ALONE IN MY BEDROOM, THE NIGHT I MET JAMES, MY heart was pounding so fast I couldn’t fall asleep. Who was he? Everything about him was different from anyone else I’d met in Thebes. Forget anyone my age. They were philistines, grunts, backwater hicks. The older men in town that some girls considered handsome looked like wrung-out sponges to me: beefy boring blond men with red capillaries dotting their faces from too many years of glugging Jägermeister and screaming at each other about hockey games.
James Hollings had the feel of a city about him. Was it the suit? Maybe he chose law school in Minneapolis to get away from the claustrophobia of this Northern Baptist Church–slash–King Construction–run town. Once I was certain the rest of the household was asleep, I tiptoed downstairs to the family room where the computer we were allowed to use only for homework sat dormant. We all snuck non-homework-related internet searches on this computer. Christopher was adamant that we’d have no unsanctioned access to the smut and filth we were guaranteed to find online. But he and Evelyn were so computer unsavvy that it was super easy for us to hide our search histories from them. It was also super easy for us to discover each other’s. Harrison’s trail of man-on-man porn was particularly educational. Izzy was boring—all about fashion and makeup. Sometimes I planted stuff for them to find—stories about giant squids and marauding bands of sharks. Izzy and Harrison shared a fear of all ocean creatures and I loved to freak them out.
But it was Paul’s searches I returned to most of all—stories and stories about the Balkans. The wars after Yugoslavia dissolved. The Serbian conquest of Bosnia, and later of Kosovo. The United Nations declaration of the war as genocide against the Bosniak people—my people. The role of Islam in Eastern European countries in the 1990s. Srebrenica and the Death March, eight thousand men and boys murdered. And the articles that forced me to turn my eyes away from the screen—the discovery of rape camps where women had been brutalized again and again and again. All part of the plan to destroy and eliminate us.
Paul had been teaching himself about our heritage before he ran away.
Uncle Christopher would consider Paul’s research as dangerous as Harrison’s porn. How many times had we had it drilled into our brains that we were Americans now? That Americans had our own history. That learning about Bosnia would get us nowhere.
Paul was reprimanded for any expression of curiosity about our former language and former culture.
“It will only depress you, Paul,” Christopher said. “Leave it be.”
We never heard the word genocide in school, let alone learned anything about Bosnia. If I wasn’t born there, I wouldn’t have known it existed. The Thebes Oracle didn’t even have a section on international news. And the television and radio news broadcasts allowed in our house were limited to WKNW, a local network known for its favorable coverage of economic growth engines such as the King Family Construction business.
Once Paul was gone, his abandoned internet cookie trail became one of my few connections to him. When nightmares jolted me out of bed, I found perverse, twisted comfort in staring at the blue screen filled with articles about crimes against humanity that my brother had collected. Crimes against my mother and my father, although they were faceless, nameless victims among thousands of ghosts. Hideous as it was to read, at least it reminded me that something real had happened. The bogeyman wasn’t only in my head and I wasn’t crazy. I might not be allowed to talk about it because I was an American now—but here on the computer was the truth.
This night, though, I had a different goal. I scrolled through everything I could find about James Hollings until my retinas burned. It would be easy enough to explain away if Harrison or Izzy found it—why wouldn’t I be researching for my new job? I could even say he had asked me to write up a bio of him or something in the unlikely circumstance of Uncle Christopher magically learning how the internet worked.
James kept his cyber nose clean. The Thebes Oracle noted his graduation summa cum laude from University of Minnesota Duluth, and his intention to attend U of M Law School. The only child of a nurse at Athens General. Single mother? That might explain Leo Roberts’s fatherly interest. Despite his suit and his tie and his adult chumminess with Mr. Roberts and Wanda, he wasn’t that much older than me.
I opened up a second window on the computer and googled “age of legal consent in Minnesota.” Sixteen. Boom.
That search history I made sure to erase.
He was a Republican of course. Pretty much everyone from Thebes old enough to vote was registered Republican. What struck me the most was how different he looked in person from his official college graduation photo. I studied every aspect of the stiff, impassive stranger in the picture, his hair slicked down, parted sharply on the right. No smile. Red necktie. The perfect cypher. Who was that guy? The James Hollings I met had a spark to him, like he secretly thought everything was a joke and he was looking for someone to share the joke with him. I knew I could be that person.
Back in my bed, blinking hard to adjust away from the blue glow of the screen, I focused my eyes on the froufrou that surrounded me. Aunt Evelyn’s idea of what a girl’s room should be, none of it my taste. I was forbidden from covering the walls with Motown posters, so I resigned myself to cultivating internal irony about my white four-poster bed with its purple-and-pink paisley spread, the matching white dresser and vanity table, the fluffy white area rug shaped like a heart—a heart! Wall décor: fabric-covered capital letters hung to spell LAUGH! LOVE! JOY! PEACE! HAPPINESS! Instead of preventing me from ever having a dark thought, they had the opposite effect. They screamed from the walls, wagging their fingers at me like enraged headmistresses from my bookshelf full of nineteenth-century novels about orphans. Also provided by Aunt Evelyn. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. David Copperfield. And a leather-bound edition of My Ántonia by Willa Cather—my seventh birthday present.
“I chose your name after this book,” Evelyn said. “It was my favorite in high school.” I was too young to get past the first sentence or two. Later, when my sophomore English class had to read it, she sat in the kitchen when I came home, waiting eagerly to talk to me about the book. But I’d been humiliated, labeled a freak once again. The fictional Ántonia, like me, was an immigrant. It just gave the mean girls in school another reason to make fun of me. My name, just like my circumstances, was simply too weird for the Brandis and Barbies of Mt. O High School. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss My Ántonia with Evelyn. I shrugged her off, grabbed an apple from the bowl on the kitchen counter, and ran up to my room. I felt disappointment radiate off her. But she said nothing.
Laugh! Love! Joy! At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to offer any of the above to my lonely and well-intentioned aunt.
The night after I met James Hollings, I lay on my back on the bed Evelyn had decorated for me and twisted a strand of my long hair between my fingers as I stared at those commands on my wall. For once, “laugh, love, joy” seemed less like a taunt and more like a promise. At age sixteen, the first glimmer of what escape could look like lit me up from the inside.
Uncle Christopher might have found me a job to prevent me from running away like my brother, but he inadvertently opened the door to my own kind of rebellion, one that suddenly seemed not only natural, but inevitable. I resolved to apply my skills and resources toward a new summer project: losing my virginity to James Hollings.
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Once I made up my mind, I had no intention of being subtle. At sixteen, I didn’t know how. I trained my eyes on James all day Monday. Blushed when he came near me. Stood too close to him at his computer when he taught me how to access the company server to download files. Leo Roberts was clueless; Wanda was too busy with her own giggly flirtation to notice my serious one. But James noticed everything. I felt the heat rise between us with every brush of his hand against mine over the keyboard, every time he brought his face close to examine a decades-old document I emerged with from the stockroom that needed his exclusive and immediate attention.
I felt so feral, so full of longing when he was next to me. I wanted to bite his shoulder, right through the white fabric of his button-down shirt. Instead, I inhaled the crisp scent of dry-cleaning chemicals that mixed with a peppery hint of his own odor and imagined him dropping the papers, taking this crazy mess of need I’d become, and fixing it. Fixing me.
I didn’t have to imagine for long. Tuesday afternoon, Wanda left early to babysit her sister’s kids. Leo Roberts disappeared into his office, ostensibly to take phone calls, but truthfully to take the nap I already knew he snuck in every day. Within five minutes of silence enveloping the front of the office, I heard a rap on the stockroom door that I’d left deliberately ajar.
From the floor where I sat, surrounded by reams of ancient deposition transcripts, I looked up and saw exactly what I hoped for. His desire. His need. I leaned back, let my knees fall slightly open—that’s how ready I was to have him on top of me.
Everything was a blur then. His mouth on my neck, his hands crawling all over me, removing my clothes, removing his. Until the sharp push that woke me, focused me. The pain that kept going, until it swelled into something better than pain. The starburst of sensation I felt from the inside out. This, I thought. This oblivion. This abandon.
James Hollings inside of me obliterated everything I hated about my life. Everything I feared about my past. And I knew I was going to crave this obliteration, so complete that I almost sobbed with relief, again and again and again.