She looks away from me. “Just what I said.”
I pause. “How’d they rule out the connection between us, Leanne?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says. “But I promise you it wouldn’t be your fault. I just wanted you to know, okay?”
I laugh a little. “Well, thanks a lot for that. I’ll just keep that thought close when they’re telling me over and over I’m the girl no one wanted to find.”
I start walking again, try to forget this whole waste of my time, but then she says, “I need my job, Romy.”
I turn. “So?”
“So when Turner tells me I’m not supposed to say something, I don’t,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t whether or not I think it’s right. I still think I should’ve driven you to the hospital that day.” She stops. “But I need my job for my family.”
“I wouldn’t say anything,” I promise and the more torn she looks about it, the more my heart wants to know what she knows. “And no one would believe me if I did.”
It deepens the lines on her face.
“It was Ben Ortiz’s daughter,” she finally says. “Tina.”
Tina.
A name like a razor on my skin.
I know whatever Leanne tells me next is going to cut me open.
It does.
my palm rests against my chest. I knead my skin. I listen for my heart because it went quiet a while ago and I’m not sure it’s there anymore.
Wait for it. I’m waiting. Waiting for the girls coming down the hall. Their voices arrive ahead of them, float sweetly under the crack in the door. I stare at the dirty floor tiles of the locker room and. Wait. For. It. Tina comes in. I stare at her feet as they walk to her locker. I watch her slip out of her shoes and when she starts undressing, let my eyes wander, up her legs, her hips, her soft belly and her breasts.
“Know why half the sheriff’s department was wasting time looking for me when they could’ve been looking for Penny?” I ask.
Tina’s fingers pause behind her back, stop seeking the clasp of her bra. She doesn’t say anything, just raises her chin in a way that dares me to go on. Dares me to say out loud how she was at the sheriff’s department that Saturday night, telling them what she did to me so they’d start looking in all the right places for Penny. I stand, my legs trembling like a newborn colt’s until I feel it, a soft thud in my chest—my heart, coming alive—and I get steadier.
“You put me on that road. You dragged me out to that road,” I say. “You wrote rape me on my stomach and then you left me there.”
She holds my gaze. This is what I want to happen: I want the girls to realize she’s the thief who stole that time from Penny. I want them to round on her. I want them to eat her alive without once opening their mouths. I want this to be the end of Tina Ortiz, but the things I want to happen never do. No one makes her guilty. No one makes her pay. Even the sheriff wouldn’t do that. Not to his good friend’s daughter.
“Nice story,” she says.
Thud, again, louder now and not so soft. Tina goes back to fumbling for her clasp. This is how little it matters to her, as little as it did the night she stood over me and wrote on my skin.
“Besides, anyone would have done it,” she says quietly, so only I can hear it.
My heart pleads with me to do something about this, so I can breathe around it. Tina and that road.
She put me on that road and invited people to my body, anyone.
What happens next is something I don’t remember deciding to do but knowing, after, that I would do it again and again, a thousand times.
I shove her into the lockers, drive her into that metal as hard as I can. The sound she makes is better than any song I’ve ever heard. I want it on repeat. I dig my nails into her arms, feel her softness give in to me. Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there’s a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don’t get to do this when you’re a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once. That same stillness seems to come over her too, and for one second there is nothing—and then—
Inside me goes wild, turns all of me into a weapon. I was born to hurt and so was Tina. I strike her, break her skin, but she doesn’t just stand there and let it happen. She comes back at me as hard and in the ways I want her to, in the ways only Tina would.
At first, the only thing I feel are the parts of her I’m trying to ruin. Then her elbow finds my center and steals my breath and everything is alive in me after that. Everything. Every blow she lands, I return however I can. It’s messy. It’s my foot on her bare toes and the sound she makes, it’s her hand in my hair, it’s those strands free of my scalp.
Girls are shouting, girls are too scared to pull us apart. Tina pushes me into a row of lockers, some of them open, and my forehead meets the edge of metal, and there’s pain but what is pain even, really—this is release, nothing worth stopping for.
We are not going to stop.
Someone will have to stop us.
It isn’t until Coach Prewitt comes in with Principal Diaz that I realize there’s blood in my eyes. She’s bleeding, a girl whispers. I’m bleeding. I bring my hand to my forehead and the tips of my fingers are soaked in myself.
I lower my hand and Tina is across the room from me and she looks like hell. There’s a scratch on her shoulder and a bruise on her cheek. I did that. But … I stare at my hand again, the red. Her bared stomach. This can’t be over.
I haven’t written on her yet.
I lunge for Tina, but Diaz grabs my arm and shouts, “Hey, hey, hey! Enough!”
Tina stumbles into Prewitt, her eyes wide and terrified, like she was never fighting back because now is exactly the time to act that way. I should act that way, but I can’t.