The next few minutes are a blur. Andrew grabs Raychel with both hands, lifting her up and over Carson’s body. Keri Sturgis is alternating between yelling at Carson and yelling at everyone else to back off, but everyone else is busy watching me chase Andrew and Raychel down the stairs.
Andrew bursts through the front door onto the lawn and drags her toward the car. “What the hell is going on?” I yell after them.
“We’re going home.” He beeps the lock so the lights flash at the other end of the street.
“No,” Raychel moans. “Andrew…”
“You want to stay?” He tosses her hand away. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Take me to my house,” she says, sobbing.
I finally catch up. “We can’t take her to Mom and Dad like this.”
“Fuck!” Andrew yells. He walks a few feet away and picks up a rock, throwing it hard at a tree. People are starting to emerge from Trenton’s house. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I use my shirt to stanch the blood gushing from my nose while Andrew puts Raychel in the backseat. We drive in silence toward her duplex. “Andrew,” she says quietly. “It’s not what you think.”
“You weren’t about to suck Carson Tipton’s dick?” he demands. I sit forward and cover my face, feeling like I’m on a roller coaster. “I thought you couldn’t stand that guy, Raych!”
She doesn’t argue. Her sobs are quiet, body folded in on itself like an animal that’s given up escaping from a trap. The porch light is off when we reach her driveway. “Let us walk you in,” I say, but she shakes her head. We watch her stumble-limp to the door and stab at the lock in the dark, not turning around when it finally opens.
Andrew pulls away before the light in her bedroom comes on. “Jesus, dude. What if she pukes in her sleep?” I ask, lowering the bloody shirt from my face.
“Then she can choke on it.” He punches the power button on the radio.
I turn it off. “She hooked up with the guy weeks ago, man. You knew she had something going with him.”
“No, I didn’t,” he says. “Not that it matters.”
“Then why are you so pissed?” I demand.
“Because she’s better than that!” he yells, taking a curve so fast that I bang into the passenger door.
“You think I don’t know?” I shout back. “You think I like watching her hook up with random dudes?”
He doesn’t answer, and it’s the last thing we say to each other for two days.
RAYCHEL
I make it to the couch before I collapse. At least one thing’s gone right tonight, I think, and pass out.
In the morning, I wake up to Mom feeling my forehead. “Dear god, Raychel, what did you do last night?” she asks. Tears immediately begin to leak from my eyes. “Oh honey,” she says, sitting down and laying my head in her lap. “It’s okay. Whatever happened, it’s okay.”
“I made…” I cough, hoping I can keep from throwing up again. “I made a mistake. I made a big fool of myself.”
She smooths my hair. “It’ll be okay, sweetie. It’ll be okay.”
*
Mom doesn’t press for more details. We pretend I have the flu, and she brings me bowls of chicken soup and saltines. I ice and elevate my leg, watching football until it’s late enough that I can reasonably go to bed. On Monday, my ankle feels better, but she accepts my excuse of still not feeling well and calls the school to tell them I’m staying home.
No one calls me. I don’t call them. I don’t even know what I’d say.
Mom starts talking about taking Tuesday off to stay with me, and I can’t let her do that. I’ll have to face the jackals sometime. So I get up, put on a simple outfit, and add some combat boots to make me feel tougher.
But at school, it’s different from last time. Less giggling, no questions. Just stares and the conversations that float over and around me. I try to dodge between them, into silent spaces. There aren’t many.
“… was going to suck his dick! There in the hallway!… not like it’s the first time, she totally had sex in his car … making out with Carson Tipton, in front of everybody … I know!…”
The teachers eye me suspiciously too. I swear, even Eddie the janitor is watching me. His head turns as I pass.
“… heard she’s screwing him and both Richardson boys too, and they were all fighting over her, god, who knows why … everyone knows she’s a slut … everyone knows she’s a whore … everyone knows, everyone knows … everyone knows…”
Everyone knows something, but no one knows shit.
*
Keri Sturgis grabs me the minute I walk into chemistry. “Are you okay?” she whispers.
I blink hard. She’s the first person to ask all day. “I’ve been better,” I mumble. Carson changed seats in calculus, but it just made people whisper and stare at both of us.
“Raychel,” she says, forcing me to look her in the eye. “I saw what happened. You didn’t want him on you!”
I start to tear up again. This was my one rule for today: no goddamn crying. “How did you even…”
She scowls. “So I was dancing with Andrew—thanks for that, by the way—and then Carson walks up and he’s all ‘Hey man, where’s Sanders,’ and Andrew’s like, ‘Not with you, obviously,’ but I didn’t know he was such a jerk so I said ‘She went to the bathroom, she’ll be back in a sec.’ And he walked off but you had already been gone a long time, and Andrew was acting all weird so I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll go find her—’”
“Ladies,” Mr. Monroe warns. I start working on the experiment, but Keri just drops her voice to a whisper.
“So then you weren’t in the line and someone said they saw you go upstairs and then I saw him bothering you and I started downstairs to get Andrew but he had followed me halfway anyway and then—well, then you know what happened.”
I stare at the Bunsen burner in front of us. I should have known Andrew wouldn’t send Carson to find me.
Keri leans against the black counter, glaring at the classmates trying to listen in. “It’s kind of sexy, you know?”
“What?” The glass tube I’m holding clanks against a scale.
Her hands flutter. “Oh no, not that. I mean boys fighting to defend you and all.”
I don’t see what’s so sexy about it. It’s like a sick fairy tale with too many swords.
“Hey, Sanders. Psst. Sanders!” A boy in glasses, a junior I don’t know, leans over from his workstation. “You want to go in the back for a sec? Maybe a little, you know…?” He makes a dirty hand gesture.
“No,” I mumble. “Screw off.” But Keri starts hissing a tirade at him and my answer gets lost.
MATT
Our parents, of course, don’t fail to notice that I have a fractured nose and Andrew’s jaw has swollen to a comical size. I do the lying, knowing they’ll never suspect it from me. “It was really stupid,” I tell Dad. “We went to a party at Trenton Montgomery’s house and he still has this big jungle gym in his backyard, so we decided to play on the swings, only it was dark and we crashed into each other.”