My Last Innocent Year(4)

“Have a good break,” I said. Then I grabbed my things and left. It was really cold out now, the wind whipping with such force I began to reconsider my position on windchill, if I’d ever really held a position in the first place. I’ll tell Zev he was right the next time we talk, I thought, before remembering that I was never going to talk to him again.



* * *



I OFTEN WONDER what would have happened if Debra hadn’t been in our room when I got back, as she so often wasn’t. But there she was, sitting on the papasan chair eating a bowl of Sugar Corn Pops. Kelsey was already gone, on her way to Sun Valley, where she’d spend a few days skiing with Jason and his family before heading home to New York for Christmas. Debra and I were leaving the next day. She’d drive me as far as Scarsdale, then her parents would put me on the train to Grand Central.

“Where were you?” Debra asked as I sat down on the sofa. Something hurt, deep in some place I couldn’t see or name. I shifted slightly until the sensation lessened.

“With Zev Neman,” I said, reaching for a handful of cereal. My voice sounded shaky. I found it hard to say his name.

“Well, praise Jesus. Did you finally fuck him?”

I thought about telling the story the way Debra would, as another crazy one-night stand, the kind she had with boys and girls she barely knew, people she picked up and discarded with ease. But I couldn’t frame what had happened with Zev in those terms. There was a darkness to it, a heaviness, like the way my body felt right before my period. The cereal had become a sickly sweet paste in my mouth, and I wondered if I might vomit.

“Isabel.” Debra pushed herself up awkwardly in the strangely deep chair. “What the fuck. Did something happen?” She set her bowl down on the steamer trunk we used as a coffee table and rested her hands on her knees.

I don’t remember exactly what I said. Only that, as I spoke, Debra stood up and started pacing, her thighs jiggling each time her foot hit the creaky wooden floor. Her dark hair had dried into the kinks she tried to tame into submission. They stuck out of her head now, making her look as if she’d been electrified. Maybe that was how she summoned her indefatigable energy, I thought, as I rested my head on the arm of the sofa. There was a tender spot on the back of my skull. I reached back and pressed on it.

“Holy shit,” she said. “I always hated that guy.”

“Well, you were right. He’s a dick.”

“He’s more than a dick. That guy raped you.”

“Oh, Jesus. Debra, come on.”

“I’m sorry.” She stopped pacing. “What would you call it?”

“I mean, it happened a little faster than I would have liked, but he didn’t force me.”

“Did you even want to?”

Did I? I couldn’t remember. In so many ways, the night had been a blur, while some parts were sharp and defined. I rubbed my forehead, trying to untangle the knot that had formed between my eyebrows. “I don’t know. I guess not, but … I mean, c’mon … Like that’s never happened to you.”

“No. It fucking hasn’t.”

I’d asked the wrong person.

Debra started pacing again. I could feel her footsteps vibrating through the floorboards as I rolled my head back and forth on the armrest, passing through the bruise each time. Debra’s anger was palpable, a living, breathing thing. Part of me wanted her to calm down, but another part was happy she was angry so I didn’t have to be.

“We have to show him he can’t get away with this,” she said. “We should call the police. Or the dean—what’s his name again?”

“Hansen,” I said. “But Debra—”

“You’re right. Fuck Hansen. What’s he gonna do?” She chewed her finger. “We can’t just sit here.”

“I don’t want to make a big deal about this. It’s not worth it.”

She looked at me. She had on an oversized Lilith Fair T-shirt, a pair of men’s boxer shorts peeking out beneath the hem. “When you say that, Isabel, what you’re really saying is you’re not worth it. And is that what you really think?”

I sighed heavily and curled onto my side. It was almost 2 a.m. I felt detached from what had happened to me, Debra’s anger reminding me how I should be feeling, but didn’t. What was wrong with me, I wondered? Why didn’t I react to things the way other people did, in ways that were normal? I opened and closed my hand, watching the mechanics of tendon and bone. Was this really my hand? If so, how was it connected to the rest of my body? What was my body anyway? What made it mine?

Debra was still talking, pacing, fuming. I hadn’t wanted to sleep with Zev, she said, and he knew that but forced me anyway, right? I’d told him no, hadn’t I, but he hadn’t listened because he never listened. He’d tricked me into coming up to his room so he could rape me because that is what he did, isn’t it, he raped me, raped me, raped me. I closed my eyes, wondering how it would feel if I let Debra’s words find purchase inside me, if I grabbed onto them and made them fit. Because I was angry even if I didn’t show it, even if Debra was describing a night I didn’t quite recognize. And the more I listened to her, the angrier I became. Especially when I thought about Zev and the way he pressed his fingers into my flesh like wet clay, the slick of his tongue in my ear, the way he’d rummaged around inside me like a bag of old clothes.