Boring Girls(84)

Finally he climbed off me and moved away, and I felt a scratchy cloth hit me. “Clean yourself up,” he laughed, and when I peeked down I saw he’d thrown an old towel onto me. I heard him joke with the other guys that I was “free” if they wanted a “go,” and I felt myself ready to throw up, ready to scream again. I heard other voices joke back that I was “too ugly” and relief filled me for a moment, until I remembered that they might kill us and I covered my face again.

“Grow the f*ck up,” Balthazar said, grabbing one of my hands and jerking me up to my feet. I saw Fern standing by the wall, stick-still, her hair covering her face.

“Look at this,” Sid said. “Get them out of here.”

“Get out,” Balthazar said in disgust. Fern stayed completely still by the wall, and I tried as best as I could to snap myself out of it and grabbed her hand.

I pulled the door open, and almost slammed into Jerry, who was returning with the two giggling girls. Would this never end?

Jerry paused and looked at us. I violently pushed my way through the door past him, pulling Fern behind me, and as we burst into the hallway and ran, laughter echoed around us. “I guess it’s 1997 all over again, guys?”





THIRTY-THREE


Fern acted as though she’d been hypnotized, but for some reason, my mind was clear and mechanical. Okay, get back downstairs. Done. Go back into the venue, done. Go to the coat check, hope the girl is still there. She was, cleaning up and looking at us as if we were crazy. Get our backpacks. Done. Get the f*ck out. Done.

Don’t think about what just happened. Just get the f*ck out.

Fern followed me onto the street, and I put my arm around her. It was chilly. I started walking. I didn’t even know where I was going. I just had to get us away from that place. Away from them right away. My eyes were so wide I felt like a lunatic. My mind raced. Get us out of here.

I found a park, a small long one that followed a path between two buildings. It was dark and there were benches. I led Fern to one. We sat down. She stared straight ahead, and I put my head in my hands. I had a thousand thoughts, a million thoughts, all of them running, racing around, and I couldn’t grab any of them to focus on. I closed my eyes and let them run through me.

“Rachel,” Fern said after a little while.

“Yes.”

“We have to go to the police.”

Yes, we should. That was the first step. “No. We’re not going to the police.”

“Rachel, we have to.”

“Do you think they’ll believe us? DED gets tons of girls, whenever they want. Why would they bother doing this? No one would ever believe what they’ve done to us. The cops won’t do anything. We went back there ourselves, I mean . . . we came to the show and went backstage, all dressed up.” My head pounded.

Fern was silent for a few moments. “But we have to do something,” she said, her voice rising to a wail.

“I know we do.”

A thought was taking shape in my mind, something concrete, something exciting, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t focus on it. Not yet. But I could feel it there, slowly forming. We had to do something.

xXx

The first thing to do was to go to the bus station. I focused on every step, every action that would take us forward. I couldn’t bear to look backwards. I knew what had happened but I did not want to envision it. I knew there would be plenty of time, the rest of my life, to think about it, to relive every horrible detail. But right now I had tasks, and I focused on them. We were two hours away from home, and we had to get back. We had to figure out what to do right now.

I held Fern’s hand and set out to find a taxi. I began to steer us into the general direction I thought the bus station was so we could walk and collect ourselves before getting into a cab. She knelt on the sidewalk and threw up, punctuating it with sobs, and I knelt beside her and rubbed her shaking shoulders. Again, I felt my eyes were wider than they normally were, absorbing more than usual, in greater detail: the way the streetlights cast patterns on the sidewalk through the tree branches, the small glittery hair clip on Fern’s head, the dry grass and the crushed juice box in the gutter.

When she said she felt well enough to get in a taxi, I hailed one. As we drove through the streets, she laid her head on my shoulder. I felt frozen, too aware, too sensitive. My skin felt as though stick-legged bugs were crawling over it. I pressed my arm tighter against Fern, screwing my eyes closed, noticed I was trembling, realized I wasn’t — it was Fern, huddled against me. I felt some sort of hollow, failed protectiveness for her.