Blue looked away. Tried to imagine saying the words out loud. But there was so much resistance, like a weighted dumbbell sitting on her chest, asphyxiating the words before they could be spoken. She couldn’t have pushed them out even if she wanted to. She thought back on that night, her mind stumbling into a darkness black as a grave, tripping over moments of that horror still so alive, so vivid.
“Blue,” Maya said.
The men chasing Hannah up the walkway. Her friends screaming. Though in Blue’s mind there’s just silence, open mouths and fear-lit eyes, their hands and bodies lunging to grab Hannah, pull her in to safety. Henry shouting for someone to get his dad’s rifle in the closet. And then they were falling backward, the door flying open, the men inside the house.
Oh God. She could still taste the hot panic. Sour and corrosive.
Now she forced herself to look at Maya. But instead of being comforted by the new softness she saw in Maya’s eyes, Blue was enraged. Because it was too damn late. It had all come too late and all she wanted was to hurt someone, to stab with words, to discharge all the poison that had been put inside her. All these years she’d held on to the secret, and now what she wanted was to wield it as a weapon. A weapon against Maya for asking her to forgive. A weapon against Renee for deserving no forgiveness. Screw it. Screw them. They wanted her story. Well then, they should get it, they should have to live with it. Renee should have to live with it.
She looked at Renee, saw those darting eyes. Saw the way her arms were wrapped around herself, defended against what Blue might say. The anger Blue felt in that moment acted as a Heimlich maneuver, suddenly propelling the words out of her. She wasn’t going to let her escape this again.
“We ran.” She jammed her finger toward Renee. “She was in front of me.” Through Henry’s kitchen and out the back patio door. The night air like freedom. The sleeping neighborhood oblivious to their terror.
“They were chasing us. One of them at least. I could feel him behind me but I didn’t want to turn. I just kept my eyes on Renee. She jumped the bushes into the neighbor’s yard. I was right behind her. Running so fucking hard. Thinking if I could just get over those bushes. If I could just...like they were some kind of...magic divider he couldn’t cross. I was right there. He grabbed my shirt. I tried to shake him off but I couldn’t. I was screaming, ‘Renee, Renee!’ And she stopped and turned. I saw her stop and turn. He told her to come back. He told her he’d kill me if she didn’t. Remember that, Renee? Remember him saying that?”
Blue looked away, tears so long unshed, now pooling.
“She looked right at me. I was so scared, so scared.” Blue paused, the weight of the next memory almost too heavy to speak. “Then she turned around and ran.”
The air was thick with their silence.
“Blue,” Renee said, moving toward her now.
Blue backed away. “I watched you go. I watched you leave me there with that...you left me there to die! How could you...how could you just—” She shook her head against the slimy tentacles of memory. Nauseated with emotion but there was no turning back. “He told me he was going to have some fun with me first.”
Hannah’s eyes were wet, tears threatening to spill over.
“Next thing I knew, my face was in the dirt.” Blue could still taste the damp grass when she hit the ground—that familiar smell of childhood play and softball games in center field—only turned dark and wormy as a burial pit. Even now it was the first thing that came to her, that damp green smell, his stale breath, her own rancid fear.
“He flipped me over, pushed my sweatshirt up to my neck, tore at my bra. I fought.” He hadn’t been terribly strong, only just stronger than her own adrenaline-fueled body. “I kept thinking Renee would come back. That help would be coming.” I just need to stall him. “But then he pinned my arms above my head. I tried to kick him. I was thrashing and kicking, trying to get away. He put a knife to my throat.” She hadn’t remembered seeing him hold it, only felt the poke of the blade against her skin. “I begged him to stop. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to do this.’”
He’d pressed it into the thin skin of her clavicle, just enough that she could feel the sting, the tickle of blood tracing its way down her breast.
“Do you know what it felt like to have to say that? To have to beg?” Her voice caught, remembering how she’d loathed the sound of her own whimpering, so meek and cowed, in the face of such revolting evil. “But I had to do it... I had to stall. Because Renee was coming back, right? She wasn’t going to just leave me there. I kept thinking, What’s taking so long? I kept thinking, Hurry! Hurry!” The words looping over and over in her mind, a refrain against his body on top of her, against his sickening odor, his enraging weight. “He pushed up my skirt.” She’d never worn skirts before. But she had that night because she’d dared to believe she could be a pretty girl, had dared to embrace her own femininity in the face of Jack’s attention days before.
“And then...” He’d been removing his belt when he’d stopped suddenly, froze like a squirrel sensing danger. A million times she’d tried to remember what had made him pause, but her mind was a skipping stone, jumping from one disconnected moment to another. What she remembered next was him looking at her, staring deep into her eyes, into her vulnerability, as she lay utterly helpless and exposed beneath him. “He said...” She stopped. Shook her head. She couldn’t say it. How could she say it?
“Blue,” Maya said.
She swallowed. Her body shaking with the force of keeping the words in. “He said, ‘You’re too ugly to fuck anyway,’ and he stood up and ran.”
She looked at her friends.
They stared back, mouths hanging open. A hush over the group like a winter.
“Oh my God,” Maya said.
Blue breathed. It seemed the first time she had done so since she’d started talking. But she didn’t feel better. She didn’t feel purged. She was still, in some way, trapped there, stuck in time, the old film playing to its inevitable end, only to start over again. She remembered the relief of weight being removed, not just of his body but of a nightmare ending. Or so she had thought. It was only later, after the adrenaline had worn off and the men were captured, after a plea bargain of second-degree attempted murder had been struck to spare the girls from testifying, after the attention around the case had faded and things had gone back to “normal,” that she’d realized he was still on top of her, all that weight crushing her and the disgusting residue he left on her that made her feel as hideous as he said she was, hideous to the core. One of the worst parts was that it wasn’t even new. He’d just reinforced the belief about herself she’d been raised with.
She turned to Renee. “I waited for you.” She was trying so hard to fight off sobs, to climb over the lump in her throat, to stand solid and big in her anger, not liquefied and reduced by grief. “I waited for you to help me. I believed that you were coming back. That you were my friend. That you were the one person, the one person in my life...” Tears were bubbling over now, burning as they spilled out of her eyes. She wiped them furiously away. “Well, friend, congratulations! He didn’t rape or kill me. Your conscience is clear.”