The Music of What Happens(72)

“I think I was raped,” he says again, and then his mom is leading him inside, and I’m following, and part of me wonders if I should give them privacy, and the other part? No way. I’m his boyfriend. I should be here.

She sits him on the same part of the couch where he sat a few weeks back, when his mom talked to us about making the truck legal. I sit on the love seat again and make sure I’m fully facing Max.

He hugs his arms to his chest. He’s about to start speaking when his mom does the strangest thing. She pries his tight fingers off his biceps, first on one side, then reaches over him and does the other side too. His arms fall to his sides.

“Defensive, closed posture,” she says. “When you need to do the opposite right now, mijo.”

Max takes a deep breath.

“It was the night I didn’t come home,” he says to her. Then he turns to me. “The night before I met you at the farmers’ market. I met this boy online. He invited me to a party. I went. Went back to his dorm room.”

“This at ASU?” she asks, her tone sharp.

He nods. “He started saying weird things and I just wanted to jet. He sat on my legs and it was almost like funny, because he was this scrawny little dude. But I froze up. I said no. But he just kept going and then it was like I wasn’t even there.”

“You dissociated,” his mom says.

He shrugs.

“People dissociate sometimes in situations like that. It’s not your fault, mijo. Not your fault.” She sits close to him and hugs him from the side, hard. Tears fall down his cheeks some more.

“It just happened and then it was like, I stayed? I think maybe I felt too dirty.” He shakes his head. “I’m so stupid. How do you sleep in someone’s bed after that?”

“Did he … penetrate you?”

Max averts his eyes to the floor. Finally he nods.

“Did he use protection?”

He shakes his head, and his mother exhales.

“Dios mío,” she mutters.

More tears from Max, and then she starts to cry, and I feel numb and distant sitting across from them, so I tentatively move to Max’s other side, aware he might go nuts again. He doesn’t. I put my head on his shoulder and this makes him cry harder.

“Sorry,” I say, looking into Rosa’s eyes and pulling my head away.

“No, no,” she says, and she motions me back. “That’s what he needs right now. Please do.”

I put my head back, my cheek and ear resting on his large shoulder, and I watch the tears fall from this weird side view that’s almost surreal. And it is a bit surreal.

I never thought of Max as even possibly being a victim. And I have questions. Like how does a person freeze up in a situation like that? But thinking that just makes me feel bad because I know it’s a real thing. I just haven’t experienced it. So I turn and kiss his shoulder many times like an apology for thinking a terrible thought like that.

Rosa, meanwhile, is holding onto him tight from the other side, squeezing and purring in his ear warm assurances that it’s all going to be okay. That she loves him and she doesn’t blame him and she will be by his side through all of this.

I have this incredible, awful, sad realization. That if this was me, if I’d been raped, and this was my mom, I’d be hugging and consoling her. She would make this all about her. No question in my mind. That makes me need to close my eyes because it’s like a dagger stabbing at my chest from the inside.

“We need to go to the police,” Rosa says.

Max shakes his head. “No. Nope. No.”

“Why not, mijo? The boy committed a crime.”

“I can’t. I won’t. Nope.”

She sighs again. “We’ll revisit that. But what we really have to do is go to the ER right now and get you an HIV test. All the STIs. You had unsafe sex.”

My body goes numb. What? I want to rewind. All of this. To have gone to my house, not his, where there is no pool. Where none of this would be so. I want an alternate universe where this nightmare isn’t. Back further, beyond that. Before this happened to Max.

But in that alternate universe, we never meet like we did. We never run the food truck like we did. He’s not my boyfriend. This is inconceivable to me.

Which would be better? Max avoiding this and us not meeting? Or him having the pain and us meeting? My head spins. Unanswerable question.

It’s 3:18 a.m. as Max’s mom gets in the driver’s seat of her Ford Focus, I get in the back, and Max gets in the passenger seat. We drive in silence to Banner Desert Medical Center, the strip malls appearing and disappearing like a terrible mirage.

What if Max has HIV? Could he really?

No. No damn way.

Or of course damn way. Because life has always been shit and why wouldn’t this happen? Maybe it’s happening to him because my shit life has bled onto him. I should never have come into his life. I’m bad luck. It’s my fault.

This thought makes me laugh a little. Max and his mom turn back, a little surprised by the outburst.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m amazing myself by making this about me even a little bit. I am truly the worst human being.”

Max’s mom reaches back and scruffs my knee. “Hardly,” she says. “This is hard for you too. For me, also. I want to batter that asshole’s brain in.”