Athena’s ghost has not bothered me once. At last, I’ve arrived at a project even she can’t find fault with.
I sketch out an outline for the rest of the story and create a work schedule for myself: at a rate of two thousand words a day, and factoring in time for revisions and line edits, I can have this finished in less than a month. Then, before I crash into sleep, I type out a title at the top of the document:
Mother Witch.
No one in their right mind could call this stealing. That’s what’s most fucked up about this whole debacle. Mother Witch is my original creation. All Athena contributed was a couple of sentences, maybe some underlying imagery. She was the catalyst, nothing more. Who knows where she would have taken the rest of the story? I certainly don’t—and I bet that, whatever it was, it’s nothing like what I ultimately publish.
And yet it’s this story that brings me down.
FIRST, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME ATHENA STOLE FROM ME.
We became friends at the start of our freshman year. We were both assigned to the same floor in our dorm, so naturally that became our default social circle those first few weeks. We ate all our meals together, went shopping for dorm goods together, took the Yale shuttle to Trader Joe’s for pepper jack cheese and cookie butter, hung out late nights in the common room, and stalked the streets of downtown New Haven on Friday nights in short skirts and tight-fitting tops, watching like vultures for the noise and lights that signified a party, hoping that someone knew someone who would let us in.
Athena and I had bonded instantly over our love of the same book, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. “It is the perfect campus tale,” Athena said, articulating clearly every feeling I’d ever had about the novel. “It describes precisely that gulf between wanting others to know you, and being terrified that they might understand, at a time when we’re not sure who we are at all. It’s not just about translating between Russian and English, it’s also about translating an unformed identity. I love it.” We would go together to open mic nights at bookstore cafés and apartment parties hosted by upperclassmen in our fiction seminars, and from late August through September I made myself believe I was the sort of person this impossibly cool goddess would be friends with.
The first weekend of October, I went on a date with a cute sophomore named Andrew: someone I’d noticed during my World History discussion sections but hadn’t worked up the nerve to speak to until we crossed paths at a Delta Phi party, both falling-down drunk and just looking for a body to glue ourselves to. We hadn’t exchanged two words before we started making out. I can’t remember if it was good or not, only that it was very sticky, but it felt like we were doing the expected, and that in itself seemed like an achievement. Before my friends dragged me home, I put my number in his phone. Miraculously, he texted me the next day, invited me over to his room the following Friday to watch an episode of Sherlock while his roommate was at late-night Ultimate Frisbee practice.
What happened next is so mundane it almost doesn’t feel worth describing. He had a handle of Burnett’s on hand. Excited, I drank too much and too fast. We never got around to watching Sherlock. I woke up the next morning with my panties around my ankles and violent, purplish-black hickeys on my neck. My vagina, to be honest, felt fine—later I would poke and prod at it, trying to tell if I was sore or bleeding, but it all seemed normal. I was just dry-mouthed, hungover, and so nauseated that I kept leaning over the side of the bunk bed to dry heave. Everything was blurry; I’d fallen asleep with my contacts in, and my eyes were so dry I could barely keep them open. Beside me, Andrew was fully clothed and asleep. He didn’t wake up when I climbed over him out of bed, for which I was desperately grateful.
I found my heels, pulled them on, and staggered back to my dorm.
I was fine throughout the weekend. I didn’t go out again, even though half the girls I knew were getting pretty for a sorority open house night. I stayed in, enjoyed a popcorn and movie night with some girls on my floor, and attempted my course reading. It was getting colder outside; I wore turtlenecks and scarves to hide my hickeys. Back in my room, where I could not conceal my bare neck from my roommate, Michelle, I made jokes about having a wild weekend, and that was the last we spoke of it.
Andrew hadn’t texted me since I left his room, which didn’t bother me much. Mostly I felt blasé about the whole affair, and proud of being blasé. I felt grown-up, womanly, accomplished. I’d hooked up with a sophomore. A cute sophomore. The enormity of it delighted me. I’d crossed a bridge into adulthood; I’d “hooked up” with someone, as the youths say. And I was fine.
It was only the next week that I started suffering flashbacks. Andrew’s face would pop up in my mind during lectures: vivid, up close, his chin prickly and his breath sour with cinnamon Burnett’s. I’d find myself unable to breathe, unable to move without feeling waves of vertigo. My imagination would spiral out, imagining the worst possible scenarios. Could I be pregnant? Did I have HIV? HPV? Herpes? AIDS? Would my uterus rot out inside me? Should I see campus health? If I saw campus health, would it cost me hundreds of dollars I didn’t have? Had my mom waived the student insurance plan? I couldn’t remember. Was I going to die because of a stupid mistake I’d made, something I hadn’t even been awake for?
Andrew didn’t text me until two in the morning the following Saturday: Hey, u up? I saw it when I got up to pee and deleted it, hoping to spare my waking self the reminder of his existence.
But I couldn’t get his face, his smell, his touch out of my mind. I started taking incredibly long showers, three or four times a day. I kept having nightmares in which I was pinned beneath him, trapped under his scratchy chin, unable to move or scream. Michelle would wake me up, shaking my shoulders gently, asking me apologetically and diplomatically if I had earplugs she could borrow, because she had discussion section at eight in the morning and I was interrupting her REM cycles. I found myself weeping randomly in the afternoons, overwhelmed with self-loathing. I even considered going to a student Bible study group, though I’d stopped going to church after Dad since the pastor told me he was going to hell as he’d never been baptized, just because I wanted something that could help me make sense of my very retrograde but still strong conviction that I was irreversibly tainted, used, and dirty.
“Hey, Juniper?” Athena stopped me one afternoon on my way back from the dining hall. Back then, Athena was the only one who used my full name, which was a habit she would sustain through adulthood, calling Tashas “Natasha” and Bills “William” as if this insistence on formality would elevate everyone in the conversation. (It did.) She touched my arm. Her fingers were smooth and cool. “Are you okay?”
And maybe it was because I’d been holding it all in for so long, or because she was the first person at Yale who’d really looked at me and noticed that something wasn’t right, but I burst immediately into loud, ugly tears.
“Come on,” she said, rubbing gentle circles on my back. “Let’s go to my room.”
Athena held my hand while I recounted the whole thing through hiccupping sobs. She talked me through my options, made me look through the campus resources list, and helped me decide if I wanted to seek counseling (yes) or report Andrew to the campus police to try and press charges (no). She walked with me to my first appointment with Dr. Gaily, where I got a diagnosis for my anxiety, unpacked all this shit I’d been carrying since my father’s death, and learned coping mechanisms that I still use today. She left takeout meals from the cafeteria outside my door when she noticed I hadn’t gone to dinner. She texted me puppy photos late at night captioned, Hope you dream of this!