“What?” I sat up straight. “No. Haley, you can’t just throw that word around.”
“She tried to kill herself.”
She was sitting up stick straight. I remembered what Coach had said: that I couldn’t talk about it, that I shouldn’t say anything, except that nothing had happened. I tried to think of what to say to Haley that would fit the bill.
“But the rape thing. Where did you hear that? Who said that to you?” I felt myself getting agitated.
“Max and Richard said it. At Denny’s. You were there.”
“They didn’t say that.” I was surprised how nice it felt to be angry.
“They said they fingered her while she was passed out.”
I asked how she had heard that.
“Alan told me,” she said.
The idea that she’d been talking to Alan made me furious. What if she was the one who told everybody? I hated Alan. I hated her. I imagined him telling her, betraying Richard and Max and all of us—I’d always known he was a liar—and it felt right to be angry, it was like finally finishing a run and drinking an entire bottle of water in one go. Haley didn’t understand that we were just trying to have a good time while we could. We had to be able to run three miles in twenty-five minutes. We had both legs and nothing to write about in our college application essays. When we broke our arms, we couldn’t even take the Oxy because our teammates might need it to give to girls. I didn’t even want a blow job from Haley. Not if I had to feel this way to get it.
I stared at the screen. I was so angry I couldn’t look at her. But I didn’t have to put up with her anymore because the movie started. I couldn’t decide if the timing was perfect or terrible. On the screen, a guy was careening through Los Angeles trying to get home in time to save his girlfriend from a murderer. I looked over at Haley once and she was looking away from me, toward the door. Just when the girlfriend got out of the shower—and the killer was right there, ready to strike—Haley got up and walked out.
I went back and forth but finally decided to follow her out. Even then she wouldn’t let me drive her home.
“I need some time alone,” she said. “I’ll get a ride with Georgia when she gets off work.”
Her arms were crossed. Behind her, kids were blowing up plastic grocery bags and setting them in a shallow fountain, giving them a little push, watching them float. I realized I would have to tell the team about this. I would have to tell Coach. Who else was Haley talking to?
I touched her for the first time since the party. It was just my hand on her elbow. I was surprised she let me keep it there. You can’t tell anyone what you said in there, I said. That bullshit about Richard and the girl. You can’t say that to anyone.
My hand was still on her arm. Her eyes softened, and her mouth opened just a little bit, and for a second I thought that I had cracked through. She was sorry, she was going to apologize. She uncrossed her arms and took the smallest step backward, just enough to step out of my reach.
“Everyone knows, Nick,” she said, and walked away.
* * *
• • •
COACH WASN’T WRONG: they started coming out of the woods for us, and hard. The second week in January was the worst. It was my first experience with injustice. We were no longer individuals, talented young men with hopes and dreams. We were the lacrosse team that had raped that girl.
On Monday they had a moment of silence over the loudspeaker for suicide awareness. Some sophomore did it during morning announcements. But the loudspeaker stayed on the whole time, you could hear the kid breathing. It wasn’t a moment of silence. It was a moment of spittle in the corner of some mouth breather’s mouth. I watched the second hand on the clock, and the “moment” only lasted thirty seconds, which seemed cheap to me.
Also that day we missed fifth period for a special presentation about suicide. A bunch of people were wearing black on Tuesday. By Wednesday it was almost everyone. Then on Thursday some girl got up during lunch and shouted that she was organizing a boycott of lacrosse games and asked people to come over and sign up. Dave wanted to go over and rip her sheets into shreds, but I told him to stop. I felt myself standing tall even as I said it. I told him what Coach had told me: that we had to keep our cool. And I was right, because then some random guy yelled suck my dick! and the girl got all red in the face and ran out of the lunchroom and no one signed her stupid boycott anyway.
Richard had stopped coming to school the day before. When I called his house, his mother said he was sick and that she’d have him call me soon. Over lunch Max said they had both talked to the police. The police had treated him like shit, he said. They kept asking the same questions, like I was an idiot. And none of us said, You are an idiot, because things were different now, we weren’t joking around anymore.
One of the cops said they talked to this other girl. This random girl told them I pushed her on a bed last summer. At some party. Max looked at us as he said this, like he was daring us to agree with the girl. She said I made her uncomfortable.
We couldn’t look at Max. We weren’t sure what to say. So the ladies’ man gets rough, Dave finally said, and sort of laughed, then stopped. None of us were laughing.
Anyway, it was months ago, Max said. What does it matter.
And we all agreed: They’re coming out of the woods for us, is all.
On Friday, Ms. Lomax gave us the whole class just to write about our feelings. “I know a lot of you are probably feeling upset, maybe confused, maybe even afraid. Writing can help. It’s not graded, and you don’t have to share.”
Dave folded his arms and refused, said he didn’t have anything to say about recent events. “This is calculus,” he said.
“You kids’ lives are more important than calculus,” she said. “But if you don’t want to write, you can excuse yourself and go sit in the library.”
I was the only lacrosse player left in the room but I wasn’t going to bail. We spent a silent half hour bent over our papers. The sound of everyone’s pens going was like ants chewing up a man buried alive to his neck. I stared at the blue lines in my blank notebook and wrote nothing. When thirty minutes were up, Ms. Lomax asked if anyone wanted to share. Haley volunteered. She walked by my desk without looking at me and stood up in front of the class.
What is a boxing ring for? Climb the velvet rope. Shrug off your robe. You can’t complain about getting hit. What did you expect, we might say, when you climbed into the ring, wearing those gloves? When you heard the bell? If you get hit on the street, one-two, by a stranger in silk shorts? Okay, we might say, not your fault. Or maybe we’ll bring out a coil of velvet rope, to wrap and wrap around you, so that when you wake up, hit and upset, we can explain what a boxing ring is for.