“Rachel, we have to.”
“Do you think they’ll believe us? DED gets tons of girls, whenever they want. Why would they bother doing this? No one would ever believe what they’ve done to us. The cops won’t do anything. We went back there ourselves, I mean . . . we came to the show and went backstage, all dressed up.” My head pounded.
Fern was silent for a few moments. “But we have to do something,” she said, her voice rising to a wail.
“I know we do.”
A thought was taking shape in my mind, something concrete, something exciting, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t focus on it. Not yet. But I could feel it there, slowly forming. We had to do something.
xXx
The first thing to do was to go to the bus station. I focused on every step, every action that would take us forward. I couldn’t bear to look backwards. I knew what had happened but I did not want to envision it. I knew there would be plenty of time, the rest of my life, to think about it, to relive every horrible detail. But right now I had tasks, and I focused on them. We were two hours away from home, and we had to get back. We had to figure out what to do right now.
I held Fern’s hand and set out to find a taxi. I began to steer us into the general direction I thought the bus station was so we could walk and collect ourselves before getting into a cab. She knelt on the sidewalk and threw up, punctuating it with sobs, and I knelt beside her and rubbed her shaking shoulders. Again, I felt my eyes were wider than they normally were, absorbing more than usual, in greater detail: the way the streetlights cast patterns on the sidewalk through the tree branches, the small glittery hair clip on Fern’s head, the dry grass and the crushed juice box in the gutter.
When she said she felt well enough to get in a taxi, I hailed one. As we drove through the streets, she laid her head on my shoulder. I felt frozen, too aware, too sensitive. My skin felt as though stick-legged bugs were crawling over it. I pressed my arm tighter against Fern, screwing my eyes closed, noticed I was trembling, realized I wasn’t — it was Fern, huddled against me. I felt some sort of hollow, failed protectiveness for her.
We got out of the taxi at the bus station, which was still open, thankfully. The attendant said that there would be a bus leaving in two hours that made a stop in Keeleford on its way someplace else. She flicked her eyes between Fern and me, noticeably weirded out by us, so I tried to smile as calmly as I could and then led Fern towards a row of plastic chairs to wait. I didn’t want the woman to call the police, because if the police came it would spoil everything. My mind was working on some idea that would show itself to me eventually. I needed time.
I got Fern a can of Coke and she sipped it, wiping her eyes. “Rachel, we have to go to the doctor,” she finally said in a wet, wavering voice that sounded as if it could escalate to a shriek very quickly.
“They used condoms.”
“Yeah, well, we have to go to the doctor.” Her voice took on a keening tone and her breath started coming in short gasps. “If we aren’t going to the police, we should at least be going to the doctor.”
An image entered my mind of poking, prodding doctors and I slammed it away, swallowing hard, actually stamping my foot to distract from the coiling nausea inside me. “Let’s just worry about getting home right now.”