Blackout (3 page)

It dawned on me that all that was last year
and probably not why she called. Could Kelsey Fritz be dead, or
something?

“What about her?” I asked.

“That party last night. I missed you.”

“I told you, Rick couldn’t—”

She interrupted, again. “You were right not
to go. Evan was there.”

“Evan Steffers? What was he doing there?
Okay, I know it was his class but I thought he was long gone.”

“You knew he was back, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess. I’m glad I couldn’t go.”

“They were all there, him and the other
jocks. Kelsey got drunk and—”

“Kelsey? Drunk?” I was amazed Kelsey even
went to the party. It didn’t seem like her kind of thing.

“I think it was the first time for her,” Glyn
said. “I—I—I’m afraid I—I—sort of encouraged it.”

“You didn’t!”

“I thought it would help her relax. She was
very tense. I knew it was hard for her just to be there. She had to
force herself. I was trying, Maddie. I just didn’t know.”

This was taking forever. “Didn’t know
what?”

“How it would turn out.”

“How did it turn out?” The way she was going,
I still thought Kelsey must be dead.

“It was Evan,” Glyn said.

No surprise there. If something bad happened,
you could count on Evan being involved.

“Glyn, would you please just tell me?”

“I didn’t mean that about your brother. I
should have said ‘accused of stalking.’”

“That’s a little better, but right now we’re
talking about Kelsey. And Evan. Would you please, please tell me
what happened?” I braced myself by sitting up and putting my feet
on the floor. If somebody I knew had died, I didn’t want to hear
about it lying in bed—

Glynis had such trouble getting it out, I
figured whatever happened was because of Kelsey being drunk and
Glyn took all the guilt on herself.

“Just tell me what it’s about,” I said.
“Twenty-five words or less. Nobody’s blaming you.”

“I’m blaming me. And you will, too, when you
hear the rest of it.”

“When will that be?”

“Okay, okay. She had a Tom Collins and it
made her feel so relaxed, she had another. And another. And I got
up to go to the bathroom and Evan came along. He must have seen his
advantage.”

“Evan?” That was an unlikely combination.
“Evan and Kelsey?”

“You know Evan,” Glyn said. “He’s a predator.
Either Kelsey didn’t know how to get rid of him or she was
flattered by his attention. He’s good at that.”

She didn’t have to tell me about Evan’s
wiles. But what could he have done— “He raped her?”

“Um—yes. Upstairs. In a bedroom. With the
other guys. I think they all did. They got her clothes off and took
pictures.”

I snatched up my pillow and screamed into it.
Not Kelsey, of all people! This was a whole lot worse than the Evan
I used to know. “Was she conscious?”

“Not much, but she might have been, a little.
She’ll find out anyway. Jerks like that usually put those pictures
on the Internet, just to prove what jerks they are.”

Kelsey was the sort of person who would die.
Just die. I couldn’t imagine this happening to her. Not that I
liked her very much after what she did to Ben, but it shouldn’t
happen to anybody. Especially a person like Kelsey who freaked out
just because Ben wanted to talk to her. Okay, he might’ve pushed a
little hard, and she thought that was bad. Now along comes Evan. .
. .

“What’s that crud doing here, anyway?” I
said. “Why couldn’t he stay in New Hampshire?”

“What would they want him for? I heard he got
readmitted to Lakeside.”

“He
didn’t.
How come he’s still in
high school? He should’ve graduated by now.”

“I think he screwed up there, too, so he has
to repeat his senior year. And Lakeside wants him, of course, for
the team.”

“He’s allowed to play
football?
They
kicked him off, you know, after that time he broke into my house
and tried to drag me away.”

“Yeah,” Glyn remembered. “I guess they got
over that.”

“But I didn’t. I hate to think what would’ve
happened if it weren’t for Ben and our dogs.”

“Yeah,” she said again. “But you know how
Lakeside is about football. It has to do with getting alumni
money.”

“That’s what colleges do! Lakeside’s just a
stupid little—oh, sorry. I forgot you still go there.”

“That’s okay,” Glyn said. “I sort of agree
with you about the football. It makes people like Evan think
they’re bigger than they are.”

That brought me back to the latest mess.
“They took
pictures?
How do you know?”

“They bragged about it. I heard them say
something about Facebook. They weren’t too sober themselves at that
point. I asked them what the hell they thought they were doing and
they asked did I want some. They said Kelsey wanted it. That she
begged for it.”

“Capital B capital S. Glyn, you’re a witness
that she was in no condition to do that.”

The depth of Evan’s depravity appalled me.
And to think, I once—I can’t use the word “love” in the same
sentence with Evan. Okay, I once dated him.

“Sick,” I said. “They’re all sick. What is
there to brag about? Do they think it makes them heroes or
something, to rape a passed-out drunk girl? And everybody’s going
to say it was her fault for getting drunk.”

“It’s my fault!” Glyn wailed. “I shouldn’t
have gone to pee.”

“When nature calls, you gotta answer.”

“Yes, but I saw him get her another drink. I
tried to let her know she shouldn’t take it but she didn’t catch
on. Then I really had to go. I didn’t know what he was doing till
he got her upstairs. I would’ve stopped him.”

“He’d have brushed you aside and done it
anyway. Or gotten you, too. Okay, where do we go from here?”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Boil it in oil.”

“Boil what?”

“It.
What else? Okay, that’s not
realistic. It’s too bad Rick wasn’t there. But I’ll tell him all
about it. Do you think Kelsey would be able to testify?”

“I think Kelsey would rather die,” said Glyn.
“But those pictures. How do you get pictures off the Internet if
you’re not the one who put them there?”

“I’ll ask Ben. Or maybe Rick would know.”
Although Rick was not the computer geek, that Ben was. But Rick
knew crime, and rape was a crime. Taking pictures of it must have
been sort of a crime.

“I’m sure Ben has the know-how,” Glyn said.
“But would he do anything? After what happened between them?”

An aroma of cinnamon wafted up from the
kitchen and through my closed door. My mother was baking her Sunday
morning coffeecake. In honor of Ben’s leaving for college in a few
days.

“I’ve never known Ben to hold a grudge,” I
said. “He puts things in perspective. He knows she didn’t
understand about Asperger’s. Most people don’t know what it’s
really like. And she’s such a wimp. Anyway, it’s an interesting
technological problem. He likes those.”

Ben’s door was closed. He might have been
sleeping late, having quit his summer job because he was going off
to MIT. That’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You had
to be really smart to get in, and Ben was.

I took a quick shower, put on clean shorts
and shirt, and went downstairs.

Daddy was already there, enjoying his
once-a-week bacon and eggs. The eggs were scrambled and I got some,
too. As was my habit, I sprinkled them with grated parmesan. My
mother, who I call Rhoda, thought that was atrocious.

“Any word about the party last night?” She
knew I’d been stood up.

I didn’t want to tell her everything yet. It
wasn’t breakfast table conversation. I felt a pang, thinking how
Kelsey’s morning must be.

“Glyn called,” was all I said. “I’m glad I
didn’t go. Evan was there.”

“I thought he left the area.”

“He’s ba-a-ack. Isn’t that nice?” How could
Rhoda not know? “He’s been back for quite a while, as you must have
noticed. Who do you think’s been plaguing me?”

Ben came down the stairs. Should I tell him
now or later? I decided to let him eat in peace, but I had to catch
him before he took off for somewhere.

My parents adopted Ben just before they found
out they were having me. They didn’t know he had Asperger’s. It’s a
high-functioning form of autism. But they were good parents for an
Asperger kid. They were patient and understanding and, to top it
off, Rhoda was a professional psychologist.

Ben and I didn’t look much alike. I was a
middle European type with brown hair and green eyes. He was more a
southern type, olive-skinned with hair almost black and eyes a deep
chocolate. He had the kind of looks that set girls swooning. All
except one, Kelsey Fritz.

Ben didn’t eat bacon, which left more for me.
He was an on-again off-again vegetarian. When he first started
that, Rhoda obliged him by planning special dishes that could be
adapted either way. But the habit became so erratic, she lost
track. He now had to do his own adapting, but he let it be known
that it would benefit the rest of us to eat a more plant-based
diet. For health reasons, he emphasized, if not out of regard for
animals.

Daddy had no intention of changing his ways.
He figured that six non-bacon days a week was good enough for his
health.

Ben lingered over a second cup of coffee, so
I started right in. “Guess who was at the Brandons’ party last
night.”

“Can’t possibly.”

“Kelsey Fritz. I understand she’s been in
therapy. Maybe she wanted to see if she was over her hang-ups.”

I didn’t need to explain what her hang-ups
were. He’d had firsthand experience with that.

It all happened more than a year ago. They
were classmates then, at Lakeside. Having a lot of the same
interests, especially science fiction, they got to be great
friends. Or so he thought. People with Asperger’s have trouble
understanding where other people are coming from. To him it seemed
as though he and Kelsey were on the same wavelength. When a sci-fi
movie was playing in Hudson Hills, he asked her to go with him.

You’d have thought he threatened her with
something ghastly. It was only an innocent movie date, but Kelsey
freaked and literally ran away

It was the first time he ever asked a girl
out and he thought he must have made some horrible mistake. He kept
trying to find out what he’d done wrong.

I mean
kept
trying. He really wanted
to know. It was part of his Asperger’s, the social awkwardness and
the wanting to wrap things up with a neat bow. He could never be
sure he was doing things right. An explanation would have helped,
but she wouldn’t talk to him. She panicked if he so much as got
near her. Being an Aspie, he had no idea that his persistence was
having that effect. And she, being the terrified wimp that she was,
had no idea that her running away caused him to persist—even though
he told her he only wanted to apologize if he’d done something
wrong.

Finally, she went whining to the school
authorities. (If I sound biased—well heck, I am.) Even though it
should have been in their records that he had Asperger’s, they
seemed to have no clue as to what it was all about. It never
entered their pea brains that they could have solved the whole
problem if they got the two together and helped them understand
each other.

Instead they suspended him from school,
charged him with sexual harassment (which it wasn’t), and planned a
big lawyer-oriented hearing. (Our daddy was a lawyer, but he did
real estate law, which is relatively harmless.) The whole thing got
Ben so sick and disgusted that he quit Lakeside and transferred to
Southbridge High. I had made the same transfer just a short time
earlier in a futile attempt to escape from Evan Steffers. So
goodbye, Lakeside. From both of us.

I thought Ben would flinch when I mentioned
Kelsey’s name. He didn’t. He drank his coffee and gazed out the
window.

“It really surprised me,” I said. “She’s such
a bashful wimp. And now she’ll have even more reason to be
bashful.”

His eyes shifted to me. I hadn’t sounded
charitable. And bashful was a gross understatement of how she must
have felt. I told him the whole story of Kelsey getting drunk. And
Evan. And the Internet.

Chapter
Three

Ben set down his coffee cup. “That sort of
thing happens a lot. Why are girls so stupid?”

There we go again, blaming the victim. I
snapped, “Why are guys such pigs?”

He had an answer, the smartass. “Because
girls are stupid. It makes it look as if they’re asking to be taken
advantage of.”

I banged on the table. “That’s bullshit!
Nobody asks to be taken advantage of. It’s just an excuse for guys
to be pigs. How come they can get drunk and pass out and the worst
that happens is somebody steals their Rolex? If they had any
decency, they’d leave the girl to sleep it off. But no, they think
they’re
entitled
to be pigs.”

“That’s an insult to pigs,” he said.

Touché. I must have made some sort of point.
I knew there were decent guys in the world and Ben was one of them,
in spite of what Kelsey thought. But too many guys had shit for
brains. Didn’t their parents teach them anything? Or did the
parents also have shit for brains?

How did their fathers treat their mothers?
That would make an interesting study. I was sure somebody’d already
done it.

“You know what?” I said.

Ben was halfway up from the table. He sat
back down and gave me a wary look.

“Men,” I said, “think so well of themselves,
there’s no room left for having any decent thoughts about
women.”

“Huh!” he snorted. “Where’d you get that
from?”

“I’m not saying it applies to all men, but an
awful lot of them. They have no regard for women as actual human
beings. We’re only playthings, not real people. Where does that
attitude come from, I wonder. It must be a cultural thing, that
women are inferior beings, or maybe just objects.”