Look at yourself, LACEY HAD said, the first time she laced me into the corset, turned me to the mirror, made me see. It’s like you were born to wear it.
Do you see now, Dex? she had said.
I saw: A girl’s face, made up with drastic colors and lips pursed in mock defiance. Romance-novel cleavage and black lace. Hair with streaks of icy blue and leather cuff bracelets that whispered tie me up, hold me down.
Look at yourself, Lacey had said, but myself was gone.
I thought: I look like someone else, and she is beautiful.
YOU. GIRL. WAKE UP.”
I did what I did best and followed orders, waking up slow and in pain, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head and a cavernous feeling like I hadn’t eaten in days, though the thought of food made every organ want to fling itself from my body into a putrid puddle at my feet. I woke up cursing and squinting, wishing someone would turn out the sun. Weeds beneath me, jeans and shirt damp with dew. Strange shirt; a stranger’s shirt.
An alien landscape: Stretch of overgrown lawn, drained pool, fringe of trees. Dingy white siding, broken windows, stained patio, crushed cans of beer.
A man, his foot nudging my thigh, his face in shadow, gold badge glinting in the dawn.
“That’s it. Get up now.”
When he touched me, I screamed.
The effort of it nearly made me pass out again, as did the tilt of the world as he dragged me vertical. Then the noise of his words, security guard and trespassing and, he kept saying, trash, trash, trash, but it wouldn’t come clear, whether he meant the empty cans and the broken glass and the used condoms or simply me.
The party was long over; everyone was gone. They’d left me alone. They’d left me out with the garbage.
Standing set my insides to sloshing. Thinking was hard, like a toddler unsteady on chubby feet.
“Get in,” he said, and there was a door with a sedan attached to it and a leather backseat and the thought of a moving car made me want to die.
“I have my bike,” I said.
He laughed like a dog.
“Are you a cop?” I said. “Am I under arrest?”
“Just give me your address.”
Don’t get into cars with strange men, I thought, and asked if he at least had any candy, and then I was the one laughing.
Maybe I was still drunk.
Lacey would have said: Skip the name, rank, serial number. No identification, no address, no consequences. He would have to dump me by the side of the road, and then I could sleep.
I couldn’t remember the night.
I couldn’t remember enough of the night.
I remembered hands gathering me up, I remembered floating in strange arms, chandeliers overhead and then stars, and laughter that wasn’t mine. I remembered fingers tugging at zippers and lace, a voice saying leave her over there, another saying turn her over so she doesn’t drown in her own puke, all the voices chanting puke puke puke and my trained-seal pride when I performed on command.
I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.
“Learn to have a little pride in yourself,” the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. “You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one.”
He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I’d been missing. I felt like I still was.
The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. “Next time, though, we won’t be so generous.”
My mother was steel. “There won’t be a next time.”
“You sure you don’t want to take me to jail?” I asked the not-cop, brain kicked into gear enough to smile. “Might be easier on me.”
Then I heaved again. There was nothing left.
Once he was gone, my parents closed the door behind us, and there was a long stint of hugging. I tried to speak — probably it seemed like I wanted to explain myself, when I only wanted to say please be gentle and can someone turn out the lights—but my mother said no, firmly enough that it was the end of it, then held on tight, and then it was my father’s turn, and for endless time I was closed in by their love, and it was almost enough to keep me on my feet.
Then, “Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like the town dump,” my mother said.
“Sleep,” my father said. “Then we’ll talk.”
I lurched up the stairs. I’d been hungover before, but this was like some New Coke version of a hangover, different and deeply wrong. I closed myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, waited for the water to heat, for the night to return to me.
I wanted to be clean; I wanted to sleep. Ahead of me, I knew, was the grueling interrogation by my parents, lectures and scolding, that I’d stayed out all night, made them worry, lost their trust all over again, and I’d have to sit through it while knowing my father was desperately hoping I wouldn’t give him up, that if I kept quiet about him letting me go to the party he’d find a way to compensate. No matter what, I’d be grounded all over again. Grounding, of course, wouldn’t extend to school, and I’d have to face all those faces who’d seen me lose control, who knew what I did, whatever it was. There would be whispers and rumors I would have to ignore; there would be stories of what and who, and I would, against my will, pay attention, try to piece together the night. I would be the story; I would be the joke; I would be the thing they’d left outside with the trash. All of that I knew.
I couldn’t know about the letter to the editor some Officially Concerned old woman would publish in the local paper, about girls gone wild and the corrupting modern moral climate as encapsulated by the drunk sex fiend who’d been found passed out half naked outside the old Foster place, or that even though the girl went unnamed in the letter, my kindly security guard would spread my name to his nearest and dearest until half the town was calling me a whore, parents fish-eyeing my parents, their kids, chafing under draconian new curfews and rules, blaming me for all the ways in which they’d gotten screwed, that even my teachers would look at me differently, like they’d seen me naked. I couldn’t know that I would be famous, the Mary Magdalene of Battle Creek, without my own personal savior, without anyone to rescue me from my own inequities except the judgment of the town, for my own good.