At school, she’d pass some of the guys who’d been there that night and avoid their gazes, although she could sense them whispering about her. Fifty-six carried on like nothing out of the ordinary had gone on. He came up behind her and patted her butt. He put his arm around her in the hallway. He talked about recruiting letters. That week, Kaylyn stopped beside her locker.
“How was that party?”
Tina honestly couldn’t tell what lay in the older girl’s smile. Was she making fun of her? She wanted to run away. Instead, she said, “Fine. Had a great time.”
Kaylyn gathered her eyebrows in delight. She put her lips next to her ear. “Don’t worry, honey, I got it on tape. I’ll make sure your initiation stays in the right hands.” She winked and walked away.
A week after the incident, 56 drove her out to a secluded spot of woods off Stillwater Road. As he eased closer to her and his breath covered her neck and face, she began to cry. He pulled back and asked her what was wrong, not concerned so much as annoyed.
“I just don’t want to black out like that again. And not remember what happened. I didn’t want my first time to be like that.”
She was about to tell him what Kaylyn had said to her when it got scary. Whereas he’d seemed embarrassed the morning after Ostrowski’s, a fury descended over him now, so quickly that she didn’t have time to so much as stutter an objection. “You wanted it,” he hissed, then began snatching her clothes off. His hands were enormous construction cranes picking apart her outfit. She made the most half-hearted effort to slow him down, but he took her wrists aside with one crushing vise of a hand and pushed her face against the window until she stopped fighting him. Years later, after she’d been with a few other men, she’d understand how truly large 56 was. So soon after the previous weekend—and her first time conscious—it felt like she was being split in half. Each time she cried out, it seemed to spur more vicious actions from him, and when she flailed an arm behind her and tried to tell him to stop, he grabbed a fistful of her hair and smacked her face into the door. The rest of it passed with her drifting into a dream, one that felt more real than what was actually happening.
When he was done, he slumped back to the driver’s side and pointed to himself, thick, pink, and uncircumcised. This was the first time she’d ever seen a man in this frankly sexual way. He was covered in her blood.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, trying to wipe it off with the rim of his underwear.
She needed to throw up, and it took everything in her to swallow the urge.
As he finished buckling he glanced at her, and now he looked as sick as she felt. “I’m sorry.” His voice retreated, and he had to look away. “I’m just crazy about you.” He started the truck. “It’ll get easier.”
She wanted to be furious at him—or at least she considered that as a reaction. Yet he rubbed the back of her neck on the way back to town. One hand on the steering wheel, the other massaged her shoulder, tickled the down at the nape, and climbed to scratch at her scalp. The clouds had a wonderful blue glow in the early evening sky. The way the sun colored their borders. This wasn’t a cruelty in him, she decided. He was just hotheaded, full of power and desire. He didn’t understand how harsh he could be. She just had to make him understand he had to be more gentle.
Even if he was the love of her life, this incident terrified her. She never wanted to feel that kind of helplessness again. He was perfectly reasonable, she learned, if she just went to Ostrowski’s and went along with everything. He liked watching his friends with her, and her compliance with the team made him gentler, tamed him. Mostly they were like any high school couple: they parked at the Brew or out in the woods off Stillwater or waited for his mom to be out of the house. But once or twice a month, they’d go to Ostrowski’s, that dim basement, and he and his friends would take turns with her. She forgot about Kaylyn’s taunt, bordering on a veiled threat—she did what she did because that’s what he wanted. They told her what to do, and she did it. They had her do things she never would have imagined herself capable of. They put on movies and re-created the scenes with her. They moved her around like a doll. She didn’t pretend to understand how he could like watching her this way. Moretti’s rat face perched over her, his hand pinching her breast. Ostrowski’s fat heaving against her. Levy biting his lip in a snarl. Matt Moore pulling her hair like he hadn’t known her since she was six when they played the Bible character game in Youth Group. How could 56 like this? Then they’d whisper gross, cruel things to her at school. Moretti showed her a banana from his lunch, and with Hailey less than five feet away: “Think I could get this all the way in you?”
The one time she managed the courage to tell 56 she didn’t want to do this anymore, didn’t want to be a toy for the team, he got frighteningly angry with her—what she’d seen that time in his truck. “You think that’s about them? Don’t be a fucking retard, Tina. That’s for me. You think when I get to the NFL there ain’t gonna be fifty fucking girls hotter than you lined up to do whatever turns me on? I want that girl to be you but don’t think that it’s gotta be.” These words were barked with such fury, she’d have agreed to anything to calm him. “Those guys are like my brothers,” he went on. “We share everything.” But this refrain wasn’t quite true. A few times other guys from the team came over, and 56 instructed her to suck them off. A freshman named Chase Gobbert had been invited because he’d once recovered a key fumble. She heard Ostrowski say as much to him (“We got a reward for you, rookie”). Gobbert had grabbed her head in such a way that she’d gagged. When she caught her breath they were all laughing, and she’d laughed along. She’d learned to construct all this as normality. Years would pass before she understood it was not. She was in love. And love made you do things you’d never expect, things so far beyond yourself or who you thought you were that you don’t even recognize the person who does them. Love was what God gave you to make you both unbearably strong and intolerably weak. Love was the ghost of yourself, a mirror image you saw in a crowd—different life, different ideals, different map of the world—but somehow still you.
She opened the trunk. In the bag was a roll of duct tape. She went around the side of the car, listening to the crickets, and opened the passenger door. Fifty-six sat with his head slumped forward, chin resting on his chest. Carefully, she took his body in her hands and eased him forward until his forehead rested on the dash. A bit of crystal drool escaped his lips and oozed to the floor. She had to work quickly. She’d given him a much lower dose than Cole because she wanted him to come to. She slipped the Buckeyes hat off and dropped it to the center console. Taking his right wrist, she wound the tape around twice, then passed it along his gut and wound it around his other wrist. Then around his back. The tape screeched horribly each time she played out more of it. Fifty-six made a soft sound in the back of his throat, and her heart beat faster. If he woke up now—the tape just looked so flimsy, so ineffectual compared to his size. She wound it around his torso and chest again and again, climbing up his arms until she’d taped all the way to his shoulders.
He stirred and the duct tape crinkled. She tore off the tape, rolled out more, and began winding it around his ankles. She coated his boots with it and then coiled it around his shins all the way to his knees. Satisfied, she stepped back. He looked like a gray mummy.
With 56 secured to the point of immobility, she tore free a strip the length of a pencil, tilted his head back and placed it gently across his lips. She patted it firmly into place.