Locust Lane(89)
Christopher thought about this, then let out a dead laugh.
“Like college. If I took a gap year.”
His son looked back at the table.
“Okay. I accept.”
“Christopher, wait…”
“Please, let’s just get this over with.” He gave his head a bitter shake. “I deserve it anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I lied to you on Saturday,” Christopher said. “About what happened.”
He opened his hands on the table and stared into them, as if reading from an invisible book.
“You just don’t know how Jack is. Yeah, he can be your best friend most of the time. He gives you stuff and tells you you’re his bro. But then he turns on you. He makes you feel like shit. Like you’re nothing.” He put on a voice, harsh and hateful. “‘You’re a pussy. You’re never going to get with her. If you can’t fuck this trashy slut, you’re never going to get laid.’”
“Why were you even friends with this monster?”
He looked up.
“Because I was nobody without him.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. I was invisible at that school. You don’t know what it’s like because you’re this hot shit chef everybody loves. But I’m just some short brown kid. Yeah, everybody’s polite. Nobody’s calling you names. But that’s only because nobody’s calling you anything. And then Jack starts hanging with me. I know he mostly just wants somebody to boss around, but whatever. It was like an initiation. That’s how I looked at it, anyway.”
“Initiation? Christopher, he bullied you.”
“It was worth it.” He smiled bitterly. “So I thought.”
He looked back at that unseeable book in his hands.
“So, she’s lying there passed out and he says, ‘You’re going about it all wrong, Mahoun. Chicks like this, you gotta take it to them. If you respect them they just think you’re a faggot. You gotta get her going, get her over the hump. She’ll love it.’ That’s when he pulls down her pajamas and grabs me by the back of the neck. You don’t know how strong his grip is. Like fucking iron. He says, ‘If you don’t fuck this bitch right now, I’m going to tell everybody what a pussy you are.’ He puts his mouth right against my ear and he’s like, ‘Just touch her, man. Just see how good that shit feels.’”
His eyes were tearing up.
“I was, I don’t know. Scared mostly. But also like, maybe this really was the way. Nothing else works. And I wanted her so bad. I loved her so much. So I just did it. I put my fingers inside her. One and then two. I’m trying to be gentle because I don’t want to hurt her. She started to move and I told myself she was liking it.”
“Christopher…”
He shook his head. He was going to say this.
“Jack’s still got me by the neck, I can hear him breathing right behind me, and then he’s like, ‘Okay, man, she’s ready. Go for it. Fuck her. Do it.’ He’s pushing me forward, pressing against me, and I feel, I can feel he has a hard-on. That’s when I knew how wrong this was. I stop touching her and Jack is swearing at me now, saying, ‘If you aren’t going to do this, I am.’ He tosses me aside and he pulls … he pulls it out. I can’t move. That’s when she wakes up. She sees Jack there with his dick out and me watching and she sees her pants pulled down. You should have seen her eyes, Dad. She was so scared. He comes at her and she starts to kick and twist away. That’s when I grab him and pull him back. She starts to attack him and I’m just trying to stop everything and that’s when she scratches me. Finally, I get them apart. Somehow they covered themselves up before Hannah comes down. We try to settle Eden down but it’s no good. She’s screaming about making people pay, calling her mom. She thought he’d raped her already, I think. So we just leave. But when we get outside Jack tells me I have to go back inside and shut her up.”
His eyes were full of tears now.
“And then what? Christopher—what happened after that?”
“I went back inside.”
“And?”
He angrily wiped away the tears.
“Isn’t what I just told you enough? How guilty do you want me to be, Dad? Just tell Cantor I’ll confess.”
He stood up and walked to the door and knocked. It opened almost immediately. The guard took him away. He didn’t look back.
Thursday
ALICE
She had no idea if Hannah would show. The text Alice had sent her had been marked READ, but she hadn’t responded. With Hannah, that could mean anything. For instance, it could have meant, “Okay, yes, I’ll meet you outside the frozen yogurt place at three this afternoon and we’ll work things out and go back to being best friends.” Or she could be saying, “You must be joking, you backstabbing bitch.” Most likely, it simply meant that she had no idea what she was going to do. Which was, after all, Hannah’s default mode.
The meeting point she’d chosen was a small, trellised grove in the shopping plaza on Centre. It served both the fro-yo shop and the build-a-salad place. Its dozen hexagonal metal tables, half-hidden by ivy, were usually unpopulated this time of year, although today they were packed with gibbering kids just liberated from school. Alice decided to stay in her car until Hannah showed. If she showed.