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 of 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 differently 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 past and realize I don’t actually harbor the urge to barf on 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…”
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 science 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 says, shaking his head.
“Why does a guy with his looks need to perv on girls? That’s sleazy as hell.” The scoffing guy scoffs again.
I keep walking. A group of frat boys sees Summers crossing the lawn and hoots at him, and he 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’ve still got the magic, sweet-ass 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, orders and I don’t exactly jibe. I mean, we jibe, but it isn’t smooth and it isn’t pretty to look at.”
“They’re going to bust you! They have cameras everywhere on campus!”
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!”
“Then we must make do with what little time we have.”
“Isis—” I feel his hand on my wrist, jerking me back. I whirl around and plant my feet and clear my throat.
“I know that kiss was nice,” I say. “And we kissed a lot for two people who met each other next to a shirtless guy throwing up on some petunias, and you’re a really nice guy and you look sort of Scottish, which is always a good thing, ladies love kilts, not me specifically but most ‘ladies’ in air quotes, denoting roughly seventy percent of women aged eighteen to thirty-eight, and I know you think you like me as a person, and that you want to date me and that we’d get along well, but here’s me, overturning your hopes and dreams. I don’t wanna date anyone. Or that’s not true, actually, the butthead I want to date just doesn’t want to date me. So. So I was just trying to get over him. And I was using your lips to get over him like a terrible person in a movie would, a villain, but I’ve always been the villain or the dragon and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m a dragon and I burn stuff down and I’m sorry.”
Kieran’s green eyes well with shock, and his grip goes limp. I tear away and leave behind another person I hurt, and I’m sorry for it, but I’m not going to beat myself up for it. I hate walking around with black eyes on my heart all the time.
I march away so hard I don’t even notice when Diana passes me. She squeals, backtracks, and catches up with me.
“Isis! There you are! We’ve been looking everywhere for y—”
“Not now, moon goddess, I have boys to confront.”
Diana laughs and slows. “What about the county fair tonight? You said you wanted to go.”
“I’ll be there!” I shout, and push through the door to the boys’ dorm. I take the stairs two at a time and knock hard on his door. There’re three seconds of silence, and then it opens. Jack looks like he’s taken a casual jog through a meat grinder, if said meat grinder ground only the souls of good-looking boys.
“Hello,” I say crisply. “I want you to help me kill Will Cavanaugh.”
Jack’s ice-cold eyes crack a little with surprise as I say Nameless’s full name out loud for the first time in four years. I suddenly remember my priorities.
“Oh, but actually we can put that off for a while. First, I want you to come with me to the county fair tonight, and if Brittany doesn’t want you to, I don’t care. You’re still coming.”
I expect him to refuse or get angry, but his eyes crinkle on the outside—the Jack version of a smile.
“All right.”
“I’m driving.”
“All right.”
“Meet me by the Psychology Building at nine.”
He nods and opens his mouth to say more, but I quickly pivot and walk away. I can’t have any more words with him—not until I’ve practiced what I want to say. Six hours and a flurry of closet-raiding is all that stands between me and figuring that out. Yvette watches with the casual interest of a hurricane observer as I chuck socks and pants and shirts over my shoulder.
“Where were you, though, seriously?” she asks finally. “Diana and I thought—”
“I was talking to a nice lady,” I say. “And she helped me figure some stuff out. Contrary to popular belief, strangers work nicely when divulging your desperately nasty secrets.”
I hold up the pink blouse, and Yvette makes a cooing noise.
“Oooh, that one.”
The Isis of a day ago would have wrinkled her nose and thrown it aside. I should do that even now. But for some reason I pick it up and pull off my shirt, replacing it with the blouse. I test the waters, pivoting in front of the mirror. I wait for the voices, for Nameless’s voice whispering how ugly I am. For once, nothing happens. I can’t hear him when I look at my own reflection. No insults, no sneers, no nothing.
He’s gone.
He’s not gone, because he’s on campus and in my scars and my nightmares, but right now, in this mirror, he’s gone.
The blouse is cool and airy on my skin, the ruffles flickering with my every move. Yvette helps me pick out jean shorts and lends me an old, ratty army surplus jacket that looks balls rad and is perfect for the cool fall weather. Yvette pulls my hair back from my neck and puts it in a ponytail for me.
“You look way hotter like this,” she says.
“I just want people to look at me and think I want to give her a million cash dollars.”
“Why are you so obsessed with money?”
“Because with it you can buy stuff and also things.”
Yvette laughs and shakes her head. “I want to give you maybe a ten. And a dime. A single dime.”
I h
old out my hand expectantly and she riffles through her wallet for a single dime. I tuck it into my bra for good luck.
I practice in my head what I want to say, over and over and over and under; through all the possible loopholes of conversation I create counterarguments, quips, and the finest of snarks, but they all drain out of my ears when I see Jack waiting for me near the parking lot. He leans against a peach tree, hair combed but still somehow messy, with dark jeans and a red flannel shirt on. His legs are so long, his shoulders so broad, his face proud and fine like a lion’s. It hits me just then—he’s getting older. I’m getting older. Time isn’t waiting. I spent four years of my time mourning over someone who was never worth it to begin with.
But this boy. This stupid, wonderful boy just might be worth it.
“It’s not a lumberjack carnival,” I say as I approach. He looks at his shirt beneath his leather jacket, then speaks without turning around.
“I just like flannel.”
“You and the entire hipster populace of Seattle,” I say. Jack smirks and follows me to the car. We drive in utter silence, but a not-weird silence, until the carnival tents and the tip of a neon-highlighted roller coaster come into view.
“I’ve got the tickets,” I say as I pull into the parking lot and we get out. “So you have the honorable privilege of buying me all the food I want.”
“All the food you want? Woman, you want the rough equivalent of a third-world country’s monthly intake.”
“Does that make me gluttonous or evil?”
“Both,” he offers, and takes the ticket book I hand him. He pauses under the archway into the carnival, the moonlight making every tree black and every cloud silver. The lights on the Ferris wheel and roller coaster and pharaoh boat beckon, the smell of greasy popcorn and hot dogs mixing with the dry, crisp smell of autumn leaves.
“The last time I came to one of these was with Sophia,” he finally says. My heart turns into a ton of lead and lands like a weight on a cartoon character’s head, except the character’s head is my solar plexus.
“Shit. L-Let’s go,” I say quickly. “We don’t have to do this. I didn’t mean to—”
Jack’s warm fingers encircle my wrist, and he holds me there. It isn’t a rough grip, like Kieran’s. It’s loose. I could rip away if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.
“I want to,” Jack says, voice soft but steely as he meets my eyes. “I want to go to this, with you.”
I melt a little around the edges, but I remember who I am and stick my tongue out and skip under the arch, leading the way.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I make him buy me a sundae and a corn dog and a slushy.
“Milady,” he drawls. “Your appetite is like a horse’s.”
“Your face is like one, so it’s all balanced in the end.”
“We’re in college now. You’re officially banned from doing ‘your face’ jokes.”
“But that’s like, ninety-five percent of my comedy routine!”
“Alas, Horatio.” Jack sighs. “However shall you make a living now?”
“I can’t make a living as a college student!” I protest. “I’m supposed to be broke, and drinking all the time, and doing the nasty like…everywhere. It’s a complicated list of demands.”
“You don’t have to do it like Hollywood says you do. You can just be you.” His eyes soften.
“Sometimes it just…feels like I’m in the wrong place. It feels like I should be doing more with my life by now, you know?”
His hand ruffles my hair, and I look up at him, half shocked. He grins a little, in that barely-an-actual-smile Jack way.
“I know.”
My tongue is blue and it hurts with all the pure sugary goodness of an exploding Peeps factory, and Jack says I’ll die and I tell him my willpower is stronger than diabetes, and he laughs at me but then I laugh at him when we go on the pharaoh and he looks like he’s going to shit himself the higher we get.
“Are you okay?” I shout at his white face. His lips are thin, his fists clenched, but he manages to yell back.
“Oh, I’m just fine.”
“You look less ‘fine’ and more vampire-y! If you’re a vampire you have to tell me before I eat the garlic breadsticks down there!” I point at the breadstick stand.
“I’m fine!” he snaps.
I put my arms up and whoop when we reach the apex, our stomachs lifting out from our abdomens, and he swears brilliantly and throws his arm over my chest as a mock-seat belt even though I don’t need it because I already have the big black one over my lap.
“You’re scared of heights!” I breathlessly exclaim as we get off. Jack wobbles a little and grips the edge of a nearby trash can.
“I am not scared!” he insists, green around the cheeks. “I have a perfectly valid wariness of being suspended fifty feet above the ground in a wildly swinging pendulum.”
“Physics protects us.” I pat his back, rubbing it sympathetically. “The only way we would’ve died is if the center axle went loose. Or if we all weighed eight hundred pounds.”
I pick up a cotton candy from a stand and look at him expectantly to pay. He grumbles, fishing a five from his wallet.
“The way you’re going, you’ll be at eight hundred in no time.”
“And I’ll be equally sexy as I am now.” I sniff haughtily and bite off a chunk of floss. Jack’s smirk returns, and he leans in so close to my face for a second I think he’ll kiss me and everything slows around us, the lights blinking in half time and people’s voices low and distorted, but he takes a bite of the floss and pulls away with it and time catches up. I decide to punish him and start toward the roller coaster. Jack gives a massive groan but follows dutifully.
After he’s stopped almost-hurling into yet another trash can, I take pity on him and wander toward the games alley. Goldfishing, water balloon tossing, shooting ranges, this place has it all. Jack strides after me.
“Hey, slow down,” he says.
“Your request has been carefully considered by the Board of Me, and denied.”
“You really should’ve brought Kieran here,” he presses.
“Why? Don’t like carnivals?”
“No, he’s just—” Jack furrows his brow. “Aren’t you and him…?”
“No. He’s fine, as a friend. But no. Too straightforward. Cute, but too normal. And in the long run, being normal is a huge no-no. Along with, you know, being a serial killer, but normal is like, number two—number one point five-ish.”
I can feel Jack staring at my face, and it makes some deep part of me squirm uncomfortably, so I pick up a shooting gallery rifle and aim it at his forehead. He looks appropriately terrified.
“Wrong way,” he deadpans.
“No, no, this is the right way,” I insist.
“Miss, please, the targets are behind you,” the high school guy running the booth says nervously. I turn and eye him, then the sign, then the huge stuffed panda that’s a prize for all five targets. It’s perfect. It’s Ms. Muffin but huge. Mr. Muffin. I want him.
“Give me some of the bullets you’re sweating,” I say to the booth guy. The guy chokes and airs out his dark armpits.
“Excuse me, miss?”
“Six shots isn’t enough,” I clarify. “Gimme more.”
“Six shots is plenty,” Jack steps in, handing the guy some tickets and taking the rifle from me. “Watch and learn.”
“Oh, this’ll be good, and by good I mean hilarious.” I lean against the booth and watch him position, narrowing one eye. He pulls the trigger, the shot sailing cleanly into the bull’s-eye of the first target and exploding in pink paint. Jack turns to me, quirks a brow in an “I told you so” way, and I scoff.
“So what? You’ve practiced a little with some squirt guns. Big whoop.”
Jack moves on to the next, and lands that, and the third and fourth, each taking just one shot and each perfectly in the center. The booth guy whistles and squints a lot, like he
thinks it’s a hallucination, and Jack looks at me before the fifth target.
“Bodyguard school’s been good to you,” I admit. “Or you’re actually a serial killer.”
“I have a talent for hurting things.” Jack perches the rifle on his cocked hip, and it’s so insufferably arrogant I want to shove him into the ball pit next to us and/or furiously make out with him. “But we always knew that, didn’t we?”
He laughs, and it’s despairing and his eyes are a little cold, and I regret ever bringing up the killer comment, but before I can apologize, he positions and aces the fifth target. The booth guy offers him the prizes, and he debates for a half second before settling on the giant panda. Jack turns and hands it to me, and I swallow my gasp.
“What are you—”
“I saw you drooling over it. It’s yours.”
“Nay.” I shove it back in his hands. “Give it to Hemorrhoid. She’s your girlfriend.”
“We were never really dating,” He puts it on my head, the legs flopping into my eyes. “And I told her yesterday I didn’t want to see her anymore.”
I quash the thrill that runs through my veins and assume an appropriately lofty expression.
“Tsk, tsk. It’s almost like you use these women and throw them away like tissues.”
“Historically, most women have used me,” he says darkly. I hug the panda to my chest and try not to dwell on the pain in his voice. He always hid it so well, but now I can hear it clearly. We really are getting old.
“You ever think about that?” I ask, trotting along the games alley in an attempt to keep us moving, keep us light. “That escorting maybe affected you more than you want to admit?”
“I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, it meant nothing to me, I felt nothing—”
“You felt used,” I interrupt. “You were reluctant, no matter how much you insist it was a mutual business arrangement. And reluctance is not consent. It’s reluctance.”
He’s quiet. I point at the Ferris wheel and smile back at him.
“C’mon. It’s slow, and if you don’t look down it’s almost like you aren’t suspended a million miles in the air.”
The Ferris compartment sways and Jack looks a little queasy, but the lights of the carnival below are too beautiful for even him to ignore. We watch the arcs of pink and green and spots of blue and white flicker on and off as we ascend, the music getting fainter. Our knees are almost touching.