Five months earlier: May
When Trisha wakes up, the light in Morganne’s bedroom has shifted. It’s early evening. She can smell the cinnamon from her own skin, from the skin of her face, and from her hands, which she used to both apply and remove the facemask Becky had made. She rubs her face with her hands and groggily becomes aware that some movement in the room has woken her up. It’s Becky, noisily clomping on the floor and rattling the doorknob of Morganne’s room.
“Becky. Where you going?” Trisha calls after her. There is an abruptness in Becky’s movements that Trisha has learned to find alarming. This is how Becky moves when she gets into her wild mode, when she does something rash.
Trisha gets up on an elbow on Morganne’s bed. “Becky?” she calls out the door. At some point since she drifted off to sleep, Morganne has gotten up from the floor and lain down on the bed beside her. It’s a single bed and Morganne’s body now takes up most of it, so that, if Trisha moves at all, she’ll tip over the edge of the mattress.
“What? What?” Morganne begins to stir.
There is a bumping sound from the room beside Morganne’s: Becky’s room. Drawers are opening and slamming shut.
“It’s Becky,” Trisha says. “She’s on the move.”
“Fuck around, Becky!” Morganne yells at the walls. She sits up and inchworms to the end of the bed with her heels and her butt. “Becky? Where you going? Hey! Make us another face mask!”
Becky has left the door open and she rushes past the doorway, in her high-waisted jeans and her seashell print shirt she got at Louis last month when the three of them had split on a garbage bag full of pre-owned clothing on Fill A Garbage Bag for Five Dollars Day.
Morganne gets to her feet. “Becky, I don’t like the look of you right now.”
There is no response from Becky. They can hear her clomping around the house. Trisha and Morganne are just entering the kitchen when they see the back door slam and Becky and the seashell shirt blur past the window in the direction of the street.
“Oh, fuck!” Morganne looks at Trisha. Trisha shrugs. They put their shoes on at the back of the house, then run through the downstairs to the front door, to gain a little distance on Becky.
Becky’s a block and a half ahead, walking in quick, firm steps, looking down at the phone in her right hand, then up at the house numbers and street signs. Trisha and Morganne make no attempt to close the gap on the lead she has on them.
“Becky!” Morganne only calls after her once or twice. Becky never turns around. “Oh my fuck I’m tired of this girl’s shit,” Morganne says at one point. But she says it in a quiet voice and Trisha can tell she feels sort of bad about saying it, so she does not respond.
It’s an early evening in May. The lawns of Morganne’s neighbourhood have all greened up. Bicycles propped against the sides of garages. It seemed like daytime when they left Morganne’s house, but the sun has left the sky, and darkness is creeping up fast. They’ve only come a few blocks, but the streets are unfamiliar to Trisha, and as she looks around she sees that the light in the sky has become dim enough that it’s hard to tell west from east. There’s no glowing edge of horizon visible where there must just have been a few minutes ago.
Trisha and Morganne are only about a half a block behind Becky when Becky looks down at her phone a final time, its screen a luminous rectangle in her palm. She looks up at the civic number of a house and juts off the street and up the driveway, down a front walk, and disappears through the front door.
The house is not far from Morganne’s, less than a fifteen-minute walk. It’s a smaller house than Morganne’s, no garage, just a paved driveway along the side. The siding looks brand new: aubergine with white trim. There’s a fenced yard at the back. A garden shed. All of the curtains are closed.
Morganne stops and looks at Trisha. Then she looks across the short distance to the house. “Oh my fuck. Becky. Jesus.” She looks at Trisha.
“Fuck it,” Morganne continues down the street. Trisha keeps up with her.
When they get to the front door of the house, they can hear music booming from inside. The glass panel in the door is rattling with the sound.
This is not the first time Becky has brought them to an unfamiliar house. One time last summer there had been a pool party a boy in one of Becky’s classes had texted her about. She’d dragged Trisha and Morganne there, the two of them complaining to Becky the whole way in the wavering heat, but when they got there it was actually fun. There was a slide and there were other girls there, and nobody was wearing some ridiculous bikini that was just meant to make everything awkward, which is what Trisha had feared. And the parents of the boy whose house it was were home, but they stayed indoors the whole time until they ordered pizza for everyone and came out the back door to the deck by the pool with the pizza boxes stacked up with paper plates and napkins on top.
And just a few months back, in the middle of winter, Becky had convinced Trisha and Morganne to sneak out of Morganne’s house at like 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday night when Trisha was sleeping over. There was some boy waiting for them in a beat-ass car just one block over from Morganne’s house. They were not dressed for the cold, but the boy had the heater blasting and he took them to a party at the house of a girl they all knew from school. Her parents were in Cape Breton for the weekend.
Trisha had a vodka cooler at that party. She got it from a girl at the top of the basement stairs just handing bottled coolers to random people going by.
Morganne drank two beers called stout that had tasted like molasses mixed with ginger ale when Trisha had tried a sip.
There were four or five guys there from some hockey team or other and it seemed like Morganne sort of knew them and they were trying to prove how tough they were by drinking stout. “This is a man’s drink,” this big guy with square shoulders and a square head was saying as he snapped the metal cap off the glass mouth of the bottle. Morganne took the open one from his hand and started drinking it like he’d offered it to her. And when he reached around to the counter behind him and took another bottle with the cap still on it, Morganne said, “Thanks. I’ll take that for later,” and she walked off with that one, too.
Trisha and Morganne had lost sight of Becky for a while. She went down a hallway with the guy who had driven them there, and it was almost an hour before they met up with her again.
But the boy who’d taken them there had driven them back to Morganne’s house when they asked him to, after Morganne made him swear he had not been drinking. And they got back into their beds and slept until after twelve noon, as they might have done anyway.
So Trisha does not feel alarmed or afraid as she and Morganne stand on the doorstep of the house that Becky has led them to this early May evening as the sky darkens into night. She is pissed off at not being consulted or told where Becky might be headed. She is a little embarrassed because of the way she and Morganne are dressed, in shorts and T-shirts that are starting to be not warm enough for how fast the air is cooling down.
“For fuck sakes.” Morganne hugs herself against the cold. The light over the door is on, and as the sky darkens, Trisha and Morganne are getting reflections of themselves in the glass of the door. Morganne puts a hand up to the glass to shadow herself from her own reflection and peers inside.
Trisha can see down a hallway, to where it seems some people are gathered in a kitchen. She can’t see Becky, but there are people moving about and it’s hard to make out any individual faces.
“Morganne.” Trisha grasps her friend by the upper arm. Morganne turns toward her with an angry look frozen on her face. “Let’s go back,” Trisha says. “I’m tired. Whatever this is, I don’t have it in me.”
“Becky is in there,” Morganne says.
The sound of whooping comes through the walls of the closed-up house.
“Do you have any idea whose house this is?” Trisha says.
Morganne shakes her head and shrugs. She presses her face to the door again. “I can’t really see.” She rings the bell a bunch of times before there is a lull in the pounding music inside and the sound of the doorbell finally cuts through it. When someone comes to the door, it is a kid they both know from school. He’s older than them, and Trisha can’t think of his name. It seems like he’s the older brother of someone in their grade, but she can’t quite think who.
“Hey, girls!” he shouts in a too-loud voice.
His eyes blink slowly, drunkenly. He has an arm across the door frame, and in the sudden charge of pounding, featureless beats that pour out the door, Trisha smells cannabis, alcohol, Axe body spray, and vomit.
There is a commotion just over the guy’s shoulder. “Fuck all you guys! You fucking assholes!” A very angry girl—young woman, Trisha corrects herself—comes careening out the door. She wears a tank top with a university name on it Trisha does not recognize. She is very drunk and her words are slurred as she yells.
“You fucking pricks! I fucking hate you!” Her voice is up into a pitch that Trisha can hear is tearing at the young woman’s throat.
The drunk boy in the doorway pays her no mind. “Come on in, girls,” he says to Morganne and Trisha.
Trisha turns her head to watch the young woman in the tank top walk in angry, unsteady steps down the driveway, away from the light over the door and into the dark.
“Where’s Becky!” Morganne demands. Trisha remains on the landing as Morganne goes through the door. The guy who answered the door staggers back a step into the wall behind him and regains his balance. The door clicks shut in Trisha’s face and the volume of the music again pushes against it. Morganne is a head taller than the drunk guy she is talking to. Where’s Becky?! Trisha can read Morganne’s lips through the closed door.
The glass door rattles against its frame with the pounding of the music. Trisha wants to leave, but she does not want to leave without her friends. She opens the door and steps inside so she can get Morganne to hear her, to listen.
The music is almost deafening. When the door seals over behind her, the music is so loud she feels the pressure of it against her chest.
Moments before, when she was looking in through the front door, Trisha had seen people moving. Now suddenly she can’t see a soul. “Morganne!” she yells. But the music swallows the sound. She begins walking slowly through the house.
There is a massive TV in the front room on her right. It’s tuned to the aquarium channel, which offers a jarringly peaceful visual counterpoint to the blasting electronic beat of the dance music that is pounding out of the same room. The room is empty of people and the sound of the music recedes somewhat as she nears the kitchen.
There are stylish new cupboards in the kitchen. And an expensive looking countertop that could have been from some home reno show. On the right, the table is wooden. A honey-coloured grain. There are empty beer and vodka cooler bottles and half-empty tumblers with mixed drinks on the table’s surface.
The cupboard and sink area open out on the right as Trisha reaches the kitchen and stands on the tile floor. There are five or six people wedged in there, lit by the rectangular fixture overhead and by the light of the open fridge door. Morganne is talking to a guy who looks too old to be at a high school party. He has a high forehead and black hair that is cropped close at the back and sides but stands up a bit from the top of his head and flops out front in a tuft that reaches halfway to his eyebrows.
Morganne has a smile on her face that looks like she is fighting against it, like she wants to not like this guy she is talking to, but can’t help thinking he is cute and being flattered by his attention. She has a drink in her hand. It is gold in colour, like ginger ale. And the black-haired guy, who is a little taller than Morganne, is backing away from her every few seconds so he can look down and check out her body.
There’s a boy Trisha recognizes behind Morganne. Carl? Kyle? is drunkenly slumped against the electric range. His eyes are locked onto Morganne’s rear end in her Lulu shorts.
“Trisha!” Morganne shouts over the music. She’s only been out of Trisha’s sight for like a minute, but she sounds sort of drunk. Or maybe it is just the pitch and volume of voice she has to use to be heard above the noise that makes her sound that way.
“This is Henry!” Morganne shouts. She puts out her arm in the direction of the guy with the black hair. Henry takes a microsecond to scan Trisha’s body before he says hi. He places a hand familiarly on Morganne’s shoulder and rests his gaze back on her.
“Morganne! Morganne!” Trisha shouts to get her friend’s attention, which is locked in a dumb grin on black-haired Henry’s face.
“Morganne. Where’s Becky?”
“What?” Morganne shouts back.
“Oh my fuck. Just”—Trisha puts a hand up in Henry’s face—“just a minute.” She grabs Morganne by the shoulders and turns her around, pulls her all the way to the far end of the kitchen, past Carl/Kyle at the stove, and gets right up in Morganne’s attention.
“Where the fuck is Becky, Morganne? And who is that guy you’re talking to? He’s old.”
“Becky’s here. You saw her come in here. We’ll find her. Let’s just have one drink.”
She holds up the tumbler with the gold liquid. “Let’s just have one drink. We can talk to Henry. Henry seems nice. One drink. Talk to Henry. Then we find Becky and go.”
“We don’t even know these people.”
Morganne points at Carl/Kyle. “We know him.”
Trisha shakes her head and rolls her eyes.
“Are you drunk, Morganne? How can you be drunk already?”
“What are you, a fucking cop? No, officer. Let me at that Breathalyzer.”
“This is fucked up, Morganne. How old is that Henry guy, even?”
“He’s like…seventeen…eighteen.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now? That guy is like twenty.”
“I neglected to ask for his ID, officer.”
“COME ON, MORGANNE!” Trisha shouts. She is so close she can feel the heat of Morganne’s body.
Suddenly Morganne’s demeanour changes. She appears serious and sober and she speaks in a reasonable tone, though she still has to compete with the volume of the music coming from the living room.
“Look. This is all good. I’ve got a drink. I’ll finish the drink. We’ll get Becky. We’ll go. We’re like six blocks from my house. What can happen? We’re fine.”
Trisha can tell when Morganne is drunk and faking sober, and this is what she sounds like when she does it. But how can she be drunk already? They’ve just got here.
“I want to talk to Henry. My drink is half gone.” She holds up the glass. “When it’s gone, we’ll go.”
Trisha closes her eyes and shakes her head in frustration. “I don’t know who I’m more pissed off at right now, you or Becky.” She takes a big breath. “Finish your drink and then let’s go.”
“Wicked,” Morganne says.
Henry is waiting for them when they get back to the other end of the kitchen. He has moved over to a chair at the table, where he has a gold-coloured drink in a glass for himself and another one poured for Trisha. He stands up as Trisha and Morganne approach.
“What’s your name, again?” he shouts at Trisha and holds out the drink for her to take.
“I never said my name,” Trisha says.
“What?” he leans in close.
Trisha closes her eyes and breathes. “Trisha,” she says.
“Here,” he says. “Have one of these.”
She takes the drink and rests it on the table top. There is a chair in the farthest corner of the kitchen, and a window that looks out at the backyard. Trisha sits in the chair and looks out the window. She thinks she sees the outline of a fence out there, diminishing against the darkness as it moves away from the house.
Morganne is at the other end of the table, her back against the same wall as Trisha’s. Henry’s chair is pulled in close to Morganne. Their drinks are beside them on the table, the golden liquid trembling slightly with the pounding beats. Morganne throws her head back in laughter and Henry moves in closer on her. His hands are down below the level of the table top, where Trisha can’t see them. But she thinks he might have both hands at the sides of Morganne’s legs now.
Morganne picks up her drink. She looks over to Trisha and motions with her glass for Trisha to pick up hers.
“Twenty minutes!” Morganne shouts. Trisha can barely hear the words, but she can read Morganne’s lips.
Trisha holds up her drink in Morganne’s direction and she and Morganne both put the drinks to their lips at the same time.
Trisha turns to the window, but this time all she can see is her own face in the lit kitchen reflected against the darkness outside. The drink has a strange peppery burn to it and she smacks her lips and feels her teeth with the end of her tongue.
Behind her own reflection, she can see Morganne again, raising her glass for them both to drink. Trisha turns and raises her glass and she and Morganne drink again.
“Twenty minutes!” Morganne says. But that does not make sense, because she’s already said twenty minutes.
“Wait a minute!” Trisha tries to say. But her mouth has gone weird and it sounds more like she’s said watermelon. She thinks that is funny and she rests her head on the table so she can laugh without tiring herself out.
She’s not sure how long she spent in the hospital. It cannot have been more than a few days. She spent a lot of that time asleep. Or half asleep. They’d probably had her drugged out with pain meds.
She has no memory of how she got there. Ambulance? Police car? Morganne’s mom? At the point where her memory picks up, her mother is already in the room with her. And like a dream, Trisha is just letting things happen to her. Doctors and nurses examine her, treat her abrasions with disinfectants. She says yes to everything and passively goes through it all. Her mother sits on a chair in a corner of the room, her face in her hands, sobbing, it seems, non-stop. But it’s not long before Trisha reaches her limit.
“I can’t stay here,” she remembers telling her mother. A nurse had just left the room. “I need to be home right now.”
For days after she gets released back to her mother’s house, Trisha lies in bed, the curtains pulled across the window. She cannot bear for the light to be turned on. When her mother opens the door to her bedroom, she must first shut off the light in the hallway. If her mother forgets and that light enters the room, the pain behind Trisha’s eyes is like a bomb going off in slow motion.
She is unable to get out of bed for anything but a wobbly trip to the bathroom with her mom under one arm. She has bruises on her face and neck that her mom can see. But when she is alone in the bathroom, only she can see the fist-sized circles on the insides of her thighs. Her hips ache from deep inside the joints. She has marks on her lower ribs that are whole handprints. When she twists her neck around, she can see parallel finger marks. High up on her ribs, where Trisha herself cannot see, there are tender spots that make it hard to find any comfortable position to lie down in.
She feels so many painful feelings at once. Anger. Terror. Hurt. Frustration with herself. She should have grabbed Morganne’s arm while they were still standing outside that front door and marched right back to the street with her. She should have told Morganne to call her mom. She should have dialled 911 as soon as Morganne went through that damn front door.
She feels broken down. Crushed shut. She feels unable to speak to her mother, to the police when they come stomping into her bedroom. People ask questions and they are like ghosts before her, wavering like heat mirages in a movie. Their lips move, but their microphones are turned off. She can hear the sounds of the room, but not the voices of the people in it.
She knows what they want her to say. They want to hear names. They want her to say the details. Identifying features. They know it all, anyway. They just want one more person to say it. For corroboration. Like corroboration is going to make any difference now.
A couple of times she opens her mouth, thinking: Now I can do it. Now I can tell it all. But everything swirls inside her like a poisonous infection. A flash of Becky’s body naked before she even realizes it’s Becky. The sound of Morganne screaming that rises through a lull in the pounding music. The blur of pain, repulsive smells, blows, and hateful words.
She knows the address. She knows a name she heard inside the house. There was at least one kid from her school. But as the thought of speaking about it tips toward action, as the cop by the bed leans forward, as her mother’s eyebrows rise expectantly, all the physical pains in her body tighten like a vise. The prospect of speaking becomes cataclysmic, as though it will cause anything that has not broken in her already to burst. Get the boys, the men. The man. Get those bastards to tell. Torture them the way she is being tortured now. That will get them talking. Fuck the guy who said his name was Henry. Literally fuck him. Tear him up inside. Tear them all up inside. Grab their throats and choke them. Leave marks on their skin. The boys who used a house as a rape trap. Punch their faces to make them comply. Call them hateful names. Pull their hair. Make them drink a poisoned drink that will turn their lives into a nightmare, a death spiral, a ghastly spasm. Share their pictures on social media. Make raping them a joke. Turn them into a local viral sensation.
No. She will not open her mouth to speak of this. If she is going to die from what they did to her, she will not help by doubling the pain, by making herself go through again what they’d already made her go through. This is a trick. It’s a trick to hurt her. It’s a trick to kill her. She’ll open her mouth and everything she has left, everything she has that is alive, everything she has that links her to a continuing place among the living: all of that will come bursting out of her. The poison will break her on the way out.
The only person she actually speaks to at first, for days, is Morganne. And they are only in touch through their phones. Becky has gone silent. She’s ghosting the shit out of them.
The first contact she has with Morganne after the assault is a pic Morganne sends through Snapchat. It shows Morganne’s swollen, bruised face. Her mouth is open in a deliberate snarl that shows her teeth. It is hard to tell through the blurry pic, but at least one of Morganne’s upper teeth and one lower one are missing.
Those fuckers broke my teeth! is written in the text band across the photo.
Morganne sends her screenshots of text messages she is getting. More than ten screenshots. First Trisha stops counting. Then she stops looking. They are all so awful.
You dirty thot.
Why don’t you kill yourself. Whore.
You disgust me, you slut.
You are fucking worthless.
You are shit. You are dirt.
Why don’t you let me fuck your drunk ass you dirty whore.
Trisha is broken down, made heavy and unmoving by the pain. She is getting the same kinds of messages, but she finds it easier not to look at them. Morganne is broken open. The pain is just spilling out of her.
Trisha gets text after text from her.
Those bastards.
I want to go back there with a gun and make those fuckers pay.
I can’t talk. My teeth are broken. My mouth is swollen. I think I have a broken rib.
In Snapchat video selfies, the camera is close up on Morganne’s swollen mouth. The dark, jagged squares where some of her teeth are gone. Her voice does not even sound like her. Her words are slurred. She is using a high, loud register that gives her anger a demonic edge. Her voice seems channelled in some frightening way, as though it originates from somewhere outside of her altogether. Or somewhere so deep within that what comes out is next to unrecognizable.
The Snapchat videos all begin with Morganne speaking. So loudly. So much monstrous pain in the voice. “Oh! Trisha! We got raped! They fucking raped us!”
“My life is over! My life is over now!”
“Oh, what they did to me! They violated me! They fucking violated me!”
“I did not consent! We did not consent! Oh, Trisha! This is not okay.”
“I am not okay right now. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay.”
“Where are these fucking haters getting my number!”
She always manages a few words. Clear but so emotionally fraught that they scare the hell out of Trisha. Then, every time, in every brief video, Morganne breaks down with such passion that Trisha’s own stomach muscles tighten and ache in sympathy.
She convinces Morganne to shut down her texting account. It’s just giving evil a way in. They open a two-person Messenger conversation. They try to get Becky in the group, but there is no word from her.
Fuck. Morganne. Where is Becky? Trisha manages.
My mom won’t tell me, Morganne writes back. She’s not here. She’s not at my house. Our lives are over, Trisha. My life is over.
Stop saying your life is over.
It is. It feels like it is.
Please. Please. Please. Please stop saying that. Your life is not over.
Watching Morganne is like watching someone on fire. She is beyond her own control. Shouting, screaming. Morganne is incapable of asking how Trisha is. She cannot see past the sheet of flames that engulf her.
“My fucking parents are not fucking helping me right now,” Morganne says over video chat one day. “My dad. Fuck. My dad. My dad thinks this is a fucking legal case.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a legal case when your fucking life is over. It’s a funeral. Fuck! He just thinks it’s a legal case because he’s a lawyer. If he was a carpenter, he’d be building me cabinets.”
It is funny. Even through all the pain. The thing about the cabinets is funny. Trisha laughs in a single burst of breath. That one breath is all she can afford to give the funny part. Morganne is not joking. Morganne video chats her for no other reason than to cry. She says what few words she has to say and then crying is all she has left. She cries loudly. Strongly. She cries like a person in tremendous physical condition. Her core is strong. The muscles there hard as steel. She’s tightened up many times and had Trisha put her hand there, high on her stomach, just below the ribs. She cries in long syllables that begin as though they will lead to further words: Oh! Ah! This experience has opened her like a full-body wound. And for a few days after the assault, Trisha gets to see all that raw pain come out of her friend. She gets to hear it, hear the pain.
“Look at this!” Morganne says in one of her Snapchat videos. She holds up her hand to show the knuckles swollen and barked, scabbing over. “That fucker Henry? I know it’s not even his real name. He got this bad boy in the face.” She opens and closes the fist slowly and turns it in the light. “Oh, yeah. I felt that connect. And so did he.”
Then Morganne’s mom takes away her phone. First she shuts down the data package. Morganne switches over to Wi-Fi and it takes her mother a day to catch up to that.
And then Trisha is on her own. Becky remains completely silent. Morganne is out of reach, but she manages to get one last message through on Messenger: Mom taking phone. And that is the end.
Trisha still has hundreds of hateful messages coming every day. She’s shut down her Snapchat. She’s shut down her Facebook. Her memories of what happened are fragmentary, almost non-existent. The photos people send her are meant as weapons. And they do wound her. At first she feels she has to look at them. She cannot help herself. She wants to know. She needs to know. She has a right. For all she knows, hundreds, thousands of people are looking at pictures of her naked body, sharing them through texts and group chats and direct messages. She needs to know what is out there. She needs to know what the world is looking at. She needs to know what it is based on, all the hatred now directed at her.
With Morganne out of reach, and with, it seems, the whole rest of the world turned against her, she decides to give away her cellphone. She lets it run down to 3 percent, and is about to password lock it and give it to her mother when her mother flips.
She comes into Trisha’s room, sees that Trisha’s got the phone going and that she’s been crying. Without speaking, she snatches Trisha’s phone and throws it hard against the laminate floor. The phone was the only light in there, and when it blacks out, Trisha’s mom goes fumbling for the light switch.
“Mom!” Trisha says. She does not care about the phone. She was relieved to hear the crack it made against the flooring, a blow she is sure was fatal. But her mother’s face looks crazy when the light comes on. And she makes a terrible grunting noise as she jumps and stomps on the phone. A wild, animal sort of sound that is so full of anger and sadness and desperation. And when she stops jumping, Trisha can see the blood-smeared floor and the wound that has opened up on her mom’s foot. And her mother is face down on the floor in a shapeless heap, sobbing as though the world has come apart.
Without a phone, Trisha’s life contracts to the room she is in. Her bedroom. The hallway to the bathroom. The bathroom, the hallway, the bedroom. The bed. She can’t eat. She is afraid of putting anything solid in her mouth. After seeing Morganne’s broken teeth, her own mouth aches as though her teeth, too, are broken. She has long, uneventful dreams that involve probing her own mouth with the handle end of a dessert spoon, looking for secret broken teeth, but breaking teeth, one after the other, by accident, with the spoon.
She is treated and released from hospital, a phrase she hears on the radio and finds herself thinking about before she even realizes it refers to her. She is a news story. What happened to the three of them is all over the media, though there is a publication ban on their names. “Three sixteen-year-old females,” they are being called. She hates being called a female. It makes her feel like an animal. Why can’t they say girls. Why can’t they say young women. Why can’t they say involuntary porn stars. Why can’t they say three sixteen-year-old owners of highly sexualized body parts? Why can’t they shut the fuck up?
“Charges are being laid,” they say. But they don’t say against who. The only people mentioned in the report are the girls who got attacked. So it makes it sound like the girls are being charged for their own assault.
She sleeps briefly, then wakes up and lies in bed for hours, in a drowsy state of brain fog, uncertain whether she has any teeth in her mouth. She is thirsty a lot. She drinks water at first. A homemade smoothie through a straw. Her mother leaves solid food on a folding tray at her bedside. She cannot stand the thought of having it go into her mouth. She is sure it will snap her teeth off like pieces of chalk. She feels woozy even looking at it. She drinks Dairy Queen milkshakes. Herbal tea after it cools. A clear soup in a broad-lipped cup. Tomato soup from a bowl, no spoon. Beef broth with tiny chunks of vegetable in it: pieces of carrot and celery a quarter the size of a sugar cube.
She curls into a tight ball, pulls the covers over her head, and sleeps through darkness and light. Sounds come to her from other parts of the house. Her mother on the phone. Male voices in the kitchen, probably police. The television. One day her mother comes into the room with the cordless phone from the living room.
“Trisha,” she whispers. Trisha is already having a terrible response to her own name. It puts a knot in her gut just to hear it. It goes through her skull like a nail. It is going to have to go, she knows it, though she has yet to put those thoughts into words.
“Trisha, it’s your brother. It’s Simon. He’s on the phone from Alberta. Won’t you talk to him?”
She pulls the blankets back from across her face. She looks up at her mother. She shakes her head slowly and pulls up the blankets again, covering her whole head.
Sometimes she hears the voice of her Uncle Ray down the hallway from the kitchen. There is a slow sureness to Ray’s voice. She cannot make out any words. But he says a short something. Then he pauses a long time and says another short thing. He’s come there to reassure her mother. Trisha can hear that in his tone. But he does not come into her room. And she does not want Uncle Ray to see her in the condition she is now in. So when she hears his voice, she does what she does in response to any voice: she pulls the covers over her head and waits for the voice to go away.
One day comes a commotion. It starts in the kitchen. Someone has come to the door. She hears her mother’s voice. Her mother sounds alarmed. More alarmed than she has in days. There is a disagreement. After a long back and forth between her mother and whoever it is who’s come with something extraordinary to say, her mother’s footsteps come down the hallway. Her bedroom door swings quickly back on the hinges. Her mother comes in, sits on the edge of her bed. Trisha wants the door closed. She is raising a finger to point at it when her mother takes a deep, dramatic breath and says, “Oh, Pattycakes. I’ve got terrible news.” Pattycakes. Trisha sits up in bed. She knows what it is. What else can it be?
Her mother says the name: “Becky.” Trisha tries to stop listening after the single word. But her mother keeps going. She hears the word gone. Then her mother gets the nerve together to speak clearly. “Dead.” And finally: “Suicide.”
She sees the puzzled look on her mother’s face as her own hand goes up to her mouth. She runs the tips of her fingers against the crescent of her upper teeth and pushes firmly to check they are all present and firmly rooted. She does the same thing to the bottom teeth. Then she puts her head on the pillow and pulls the covers up over her head. She sticks her right hand into her mouth sideways, feels the meat at the root of the thumb against her lips. She clamps the flesh there in her teeth and bites as hard as she can. She bites until the pain runs up her arm to the shoulder and her whole right side feels a twitching, numb paralysis. She bites hard until her jaw begins to ache and until she tastes the metallic taste of her own blood come trickling back across her tongue. Becky! She knows her mouth wants to scream the name. But she will not allow it. The harder she feels the urge to scream, the harder she bites her hand.
She wants Becky back. She wants to see Morganne. She wants her phone so she can try to get through. She wants the last week back. She wants to go to Morganne’s bedroom on the afternoon before the so-called party, the rape party, the rapety. She wants to stand up from the bed and smash the fuck out of Becky’s phone and whatever that creepy guy was telling her on Tinder. She wants to hold Morganne. To tell her: Let’s not follow behind Becky. Let’s run ahead and stop her. Let’s drag her back to your house. We can lock her in the bathroom. It’ll be funny as hell. Let’s watch Sharknado on Netflix. Let’s look at Khloé Kardashian’s Instagram and laugh. Let’s make another honey and cinnamon face mask. Let’s go swimming. Let’s go running. Let’s call your fucking volleyball team and break into the gym and get arrested for having an illegal volleyball game! Let’s not die! Morganne! Let’s not kill ourselves! Let’s not let those bastards win!