“It takes over an hour and involves not just a thorough external examination but a painfully thorough internal one as well. It involves having your body scrutinized under UV light and swabbed for evidence. It involves photography. It involves being asked intimate details about your sexual habits. It involves having your clothes confescated. I've been an ER OB/GYN for fifteen years, Detective, and I have yet to see the woman who'd be willing to suffer through a sexaual assault exam just for the hell of it.” She glanced up at Mike. “Yes,” Dr. Roth said. “I'll testify.”
* * *
Janice didn't just have tea in her office. She had Toolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha. Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lapsang souchong: Yunnan and Nilgiri. “What would you like?” she asked, Trixie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Coffee.”
“Like I haven't heard that before.”
Trixie had come to this appointment reluctantly. Her father had dropped her off and would be back to get her at five. “What if I have nothing to say?” Trixie had asked him the minute before she got out of the car. But as it turned out, since she'd sat down, she hadn't shut up. She'd told Janice about her conversation with Zephyr and the way Moss had looked through her like she was a ghost. She'd talked about the condoms in her locker and why she hadn't reported them to the principal. She talked about how, even when people weren't whispering behind her back, she could still hear them doing it.
Janice settled down onto a heap of pillows on the floor - her office was shared by four different sexual assault advocates and was full of soft edges and things you could hug if you needed to.
“It sounds to me like Zephyr's a little confused right now,” Janice said. “She thinks she has to pick between you and Moss, so she isn't going to be a viable form of support.”
“Well,” Trixie said, “that leaves my mom and dad, and I can't quite go dragging them to school with me.”
“What about your other friends?”
Trixie worried the fringe of the pillow on her lap. “I sort of stopped spending time with them when I started hanging out with Jason.”
“You must have missed them.”
She shook her head. “I was so wrapped up in Jason, there wasn't room for anything else.” Trixie looked up at Janice. “That's love, isn't it?”
“Did Jason ever tell you he loved you?”
“I told him once.” She sat up and reached for the tea that Janice had given her, even though she'd said she didn't want any. The mug was smooth in her palms, radiant with heat. Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to hold a heart. "He said he loved
me too."
“When was that?”
October fourteenth, at nine thirty-nine P.M. They had been in the back row of a movie theater holding hands, watching a teen slasher
flick. She had been wearing Zephyr's blue mohair sweater, the one that made her boobs look bigger than they actually were. Jason had bought Sour Patch Kids and she was drinking Sprite. But Trixie thought that telling Janice the details that had been burned into her mind might make her sound too pathetic, so instead she just said, “About a month after we got together.”
“Did he tell you he loved you after that?” Trixie had waited for him to say it first, without prompting, but Jason hadn't. And she hadn't said it again, because she was too afraid he wouldn't say it back.
She had thought she heard him whisper it afterward, the other night, but she was so numb by then she still was not entirely sure she hadn't just made it up to soften the blow of what had happened.
“How did you two break up?” Janice asked. They had been standing in Jason's kitchen, eating M&M's out of a bowl on the table. I think it might be a good thing if we saw other people, he had said, when five seconds earlier they had been talking about a teacher who was taking the rest of the year off to be with the baby she'd adopted from Romania. Trixie hadn't been able to breathe, and her mind spun frantically to figure out what she had done wrong. It isn't you, Jason had said. But he was perfect, so how could that be true?
He said he wanted them to stay friends, and she nodded, even though she knew it was impossible. How was she supposed to smile as she passed by him at school, when she wanted to collapse? How could she unhear his promises?
The night Jason broke up with her, they had gone to his house to hook up - his folks were out. Afraid that her parents might do something stupid, like call, Trixie had told them that a whole bunch of kids were going to a movie. And so, after Jason dropped the bomb, Trixie was forced to spend another two hours in his company, until the time the movie would have been over, when all she really wanted to do was hide underneath her covers and cry herself dry.
“When Jason broke up with you,” Janice asked, “what did you do to make yourself feel better?”
Cut. The word popped into Trixie's mind so fast that only at the very last moment did she press her lips together to keep it inside. But at the same time, she subconsciously slid her right hand over her left wrist.
Janice had been watching too closely. She reached for Trixies arm and inched up the cuff of her shirt. “So that didn't happen during the rape.”
“No.”
“Why did you tell the doctor in the emergency room that it did?” Trixies eyes filled with tears. “I didn't want her to think I was crazy.”
After Jason broke up with her, Trixie lost any semblance of emotional control. She'd find herself sobbing when a certain song came on the car radio and have to make up excuses to her father. She would walk by Jason's locker in the hope that she might accidentally cross paths with him. She'd find the one computer in the library whose screen in the sunlight mirrored the table behind her, and she'd watch Jason in its reflection while she pretended to type. She was swimming in tar, when the rest of the world, including Jason had so seamlessly moved on.
“I was in the bathroom one day,” Trixie confessed, “and I opened up the medicine cabinet and saw my father's razor blades. I just did it without thinking. But it felt so good to take my mind off everything else. It was a kind of pain that made sense.”
“There are constructive ways to deal with depression . . .”
“It's crazy, right?” Trixie interrupted. “To love someone who's hurt you?”
“It's crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you,” Janice replied.
Trixie lifted her mug. The tea was cold now. She held it in a way that blocked her face, so that Janice wouldn't be able to look her in
the eye. If she did, surely she'd see the one last secret Trixie had managed to keep: that after That Night, she hated Jason
. . . but she hated herself more. Because even after what had happened, there was a part of Trixie that still wanted him back.
* * *
From the Letters to the Editor page of the Portland Press Herald:
To the Editors:
We would like to express our shock and anger at the allegations leveled against Jason Underhill. Anyone who knows Jason understands that he doesn't have a violent bone in his body. If rape is a crime of violence and dominance over another person, shouldn't there then be signs of violence?
While Jason's life has been brought to a screeching halt, the so-called victim in this case continues to walk around undeterred. While Jason is being redrawn as a monster, this victim is seemingly absent of the symptoms associated with a sexual assault. Might this not be a rape after all... but a case of a young girl's remorse after making a decision she wished she hadn't?
If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case, Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.
Sincerely,
Thirteen anonymous educators from Bethel H.S and fifty-six additional signatories
* * *
Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be resurrected. The first, and arguably the most legendary, arrived in the 1930s, care of Shuster and Siegel, two unemployed, apprehensive Jewish immigrants who couldn't get work at a newspaper. They