we both knew it wasn’t true, he calls me slut? Uncle Freestyle was right, guys do talk shit about you. Not that I really care. Jerk. I hate Fortune. I fucking hate him. I knew he was with other girls. I hate all men.
I go into the kitchen and down three shots of vodka and wait for my head to clear. I turn on the TV and flick the channels. Then I go take three more shots.
Even when I start feeling drunk, I still feel a little weird. Shaky. Like I’m scared or something. I hate myself for being afraid of him. It’s stupid. It’s not like anyone has ever hit me before. I’ve seen it happen to my mom, when I was little and she had some idiot boyfriends. So maybe that’s why I expect it will happen to me. When a guy raises his hand, I brace.
I hate this weakness. I hate being a girl. There’s always this inevitable submission. Men will always have the last word. The last fist. They will always have that ultimate power.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling really bad, I reach into my mind and bring out a memory of Bradley. It’s the only thing that can possibly make me feel better, as if somehow I’m not alone. As if somehow the ghostly memories bring his spirit to my present. I go take two more shots and lie back down on the couch, just letting my mind roam, like one of those roulette machines that bounces a ball around until it randomly lands on a number. My head spins and spins and spins until it lands on this:
I’m playing with Bradley on the front lawn of our apartment building. His favourite thing to do was spin. I’d take his wrists and pull him up into the air and twirl around and around, his feet flinging wildly. I have this image of his face imprinted on my mind: his open, laughing mouth, his ecstatic eyes locked on mine, intoxicated with his cocktail of pleasure and thrill and trust all mixed together. I remember loving this face ’cause I could recall feeling like that when I was younger. I used to cherish that feeling of weightlessness.
“Faster!” he’d shout tirelessly. “Faster!” And I’d propel his featherweight body through space till my arms ached and I had to let him drop. And his bare legs dragged along the ground, leaving him with green grass-stained reminders of the inevitable fall, because everyone, even little kids, must pay some kind of price for the dizzy high.
Suddenly my stomach churns. I jump up and run to the toilet, grip it with both hands, and hurl into the brownstained bowl. Just the stench of the toilet bowl makes me puke more. When I’m done, I lower myself onto the bathroom tiles and curl up in a ball, lying on my side. It’s dark. I didn’t turn on the light. I hear my breathing. And a slight pounding in my head.
My mind spirals down to somewhere dark and cold. I suppose it’s natural to think only of the good times with Michael, but the bad memories have always been there, hovering somewhere in the past. Sometimes, it’s the body that remembers. Sometimes, the body’s memory is so much more powerful than the mind’s. Even if you don’t want to think about it, even if you fight it, the moment comes to you anyway in its entirety, flashing through your mind, smashing your skull like a bullet.
It happened on our last night. Before he said the words and I walked out the door.
Michael had applied for teacher’s college before I met him. He was so nervous about it, always saying he feared he wouldn’t get in. I knew it would be no problem because his high school marks were so good, even if he did drop out of his science degree. But he said the acceptance would depend on a number of things, like volunteer work and experience, so it was all a gamble. He was all doomsday-like, which made me oddly optimistic. I swear, if you want to cure depression, put a sad person around someone even sadder, and that’s better than five years of Prozac.
The closer the acceptance deadline came, the more agitated he grew. And when the acceptance deadline passed, it was like there was an instant fog over his eyes.
“You’d make a great teacher,” I encouraged. I was jumping up and down on his bed while he sat at his desk