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Or that I’m standing here, arms wrapped around my torso, smiling at my feet.
It’s too screwed up, so I just won’t think about it.
I won’t wonder if he’s right and I’m wrong—if everything I’ve done to try to rescue my future is pointless and really I should be doing something different. Fighting for myself, somehow.
Right now I can’t handle it. I can only breathe in deep and try to make myself remember what’s next on my schedule. Where I have to be. What I have to do to get through the rest of this day.
This is my fight. The only thing I know how to do to get my life back the way it was. Bury the pictures, rebuild my reputation.
This is my fight, and I’m not giving up.
Two weeks later, a nightmare wakes me.
It happens a lot.
I roll out of bed and slide my feet over the cool floor until I’ve found my flip-flops in the dark. Grab my keys from the dresser. Cup them against my palm so they won’t jangle.
When I pull a sweatshirt over my head, holding my breath because I want to be quiet, Bridget’s comforter heaves on the top bunk. Her head pokes out from beneath the covers.
“Where are you going?”
“Just out. I’ll be back in a few hours. ”
I feel guilty for waking her up, but I can’t really help it. It’s hard to be an insomniac when you have a roommate.
“Be careful. ”
“I will. ”
She rolls over, and even though she’s awake, I ease the door shut slowly until it latches and locks with a quiet snick.
I’m always careful.
I walk to my car with my keys gripped in my fist, looking left to right across the parking lot, listening for anything, anyone. I had parked under the security light. From ten feet away I unlock my doors with the remote, and my heart beats so fast, so fast. The gasping sound of relief when I shut the door behind me is too loud in the clean, safe interior of my Taurus.
I turn on the stereo and crank up the volume and drive.
I have a series of loops that I do. First I go in a circle around the college, which is four blocks long and three blocks wide. Then I do widening circles around the surrounding college-owned buildings, the downtown, the fast-food strip and box stores, the Little League diamond and Frost-E-Freeze shack. I pass fields of cornstalks starting to break ranks and turn brown. My high beams spotlight the blank landscape of my home state.
One of these loops used to be my evening run, but I had to stop. After my naked body and my location became public information, being alone outdoors lost its charm.
I make only right turns, because I hate turning left, and my dad isn’t here to tell me I need to get over that.
I don’t know how to talk to my dad anymore. When I call him, I can’t figure out what words I would have said before, when I never had to think about it. I knew just how to make him laugh and love me. Now when we talk, it’s like I’m acting, only I don’t know my lines, and I suck at improv.
I can’t remember how to be the Caroline Piasecki who graduated from Ankeny High with her smile white and perfect, wearing her graduation cap and gown, walking onstage to give the valedictorian speech with her two sisters and her father in the front row of the bleachers, beaming with pride.
I haven’t told him about the pictures. I can’t.
I’m a mouth with a boy’s dick in it, a body to look at, legs to spread.
I spin the wheel, turning my car to the right. To the right. Always to the right.
I haven’t seen West for thirteen days, but I think about him. I walk myself through that afternoon at the library, trying to follow all the twists and turns of our conversation. Why did he push me back against the shelves? What was he thinking when he told that guy to leave? What was he trying to accomplish?
I think about him asking me if everything I do is about accomplishing something.
I pick over my relationship with Nate, trying to answer all the unanswerable questions.
