The engine of the black Lincoln town car purrs like a cat as we glide across Raleigh. The world outside is crisp and white, shrouded with snow. The sky is a leached duck egg blue, practically devoid of all color. In the front seat, the driver adjusts his trim chauffeur’s hat and tries to make eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror. I avoid doing so at all costs, however my carefully crafted blank stare out of the window doesn’t deter him. “Well, then? What you got planned? A party? Some sort of girly sleepover?”
My eyes snap up and to the left, locking with his watery blue irises in the small expanse of mirror. “I’m sorry? What?”
The driver—now that I’m looking at him, I see he’s older than I originally thought—grins at me. “Yeah, y’know. New Year’s Eve? Bullshit if you high school kids don’t celebrate New Year’s anymore. I know you do. I was cleaning puke out of this car for a week after last year. Gotta say, that get-up’s a little depressing for a party, though. Figured you kids were all still into neon and shit. Looks like you’re going to a fucking funeral.”
I almost laugh. Almost. I’ve clean forgotten that it’s New Year’s Eve.
The car was Dad’s idea. He didn’t think I should have to drive today, and he knew Alex wouldn’t be capable, so he forked out for a professional driver to transport us to the church and then on to the cemetery. Clearly whatever agency Dad used hasn’t passed on the particulars of today’s journey to their driver.
I’ll break into pieces if I have to fill him in. I lean my head against the window beside me and the glass is cold and wet, anchoring me into place. “Yeah, well. You know how it goes,” I mutter. “Fashion’s a fickle thing. One week it’s electric pink. The next, it’s black lace and memento mori.”
“What’s that? Latin?” He grunts. “You Raleigh kids are fancy. Didn’t teach us no Latin at Bellingham.” All of a sudden, he doesn’t sound too impressed. I think I’ve offended him with my use of a foreign language, and a dead one at that. He thinks I’m being pompous. “What are memento mori, anyway? Three-hundred-dollar sneakers?” he grumbles.
I’m so drained, wrecked from night after night of insomnia. I dig deep for the energy necessary to explain that memento mori have nothing to do with sneakers, but I come up empty. For the remainder of the car ride, I close my eyes, head tilted back, resting on the seat behind me, and I pretend to be asleep. Weak, yes, but I’ve realized that sometimes you have to play dead in order to survive.
When we reach Raleigh’s main street, a deep cavern of sadness pulls at me; swarming the snowy sidewalks, gathered in front of the decorated store fronts, the residents of Raleigh are rosy-cheeked and smiling, still drunk on the holidays and the fact that most of them didn’t have to show up for work this morning. The town’s small enough that I recognize a number of faces loitering on the corner in front of the hardware store. They recognize me as I climb out of the Town Car, too, and their festive smiles tactfully fade as I sidle past them, heading around the back of Henry’s to the fire escape that leads to Alex’s front door.
When I was raped in that bathroom, I didn’t want to broadcast what had happened to the world. I told one person, Principal Darhower, who summarily dismissed my accusation as, in his words, a ‘storm in a teacup. Something and nothing.’ I kept my mouth shut after that. No one knew what Jake, Sam and Cillian did to me. They know now. It was impossible to keep the information quiet once I was hospitalized, Jake was arrested, and people started to talk. It came out, all of it, every gory, hideous, ugly detail, and now everyone within a twenty-mile radius of Raleigh knows who I am: Silver Parisi, seventeen years of age, raped, kidnapped, assaulted, attempted murder victim.
Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim.
I hate that word. No matter how hard I reject it, people keep trying to pin it to me like one of those red and white, Hi! My name is_________! stickers. They want me to be broken. If I’m a mess, whimpering and crying in public, then they can get behind my story. They can make sense of it. I was bullied, kicked, punched, spat on, embarrassed and humiliated too many times before Jake dragged my unconscious body out of my house, though. I’d already learned to set my jaw, lift my head high, and dole out a look of defiance that screamed ‘FUCK YOU’ very loudly whenever I felt judgmental eyes on me. That defiance doesn’t sit well with people. It gives them the impression that whatever happened to me couldn’t have been that bad…which is so untrue it’s almost funny. This morning, I keep my head down, avoiding making eye contact with anyone in the first place. No sense in fueling gossip or feeding the rumor mill.
The studded metal steps that lead up to Alex’s place are slippery. I hold onto the handrail nice and tight as I ascend the stairs, and dread seeps into my veins. Alex has been a supercharged magnet over the past week; I’m pulled toward him so fiercely that it sometimes feels as though it physically hurts to be apart from him. At the same time, it also seems like Alex has been doing his level best to push me away. I’ve been both drawn to and repelled by him so badly since the news about Ben that I barely know if I’m coming or going anymore.
I knock on the door—the doorbell hasn’t worked since Alex moved in—and tuck my chin into the collar of my thick wool coat, waiting nervously for him to answer. It’s nine thirty in the morning. The service doesn’t start until ten, but we need to get across town and settled into the church, so we need to leave pretty much immediately.
The door remains closed.
“Come on, Alex,” I mutter under my breath, knocking again, this time with a little more force. If he’s in the shower, we’re going to be late…
Just as I’m about to knock for a third time, the door flies open, sending a cloud of weed smoke and red light billowing out into the early morning. Zander Hawkins greets me with a flat, bored smile. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls basketball shirt underneath a red silk robe that looks like it belongs to a forty-five-year-old woman named Maura. “’S’up Parisi?” He brings a pipe to his lips and takes a deep pull.
This is becoming a really bad habit. Why, whenever I show up at Alex’s place, does Zander Hawkins end up answering the door? He’s like a bad fucking smell that will not go away. “Where is he?” I shove past Zander, making my way down the hallway toward the bedroom, briefly scanning the living room through its open doorway as I pass. Alex might be a hard ass, and he might give off the impression that he will gladly punch a hole through someone’s head so much as look at them, but he’s not what most people expect him to be. He’s meticulously clean—tidy, to the point that even I get embarrassed by my own messiness whenever I’m around him. He needs his environment to be controlled. Everything has its place, everything has an order, which is why I’m so confused when I see the state of the apartment. The place is a fucking shit show.
“What the fuck, Zander? How has this place gotten so trashed? I was here yesterday, for Christ’s sake. It did not look like this then.”
Empty beer bottles; pizza boxes; actual pizza crusts discarded on the coffee table; a pool of something dark red and sticky-looking, half-dried on the hardwood floor outside the bathroom. The place reeks of cigarette smoke.