IT’S THE LONGEST WEEK OF my life. Every morning, I wake up at six o’clock because my body thinks I should be going to practice or going to the gym, and every morning, I try to go back to sleep until I realize that I have to go to the bathroom, and then there’s no going back. The day must be faced, and I insist on doing it in clothes I would leave the house in, even though I have no intention of actually leaving the house. I leave my uniform in my closet, and miss it all day long.
Mum has taken the week off work. I don’t know if it’s compassionate leave or if she took more holiday time or if she just told them she wasn’t coming in, and since they know what happened, they didn’t try to stop her. I suspect it’s the latter. Dad and I have reached a détente, that’s not so much a détente as me telling him that I needed him to hug me, so now he does. All the time. We all sit around the table at breakfast and dinner, and try to figure out how it works now. None of us are sure. It’s probably the scariest part of the whole thing so far. Words have changed meaning for my parents too, but the translation seems harder for them. Their words have no emotion or too much emotion or the wrong emotion. Not only am I broken, I’ve broken my parents.
Polly comes over a lot, and we spend time in the yard because it’s still warm out and winter is coming. She jumps on the trampoline, and I watch with longing as she reels off one effortless back layout after another. When I look at her, I forget that I should be afraid of six of my teammates. I forget that any one of them might be guilty. I forget that I am damaged and remember that I love to fly. Mallory comes over a lot too, but her visits are shorter. She has chores on top of her practice schedule, but she is scrupulous about keeping promises, and she promised me homework. By Wednesday, I’m starting to think that Polly was right, and staying home this week was a mistake, but I really doubt my parents would have let me out of their sight. I’m still not convinced they’ll let me go to school on Monday.
They don’t hover, exactly, but one or both of my parents is always there. It’s just shy of being annoying. It will definitely be annoying if they try to stop me going back to school. We don’t talk about therapy or my looming test. I think we’re all waiting on the result before we think any further than Sunday. That works for me, but I can already tell I’m falling behind in my classes, and I don’t like being this far out of it a week into school.
On Thursday, Polly has to watch her siblings, so it’s just Mallory and me in the afternoon. She’s very skittish when I answer the door. My mother is in the kitchen, making dinner and pretending to be normal. It’s the opposite of normal, though, because we’ve had more home-cooked meals this week than I think I’ve ever had in my whole life. On top of Mum’s cooking, neighbours keep bringing casseroles over. I answered the door the first time, and Mrs. MacLennan practically wet herself trying to be nice while also extracting the most amount of gossip possible from “Here is a tuna casserole” and “Thank you, did you label the dish?” After that I let Mum answer the door unless it was Polly or Mal, and the food just goes straight to the freezer. Like a wake. Like someone had died. We had the tuna casserole for dinner yesterday, and afterwards I spent fifteen minutes throwing it back up. You’re not supposed to eat your own funeral food. I think it’s bad karma or something. So now they just pile up because Mum refuses to throw out things that are still edible.
Anyway, Mallory is clearly upset about something. I know I have about ten seconds to decide whether I want to deal with it. I can just take the homework and shut the door, or I can invite her in. I didn’t used to overthink my choices quite so much. Then someone made what I’ve always been told is a very important choice for me, and now I tend to overthink everything else.
“Hey, Mallory!” I say, because I really am glad to see her. I mean, I’m not thrilled about the homework, but Mallory is normal and normal is good.
Except Mallory is not any more normal than whatever my mother is cooking. I invite her in anyway.
“What is it?” I ask, once we’re upstairs in my bedroom. I don’t close the door. Mum and Dad don’t like my door closed anymore. They worry.
“Oh,” Mallory stutters. She almost never stutters anymore. “I-I just wanted to tell you—I just thought—Don’t, um, don’t check your Facebook, okay?”
“What?” Of all the things I was expecting, advice on social media was certainly far down the list.
“Your Facebook,” she repeats, voice stronger. “Probably you should just stay off the whole internet. For a while.”
“Why?” Polly and I communicate almost entirely by text or phone, and I don’t really live and die by Facebook. Still, at that exact moment, I want to go online more than I’ve ever wanted anything. Mallory seems to detect her mistake.
“Oh, shit,” she says. “I’ve just made it worse.”
“Made what worse?”
“You know how—I mean, you knew there’d be rumours, right?” she asks. I nod. “Well, I did my best. Every time I heard someone, I would tell them that you didn’t—that it was a crime.”
I am constantly surprised, these days, at the creative ways by which people will avoid saying “you were raped.” Everyone’s broken where that word is concerned.
“Mal,” I say. “Just say it.”
“I told everyone about the roofies. How they work; make you sleepy and take your memory and stop you from fighting back. I told them all. But I’m not Polly. People don’t listen to me.”
“People listen to you,” I tell her. “They just don’t fear you.”
“But they didn’t listen to me,” she says. She’s nearing hysterics, and I feel oddly calm. If I ask her to stop, she will stop. I will remain unknowing, and it will kill her, but she will stop.
I don’t ask her to stop.
“Mallory,” I say again. “Just tell me.”
“Leo told everyone you spent two weeks flirting with every boy at the camp but him,” she blurts. “And Jenny said she saw a huge box of condoms in your suitcase.”
It takes a moment, a moment in which I remember how everything used to make sense, and how it didn’t used to take me a moment to figure things out, and then I realize what my Facebook is going to say. What everyone is going to say.
“Oh.” My voice wasn’t always this small, hurt thing. Once upon a time, it rang in the rafters. I think that story might be over though. I think it drowned in Lake Manitouwabing. “Oh no.”
“I’m sorry,” Mallory says again. “I did my best.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I find that I mean it. In my bedroom, leaning back against the headboard with my knees pulled in, it’s easier to find the parts of me that used to be brave. “Thank you for trying.”
Mallory is popular enough, but she is shy. She’s a cheerleader because she loves to dance, and because even though she doesn’t like free fall, when she’s in a lift, she can hold a pose, one foot in someone else’s hand, forever. And this week, she stood up for me, over and over again. And now she thinks she has failed.
“Why would Jenny lie like that?” she asks.
“She’s not lying,” I say, and my throat feels sick. I’m done vomiting, though. I have decided. The first year at camp, when the other campers found out my name was Winters, they tried to nickname me the Ice Queen. It didn’t stick, mostly because I am so darn cheerful. I think being ice, like a glacier, would be useful right now. Maybe it’s time to embrace it.
“What?” Mallory demands.
“If you’re nice to a boy, they think you’re flirting. I let all kind of boys lift me up, throw me around and catch me for two weeks!” I tell her. My voice is harsh. Mallory hates to be a flirt. She’ll probably never talk to a boy again, and it’s my fault. “And Leo planted the condoms in my suitcase himself, probably on the bus ride up. I found them, and Jenny saw me before I could hide them again.”
“He’ll come clean, then,” Mallory says. “When he hears that rumour, he’ll know it was his fault, and he’ll tell everyone. They’ll believe him.”
I started dating Leo because it was easy and because it seemed like the thing to do. He kissed me after the championships in the spring, even though we’d only come in fourth place. And he was easy on the eyes. I liked him; he was a dependable teammate, a natural leader for the other guys, but I don’t think I liked him as much as he liked me. I saw the jealousy in his eyes every time another guy touched me at camp, and I did nothing to reassure him. I had fun and I never thought about his feelings, mostly because he was doing the same thing with the girls he was practicing with. He was mad enough that he ended up thrown in the lake, and still I didn’t stop. I should have been a better girlfriend.
I shake my head hard at that last thought, and it feels wrong. It is wrong. I owe Leo McKenna absolutely nothing. He’s the one who lost perspective, who saw me having fun and refused to join in. I did nothing wrong, and he did nothing. It’s as simple as that. If he expects an apology or something like that before he comes clean about the condoms, then he can rot in hell. I did nothing wrong.
For the first time, I feel like a victim without hating myself for it. I raise my chin and look Mallory in the eye. She looks hopeful, but still scared. She’s worried about me, the way everyone is. But I add her to my list anyway. I don’t even feel that mercenary about it. Caledon will do grown-up things my parents can’t, and Polly will kill people if I need them to die, but Mallory will be nice. I know she’ll stand up for me when things get bad. And suddenly I know without a doubt that whether I check my Facebook or not, things are going to get very, very bad.
“I don’t think he will,” I say.
He doesn’t.