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His car wasn’t a clunker like mine. When he opened the door for me, I thought about how low the bar had been set for the other men in my life, and how I needed to keep it that way. After he’d settled into the driver’s seat, he turned to me and raised his brow. “Where to?”
I pressed my lips to one another and gave him the satisfaction of pretending to think it over. “Your place?”
His apartment was not like the apartments of other boys. There weren’t posters on the wall or bongs littering the table. It didn’t smell like leftover food. Maybe it was because he was older, but I got the sense that he was different. I was worried he might not want to fuck.
But then he put on a record, Nat King Cole, something I’d never heard before. I don’t think anyone in our generation had, and I told him as much. He laughed, a full head back, throaty kind of laugh. “It sort of grows on you.”
Does it now? I smiled, but I don’t remember doing much talking that night. He did enough for the both of us. He asked me to dance, and he told me lame jokes. He told me what he did for a living and about where he grew up. Later, after we’d finally fucked, as he drifted off to sleep, he whispered that I should be careful. I was the kind of person he could easily fall in love with.
Even though the sex was actually pretty good, despite a slight vanilla touch, I knew then it would be the last time I saw him.
I laid there staring at the ceiling, wondering how long I had to wait before waking him from sleep to ask for a ride home. Finally, my pager went off. It was Megan, and it read 9-1-1, followed by the address of the fraternity house. I decided a clean break would be easier. It would be better that way. No awkward explanations, no half-hearted promises of seeing each other again. Quietly, I climbed out of bed, dressed, and walked the three miles it took to get back to the fraternity.
It was just after 3:00 a.m. when I arrived. The party was still in full swing, albeit the crowd a little thinner, a little more subdued. I found Megan in the bathroom with a bloody nose and black eye, naked from the waist down, semi-conscious.
“Megan—” I shook her hard. “What the fuck?”
She mumbled my name. Maybe she said why’d you leave? Maybe she begged me to stay. Her words were jumbled and unclear. As I wrapped her in a towel, I noticed the blood smeared between her thighs.
“Megan,” I hissed, searching for her clothes, for something to cover her with. “Megan—who did this?”
She mumbled inaudibly.
I took off my jacket and covered her legs. I started to tie it around her waist. “Where are your pants? Did Brad do this?”
“We had a fight,” she slurred. “I told you.”
I didn’t kill Bradley Simmons that night. I wish I had. He raped and beat Megan two more times. Each time she promised—she swore—she’d end things. Each time she didn’t.
After the third time, the last time, the time he broke her arm, I made sure I was in attendance at his next frat party. I made sure he drank more than usual and that Megan did as well. She should have known, they both should have, that alcohol and painkillers don’t mix.
Once Brad had passed out, I drove her home and tucked her safely into bed. Then I drove back to the fraternity house, entered through the back door, and found him in his room. I slipped my hands around his throat, feeling the weight of his head in my hands, how effortlessly his neck held it up. I thought about snapping it. Like a twig. I imagined myself, choking the life out of him just as he was doing to Megan.
But I knew that was risky.
I knew I’d leave a mark. Evidence. So instead, I placed a pillow over his face and sat on it, bearing down with the entirety of my being. He struggled, but only a little. The music was loud, the beat thumping in time with his movement. It was pure art, the give and take between us, a wonderful dance as his whole world stopped. It was too bad he couldn’t even hold out the entire song.
Chapter Eight
Charlotte
“I’m sorry,” I said to my father. “I don’t have a choice.” I’d just turned twenty and was, in essence, a full-blown adult. But in that moment, standing there in front of his recliner, I’d never felt more like a child. A girl, who, in four short months, was going to have one of her own.
“We always have a choice.”
Shaking my head slowly, I looked away, hoping it might stop my chin from quivering. “It’s too late to have an abortion.”
My father didn’t respond. When I glanced back at him, he didn’t look me in the eye.
“He changed his mind. He isn’t going to leave his wife.”
“I tried to tell you Char—they never do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and it was the truth. I hated to disappoint him. I’d been on a roll lately, and this, while surely the biggest, was just one more in a long succession of letdowns.
“First the incident at school,” he said, reading my mind, “and now this.”
“I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know anyway.”
