I didn’t feel ready.
“Let’s just hang for a while,” I said.
Peter smiled. He reached down for my hand again.
“Come on,” he said.
“I’m going to hang for a while,” I said. “Just sit down. We’re having a nice time.”
He reached for my hand again.
And that’s when Amy punched him.
*
She punched him so quickly, so unhesitatingly, that it stunned everyone.
One second she had been half-submerged, watching, joking with the puppies, and the next she had crossed the diameter of the hot tub, had surged up in the water like a great white shark beheading a seal, and she punched Peter on the chest with a force that knocked him to a sitting position on the side of the hot tub.
“Not now means not fucking now, douche bag!”
She screamed it. Even after she stopped, her voice reverberated around the natatorium. Everything, every little thing, went silent.
*
“You saw us leave the bar,” Amy said. “Alfred and me. Or is it I? No, it’s me, right? But do you remember him? I picked him up, and he had those horrible, long fingers.”
“Of course I remember him,” Constance said. “So does Heather.”
I nodded. We sat at a butcher-block table in the small kitchen area of our condo. Constance had made us a salad with a side of mac ’n’ cheese. We were done drinking. Amy sipped tea. We all wore pajamas. I felt exhausted and hungover and foolish. I had a bottle of water in front of me. The mention of Peter, the afternoon hot tub punch, had started Amy talking about Alfred of Amsterdam. She knew more about what had happened with Alfred now. Therapy had brought things to light.
“Anyhow,” she continued, “we went back toward his apartment, or something, and we stopped along the way and ate a brownie that he had with him. I mean, this brownie kicked my ass. I have never felt so high in my life. Added to that was all the pot and booze we had had that night, and I was stretched out.”
“Do you think he extra doped the brownie?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Hard to say. He might have. Or maybe it’s just really strong stuff. I ate too much of it, because, well, that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done all my life. Amy can do it because she’s Amy! You know the deal. It’s my badass, self-imposed identity. That’s something, by the way, that Tabitha, my therapist, is helping me deal with. She says I don’t always have to lead the charge. That came as a news flash to me.”
She sipped her tea. She looked radiant sitting in the stupid little kitchenette, her hair wild as always, her gray-green eyes slicing through everything around her.
“So I don’t want to give all the gory details, but we started making out, and then he said, ‘Here’s a friend’s boat,’ or something, and we climbed down onto it, and I had more or less made up my mind not to be Alfred’s ho, when suddenly I couldn’t stand up straight. That’s about all I remember with any accuracy. You know the rest of the story almost as well as I do. My stuff was gone. He wanted to rip me off. That’s why he hung out with us. With me, anyway.”
Her eyes did not tear. She sipped her tea thoughtfully, almost, it seemed, astonished that this thing had happened to her and that, at last, we all knew the final details.
“It had to be the brownie, right?” Constance asked after a moment had passed.
Constance, of course, would want real, demonstrable reasons. I wasn’t sure Amy believed in those kinds of answers. Not about this.
“I think so. It tasted chemical, but who knows? Something knocked me out. I’ll say this for Alfred. He didn’t do anything to me. I’m pretty sure about that. My clothes were in place, no sign of rape. He was a gentleman about all that.”
Constance reached across the table and held Amy’s hand. Amy nodded.
“Well, come on, you both wondered. I’m solid that he didn’t molest me that way. It’s a thing. It happened. No real repercussions except the mental part. And maybe even that was good, because it made me start asking some serious questions. Like, what the fuck was I doing with a guy I had just met at some ridiculous hour walking around a city I didn’t begin to know?”
“It was our fault,” Constance said. “We shouldn’t have let you go. I hate that we let you go.”
“Do you really think you could have stopped me? Haven’t you both wanted to say I should cool down a little with the whole men thing? I know you have. I wasn’t able to listen at that point. Now, it’s different.”
“And that’s why you punched Peter,” I said, stating the obvious.
“And that’s why I punched Peter, stupid-ass little puppy. It’s all about ladies’ choice for me. If the woman isn’t into it, then nothing is going on. Not while I’m around. Sorry if I overreacted. He seemed like he was pushing it. You didn’t seem ready, Heather.”
“I don’t know what I was, honestly. I can’t pretend I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“Well, maybe I overreacted. I don’t know. But I’d rather err on the side of caution, right? You can always pick up with Peter. With any Peter.”
She finished her tea and went to the sink and rinsed out the cup. Then she came back and sat down again.
“That’s it. That’s the story,” she said.
“There had to be something in the brownie,” Constance insisted. “I’ve seen you party, Amy, and nothing can bring you down.”
“Well, something did. Something definitely did. The truth is, there had to be something in me to put myself in that position. You can’t imagine Ellie Pearson walking the streets of Amsterdam with a vampire like Alfred, can you?”
Ellie Pearson was the most goody-goody girl at Amherst College. We always used her as a counterpoint to whatever mischief we had engaged in.
“No, Ellie Pearson wouldn’t have been walking around the streets of Amsterdam late at night with Alfred,” I conceded.
“So the fault was in me,” Amy concluded. “Nice to think otherwise, and I hate Alfred’s guts and would stab him in an instant if I could, but I take my share of the blame. You know what I think about a lot, though? I think about the fact that he didn’t cover me. That he didn’t have enough kindness toward me that he would at least put something over me. I hate thinking another human being could treat me like that. I don’t know what he would have had on the boat to cover me with, but it would have made it a little more bearable to think back to. It’s probably just an absurd quirk of mine. I wanted to have a blanket over me and stay home from school, I guess.”
She reached across the table and squeezed our hands.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I am. Just don’t make a big deal of it, okay? Don’t ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen, and don’t get a worried look on your face every time the story comes up. It’s a fact of my life now, and it does no good to try to pretend anything about it. You with me?”
We nodded.
“I probably should apologize to Peter, though,” she said.
“Fuck no,” Constance said.
Coming from her, the word was such a shock that Amy and I both laughed.