We passed Velda Sheehan’s house with its red tile roof. Cree and I both turned to look at it. We had been there together a couple of times. It was where we found out about Kelsey’s childhood trauma. That was before we confronted Kelsey herself.
I said, “I wish we had Velda’s phone number.”
“I’m glad we don’t.”
That was Glyn talking. I could see her in my rear view mirror, all hunched over. She added, “I couldn’t face any of that family.”
“Don’t you want to know how she’s doing?” I asked.
She hunched still further. I tried to keep my eyes ahead and not on the mirror. “Glyn, will you stop it? Even if there was something you could have done differently, you didn’t know it at the time and you can’t go back and change it. Try moving forward. There must be something you can do.”
Maybe she had to blame herself. Sometimes you have to, but I was getting tired of it. Possibly my constant reassurance was part of what she needed. Still, it would be nice if we could change the tune a little.
When we got to my house, Ben’s truck was still there. He hadn’t gone out, probably because I had Cree with me. Ben had always been pretty much a loner, but these days he scarcely went anywhere without Cree.
“Come in and have some soda, coffee, iced tea,” I invited my buddies. “That’s all we’re serving. Oh, and fresh water.”
“No gin and mixer?” Glyn tried for a bit of levity.
“You can have mixer without the gin,” I said.
“I can?”
“But I don’t think we have any. My parents only drink when they have guests, and they go in for wine.”
The dogs woofed as we entered the house. Cree got down on the floor and hugged them. We chose our sodas and sat at the kitchen table. Nobody had anything to say except to wonder how Kelsey was doing, and we’d already covered that.
“I could try calling the emergency room,” I said.
“Yes, do that.” Glyn was back in the dumps again.
“She wouldn’t still be there, would she?” said Cree. “They don’t keep them there, do they?”
“Not in the ER. She’s either out or somewhere else in the hospital.”
I hoped not dead. I called Patient Information and found they’d put her in Intensive Care.
“Better than—not,” said Cree. “Where there’s life there’s hope.”
It cheered me, too, just a little. I could have asked for the nurses’ station, but at least I knew she was alive.
Another issue was involved that concerned me as much as Kelsey.
I asked Glyn, “Do you happen to have his email address?”
She gave a little start. “Whose?”
She must have known who I meant. She’d been rather taken with him last winter when he was giving me a hard time. He tried to get at me through her. It took her a while to figure out he was using her. Then she began to see him as he really was.
“Who do you think?” I said. “He can’t keep hiding from the police. This time he’s really done it. Not that my brake line wasn’t bad enough.”
She stared down at her Pepsi can. She’d told me his whereabouts once, when the police needed him for something else. But she still wanted to deny, even to herself, that she’d ever had anything to do with him.
“Why would I have his email address?” she asked. “I would think you’d have it. Unless you threw it away.”
Actually, I had. I’d also deleted it from my memory, both the computer’s and the one inside my head.
“Maybe it’s better I just keep hands off,” I decided. “We don’t want to alert him that the police are after him, if he can’t figure it out for himself.”
“He’s not stupid.” Glyn sloshed the Pepsi around in its can.
“No, but he’s insufferably arrogant. And psychopathic. He might not think he did anything wrong. Just fooling around. Having a little fun. Showing off to his pals.”
“How could he?” said Cree.
I took a breath to explain, when she got it. “Oh, yeah. Because in his mind Kelsey’s not a real person.”
“Exactly. And that’s what we have to change. Not just him but the whole male race, or a lot of it.”
“Not Ben! He’s not like that.”
“No, I know he isn’t. Neither is Rick, or my daddy, or a lot of other guys, but too many are. And we’re going to change that.”
Cree fixed me with her gold-flecked eyes. “How?”
“Yes,” agreed Glyn. “How are you going to do that? They like themselves the way they are.”
“It won’t be easy. Too many women think they have to appeal to men’s prurient interests to get their attention. That just reinforces their attitudes, so we’ll have to work on women, too.”
“Who interests?” asked Cree.
I hoped that was what I meant and hoped I pronounced it right. “Prurient. Sexual.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“And I don’t plan to do it all by myself. It’s us. We. We’ll need more members. We can get a whole thing going. You know the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes?”
“Huh?” said Cree.
Glyn asked, “What are you talking about?” That reassured Cree that it wasn’t just a Lakeside thing, although that may have been where I heard of it.
“Aristophanes,” I said, “was an ancient Greek playwright who specialized in comedy and satire. The other biggies mostly did tragedy.”
“Well? What is it?” Cree gulped down the last of her soda.
I heard Ben’s sneakers galloping on the stairs. Our parents were out in back, Rhoda gardening and Daddy reading the Sunday Times.
Ben came into the kitchen, greeted Cree by tugging on her ponytail. I didn’t want to talk about Lysistrata with him there. Guys, including Ben, can get defensive about their species, even if they wouldn’t do those things themselves.
“Rick was thrilled,” I told him, “that you thought to put the pictures on a flash drive, but did you get them all off the Internet? Before they go viral?”
“All off,” he assured me, “and I checked for viralness. Or virality, or whatever. You can stop panicking.” He opened the refrigerator, did a quick inventory, and closed it. Then he opened it again and took out a 2-liter bottle of Coke that was three-quarters empty, and started to leave.
“Thank you, Ben,” I said.
“For what?”
“For taking care of the pictures.”
“De nada.” He signaled to Cree that he would be with her shortly, and bounded back upstairs.
“Are you going to tell us about it?” asked Glyn.
I’d forgotten what the topic was. “I wonder if he took a look at those pictures. I don’t know what you have to do to get them off the Net, but she’ll be mortified if he saw them.”
“Maybe she doesn’t need to know,” said Glyn. “Anyway it’s better than if the whole rest of the world sees them. Now, tell us about the Greek thing.”
“Okay. Well, the Greek city-states were always at each other’s throats. They liked having wars. It’s what men do. But their wives were sick of it. They wanted the men home and everything the way it should be. The men must have been home at least part of the time because the women all got together and issued an ultimatum. There would be no more marital relations until the fighting stopped.”
“You mean sex,” said Cree.
“Yes. That.”
“Did it work?”
“Yep. But everybody had to be in on it, or it wouldn’t have worked.”
Glyn said, “So how do we do it when a lot of men are perfectly decent? And what if you’re not having sex with your guy to begin with? Or what about people who don’t have a guy?”
“Okay, that was a bad example,” I conceded. “It only shows that women can be empowered if they act together.”
“I don’t think it’s practical,” she argued.
“Probably not. And furthermore, a lot of women depend on a man not only for support but just to have one around.”
“It’s a cute idea, though,” said Cree. “Even if it wouldn’t have been practical even back then. Maybe less so because I’ll bet most of those women couldn’t earn their own living. Unless they were all hookers.”
“They were wives,” I said. “And quite possibly it didn’t take all that long, men being the dickheads they are. Anyway, it’s a satire. It’s not supposed to be real. I think he was mostly making fun of men. We’re not saying they can’t be dickheads, since that’s the way God made them. They just have to see us as equal human beings. That’s all we’re asking. We need a name.”
Cree said, “That’s not as important as getting recruits and deciding how we’re going to do this.”
“It is important,” said Glyn. Some of her gloom had lifted. “We need something to rally around. A name and some kind of symbol. It’s too bad we can’t use Kelsey.”
“Well, we can’t,” I said. “We’ll have to invent a composite and give her a name. And a face.”
What was I doing? Was I creating something important or unleashing a monster? It would take a lot of time. In a couple of weeks, I’d be starting my senior year and I wanted to get into a good college. Ben had done it, even with his job at Frosty Dan. But Ben had brains in spades. All I had was one tiny brain that couldn’t cover everything.
That just made me stubborn. I could and would do it, along with everything else I had to do. I tried to think of a few things I could cut out.
Cree slapped her hand on the table. “We need a name for our composite girl. Then we can publicize and maybe out of that we’ll get a name for our group.”
“It’s got to be more than a group,” I said. “It’s a crusade. Okay, give her a name, and then I’ll write an article for the paper.”
“The school paper?” she asked.
“No, The Chronicle.” That was our community rag.
“Can I help?” asked Glyn.
“Um . . .” I wanted to do it my way, with my own ideas. But that was bad leadership. So I said, “Sure. I’ll need your input anyway about what led up to it.”
“You’re not going to use my name!”
“Of course not. No one gets named, not even the jocks who perpetrated the outrage.”
Cree shook her head at my vocabulary. I went on, “Even though they deserve it. But as soon as they get arraigned we’ll go at them with guns blazing.”
We mulled around for a bit and came up with the name Alice Field. I hoped it wasn’t anybody’s real name but probably it was. Anyhow, it sounded generic enough so maybe no one person would think we were singling her out.
We went upstairs to my room where I grabbed some paper and started jotting notes.
“Alice Field. Let’s make her seventeen. She lives in the suburbs, a fictitious one.”
“Why not make it someplace different?” Cree suggested. “Completely different, like a farm in the Midwest.”
“Because the burbs are what we know. We want it realistic.”
“East Bridge,” offered Glyn.
“That’s too close,” I said. “They’d guess.”
“So what if they do? We disguised her name. Isn’t that enough?”
“How about Eastridge, without the b? Damn that Evan. It’s mortifying that I ever liked him.”
“How could you know?” Glyn had said it before. Glyn liked him, too, after I split, even though she would never admit it. She must have thought she was getting away with something.
And he had a lot of skill when it came to turning on the charm. Psychopaths are good at that.
“We need a name for him, too,” I realized. “Not that he deserves it, but we don’t want to start trouble.”
Cree said, “It would help protect Kelsey, too, if he can’t be identified.”
I hadn’t considered that angle. “Okay, so Alice goes to the party. She’s shy and terrified and hooks up with a classmate. Or maybe not terrified, just a little bit shy. Anyway, she goes to the party and hooks up with—”
“Callie Grimsby,” said Glyn.
“Is that your alter ego?”
“No, it just popped into my head. It might be a name I heard somewhere. That’s usually the sort of thing that pops into my head.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Even if it’s a real person, we’re not saying anything bad about her. Now give me a blow-by-blow account of what happened.”
I wrote it all down as she described it. Some of the details would have to be changed but I kept the Tom Collins. They do taste nice, as I knew from experience. Sweet enough to dilute the gin, which isn’t very good by itself. I never understood people who could drink it straight.
Next, we came to Evan. I decided to keep his initials, or reverse them. Stu Edwards? Stefan Edwards? Ha! Even closer.
“I saw them going upstairs.” Glyn covered her face. “I should have grabbed her then.”
“But you didn’t because?”
“I was chicken. I knew the jocks would get antagonistic and smarty-pants and everybody’d be on their side. I wasn’t thinking of any long-term results.”
“Okay, I’m going to use those thoughts for Callie, okay?”
“Be sure to have her really beat on herself,” Glyn said. “Even if she’s not the primary victim, it’s a lesson for everybody. And don’t forget the pictures. That tells us everything.”
“But we can’t use them.”
“Of course we can’t. But we can describe them.”
“How?” I asked. “If we didn’t see them.”
Glyn looked momentarily abashed. “I did. That’s how I know. They didn’t leave out much, not even Evan’s arse.”
“Ew!” said Cree. “How could he?”
“Men don’t mind showing off their thingie,” I said. “They’re proud of it.”
Glyn corrected me. “Not his thingie, his bare ass, or part of it. He pulled his trousers down but not off. It wasn’t a courtesy he extended to Kelsey. They took everything off her.”
I almost asked if she was as skinny as she looked, but caught myself in time. That was not the issue here.
What if she’d been having her period? Would that have turned them off, or were they too rabid to care? As Cree had already expressed it. Ew-w-w.
The notes made a sort of first outline. I looked them over, fleshing them out in my mind. “I wish I could interview Kelsey. Don’t worry, I know I can’t, but it would be interesting to know if she had any awareness of what was going on.”
“You’ll have to put yourself in her shoes,” said Glyn. “Get drunk and see how much awareness you have.”
“Different people get drunk differently,” I reminded her. “Did you see her after it happened?”
“No. I fled.”
“They could have added something. A date rape drug or something. We’ll never know until they grill Evan and the others, and the police won’t tell us anyway.” Not even Rick, while they were still investigating. Not even for the sake of my article.
Glyn rolled her eyes. “You’ll be lucky if they find out anything. He’ll cop a plea. Or his parents will get him out of it.”
With that discouraging prospect, we broke up. Cree drove Glynis home and then went off somewhere with Ben.
Once again, I called the hospital. She was still in ICU, awake but groggy. She had no phone by her bed so I couldn’t talk to her or to anyone who might be there with her. Even if I paid an in-person visit, I couldn’t see her. They only allow family members into ICU. Even without that restriction, I very much doubted that she would want to see me. Instead, I got to work on my article.
We needed a name for our group. How about Women Are People, Too? It wasn’t catchy, it didn’t form a word, and as an acronym, WAPT read awfully much like a radio station. Aren’t acronyms supposed to make words? If they didn’t, it was just a bunch of initials.
All I could think about was Kelsey and the horrible thing that had happened to her. If she was the sort of girl who liked to flaunt herself she might have been able to endure it. Maybe. It seemed to me this called for Dr. Schiff cutting short her vacation. Mom said therapists need vacations, just like anybody, but right now Kelsey needed her even worse.
As for Evan, I wished there were something I could do. Some way I could entrap him. I’d tried that once before and it didn’t work. He couldn’t still be living in his parents’ basement now that that had been found out.
Forget about Evan. He was a stinker but first and foremost I needed to get my article out there and start people thinking.
I looked through my computer for anything I could find. I had to narrow down the search because of course there were a billion things about rape. I narrowed it to “drinking and rape” and found a beautiful article that had both those words in the title. It was all about not blaming women for men’s violence. It’s the rapist’s crime, not hers, even if she’s blotto. That’s what I’d been thinking, but he said it better.
Yes, the author was a man. Three cheers and more for him. He used the word “misogyny” a few times and I realized that had a lot to do with it. Men who can’t accept that women are human beings, who brutalize them with rape, may well harbor hostile feelings toward women. I put that in my article along with the words “power” and “control.”
This was getting too much for ignorant little me. I went out to the back patio where Rhoda was still gardening. Daddy must have finished the Times and gone off somewhere.
I reminded her of what I’d told her earlier about Kelsey, adding more details. Her jaw dropped almost into the canna plants.
“Why,” I asked, “do they hate us so much?”
She didn’t tell me I was exaggerating. She only blinked and thought about it.
“I doubt that there’s any one reason,” she finally said. “Everybody’s different, and a lot of men would deny that they hate women.”
“Of course they don’t,” I agreed. “We make wonderful playthings and they always want to play. But why is it so hard for so many males to think of us as real, genuine, actual, live human beings with a brain and feelings? Haven’t you had any patients like that?”
She smiled. “I’m pretty sure a true misogynist would want a male therapist.”
“Unless he wanted a female so he could fight with her.”
“Come to think of it, I did have somebody like that once. He was quite antagonistic, but he didn’t stick around long. I refused to lose my temper and that galled him.”
“Okay, now a person like Evan. You said he might have an inferiority complex that he just can’t deal with or even recognize.”
“I said might have. There could be other reasons. I wouldn’t know without getting inside his mind.”
“But isn’t a lot of it cultural?” I asked. “Where males grow up feeling superior just because they have bigger muscles? And because they’re superior, they get to kick us around.”
“Maddie, what you’re doing here is you’re generalizing. As I said before, everybody’s different. There may be certain general factors but different people process those factors differently. Each person has different life experiences—”
“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t want a big long speech in psychobabble. Furthermore, psychology is an inexact science and I was perfectly capable of figuring out a few things for myself and drawing my own conclusions.
“Don’t you have to dig those up in the fall?” I asked, diverting her attention to the cannas.
“These and the gladioli. But it’s not time yet. It can wait till October.”
“Do you want me to do anything about dinner?”
She seemed surprised that I would offer. Usually I didn’t take the initiative about that, but I felt bad about interrupting her big speech.
“You can set the table. Daddy’s gone to get Chinese take-out.”
What were my parents coming to? Was it all because of Ben leaving? Mom stood up and went to clean the garden off her hands. I set the table and put my computer to sleep just as Daddy and Ben both drove in.
We had a lovely dinner, including some vegetarian stuff for Ben. Rhoda was sad. Her little boy was all grown up and leaving her.
“I’ll be back,” he assured her. “Probably for Thanksgiving, if not sooner. And you can come and visit any time.”
“Why, thank you. We’ll do that,” she said.
That night I went to bed still trying to think of a name for my campaign.