As the girls wash and reassemble themselves at the sinks, their eyes meet in the mirror. Our girl nods and says, You’re fine. Let’s have a good time.
Lena smiles weakly. I’m fine, she repeats. They return to the casino.
In her bed, she’ll go on. The room, she’ll begin, remembering two queen-size beds with thin synthetic quilted coverlets in mauve and gold. All the lights turned on. No, the light was from the TV. Beer from cans in a torn box sitting on its side at the bottom of a small black refrigerator. But the sensible man will interrupt her.
Was it all four of them?
No. And she’ll see in his face relief, the excess of which will force her to turn from him, to the window and the pinkening dawn. One of them left to get pancakes, she’ll say. Allen. I gave him directions to IHOP.
Three, then, he’ll say, his voice blank as a dead thing. And you two girls.
We started watching a movie. Something with Halle Berry. Lena said she’d almost done it once with her boyfriend in Minnesota. But.
Had she?
No. I told her she had to get it over with.
Had you?
Yes, she’ll say. But not like that.
What did they do to you?
She will shake her head, a movement nearly imperceptible. It wasn’t like that. Afterward, mine asked for my phone number. Tom, I think. He said, I really like you. Or something.
Did he ever call you?
This question will surprise her, and she will have to pause, trying to remember. No, she’ll say eventually. I gave him the wrong area code. They thought we lived in the city.
And your friend?
Lena. She passed out on the other bed. I thought maybe she was faking. I don’t know why. During the movie the big one got on top of her. Brad. He took off her clothes. Her eyes were shut but she was mumbling something. I don’t know what. The other one spread her out, kind of. The big one spit into his hand. I remember that. I was on the other bed, with mine.
Jesus.
The other one put his dick by her face. He hit her with it, softly. They called her names. Drunk cunt. Fuck rag.
Jesus Christ.
Here, she will stop. Are you sure you want to hear this? she’ll ask. Though she won’t be able to stop even if he asks her to. He’ll nod, slowly.
Lena woke up, she’ll say, during. She got out of the bed and stood by it. They didn’t try to stop her. She was naked, looking at the floor around her. For her clothes, maybe. Or the keys. But then she stopped and just stood there, looking at me. Tom—or whatever—was already inside me. She was just standing there.
Now Lena is limp in the light from the hotel television, as though, underneath her splotchy skin, her bones are no longer adequately bound together. She stares at our girl from between the two beds, her naked body like a question she can’t ask, a prayer she can’t recall. Behind Lena, the two young men look to our girl. The big one is shirtless, with his pants splayed open. The other has removed his pants, though he still wears his collared shirt, buttoned up. His bare ass glows blue in the light from the TV and he holds his dick in his hand. She forces herself to wonder what they want from her, though she knows. Permission.
Once, before Lena got her license, the girls were waiting at the county clinic for Lena’s mother to drive them home, and they found a file folder filled with pictures of diseased genitals mounted on heavy card stock. Lena said her mother used them when she gave sex-ed talks at the high school. Our girl flipped through them. Lena giggled and looked away, saying the pictures were gross. Our girl went on. They were gross, but in a curious, enthralling way, like a topographical map of a place she would never visit. But then there was one photograph in which the photographer, or the doctor—Who takes these pictures? she had wondered suddenly, then thought, A nurse, probably, or an intern—had captured the patient’s thumb and index finger where they held the penis. She could see the man’s grooved thumbnail and a little rind of skin peeling back from the cuticle. It made her wish she weren’t a woman.
In the hotel room, Lena reaches for her friend. She says her name. The boys look to her too, even the one called Tom, above her. Our girl takes Lena’s hand.
It’s okay, she says. We’re having fun.
She urges her friend back to the bed, gently, as though pulling the last bit of something shameful and malignant out through the tips of Lena’s limp fingers.
Afterward, on the way down to the lobby, our girl watches her own face in the polished doors of the elevator, and then Lena’s, puffed around the eyes and mouth, her hair clumped to one side where they’d poured something on her. Through the summer, the tight circles in which the girls circumnavigate the pizza parlor will overlap less and less each day. Sometimes our girl will be at the oven, watching Lena’s back as she works the line, and the heat will well up in her and she’ll want to cry out. But what would she say? Sometimes, as she cuts a pizza, boiling grease cupped in a piece of pepperoni will spatter up and burn the back of her hand, or her bare forearm. This will bring her some relief.
That summer, Lena will shrink and yellow. Her eyes will develop a milky film. Even her big teeth will seem to recede into their gums, as though the whole of her is gradually succumbing to the dimensions of their town, its unpaved streets, its irrigation ditches and fields of stinking alfalfa. The four walls of the pizza parlor, the low popcorned ceiling of her mother’s manufactured home. When Jeremy the delivery boy shuffles back to the walk-in where Lena stocks the commissary and asks her to come over to watch his band practice, she’ll say yes, her voice wet with inevitability and exhaustion. The master bedroom of his trailer will start to feel like her own. Jeremy’s love for her will be an unquestioning and simple thing, with rising swells of covetousness. It will be this particular strain of love—that’s what he’ll call it—that makes him hit her for the first time, on the Fourth of July, on the darkened plot of packed dirt in front of a house party where she’d danced too closely with a friend of his. Our girl will watch this from the porch of the house, where a crowd will have gathered. She will do nothing.
By September, she and Lena will not even nod in the halls. When the announcement comes over the intercom first period, our girl will try to make herself feel the things she is supposed to feeclass="underline" grief for dead people in buildings she didn’t know existed, sorrow for a place she can’t envision. Deadened, but afraid of the deadening, she will look across the classroom to Lena, hoping to inflict upon herself that sickly shame that the sight of her old friend now evokes, thinking it the least she could do. But Lena—standing humped beside her left-handed desk with her right hand over her heart, crying—will be barely recognizable. This will bring our girl a sturdy rising comfort, a swelling buoyancy: A person can change in an instant. This, almost solely, will take her away from here.
The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.
THE PAST PERFECT, THE PAST CONTINUOUS, THE SIMPLE PAST
This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register. Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.
“His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”