“Don’t apologize.” A pause. Catherine could almost hear Amber thinking on the other end. She wondered where Amber was, if she was in her room. Was it raining where she was, hours to the east, in Ellensburg?
“I’m guessing that whole after-finals campus cleanup wasn’t actually a thing then.”
“It was,” Catherine said. “But not for me. I just…I couldn’t drive. I just couldn’t.”
“Do you think you were raped?”
The word sliced into her ear, burrowed in her brain like it would never leave. Like she’d forever hear it in Amber’s cadence, in that exact sentence.
“Maybe.”
Pretty sure that’s the opposite of serious.
Amber blew out a breath. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I’m going to tell you, and you can ignore me and do whatever, okay? You have two choices here: report it or move on. Because if you stay in the middle you are going to lose your mind, okay? I say report it. It will suck majorly and maybe nothing will happen to the guy and people will hate you anyway, but at least you get to say what happened. What you remember. Or you do nothing—because I can’t make you report it, no one can, not even fucking Cordelia who I hate as much as anyone—and move on. Or try to. Convince yourself it was something different, something else. Or that it was one night of your life and it doesn’t define you and your life is made of hours and days of other, good things and you’re not going to let some asshole take away the things that come next.”
Amber’s words were a torrent washing over her, and her skin grew cold and goose-bumped in the ensuing silence.
“Amber,” she said slowly, “did—”
“Eight minutes. Two years ago. If I live to be eighty, that’s forty-two million, forty-eight thousand minutes. I tried to figure out the fraction, like what percentage that eight minutes was out of all my minutes, and the calculator literally gave me an error message.” A pause. “It wasn’t rape. I was at a gas station that got held up. I wanted to buy a Vitaminwater, trying to figure out what flavor, just standing there and debating between orange-mango and mixed berry like an idiot. I still think about it, seeing what was happening in the reflection of the door first, sort of fogged and blurry, but still clear enough to know what was happening. Have you ever had a gun pointed at you?”
“No.”
“It’s like…” An exhale of breath. “Like the person holding it has already killed you, even without pulling the trigger. Like the dying’s already started. Everything sort of narrows and falls away and there’s just you and this thing that can kill you and you think no as if that would help and you realize how fucking helpless you are. That’s what I remember most about it. The helplessness. Like I could literally not do one thing to change my fate. Thankfully, the guy just wanted money, and the cops came, like, a minute after he left. They tracked him down. But that’s how I know it was only eight minutes, from the time he entered the store to the time he left. I think the actual holdup was, like, three.”
“Three,” Catherine repeated.
“Yeah.”
She pressed the phone to her ear, hard. It was slick with tears. “Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah,” Amber said again. “I don’t tell that story a lot. It’s just…I don’t know. I think I get what it’s like. Sort of. I mean, it’s not the same, I know that. But I know how it feels when something huge and terrible happens and you can’t process it because it doesn’t even seem real, even though it was real and it was the absolute worst thing in the world. Like the world was one thing before and something totally different afterward. And nothing feels safe or even okay anymore. So I get it, how big a deal it is for you to tell me what happened.” A pause. “Or maybe I’m way out of line and you think I’m a total asshole and—”
“No,” Catherine said. “No, you’re not. Because it is like that, like the world isn’t…isn’t…” She struggled for a moment, then went on. “It’s weird. Like, I want to know more but I don’t. I think I won’t be able to handle it if I know more, but at the same time it sucks not knowing.”
“What do you want to do? Don’t think. Tell me.”
“I want for it not to have happened.”
“Nothing behind door number one. Would you care to try door number two?”
Despite herself, Catherine almost smiled. “I want to see you. I want for things to go back to normal.”
“Then don’t leave.”
Ugh, ignore me. Being dramatic. Not transferring.
?
I’m going to go back in Jan. Just freaked out. Being weird. Srry
Okay…
It’s bc you think it’s Fails College, isn’t it?
Haha no
Catherine put down her phone on the bathroom counter and towel-dried her hair. She’d been up until three in the morning thinking it over and had made her decision. Now it was eleven and she was clean and smelled like lavender soap. She’d washed and moisturized her face, tried to cover the bruise on her neck—purple before, now green and yellow—with makeup, brushed her teeth even though she wanted coffee. But that was fine. She’d wait.
Baby steps, she told herself, running a comb through her tangles and forcing herself not to wince. Like texting. Like showering. Like not wanting to die.
She was going to go downstairs and tell her mom she’d made a mistake. She didn’t want to transfer. She’d say whatever she had to in order to undo the worry she’d caused. She’d show her mom the email from her professor. She’d tell her dad about the conference, and he’d be proud and relieved and they could just pretend this whole fiasco hadn’t happened. It was her fault, really, that her parents were freaked out: calling her mom in tears right after, telling her she was so messed up she couldn’t even go back to school; her dad staring into the night, not able to even look her in the eye. She wanted to go back to before, to normalcy and peace and parents she hadn’t terrified out of their wits.