“Aww, your room is cute,” Blythe says.
“Can you stop calling everything I do cute?”
“You are cute, Ali. Can I have a tour? Show me everything. I want to see everything.”
I look at her strangely, because I don’t know exactly what that means, but I laugh and show her all of the main points of my life. The third place ribbon I won the year I was on the swim team. The old dollhouse I had with the super put-together nuclear family.
“What do you keep under there?” She’s staring at the black boxes under my bed. They’re filled with my stupid pictures of Sean Nessel. I never finished ripping up all the scrapbook pictures.
“Nothing is under the bed.”
“There’s always something under the bed. No one has nothing under their bed. And you have black boxes.”
Blythe bends down on the floor and eyes the boxes. She looks up at me with puppy dog eyes and smiles sideways. “Ali. There are secrets packed away in these boxes, aren’t there?”
“Honestly, it’s nothing.”
“Oh my God, I have to see now.”
She pulls at one of the boxes, laughing. She thinks it’s something embarrassing from my childhood, and because Blythe Jensen isn’t used to hearing no from anyone, she won’t take no from me. I’m telling her to stop. She’s not listening.
“You said you had to talk about your mother!” I say now, my voice shaking. I shove her back with my foot and then try to block her with my thigh down to the ground. I’m all contorted in front of her, between her and the black boxes filled with photos of Sean Nessel.
She crawls away, coughing because I guess I got her in the belly.
“Seriously, Ali, what the fuck?”
“What the fuck with you? I told you not to look at those boxes and you—you just can’t stop.”
“I didn’t know it was so serious. I thought you were doing your Ali snarky thing.”
“It’s pictures of Sean Nessel if you really want to know. I was in love with him. Stupid me. So in love with him. I used to clip pictures of him. I used to clip out everything he did.”
Does hiding it matter anymore? It just makes me look crazier than I already am. What am I trying to protect anyway? Myself? I’ve already lost it all. I drag one of the boxes out and dump it in front of her. All the cutout hearts and cutout tiny stars and the black paper and the glitter and the markers and the newspaper clips and the printouts. The feathers and gold ribbon that I used to line the book.
“Here it is. Here it all is. My life before that horrible night. This was everything. Everything that I dreamed of is here right in this box and now it’s just nothing.” I start ripping up collages and pictures. Just tossing them to the side.
I see that I’ve freaked out Blythe now. I’m crying and she’s just sitting there on her knees, not realizing what she got into with me and this black box thing. She’s going to leave. She’ll leave and we’ll never talk again.
But she takes a deep breath instead and stares at me. She’s not laughing anymore.
BLYTHE
I want to tell her everything. I want to tell her how Sean cried to me. That I understand her having a whole box filled with photos with idiotic hearts glued to the edges. I want to admit that I have this weird loyalty toward him that I don’t entirely understand. That my friends don’t entirely understand. My boyfriend’s best friend. That I’ve become his confidant. I recognize the collage books and I know what it feels like to be obsessed with someone. I get it. Some of Ali, in a way, reminds me of Dev. So honest and good. Her face, the way she’s so scrunched up and confused. It reminds me of how Dev gets frustrated about the injustices of the world. It makes me want to tell her things.
She’s crying and I feel bad. It’s a soft cry. Her father is downstairs, and I know she doesn’t want him to hear.
“Have you ever heard of something called the Initiation?”
“A little. I always thought it was a rumor.”
“Not a rumor. It’s a thing that happens when you’re in the ninth grade. And you have to be really hot.”
She laughs, snorting out her tears. “Oh, I guess I wasn’t really hot.”
“Not hot. You have to be . . . you have to be developed. You have to seem older. You have to seem like you’re down for anything.”
Ali sits back, wraps her arms around her knees.
“I was asked to be in the Initiation. You get asked by senior girls. And I stood in a room with a bunch of senior boys. Me and Donnie. We . . . we sat on the floor. Got on our knees. And we . . . you know.”
But Ali is staring at me. She’s not filling in the blanks.
“Know what? What do I know? What did you do?”
“You really never heard this, Ali?”
“I heard that girls get chosen and people hook up.”
“It’s more than that. It’s like we walk into this room. And all the guys are sitting there on chairs. They’re all smiling, but they’re not supposed to. My initiation leader, Amanda Shire, is yelling at them. Like a dominatrix or something. ‘Get that smile off your face. I’m going to smack it off your face, you pervs.’”
And it’s true, everything I’m telling her. I remember thinking to myself when I walked in there, all of us in a straight line, that maybe this won’t be so bad because Amanda Shire has the whole thing under control. Maybe it’s even a joke, I thought. Maybe it won’t happen at all.
“And then she reads out all these rules. She starts saying, ‘No touching. Keep your hands in your lap. No touching heads. No touching hair. No moaning. Keep your mouths shut. We don’t want to hear a word. Not a fucking word.’”
“And you . . . just stayed there?”
“What was I going to do, run? I thought it was an empowerment thing. I thought we were in charge of it. Amanda Shire. Calling me lil sis. Telling me that this would put me in control of my body. There were a lot of girls getting attacked by guys in school. A lot of cover-ups. And so this was her antidote. She said it would put us in charge of the act. Get it out in the open so that we were no longer conquests.
“But I knew that was a lie. That was a lie right when I stepped in front of Kramer, this senior. He smirked. Jittery. His nails bitten down to the edge like some attention deficit hyperactive maniac.
“‘Stop smiling, Kramer,’ Amanda Shire was saying. ‘I’m going to tell her to cut it off.’ This made them all laugh more. They loved it. They loved the challenge of it.
“She was like a drill sergeant. ‘Get on your knees, girls. Guys, unzip your shorts. Do not pull down your pants. If you pull down your pants, you’re out of here.’ I sat on my knees and looked over at Donnie, who sat on her knees, staring at me like what are we doing here. Her face blank when the guy in front of her pulled it out. Jason something. I can’t even remember his last name. Isn’t it weird how we blank out those details?