Her last solid memory is pain.
Then black. Then nothing. Then her brain shuts off and scrambles the memories, rips them, tears them apart. There were so many red cups. So much darkness in the murky water, her head submerged. Her body torn apart by violent waters. She is nowhere. She is nothing. She disappears.
Then brief gasps for air, tiny moments, bright flashes in the darkness. Memories surface like tight bubbles.
Hands. Bed. Pain. Fear. A searing inevitability. A life taken and redefined.
A thought: I did this to myself.
A thought: It will be over soon.
Stillness. A heavy blanket of flesh, unmoving. She lets herself hope it is over.
Then movement. His voice: “Did you lock the door?”
Another voice: “Yeah. No one’s coming.”
His voice: “You ready, Ennis? Or are you going to be a pussy?”
Another voice. She knows this voice. Everybody knows Eric Jordan’s voice. “Fuck Ennis. It’s my turn.”
A rhyme for children: One, two, three: How many can there be?
A thought: I’m going to die.
Rocking, thrashing, a violent sea. Then more. So much more. More than could possibly be imagined.
A voice: “Turn on the lights, man. I want to see her.”
A hand on her mouth, shoving her voice back inside.
She sees nothing. She is dying. She is dead. She is a whale carcass being torn apart by eels at the bottom of the sea.
A voice: “Fuck, she’s puking.”
A voice: “Just turn her over.”
Then a place even darker than black. Then time cut out of history. Then her mind is gone, her memories are gone. She is pulled underwater. They take her body, her breath. They bend and break and use her up until she is a memory no one can remember.
Sometimes the only thing worse than death is surviving.
It is morning and she is only mostly gone. Her hair is caked with puke. She hurts all over. She hurts inside. The floor is littered with her crumpled clothes and half a dozen used condoms. How vile this tiny sliver of gratitude: they only destroyed; they did not plant anything live inside her.
The bottom-feeders have cleaned her skeleton of all its flesh. She is washed up onshore, tangled with seaweed, smelling of decay. She crawls across the storm-tossed beach, over the rocks and garbage, over the beer bottles and cigarette butts and lifeless bodies. Over so many red cups.
Bodies all over the place, bodies everywhere, people who didn’t make it home last night. All these people down here while she was drowning.
Bodies stir. Eyes open and follow her ghostly walk to the door.
A laugh like glass breaking.
A voice in the darkness, giving her a new name:
Slut.
ERIN.
“You need to get a life,” Erin tells Grace at lunch because she won’t stop talking about Lucy Moynihan.
“Manners,” Rosina says.
“Being honest is more important than being nice,” Erin says. “I’m being honest.”
Grace is being annoying. Erin doesn’t understand why people are so insistent on letting each other get away with being annoying. If she’s being annoying, she wants someone to tell her about it, like Rosina does.
“Grace here hasn’t had the time we’ve had to become hopelessly apathetic,” Rosina says. “She still gives a shit. We gave a shit at the beginning, remember?”
“I never gave a shit,” Erin says, because it’s what she wants to believe, but she’s not quite sure she’s telling the truth. A tinge of discomfort spreads through her, a vague suspicion that perhaps there is a different truth beneath the surface that is staying murky and hidden. Usually, she is a big fan of truth, but these sneaky kinds of truth are definitely not her favorite.
“Well, I cared,” Rosina says. “I was fucking pissed.”
Erin remembers Rosina going up to that football guy Eric Jordan and spitting in his face, how it dripped off his nose in slow motion, how the entire hallway was silent in those moments it took for the gob to reach the ground, how he just laughed in her face, called her a spic dyke, and walked away. Then, like everyone else, Rosina realized caring was a waste of time. Like Erin, she realized caring hurts.
Rosina never actually talked to Lucy, the girl she supposedly cared enough about to spit in someone’s face to defend. But Erin knows there’s a difference between an idea and a person, how it’s so much simpler to care about something that does not breathe. Ideas do not have needs. They demand nothing but a few brief thoughts. They do not suffer or feel pain. As far as Erin knows, they are not contagious.
“Point the guys out to me,” Grace says. “Are they here?”
“Eric has third lunch, I think,” Rosina says. “But Ennis is here. Over there at the troll table.” Rosina nods toward the center of the lunchroom, where the worst people sit. The girls who have been making fun of Erin since she moved here freshman year, the guys who don’t even bother lowering their voices around her when they brainstorm about what it must be like to fuck “someone like her.” Compared to the rest of them, Ennis is quiet, even soft spoken, the one you’d least suspect to be a monster.
“Ennis Calhoun is the one with the pubey goatee,” Rosina says. “And you’ve probably seen Eric around school. He always has a gang of trolls following him around. There was a third one, the ringleader, Spencer Klimpt, but he graduated. Works at the Quick Stop off the highway. Real winners, those guys.”
“I don’t think ‘pubey’ is a word,” Erin says.
“Is Ennis that guy sitting by Jesse?” Grace says. Erin recognizes the look on Grace’s face as disappointment, as if she expected that large, dopey boy named Jesse to be someone else, someone who does not sit by Ennis Calhoun at lunch.
“You know him?” Rosina says.
“He goes to my church.”
“He’s waving at you,” Erin says. “He looks like a stuffed animal.”
“You like that guy?” Rosina says.
“No,” Grace says. “Never.”