he just broke open, and you could see what was inside. Which was basically the same, only more so.”
It had occurred to me, a little late, to wonder how exactly Leon fit into this. Su I still think this isn’t a good idea— Clearly he knew the whole story, had for a while; what the hell did that mean? Had we all been in on it together? I wouldn’t have put it past Susanna to come up with some byzantine Orient Express thing— I took another Mars bar.
“Anyway,” Susanna said, “he kept getting worse. This one day he showed up outside my work and walked with me to the bus stop again, only there was no one else there, which I knew right away wasn’t good. He shoved me up against the bus shelter and started groping me. I smacked him across the face, and he smacked me right back, good and hard, without even stopping what he was doing. My head bashed off the bus shelter; I had a big lump for days. When I stopped seeing stars I tried to push him off me, but he was strong. He got both my wrists in one hand and held them above my head, and stuck the other hand up my skirt. I tried kicking him, but he just laughed and slammed his whole weight against me so I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even get enough breath to scream. If a bunch of old women hadn’t come along, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
“But that’s assault,” I said. Her tone—cool, detached, she might have been describing a trip to the shops—was bothering me; this was Susanna, for God’s sake, who could work herself into a passion about an injustice to someone in a whole different hemisphere, what was going on? “Why didn’t you go to the cops?”
“Way ahead of you there, champ,” Susanna said, raising an eyebrow. “I did. After that happened, I told Leon the whole thing. Not that I expected him to jump in and put a stop to it, but I needed someone to walk me to work in the mornings and meet me outside when I finished—which was pretty humiliating: like I was a little kid who couldn’t handle the big bad world. And I knew Leon wouldn’t think I was being a wimp, because he knew what Dominic was like.”
“Oh, I did,” Leon said. “I knew exactly what he was like. He was still giving me some of the same old shite, by the way; he was well able to handle more than one victim at a time. Multitasking; he’d have done well in management. But at least I was getting a lot less of it. He’d only really ever picked on me when he had his buddies around—it was some kind of chimpanzee thing, displaying dominance for the other males—and now that no one wanted to be around him, he didn’t bother as much. Just casual stuff, in passing. Knocking my coffee down my chest, that kind of thing.”
“But,” Susanna said, with a glance of real affection, “Leon was horrified. Outraged. ‘That bastard, we’re not going to let him get away with this . . .’ I think if I’d let him he would’ve rushed right out to teach Dominic a lesson, and that wouldn’t have ended well—no offense, Leon—”
“None taken,” Leon said cheerfully. “He’d have eaten me for breakfast.”
“Instead Leon convinced me to go talk to the cops. I took some convincing, but seeing how furious he was . . . that made me twig that yeah, actually, I wasn’t overreacting, this genuinely was a big deal, and it was about time someone stuck a spoke in that fucker’s wheel. And like he pointed out, we weren’t in school any more; I didn’t have to worry about everyone finding out and me being a leper.” She was smiling over at Leon. “He went with me and held my hand while we waited, and everything.”
“I’m so ashamed about that,” Leon said, covering his face with his hands. “God. Every time I think of it, I want to ring you up and apologize. I don’t even know what I thought they’d do. Go give him a stern talking-to. Scare him into backing off.”
“It’s OK,” Susanna said. “Seriously. I actually expected them to do something, too. Pair of middle-class spoiled brats that we were.”
“What, they didn’t?” I said. “Like, nothing at all?” This sounded completely bizarre. Martin and Flashy Suit had been pretty useless, but at