Mullan? And then you got a text from someone and forgot the whole thing.”
“I didn’t—” This didn’t sound right. “I must not have got that it was serious. I wouldn’t have—”
“Nope,” Susanna said. “You definitely didn’t think it was serious. Which, in fairness, was partly my fault. I was too embarrassed to tell you all the gory details. I just gave you the general gist.”
“Well there you go,” I said. A quick arse-grab and a few douchey comments wouldn’t have sounded like a huge deal, Susanna always had liked getting herself worked up, probably a week earlier she had been throwing a wobbler because she had got an A− on some test . . . “If you’d told me—”
“Well, I kind of expected you to take my word for it. But no. I asked you would you at least tell him to leave me alone, but you said that would make things awkward with the guys. You were a little miffed at me for asking. I think you felt like I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
Then when, how, how had I— Maybe this was what had done it? anger at myself, as well as at Dominic, when I found out what I had let him get away with—could I have needed to make up for that, taken it too far? “Shit,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
She shrugged. “Water under the bridge.”
“What did you do? Did you tell someone else?”
“My mates, sort of. They knew he was giving me hassle, but I didn’t give them all the details either. I felt weird about it. Dirty. I wouldn’t now, but hey: eighteen.” A philosophical shrug. “And it’s not like they had any idea what I should do, any more than I did. ‘God what an arsehole, maybe if you ignore him he’ll stop, maybe you should tell him you’ve got a boyfriend down the country—’”
“I meant like your parents,” I said. “Or that English teacher you liked.”
With an arch of her eyebrow, over her glass: “You mean did I Tell A Trusted Adult? Nope. Probably I should have, but I was embarrassed. No one wants to tell her parents how some guy felt her up. And I wasn’t sure whether I was making a big deal out of nothing—he was so casual about it, you know? Like it was all just a laugh. Plus, if I talked to a teacher and Dominic got in shite with the school, then everyone would find out and it would be total hell.”
“It would’ve been,” Leon said, turning his socks on the hearth rail. “Remember when Lorcan Mullan ratted out Seamus Dooley for hiding his glasses? He was a leper. For months.”
“And anyway,” Susanna said, “Dominic was smart about it. The worse he got, the more careful he was. He’d grab my wrist and pull my hand onto his dick and tell me I was going to suck it, but he’d only do it when there was no one watching. He’d come up to me in the park with a video clip on his phone—because of course he always had the fanciest phone, remember?—a video of some woman getting shagged in some creative way, and he’d be like ‘This is what I’m going to do to you,’ but he wouldn’t send me dick pics or anything. I couldn’t prove anything had happened at all. If I’d told anyone, all he would’ve had to do was say he didn’t know what I was talking about and I was a crazy bitch. Overall, it didn’t seem like there would be much upside to talking.”
“I felt exactly the same,” Leon said. “That’s what he relied on. God, he really was ghastly, wasn’t he?”
“And at that stage,” Susanna said, “I still felt like I could handle it. I mean, not like I was handling it well. I was jumpy as fuck. I was rearranging my life trying not to go anywhere Dominic Ganly might be, and whenever I went out of the house I was whipping around every two seconds to check for someone coming up behind me; every part of me felt like it was about to be grabbed, the whole time. But it still wasn’t the center of my universe. I was studying like crazy; most of my mind was on the Leaving, and that was where I wanted it. The last thing I wanted to do was make the Dominic mess blow up even bigger.” She reached for another cigarette. “Looking back, I don’t think