Page 1 of What Happened to Nina?

PROLOGUE

My name is Nina Fraser. There’s a good chance that you know who I am. You’ve probably seen my picture online, and heard my story, and if you have I guess you’ve already judged me. I mean, not in public, because victim-blaming is a bad look, but in the privacy of your own head, some quiet part of you probably thinks I was stupid or weak or both. Maybe you think that if I’d just stood up for myself, if I’d just walked away, everything would have been okay. I’m not going to argue with you or try to convince you that you’re wrong. I just want to say, a thing can be crystal clear with hindsight, but just about as clear as mud when you’re actually living it. Also, sometimes it’s the walking away that gets you in trouble.

So. Like I said, I’m Nina. I’m twenty years old. I have a sister, Grace, and two parents. And I’m a climber. You know all of that already if you’ve read my story online. Here’s some stuff people don’t know. I have calluses on my fingertips, a scar on my knee, and another on my elbow, both from falls. I love to climb. When I am on the mountain, I can’t think about anything except my fingers wedged into a crevasse and my feet balanced just so and the route ahead. I never think about what lies beneath me. When I reach the top I sit and I breathe and I look out over the valley. I look back over the route and I work out how I could have climbed it better.

If you know anything, you know that I have a boyfriend named Simon Jordan. Simon and I met in school when we were five years old. In middle school we became friends. When we were sixteen we fell in love. It’s important to me that you know that it was really good between us. I won’t say that Simon was perfect, because no one on this earth is perfect, but if there were such a thing as a perfect first boyfriend for an awkward girl who did not know who she was, then he was that. He laughed at my jokes. He was always interested in what I had to say, even when his friends were around. He never played games, never made me feel like some other girl was better. With him I felt pretty, which matters, way too much, when you’re sixteen. We slept together for the first time on his eighteen birthday, and it was awkward and a little painful but also funny and beautiful and I was sure, down to my bones, that I would never love anyone the way I loved him. After things started to go wrong, I spent a lot of time thinking about the way we used to be. I looked at our old photos and spent time with friends who had known us from the beginning. I needed to believe that I hadn’t imagined everything. That I was holding on for something real.

When we finished high school, Simon went to Northwestern and I stayed at home in Waitsfield and went to UVM. Simon and I didn’t think the long-distance thing would be a problem for us. We were solid. And the first year was okay. We came home a lot, and we Face-Timed every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and we emailed. My friend Allie told me that it couldn’t last. She said Simon was too good looking, plus his parents were loaded. He’d meet a hundred girls who wanted him, a hundred girls who were more sophisticated, more experienced, and more exciting than the girl next door. Allie can be a bitch like that. I didn’t want Simon to dump me, but I’m the kind of person who likes to prepare for the worst, so I put a lot of mental energy into getting ready for the inevitable. I studied hard, and tried to make new friends, and went climbing pretty much every weekend, and I kept waiting for the ax to fall.

But instead of dumping me, Simon just seemed to get more intense. Instead of calling me a couple of times a day, he started calling four or five times. Sometimes he wanted me to “carry him around in my pocket.” Which meant FaceTiming him and then muting my phone and taking him with me to lectures or just propping the phone beside me on my desk while I was studying. Simon came home every other weekend, and he wanted to pay so that I could fly out to Illinois to see him too, but I couldn’t do that. I had to work in my mom’s inn on the weekends. Also, taking his money and spending it like it was mine would have felt weird. He didn’t understand. He was really angry and really upset.

Looking back, I can see that that was when our relationship started to change. After I said no to coming to Illinois, Simon had a permanent attitude. Like he had the moral high ground. Like he was the perfect boyfriend and I was the bad, unreliable girlfriend. He made jokes about it, but I could see that behind the jokes his feelings were hurt, so I did everything I could to reassure him. Nothing seemed to be enough. He was rougher with me, in bed and out of it. He would grip my shoulders or hips so hard that I had bruises—purple finger marks on my skin. He bit me, a few times. It really hurt, but I didn’t tell him to stop. This is going to sound insane, but I was worried about embarrassing him. I figured that he thought it was sexy or something (it so wasn’t), and because everything was weird between us I was afraid that if I told him I hated the biting, that would hurt his feelings too. I told myself that Simon was just going through an insecure stage, that I knew the real him and that we’d get back there again if I could just make him understand how much I loved him. I was stupid, but then, I was a lobster in a pot. The water warmed up so gradually that I didn’t realize I was boiling until it was too late.

Simon came home for the October vacation during our sophomore year. He’d wanted to go to Hawaii with friends, and I had to stay home to work, so he came home too, but he was really angry about it. Nothing I did seemed to make him happy, until I finally agreed to blow off work at my mom’s inn and take off for the whole week with him. I called my mom and of course she was upset and angry, but Simon seemed to finally be himself again and the relief of that was so intense. I hadn’t realized how much I was stressing about us until I thought I could stop.

Simon’s parents had just bought a new house near Stowe. It came with four hundred acres, a small lake, unmarked trails, and climbing routes. He wanted us to go there, just the two of us, to really focus on our relationship. So we went. We hiked and climbed and walked and talked and things really weren’t any better. I felt like we were faking things. Pretending to be close but not really. I wanted to talk to him about the bruises and the hurting, but every time I tried my throat closed up. On Friday, Simon wanted to go climbing again. My body was complaining. My fingers were sore, and my right shoulder was hot. I felt like I needed a rest day, but I said yes anyway.

“Let’s climb that crag we saw on Wednesday,” Simon said. We were eating breakfast. He reached over and smoothed my hair back, tucking it behind my ear. He cupped his hand around the back of my neck. His hand was warm and dry and gentle. For some reason I wanted to cry.

“Sure,” I said. “That looked good.”

We ate, we dressed, and we hiked out. It was a short hike to the crag. Simon chatted the whole way there, and I smiled and answered and took his hand when he offered it, but I had tears just under the surface the whole way. I hated feeling like that, and I tried to shake it off. I started to cheer up when we got to the crag. It really did look like an awesome climb, maybe eighty feet of granite, with some nice holds at the beginning to get us started. And the weather was good. It was chilly but sunny, and there was no real wind. I dropped my pack and started to take out my gear.

“This was such a great idea,” I said. “I’m so glad we’re here.”

“Better than cleaning another bathroom?” He gave me a little jokey shove that set me off balance.

“Understatement,” I said. He picked me up, put his hands on my butt, and pulled me in close. He kissed me. I kissed him back. The messed-up thing is that the kiss felt good. Simon let me go, and we both did our prep and started our climb. I didn’t think about us as I climbed. I just zoned out and thought about my holds and my route and I started to feel like me again. I felt stronger.

We got to the top, sat on the edge, and took in the view.

“You okay?” Simon asked.

“Sure. Yes. A little tired. Hungry too.” I searched in my pack for the sandwiches I’d made that morning. They were chicken salad, which was his favorite. He unwrapped the sandwich, took a couple of bites, made a face, and handed it back to me.

“Think the chicken might be off, babe. Got any chocolate?”

I had chocolate. I handed him a bar, silently. He ate it. There was nothing wrong with the chicken salad. I’d cooked the chicken myself the day before and made up the salad with all fresh ingredients. I started to feel pissed. A small ball of fuck-you showed up at the bottom of my stomach. I kept eating my sandwich.

“You can’t eat that,” he said. “You need to throw it away.”

“It’s fine.”

He stared at me. “Okay, but when you’re puking tonight don’t call me to hold your hair.”

I shrugged. His shoulders stiffened, and he turned away from me. Which was my cue to pack up the sandwich, to say sorry and kiss him and thank him for looking out for me. But no. The fuck-you wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, it was starting to grow.

“It tastes good, actually. Mmm.” I thought he might lose it. Maybe I wanted him to. But he just stood up.

“I need to take a piss.” He walked away and took a leak up against a tree. I finished my sandwich and packed everything up in my bag again. Simon started to prepare for the rappel down.

“Let’s simul-rap,” he said. He had a gleam in his eyes. A challenge. Simultaneous rappelling is when two climbers use one rope to rappel, relying on each other’s body weight, with the single rope rigged through a central rappel anchor. It can be dangerous if one climber loses focus or control, but people do it sometimes if they want to get down quickly. We weren’t in any rush. We had the whole afternoon to make our descent, and I could have just said that, but I saw that challenge in his eyes and I didn’t feel like backing down.

“Fine.” I tied on, then tied my stopper knot, which would make sure that my end of the rope couldn’t slip through my gear, always the worst-case scenario with this kind of rappelling. If the rope slipped through my gear it would also slip through the rappel anchor, which would mean that Simon would fall. I watched him prep.

“Did you tie your stopper knot?” I asked.

“Of course,” Simon said mildly. He showed it to me.

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