Is there any use in asking these questions? If it’s God’s will, it’s God’s will, plain and simple. If it’s not, Grace will certainly find out when the meeting turns out to be a disaster and she lets everyone down.
Grace is shocked to realize this thought does not fill her with the usual terror. Somehow all the potential catastrophes of failure and humiliation she can imagine do not actually feel like the end of the world. Perhaps she will be embarrassed in front of a few dozen girls from her school. Maybe they will never want her to lead the meeting again. And so what? When she asks herself what’s the worst that could happen, the answers are not that scary. Because even if she fails, it is a small failure. Even if she’s embarrassed, it will not last forever. The girls will still be her friends. The Nowhere Girls will still meet, still plan, still make each other stronger. No matter what happens, she will still be part of them.
Grace stands alone in the empty hallway. It seems like just seconds ago that she was surrounded by hordes of students slamming lockers and running to catch their buses. She does not know how long she’s been standing here, feeling the ripples of Margot’s wake. Echoes of noise and movement fill the space around her, carry her down the stairs and out the door as she remembers what she was on her way to do before Margot intercepted her.
Grace goes the long way home. It is not her usual route through the carefully manicured front yards and white fences of the neighborhood around the school, into the more modest houses and smaller lots of her own neighborhood. This route takes her onto the busy street lined with chain stores and fast-food restaurants that leads to the highway. She inhales five blocks’ worth of exhaust fumes until she reaches her destination just before the street empties into the on-ramp.
Grace is nervous as she approaches the Quick Stop. It’s weird to have spent so much time thinking and talking about someone she’s never met. The distance has kept Spencer Klimpt somewhat hypothetical until now. She needs a face to attach to the stories. She needs to see him in the flesh, needs to remind herself that The Real Men of Prescott blog is more than words. It is the weapon of a man who hurts girls, of a man who teaches other men how to hurt girls. She needs to make him real. On her own. Alone.
When she finally sees him for the first time, the experience is anticlimactic. She expected a sadistic rapist to look a little more like a cartoon version of a bad guy than what she finds when she enters the Quick Stop. She imagined his face in a mug shot, his eyes dead and cruel, the lighting around him dramatic and sinister instead of these too-bright fluorescents. He just looks like a guy, the boy next door, someone who could even be handsome if his eyes weren’t so sunken, if his skin wasn’t so greasy, if he were wearing something besides a gas station uniform and a scowl on his face. Nothing about him says “rapist.” Nothing about him is particularly intimidating. There’s no clue to stay away from him besides his crappy job and unfortunate haircut. There’s nothing about him that screams evil. Someone like him could be anyone.
But still, Grace’s skin prickles with the knowledge of him. He is not just some guy behind a counter writing notes on a clipboard, taking inventory of the cigarettes. Grace knows what he did. She’s reminded of it every second she spends in her bedroom, Lucy’s pain scratched into the walls of a place she is supposed to feel safe.
“Do you need something?” Spencer says, and Grace jumps. She feels his eyes bore into her, and it makes her skin crawl. Just his gaze is a violation.
“No,” she mumbles. “I mean, yeah.” She starts to panic. She reaches for something, anything, to make her look like a normal shopper, not some weird girl who came just to stare. She grabs a pack of gum, a candy bar. She walks up to the counter, puts the items in front of him. His hands are dirty, scabbed at the knuckles, his chewed-up nails black with grime. Grace imagines those hands touching Lucy’s body, her friends’ bodies, her own. So unclean. So marked by violence.
He says something. She cannot look at him. She did not hear it.
“Hello?” he says again. “That’ll be two sixty-five.”
Grace fumbles for her wallet, pulls out a five, hands it over. His fingers brush hers, and a surge of rage pulses through her. How can he be in the world so easy like this, selling girls candy, touching their hands?
Grace runs out as soon as he hands over her change. She tries to do what Erin does when she feels anxious. She counts backward as she walks away from the store, focuses on the feeling of her feet hitting the ground, the smell of gasoline in the air, the wet breeze of a coming rainstorm. Then without thinking, before she turns the corner toward her house, she turns around for one last look at Spencer Klimpt.
She is still close enough to see that he is typing something onto the smart phone in his hand, an amused smile on his face. Then he looks up, his face turned in her direction, and for just a moment their eyes meet. A shiver runs down Grace’s spine; she feels caught, trapped, like a deer in headlights who sees danger coming but is incapable of moving. He could walk out of the store right now and grab her. But he just laughs and looks back at his phone, releasing her. Grace speed walks the rest of the way home.
Grace is sweaty and out of breath when she gets home. She knows Mom and Dad are at a meeting at church all afternoon, so she opens the candy bar and sits down in front of the computer in Mom’s office. There’s a picture of Grace on the desk from early last year. In the picture, Grace still has braces and is even chubbier than she is now. Her outfit is atrocious—pink leggings, a yellow T-shirt with a kitten on it, a frizzy ponytail on the top of her head. She looks like a little girl, so na?ve, so ignorant. That girl looks happy. She hasn’t yet lost her friends and moved across the country. She hasn’t lost her mother to more important things. That girl doesn’t even know what rape is.
Grace takes a bite of her candy bar, but it doesn’t taste as good as she wants it to. She turns on Mom’s computer, types a web address in the browser window. The Real Men of Prescott blog opens.
A new entry was posted five minutes ago.
The Real Men of Prescott
Homely and kinda fat girl just walked into my work, was totally checking me out. Obvious she wanted me. If I wasn’t so hungover, I would have played that. She probably wouldn’t have been too bad with the lights out. Nice lips, lots of nice pieces to hold on to. A lot of the time, plain girls can be way better fucks than 9s and 10s because they know they have to work harder. Sometimes the hottest girls don’t even try. They think they just have to lie there.
This one would have been an easy score. Am now regretting not picking her up. Unless she’s one of those ugly girls with a feminist mommy who raised her to have more self-esteem than she deserves. But if she makes you work for it and then pulls some shit later saying she didn’t want it, she’s the kind of girl everyone will know is lying through her fat face.
—AlphaGuy541
US.