Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,48

say it was the other way around.”

“That they had sex with you?”

“Right,” I said. “That’s right.”

Jack looked at his shoes. He looked at his shoes for a long time. He became so still I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I tried to think what it would be like to be him, hearing such news for the first time, but that was hard to do when I’d known already for a while. It was possible that he might like to do something about what had happened. Unfortunately, it had happened five weeks before. Though it’s not hard to get emotional about the past, it’s hard to apply those emotions effectively.

Did the rumors happen to mention the way the guys came into the upstairs bathroom of Mary Brierly’s summer house in Napeague while I was peeing, the way they hoisted me against the wall before I could pull my pants up, the way L. B. Strickland covered my mouth with his mouth while Nico twisted the faucet on the sink very hard. Water splattered up from the basin onto my belly in icy slivers. I did not like water to splash up, not ever.

Would Jack feel better or worse knowing that because the back of my neck was pressed against the wall, I could hear but not see Nico’s zipper coming undone with one sharp shot. And unwillingly, I memorized the feel of my two wrists fitting into someone’s one hand, and the feel of drunken gasps on my neck going in time with strokes that tore me open, and the feel of a stranger’s hair against my skin.

“Rapture” by Blondie played. It seemed to play exponentially, with each next verse multiplying out. Surely no one had described that to Jack, or the part about Mary banging on the bathroom door and pushing it open onto the three of us, shrieking, “Get out of my house!” and “You tramp!” Did people include in the notes they passed a description of her nails going into my arms when she dragged me into the hallway with my pants around my ankles? How when I reached down to dress, there were streams of someone else’s fluid running down my inner thighs? How I stumbled down the stairs, how I ran out the front door, how I had hoped against hope that no one had noticed?

The night was moonless but not entirely unkind. Three bodies appeared. Rocky Santiago and his younger brother, Manny, and some underclassman whose name I could not recall. Rocky eased me into the passenger seat of his dented Chevy. My bike fit into his trunk. He drove cautiously toward East Hampton from Amagansett, and Manny followed in his friend’s car, cautiously also.

Rocky asked was I okay.

I felt bad not to answer. I could not get past this feeling, this harrowing after-feeling, a feeling beyond grasp or intelligence. Beyond any obvious comparison to having been robbed or cheated, inside I felt robbed and cheated. Inside, I felt the physics of injustice, which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the language of injustice. The indisputable wrongness of someone’s having taken something that did not belong to them, filthied something that I’d kept clean, made their mark on property that was mine, and contemptibly crossed over into my intimacy in defiance of my desire, was all distant conjecture compared to the pragmatics of my situation—the pulled muscle in my neck, the cut on my mouth possibly from a watch, the stinging scratches on my arms made by Mary, the dampness in my underwear not from me, the surface abrasions and internal hairline splits that I could not mention to Rocky despite his kind interest because it is hard for people to understand the inside of a girl, the way it is shaped like a conch with filigreed avenues that are spectacular and ornamental. People tend to think it’s just a hole.

I asked him to pull over and when he did, I leaned out to vomit. Manny turned off the headlights on the second car to give me privacy.

When we arrived at my house, Rocky shifted the arm of the car into park and asked was I all right to go in on my own. I said that I was. Maybe I was in shock, but I didn’t feel embarrassed with him. I had the feeling he’d seen enough of the world to understand the random brutality of instinct and to know I was not to blame for what had happened