Everyone knew that men thought about sex all the time. Young men and old men and married men and single men and rich men and poor men and black men and white men and gay men and straight men and rock stars and bank tellers and crossing guards and presidents and lacrosse players and math teachers and brothers and fathers and kidnappers. So Meredith wasn’t going to be a baby about it and try to pretend that Lisa Bellow wasn’t getting raped.
She lay in bed and listened to morning things downstairs: the gurgling of the coffeemaker, the ringing of cereal hitting bowl, the bump of the front door being opened (intolerant cat out) and closed (newspaper in). Meredith thought about sex a fair amount as well, not every nine seconds like guys did—according to the internet—but maybe every nine minutes. She and Kristy and Jules often lay awake during sleepovers talking about things that were going to happen to them, sex they were going to have, and with whom, but in all these fantasies Meredith was always nineteen or twenty, a sexy and confident college student who bore almost no resemblance to her current self. Her sexual partner, often the adorable and funny drawer of watches Steven Overbeck, was also a sexy and confident college student in her fantasy, with muscles and sometimes a mustache. So although she could very vividly imagine herself having sex with Steven Overbeck, and was aroused by the thought, the self she imagined in the throes of passion was an entirely different version than the self that lay in this bed now listening to morning happening downstairs.
It was possible that Lisa had already had sex with the freshman lacrosse player, the boy on the beach, the orderer of the oniony sandwich. It wasn’t common (which is to say usual, which is to say ordinary, which is to say normal) in eighth grade, but it happened; Meredith had heard stories. But it was also very possible that Lisa had thus far limited herself to hand jobs and blow jobs, possible that Lisa was holding out, hanging on to the one valuable property she still held, already understanding her own sexual power, already knowing about things like being “used goods,” saving herself not as a moral choice but out of a desire to have something—anything—left for high school.
Regardless. Today, Saturday, October 11, sixtysomething hours post–Deli Barn, the queen of the eighth grade was definitely no longer a virgin.
It was a good thing for Lisa that there was the dog, Meredith thought. Right? At least there was little Annie, who might stand idly by while the sex was happening, chewing her Nylabone and minding her own business, but who afterward would definitely leap up onto the blankets covering Lisa and curl up in a ball beside her while the man stood by the bed pulling up his pants.
And maybe the sex itself wouldn’t have been that bad, not too bad, not really awful but rather just sort of awful, just something to get through, like a long school assembly or your grandparents’ anniversary dinner. This thought was enough to buoy Meredith into an upright position. Having sex with the kidnapper—really she wasn’t even going to think of it as rape, because maybe it wasn’t quite exactly rape, not like someone jumping out of the bushes and tearing your clothes off—was unpleasant, to be sure, but it probably wasn’t horrible. Maybe Lisa even thought the kidnapper was sort of cute. Maybe he was sort of cute. Maybe, in a certain light, he looked a little bit like the mustached, grown-up version of Steven Overbeck.
She stood up and clenched her toes into the thick carpet of her bedroom. She knew she had to go downstairs eventually. A check of the clock told her it would not be long before they came up and did a gentle tap-tap-tap on her three-quarters-closed door, the door opening a little farther with each tap, then a face in the space between door and frame. They did not come into her room often. She and Evan, children of two working parents, were expected to take care of their own spaces. They made their beds and straightened their desks and every night put their clothes in the laundry hamper in the bathroom. Meredith did not understand people who left clothes lying all over their bedroom floors, though some of her friends did this, just kicked aside piles to make more piles, until at some point a mother intervened and picked everything up and put it in the washing machine and then folded it and replaced it in drawers and closets and then the whole thing started over again. She liked that her mother did not have to do this for her, liked that her room felt more like an apartment, a place that was truly her own. One time at Jules’s house, Jules’s mother had come into Jules’s bedroom and flopped down across the bed, and Meredith had to conceal the distaste she felt spreading over her face.
It was possible they would send Evan to fetch her, and Evan was always welcome in her room, and sometimes he would just come in and sit down on the floor and start playing with the battling animals. They had a vast collection of these figures, wild animals who walked upright and carried swords and clubs and axes—and they would set them up around her room and have battles, and there was no sense that any time had passed. He could have been seven and she three; he could have been twelve and she eight. She didn’t play with the animals with anyone else, because it wouldn’t have been any fun. They had belonged first to Evan, and then they had each had several, and divided them into defined teams, bitterly opposed (Croc/Rhino/Lion/etc. vs. Tiger/Ram/Octopus/etc.). Now they all lived in her room, the whole collection, but it was understood that they all belonged to both of them.
She got dressed and went downstairs. As anticipated, her parents were instantly intolerable. Before a single word was spoken, she could see that they were doing their best to appear friendly but parental, caring yet not overbearing. They were failing on nearly every count. Her father was a flashing yellow light in the middle of the kitchen; her mother’s smile looked like she’d drawn it on her face after consulting an illustrated encyclopedia of expressions.
“I made pancakes,” her mother said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Where’s Evan?”
“Still sleeping, I think. Should we wake him?”
“I’ll go get him,” her father said, lurching into motion.
“No,” Meredith said. “It’s fine.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. Her parents, who had apparently already eaten, sat down across from her.
“Well, that’s a little formal, isn’t it?” her father said, and he scooched his chair to the corner of the table so that it looked a little less like an interrogation, but now felt weirder for the anti-interrogation effort having been made.
“Did you sleep okay?” her mother asked.
“Yeah.”