Ana is grinding her teeth so hard that her dad can hear it. He whispers: “They’re just frightened, Ana, they’re just looking for a scapegoat.”
Ana wants to scream. She wants to yank open the door of the neighbor’s house, tear down the green flag, and shout: “Why isn’t KEVIN the scapegoat, then? WELL?” She wants to scream so loud that all the other neighbors here in the Heights can hear it too. Scream that she loves hockey. LOVES hockey! But she’s a girl, so what happens if she says that to a boy? He says: “Really? You’re a girl and you like hockey? Okay! Who won the Stanley Cup in 1983, then? Well? And who came seventh in the league in 1994? Well? If you like hockey you ought to be able to answer that!”
Girls aren’t allowed to like hockey even just a little bit in Beartown. Ideally they shouldn’t like it at all. Because if you like the sport you must be a lesbian, and if you like the players you’re a slut. Ana feels like pushing her neighbor up against the wall and telling him that the locker room where those boys sit telling their stupid jokes ends up preserving them like a tin can. It makes them mature more slowly, while some even go rotten inside. And they don’t have any female friends, and there are no women’s teams here, so they learn that hockey only belongs to them, and their coaches teach them that girls are a “distraction.” So they learn that girls only exist for fucking. She wants to point out how all the old men in this town praise them for “fighting” and “not backing down,” but not one single person tells them that when a girl says no, it means NO. And the problem with this town is not only that a boy raped a girl, but that everyone is pretending that he DIDN’T do it. So now all the other boys will think that what he did was okay. Because no one cares. Ana wants to stand on the rooftop and scream: “You don’t give a shit about Maya! And you don’t really give a shit about Kevin either! Because they’re not people to you, they’re just objects of value. And his value is far greater than hers!”
She wants so much. But the street is empty, and she stays silent. She hates herself for that.
Ana’s dad still has his fingers resting clumsily on her shoulder as they go inside the house, but she slides away from his hand. He watches her as she carries the rifles down to the cellar. Sees the hatred in her. He will remember thinking: “Of all the men in the world that I wouldn’t like to be, he’s the one I’d like to be least of all: the one who hurt that girl’s best friend.”
*
“What’s that on the floor?” her brother repeats.
“Water,” Jeanette replies.
She knows there aren’t many pupils at the school who know how to break in here, whether or not they set the alarm off. She doesn’t know if the person who did this managed to get out before she and her brother showed up, or if they just didn’t care.
Jeanette’s first lesson that morning is substitute teaching with a grade-nine class. She sees that Zacharias has ink on his hands. He smells faintly of solvent. In the corridor there’s a locker on which the word BITCH is no longer scrawled, because he spent part of the night scrubbing it clean. Because he knows what it’s like to be the one other people hurt, just because they can. Because he knows what the strong do to the weak in this town.
Jeanette doesn’t say anything to Zacharias. She knows this is his silent protest. And her decision not to tell anyone about who broke in last night becomes her own silent protest.
42
When a child learns to hunt, they are taught that the forest contains two different sorts of animal: predators and prey. The predators have their eyes close together, facing the front, because they only need to focus on their prey. Their prey, on the other hand, have their eyes wide apart, on either side of the head, because their only chance of survival is if they can see predators approaching from behind.
When Ana and Maya were little they used to spend hours in front of the mirror trying to work out which of them they were.
*
Tails is sitting in his office. The supermarket isn’t open yet, but the room is full. The men have come here because they don’t want anyone to see them meet at the rink. They’re nervous and paranoid. They talk about journalists snooping around. Use words like “responsibility” several times, explain to Tails that they “have to stick together now, so that this doesn’t get out of hand.” They are sponsors, board members, but today, of course, they are just concerned friends, dads, citizens. They all just want what’s best for the town. For the club. They all just want the truth to come out. One worried voice says: “Anyone can see . . . I mean, why would Kevin do a thing like that? It’s obvious it was voluntary, then she changed her mind. If only we could have dealt with this internally.” Another says: “But of course we need to think about both families, of course we do. The girl must be scared. They’re only children, after all. But the truth needs to come out. Before this gets out of hand.” At the end of the meeting, Kevin’s dad gets up and walks into town with Tails. Knocks on door after door.
*
Maya is awake early. She’s standing in the garage on her own, playing the guitar. She will never be able to explain what’s happening to her. How she went from being so destroyed that she was just lying on the bathroom floor in her mother’s arms, crying and screaming, to . . . what she feels now. But something happened last night. The stone through the window, the broken glass on the floor. BITCH in red letters. In the end, that does something to a person. Maya is still so scared of the dark that it feels like it’s clutching at her clothes if she so much as enters a room where the lights are out, but she realized something this morning: the only way to stop being afraid of the darkness out there is to find a darkness inside yourself that’s bigger. She’s never going to get any justice from this town, so there’s only one solution: either Kevin must die, or Maya must.
*
Ramona is drinking her breakfast when they arrive. Kevin’s dad, that Erdahl guy, walks in the way he walks into every room: as if it belongs to him. Tails comes stumbling after him, as if his shoes were too big for him.
“I’m closed,” Ramona informs them.
Tails grins. Just the way his dad used to, Ramona thinks. He was just as tall and just as fat and just as stupid.
“We just want a little chat,” he says.
“Off the record,” Erdahl adds.
His eyes are set close together.
*
Kira’s office is full of boxes, her desk drowning in paper. Her colleague puts a cup of coffee down and promises: “We’re going to do everything we can, Kira. Everyone in the firm will do all that we can. But you need to be prepared that most cases like this, where it’s one person’s word against another’s . . . you know how they end.”