She laughs at that, but as her little brother falls asleep Katia blinks away tears. Throughout his childhood, ever since the sandboxes and swings, she has seen girls look at him. As much because they dream of being able to rein him in as because they suspect it wouldn’t be possible. But they never understand why.
With each passing year, as Benji has grown older, Katia has wished him a different life. In a different place, another time, maybe he would have been a different boy. Milder, more secure. But not in Beartown. Here he is burdened with too much that no one sees, and here he has hockey. The team, the guys, Kevin. They mean everything to him, so he is everything they want him to be. And that’s a terrible thing.
Having to keep a secret from those you love.
*
Everyone talks about what it’s like. The school nurse, the poor teacher in charge of the sex education lessons, anxious parents, moralizing television programs, the entire Internet. Everyone. All your life you’re told exactly what happens. Even so, no one tells you it’s going to be like this.
Maya is lying on her back on Kevin’s bed. It’s her first time smoking marijuana. It feels different from how she’s imagined it—as if warmth has a flavor. The smoke seems to fly straight up into her head instead of down her throat. Kevin has posters of hockey players on the walls, trophies on all the shelves, but in one corner is an old record-player. She will remember that because it doesn’t fit in.
“It’s my dad’s old one. I like the way it sounds . . . the way it crackles when you switch it on,” he says, almost apologetically.
He puts some music on; she doesn’t remember what, just remembers the crackle. In ten years’ time she will hear the same crackle from a record-player in the corner of a bar or in a clothing boutique on the other side of the world and will be instantly transported back to this place, this moment. She feels the weight of his body on top of hers and she laughs—she’ll remember that. They kiss each other, and she’ll get these two questions more than any other she ever gets asked in her life: Who kissed whom? Did you kiss him back? He’s the one kissing her. And yes, she kisses him back. But when he forces her jeans down she stops him. He seems to think it’s a game, so she catches his hand and holds it tight.
“I don’t want to, not tonight, I’ve nev . . . ,” she whispers.
“Of course you want to,” he insists.
She flares up.
“Are you deaf or what? I said no!”
His grip on her wrists tightens, first almost imperceptibly, then to the point where it hurts.
*
Katia turns the car onto the little road that leads up into the forest just after the “Welcome to Beartown” sign. Drives toward the kennels. There are no lights out here, so when Benji wakes up and looks out through the window, he doesn’t realize what it is before they’ve already gone past.
“Stop,” he mutters.
“What?” Katia replies.
“STOP!” Benji shouts.
Shocked, she brakes hard. Her little brother has already opened the door and run out into the darkness.
*
Everyone talks about what it’s like. All your life you’re told exactly what happens: you get assaulted on a jogging trail, beaten and dragged into an alleyway on a package holiday, drugged in a bar and locked up by unknown adult men in a slum in a big city. Everyone warns you, time and time again, they warn all girls: This can happen! This is how it happens!
It’s just that no one tells you it can be like this: with someone you know. Trust. Have laughed with. In this boy’s room, beneath the posters of hockey players with the entire floor below full of classmates. Kevin kisses her neck, moves her hand out of the way. She will remember the way he touched her body as if it didn’t belong to her. As if it were a thing he had earned, as if her head and the rest were two separate objects, independent of each other. No one will ask her about that. They’ll just ask how much resistance she put up. If she was “clear” enough.
“Stop playing hard to get—you came upstairs with me, didn’t you?” he laughs.
She tries to pull his hand away, but he’s infinitely stronger than her. She tries to twist out of his grip and get up from the bed, but his knee is locked around her waist.
“Stop it, Kevin, I don’t wa . . .” His breathing echoes in her ear.
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I thought you liked me.”
“I do . . . but I’ve never . . . Stop it, please!”
She tries so desperately to move his hand that her nails tear two deep scratches in his skin. She will remember seeing drops of blood seep out, slowly, slowly, slowly, and the way he doesn’t even seem to notice. He is holding her down with his weight alone; he doesn’t even have to put any effort into it, and his tone changes instantly: “Come on, for fuck’s sake! Stop playing hard to get! I can go downstairs and get whatever girl I want and fuck her instead!”
With a last effort Maya manages to pull one hand free, and hits him as hard as she can across the cheek.
“Go on, then! Do that!!! And LET GO OF ME!!!”
He doesn’t let go. His eyes just turn black. It’s as if he’s no longer in there anymore, the guy she had spent all evening joking around with. When she tries to stop his hand he closes his other fist tightly around her throat like a vise, and when she tries to scream his fingers are covering her lips. Lack of oxygen makes her slip in and out of consciousness, and in the midst of everything she will remember peculiar details that no one asks about: a button coming off her blouse when he tears it open, and the fact that she hears it land and bounce across the floor somewhere in the room. And she will remember thinking: “How am I going to find that later?”
*
They will ask her about the alcohol and marijuana. They won’t ask about the bottomless terror that will never leave her. About this room with its record-player and posters, from which she will never really escape again. One blouse-button somewhere on the floor, and a sense of panic that will be with her forever. She sobs noiselessly beneath his body, and screams silently behind his hand.
*
For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.
22
It’s Saturday night, and everything is different now. Ana just doesn’t know it yet. All she knows is that the older girls in the kitchen laugh at her cruelly when she asks after Maya.
“That little whore? She went off with Kevin. Don’t worry, sweetie, he’ll throw her back when he’s finished with her. No one on the team holds on to second-rate bitches!”