Her face broke into a smile, and she issued a long Ohhhhh.
The young woman had turned to the frat boy with the camera and made a kissing shape with her lips. She was making love more to the crowd and camera than to the muscled boy behind her.
Each thrust, each gyration, raised another wild cheer. People started to clap in time to each up-and-down movement.
Andy Candy had turned away from the show before completion. She wasn’t a prude-she’d been to enough out-of-control parties in her college years, and she’d seen sexual spectacles before-but this night there was something in the sweaty abandon she’d seen that unsettled her. Perhaps it was the idea that what should have been intimate and private was being displayed so theatrically. She had wondered if the straining erection and the shaved sex even knew each other’s names.
When she turned away, she’d caught sight of the boy who’d ostensibly invited her to the party. He fought his way toward her, glanced over her shoulder, and caught a glimpse of the action in the side room.
“Whoa,” he’d exclaimed. “That’s intense.” His face broke into a grin.
He was a nice enough fellow, she thought, seemed polite, attentive. Sensitive, even. He’d shared his notes on Dickens with her after she’d missed the class on Great Expectations with a touch of stomach flu. He came from an expensive suburb. His father was a button-down corporate lawyer and divorced from his free-spirit mother, who now lived with her new family on an avocado farm in California. He’d taken her to dinner once, not a pizza place, but a Chinese restaurant where they’d sat and enjoyed moo shu and talked about a writing course they planned to take in the last semester of their senior year. He said he liked poetry. He’d given her a small kiss when he’d dropped her off, and asked her if she might want to go to a party that weekend. Little details-all seemingly benign, and none of which really amounted to who someone was.
“I want to leave,” she’d said.
“Yeah. No problem. We’ll get out of here. Things might be getting out of hand. But you look like you can use a bit of something strong first.”
She’d nodded.
Was that where she went wrong? No. It was going to the party in the first place.
“Here, take mine. I’ll get another. It’s too hard to fight your way to the bar.”
Mine. That’s what he’d said. But it wasn’t his. It was always for me and me alone.
He’d handed her a large plastic cup filled with ice and ginger ale mixed liberally with cheap Scotch. The same brand probably that the naked girl was drinking.
I hate the taste of Scotch. Why did I take it? Trust.
She’d ignored the first rule of college parties: Never drink anything that you haven’t seen opened and poured.
She didn’t connect the slightly chalky taste with anything suspicious, and certainly not the GHB that liberally laced the drink.
She had gulped it down.
Thirsty. I shouldn’t have been so thirsty. If I’d only taken a modest little sip, then handed it back.
The date had smiled.
Rapist. What does a rapist look like? Why don’t they wear a special shirt or have a special mark? A scarlet R, maybe. Maybe they should sport a scar or a tattoo-something so I could have known what was going to happen to me after I passed out.
“Okay,” he said. “Well fortified. You look a bit pale. Come on-I put your coat upstairs in my room. Let’s get it and get the hell out of here, maybe go get a cup of coffee someplace.”
No coffee. There was never going to be any coffee.
It took a few minutes to work their way through the throngs, and she was already dizzy by the time they reached the stairs. The music seemed to have gotten louder, all guitars and shrieks and drums pounding out a violent backbeat.
“Hey, you okay?” the nice-guy date asked midway up the stairs.
Solicitous but not surprised. That should have told her something.
“A little woozy,” she said. “Feel a little weird. Must be the heat going to my head.”
She’d slurred her words, but she wasn’t drunk. She remembered that detail afterward.
She’d steadied herself with the handrail.
“You need some fresh air,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”
Nice. Polite. Gentlemanly. Thoughtful. He said he liked poetry. He took her arm to help her, except they were heading upstairs, not outside.
She knew she needed the air.
She didn’t get any. Not for some time.
I should have turned him in. Called campus security. Filed a complaint. Gone to the police. Hired a lawyer.
Why didn’t you?
I don’t know. I was lost. I was confused. I didn’t know what happened to me.
And so, you let him off the hook.
Yes. I guess so.
This, too, she remembered: nausea overcoming her in the morning. Violent, dizzying, gut-wrenching nausea. And then again-the same sickness repeated, slightly more than a month later.
And one additional memory: the nurse at the clinic kept calling her dear as she helped her up and fitted her onto the examination table. The instruments were stainless steel, but glistened so brightly she imagined she might have to shade her eyes. They had knocked her out with anesthetics, and told her she wouldn’t feel any pain.
Physical pain, that is.
The other kind was constant.
The guilt made her cry. Less as the days went by, but she could still feel her eyes filling at what she imagined were random moments. Right and wrong blended within her into an unmanageable tension, and even if it was dissipating, it was slow to leave her. She told herself that there had to be a faster way out of the spider’s web of emotions that trapped her.
Yes, Andy Candy thought, maybe I should go back to school and kill the frat boy. Moth will help me, after we kill whomever it is he wants to kill.
That would make things even for everyone.
Moth was waiting for her outside his apartment. He looked hesitant, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something.
She pulled to the curb but Moth didn’t immediately get into the car. Instead he leaned down, and she lowered the window. A blast of hot air penetrated the car interior.
“Hey,” she said softly. “Where to today?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he added, “I’m not sure I’ll ever know.”
They walked. Side by side. They would have appeared to anyone to be a young couple deep in discussion, probably talking about some momentous decision, like renting an apartment together, or if this was the right time for one of them to meet the other’s parents. But a casual observer would not have noticed that as close as they seemed pressed together, they did not touch.
Andy Candy thought Moth sounded defeated. He was glum, filled with a sudden pessimism. The energy that had characterized their first days together seemed to have fled.
“Tell me,” she said softly, using a delicate tone that a current, not former, lover would employ. “What is it?”
The sun was beating down on them, but Moth’s look was overcast. They were heading into a small park, trying to find some shade beneath trees. Children were playing on swing sets and jungle gyms in a nearby exercise area. They were loud, in that unrestrained way that children having fun have, and it only seemed to make Moth’s voice sound more discouraged than it already did.