“He was protecting Sophia!” I snarl.
“Protecting is one thing. Mindless violence is another. This tape shows the difference very clearly.”
I clutch the tablet and weigh the pros and cons of throwing it into an incinerator, but Nameless laughs.
“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t try it. I have many copies on different harddrives. You’d just be ruining a perfectly good tablet.”
Nameless stands, and I shrink into myself, fully aware again of how locked in this room we are. I grip the nail file, but he just laughs louder.
“I wanted to show you just who you think you’re in love with. He’s not me, that’s for sure. But he’s worse than me. He’s a killer. He’ll hurt you more than I ever did.”
He ducks just in time as I throw the tablet at his head, my chest heaving. It clunks against the wall, leaving an indent in the pink paint.
“Fuck you,” I spit. “No one will ever hurt me more than you did.”
The door behind me suddenly unlocks, and a wild-eyed, afro guy walks in.
“Oh, u-uh, shit. Sorry, wrong room.”
I lunge for the door, but Nameless calls me back.
“It’s been nice talking with you, piggy. I know you don’t like it, but you’ll have to do a lot more of it.”
“Why?” I hiss. He smiles.
“I saw you on the camera feeds, defacing Summers’ office. Even made a few copies of the video for myself. What will the dean think of that, I wonder?”
I run, as far as I can from the room, from the house. When Nameless’ voice finally fades in my head, I collapse on the lawn and throw up on the grass.
-11-
4 Years
0 Weeks
0 Days
Seeing and talking to Nameless is one thing.
Seeing and talking to him the day before the anniversary of his evildoings is too coincidental. He had to have planned that. Or not. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers the exact date everything went to shit. He could probably care less.
In the last few years of my short yet brilliant and extremely fucked up life, I’d take the day off from school, play hooky. I’d walk down to the beach with McDonald’s and count crabs and collect little jewel-colored rocks. I tried to go easy on myself, since on that day no one had gone easy on me. Last year I hadn’t done anything at all, because I was so wrapped up in the war with Jack. It was the only year I’d completely forgotten about it.
Looking back, I should’ve realized the only boy in the world who managed to distract me from my pain was special. Special and worth keeping around. Maybe I knew that subconsciously, because I tried to keep him around in my own way, in my ‘haha-I-planted-drugs-in-your-locker-and-pried-into-your-past’ way, which admittedly probably wasn’t the best way. But I was so out of practice asking people to be my friend, asking them to stay, it was all I could do. Be annoying. Be loud, and people will remember you and maybe hopefully stay.
Maybe hopefully.
‘You try to. You try to stop all these injustices, and save people from them. But you never try to save yourself.’
I shake Kieran’s voice out of my head, and make a quick damage assessment. For obviously working with Nameless by luring me into that room, Heather is now on my shit list permanently, with at least ten red exclamation marks. I can’t trust her, but I don’t think I ever really did to begin with. Nameless is gonna give the feds back the video, and Jack will be in a whole new world of shit. Even better – he has the camera footage of me defacing Summers’ office. I’d considered cameras, but I figured I’d be inside the office, away from the cameras, while I did the defacing. My unquenchable zeal for justice blinded me and I went completely overboard and into the sea but that is honestly nothing new, the only new thing is this time, I could get kicked out of college for it.
College! Collagen! Collage! This isn’t high school. This is the Real World™, waiting for me to slip so it can open its mouth and swallow me whole. College is the end-all-be-all, the big cool thing you’re supposed to do so you can get a degree and put it on your wall or use it as kindling when your student loans eat the money for your heating bill, I guess, and sometimes it helps you get a job but all the upperclassmen at my old high school went to college and got a degree and then worked at American Eagle or Starbucks anyway, so I’m fairly certain it would be more useful as toilet paper, or, if you’re feeling particularly vindictive about your college experience, a maxi pad. I worked hard to be here, didn’t I? I think I did. I can’t exactly remember, it’s a blur of school assignments and your mom jokes and bad fish sticks. If I get kicked out of college I’ll bring shame to my entire family and dad will be disappointed and mom will be happy, probably, and I’ll be sinking my future into the ground with a jackhammer and condemning myself to a life of flipping burgers and blood will probably start raining from the sky or something. Everyone just goes to college. That’s something middle America does, and I’m definitely privileged middle America.
If everyone goes here, why do I feel like I’m a seal in a fishpond?
Why do I need to go to college again? To figure out what I want to do? But I already know what I wanted to do, and that was get out of this state. Get away. Go to Europe. But I couldn’t leave Mom, so I compromised.
I put my feet up on my desk and frown.
Getting kicked out of college is nothing compared to getting arrested for murder.
The tape lingers in my mind, Wren’s young face and Sophia’s healthy face and Jack’s furious, heartbroken one. I wandered right into all that without even considering their feelings. I forced my way down the shittiest, darkest rabbit hole, their rabbit hole, and they somehow tolerated me for it.
If I close my eyes too long, I hear Jack’s screaming again.
If I close my eyes for too long, Nameless’ laughter mixes with it and makes thinking impossible.
My arm throbs, and I remember I have to get the bandage changed, so I head to the nurse’s.
Jemma is a pretty woman with brown hair and big dark eyes like a deer. She sits me down the second I walk in and peels the bandage on my arm back carefully. The smell is rotting flesh and stale cotton balls. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose.
“Well, it’s looking good. You’re taking those antibiotics I gave you, right?”
“I made a candy necklace out of them and I’ve been chewing at it in class.”
She fixes me with a stern gaze, and I sigh.
“Two a day with meals.”
Jemma smiles. “Good. You can’t imagine how dirty a human mouth is and what it can do to a wound.”
I fidget as she dresses my wound, my eyes catching on a fish bowl full of condoms she has on the counter. She unfortunately catches me staring.
“Are you sexually active?” Jemma asks.
“Nay, madame.”
“Do you plan on being sexually active?”
“In the entirety of my future as a living human being I would certainly hope so. But, you know. Things could change. Meteors could strike. The sun could go cold and peanut butter could stop being gross and I could get smart.”
Jemma stares at me forever. Fiveever. Her brown eyes are huge and knowing and for a second I could swear she knows me, knows what I’m all about in a creepy crystal ball way. And then her eyes soften, and I know she knows. She knows what happened, without me saying much at all.
And it makes me angry – angry that I’m so obvious. Angry that I’m too weak to hide it anymore. The bruises and the booze and the flurry of make outs have only made me weaker, and I didn’t want that shit. I wanted to be stronger. Better. More experienced.
“I’ve been having some problems,” I say carefully. Jemma takes out a clipboard slowly, so closely, like she knows she won’t be able to take notes on this at all.
“Where does it hurt?” She asks.
There’s a moment, a moment where I could get up and walk out and leave her to less complicated problems, problems that pills and casts and shots can fix.
>
“I tried shots for my problems, too,” I say finally. “Vodka shots. But it didn’t work because that’s not how it works. You can’t just shoot things over and over and expect them to get better.”
Jenna’s silent, writing fluidly.
“Bad things happen, and you tell yourself that’s life, because you’ve lived a while and you know bad things happen ,and they’ll keep happening, but you try to stay alive even after they do because you know it isn’t all bad, so you keep moving, keep going, try to put space between you and the bad things so you forget about them but they always catch up and then they sit on your back and make you trip while you try to move forward and it sucks,” I knead my forehead with my knuckles. “It just fucking sucks.”
A couple sits out the window below us, holding hands on the bench and I want to be them and kill them at the same time.
“And sometimes you get tripped so much and so hard you just feel like staying down, you know? Like, maybe you deserve to stay down, maybe it’s meant to be. Maybe it’s just easier to stay down, and you don’t have the energy to haul your ass off the ground again at all.”
“It sounds terrible,” Jemma says softly.
“It is! It’s the worst,” I laugh. “It’s everything you don’t want to happen to you. You think you’re strong and that you’ll always love living and want to live, but sometimes you get so tired…”
“You’re tired a lot, then.”
I shrug. “Sometimes. But I’m Isis Blake. I’m the opposite of tired. Derit. Being tired just isn’t something I do.”
“We all do it once in a while, Isis,” Jemma assures me. “No one is an exception.”
“But I’m special!” I whine. “You don’t understand! Crazy shit is my forte and I do stuff, the best stuff, and I never stop moving ever except when I am peeing and even then sometimes not, sidenote: the janitor hates me.”
Jemma tries to hide the laugh-snort behind her hand, eyes twinkling, and suddenly I start laughing too. But it’s a different laugh from the angry short ones I’ve been making lately – it’s loud and happy, and it only gets louder and happier, and it’s light, the lightest thing I’ve done in a long time.
“That wasn’t even my best joke,” I sigh when we both calm down. “And I broke rule numero uno.”
Jemma wipes away a tear. “Which is?”
“Never laugh at your own joke, because that means it’s probably not a very good one and also you look like an easily amused, self-absorbed asshole. Also; it’s grossness.”
“I see what you mean now,” She says. “Someone like you, so vibrant and funny, is rarely tired. It must be so strange for you when you are.”
“It’s like….like losing a leg but trying to run a race anyway,” I say. Jemma nods, then inhales.
“I know this isn’t going to sound very sensitive, and please don’t take this to mean I’m diagnosing you with anything, because I’m not qualified to do that, but does anyone in your family have a history of depression?”
I melt all over the chair dramatically and grumble. “My mom. But I don’t have it!” I protest, sitting straight up. “I swear to you I definitely don’t because I’ve worked really hard to not have it and I’m happy all the time so I don’t have it. Ever. And I never will.”
Jemma nods, and writes on the clipboard, but my words are so hollow and wrong-sounding I burn to fill them up with the truth. I squirrel my hands together and clutch them together tight.
“I had it. Maybe. I think. When I was fourteen.”
“What made you think that?”
“I didn’t like myself. I still don’t a little. But I really didn’t like myself because I was huge and I thought being huge was wrong but it’s not, but when you’re in love and a guy tells you you’re ugly and fat you start to believe it, you know? Also it wasn’t love. Maybe it was. But probably not, because it made me feel horrible, and love’s supposed to make you feel good.”
“Some people say it’s supposed to make you feel good and horrible at the same time.”
“Well, those people are dumb and wrong,” I jut my chin out. “That’s just….that’s just the old-man-poetry-romanticism of it. People like to sound deep so they say pain is a part of love but it’s not. Love is –”
"There is nothing about it that is ugly," Jack says. "May I?"
I hesitate, and nod. He reaches around and brings my forearm up, gently running his fingers over the cigarette burns on my wrist. He traces around each circle with his thumb gently, so gently.
"It looks like a galaxy," He smiles. "Full of stars and supernovas and conductive cryogeysers and a lot of wonderful science things I could go on to list that would probably bore the hell out of you."
I laugh against his chest, and burrow deeper into it.
“ – Love is being accepted and adored for who you are, scars and all.”
My eyes get wet and my lap gets wet and I curl in on myself, hugging my arms.
Now I know the difference.
Now I know what love is, and what it isn’t.
Jemma puts the clipboard down and her arms up, enclosing me in them as the darkness comes rushing out of my mouth and into her sweater.
“I w-was….I was r-raped. When I was fourteen. By the guy I thought I loved.”
It pours out of me, it falls on the floor and pools on the tile and slithers down my cheeks. Four years of carefully silent suffering floods her office, and her lap, and I’m a stranger and she must hate me for it but all she does is hug me closer, and I hate myself I hate who I used to be and I hate who I’m trying to be and the people I loved betrayed me, and I betrayed myself, I hid it away instead of telling, telling somebody, anybody, I stayed quiet instead of asking for help from somebody, anybody, and all the hurt is being pulled out of me sideways, the thorns scraping my mouth and eyes and this must be what it’s like to die, except the pain doesn’t end, not for hours and hours, and Jemma just holds me, and cries with me, and whispers ‘I know’, over and over again, because she does know, because she went through it too, and I’m not alone, not anymore.
***
In the entire history of planet Earth, no one has been more of an idiot than I have. Except God, or the Big Bang, or whatever you wanna call it because it made this place, and us. And that was, obviously, a very bad move.
Anyway, god and I are tied for Universe’s Biggest Morons because I did something equally stupid, which was to hurt myself. For years. By keeping a nasty secret inside me.
I thought I was stronger than the traumatic event, which is entirely true except for the part where I forgot to admit it was a traumatic event to begin with, because, as Jemma tells me after I pass out on one of the cots in her office and wake up to birdsong and a Styrofoam cup coffee she hands me, no matter what happened, or for how long, it still happened. Just because it wasn’t prolonged or penetrative doesn’t mean it wasn’t rape.
He still held me down and masturbated on me.
It was still rape.
Jemma invites me to come in next week to talk some more when she changes my bandage again, and I agree. She’s not a therapist, and she’s not getting paid to do it, but she’s taking a chunk out of her free time to listen to me talk, and I’m grateful. Also, sore and worn out and mentally exhausted from reliving the entire event in one night, but mostly grateful and ready for nine pizzas.
But I walk different, now, like all the space in my body was replaced with helium overnight. My shoulders feel lighter, my head feels lighter. I flip my hair dramatically as a couple walks passed and realize I don’t actually harbor the urge to kill them anymore.
Nameless, though, is a different story.
I duck into the front office and grab a cup of water, the office ladies’ chattering following me out the door.
“Summers? That’s impossible. He’s such a nice looking man.” One lady sighs.
“Well one of the students did it,” another lady says. “And we had that harassment complaint against Summers a year ago that the Dean
refused to listen to, remember? The poor girl dropped out.”
“Do you think it’s true, then?”
“College students do a lot of silly things,” the first lady says. “But they don’t typically write ‘pervert’ in fake blood on doors unless they have a good reason to.”
“If he’s been inappropriate to the female students, so help me, I’ll –”
“Campus security is interviewing his students now, you know, and they’re looking at all the cameras, but there’s no footage…”
The door shuts and their voices cut off, but word of my exploits doesn’t stop. It filters around a few people eating cream puffs on the steps of the Culinary Sciences building.
“Ew, blood?” A girl wrinkles her nose.
“It deserved to be written in shit,” A guy scoffs.
“I’ve always thought he was too nice,” another guy shakes his head.
“Why does a guy with his looks need to perv on girls? That’s fucking sleazy as hell.” The scoffing guy scoffs again.
I keep walking. A group of frat boys sees Summers crossing the lawn and hoot at him, and, startled, the handsome, tall, slightly pot-bellied professor drops his notebooks and scrabbles to pick them up. The snide glances and doubting whispers are proof I’ve turned the school against him. It’s proof I still got the magic, sweetass Isis touch that strikes fear into the hearts of evildoing men everywhere –
“Isis!” Kieran runs up to me, a scowl on his face. “I told you not to do anything!”
“Yes well, me and orders don’t exactly jive. I mean, we jive, but it isn’t smooth and it isn’t pretty to look at.”
“You’re going to get so busted. They have cameras, you know.”
My stomach twists unpleasantly, but I shake it off.
“Never fear, they spontaneously combusted because of my hotness.”
“Nothing is spontaneously combusting, and you’re going to get kicked out!”