Julian. Mary Elizabeth had laughed at Amber right along with the other kids.

Over the past few years Mary had pushed Susan away, but now she was trying to channel her. How would she keep Caz’s interest without compromising her integrity?

“Caz. Caz, let’s go to my room.”

Mary Elizabeth wanted him to sense her no without having to say it. To hear it from the way her body failed to move, the way she shifted as if her limbs were a series of planks, unbalanced, toppling, unyielding. This was the difference between real life and the movies; in real life no one ever read other people’s minds, even if they could, because to do so would mean concessions they were almost always unwilling to make, concessions that meant the inability to push one’s own agenda. Caz had taken her clothes off. All of them except her socks and her bra, which remained hooked behind her, her breasts dangling out of it. The music was loud enough that she had to raise her voice to talk over it. He was dressed still, his penis jutting out from his pants, the only flesh he revealed to her.

“Caz,” she whispered. “Caz. Please.”

“I know. I know, baby.” He told her to get on the floor, under the table. “I know you want it. I’m getting there, baby.”

If they could only go up to her room. Escape the public space of the dining room. Led Zeppelin wafting into the dining room. “We can go upstairs.”

“You gotta reclaim this space,” he said. “Take charge of it.”

Caz turned her over, pulled her up by the hips. She was half under the table, her head and shoulders in shadow and, from the waist down, open to him. She felt a pressure behind her. She thought momentarily of the kids at school, of lunch, of how her hips had seemed so aligned with Caz’s then, so on fire, so joined. How she’d felt so beloved at that moment. Beloved.

Be.

Loved.

By someone who meant something. By someone whose presence was noticed at school. She belonged then, for a moment. And in her belonging why hadn’t she eaten the cookie? The whole fucking cookie? She could no longer remember. Had she thrown it away, even?

She saw the dark posts of the chair legs. “I don’t need to reclaim this space.” The words tumbled out of her quickly. “I was only here for a minute yesterday. I was with Sofia Oum. Do you know her? She’s very popular. I didn’t even know—”

The space. Under the table.

She felt a tearing, searing pain behind her.

Her breath came in sharp bursts, held then released, held then released.

Felt the halves of herself separating, whittled away to thin, sharp wedges.

She hit her head on the side of a chair seat. Tried to move her legs, her knees closer together, so it wouldn’t hurt so much. Caz pushed her knees apart on the carpet. Pushed her head down so she was kissing the rug.

Heard the hard slap of Caz’s skin against hers.

The space. Under the table. Reclaim. To demand the return or restoration of.

She would avoid this room until she left for college two years later.