Smashed (28 page)

“You drank before Alec. You said Matt used to get mad at you about it. Yet you did it anyway. Why?”

“Matt’s a Puritan. He doesn’t think anybody should drink.”

Gail swiveled slightly in her chair, first one way, then the other. She did that when she was thinking hard.

“Do you want to stay sober, Katie?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

I shrugged, looked away. “Some days I do, some days I don’t.”

“Thanks for being honest.”

“Honest won’t get me out of here.”

“Is here so bad?”

I shook my head and wiped my eyes with my shirtsleeve. I was always crying at the weirdest times. I couldn’t predict it.

“Here.” She handed me a tissue box. “Let’s say for today that you want to stay sober,” she said softly. “The first thing you’ve got to do? You’ve got to learn to like yourself.”

“Ha.” Half the time I was in her office, I felt like I was on some tearjerker episode of
Oprah
.

“Is that funny?”

“Not really.” I shook my head. But it was like saying I had to fly to Mars and back without a space suit. “What’s to like?”

“You tell me,” she said.

I sighed loudly.

“Try,” she said.

“Let’s see—I have excellent taste in guys, I’m a drunk like my delinquent father, I ruined my chance of success at the one thing I’m good at. . . . How am I doing?”

Silence.

Now I was mad. “You want me to
lie
to you? I don’t like myself, okay?
Satisfied?
”

“I think this goes back a long way for you. I think it goes back to your dad.”

“Well, how would you feel if your dad didn’t bother to hang around? If he didn’t bother to visit or pick up the phone or pop a birthday card in the mail? Would that make you feel special, Gail? ’Cause I just don’t feel that special.”

“It was a lousy thing to do to his kids.”

She let me sit in peace for a while, blowing my nose. I pulled my stocking feet up onto her couch, curling them under my legs. My slippers lay abandoned on her floor.

“Remember you told me last session how your good friend Cassie came to visit recently and how mean you were to her?”

I nodded.

“Was it because you think she’s a loser who doesn’t deserve your friendship?”

“Yeah, right.”

“What did we talk about?”

“How I’ve never felt good enough for her.”

“Even though she’s always cared about you, and she’s never judged you, you still felt that way.”

I nodded.

“Your father is an alcoholic, too, Katie. An alcoholic’s thinking sometimes doesn’t make much sense. Maybe,” she said, and swiveled her chair ever so slightly, “maybe your father never felt he was good enough for
you
.

“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” she said. “Just give it some thought.”

And my session was over.

*     *     *

I’d like to tell you this: that I strolled back into school a month or two later with my head up, the old Katie back again, strong, defiant—cured. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t care what people said, that I sat right down next to Alec in class, that I didn’t care about what had happened.

But that would be a lie.

I made my peace with Gail. She helped me, even though I wasn’t easy. She told me over and over that Alec is the one who carries all the shame for the rape, not me. After sixty days, she allowed me to move into the Transitions wing, a place where we had more privileges and did our schoolwork so we didn’t flunk out. I still met with her every day; most days I looked forward to it.

We had some free time there, and group meetings with other kids with the same problems. Lots of girls had it worse than me: They’d run away or been abused by someone in their own family. Some of them had nowhere to go back to, no friends who called. Even so, I was still so depressed sometimes that I thought the
only way out—the only way to stop feeling so bad—was to die or to drink. Sometimes I wanted to drink so bad I could almost taste it: the burn down my throat from a single shot of tequila, a whisper of salt on the tip of my tongue. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t exactly mixing margaritas there at the end. And the counselors told me if I felt like crap now, they’d guarantee I’d feel worse if I got drunk.

“Did it work last time you tried it?” one would say.

Sometimes I hated them.

*     *     *

One day a fourteen-year-old named Bethany came up to me after a group meeting where I’d admitted I wanted to drink or kill myself, and I didn’t care which. We were in a deserted hallway near our wing; fluorescent lights glared on the concrete walls and grungy linoleum.

“How can you let him do that to you?” she asked. Her face was pale above her narrow shoulders, her eyes big and haunted.

“What are you talking about?”

“That guy, Alex,” she said.

“Alec . . . ,” I said.

She nodded. “Don’t hurt yourself. Don’t let him win.”

If anyone back home had said that to me, I’d have told them where to go. But I knew Bethany’s story: that her stepfather had been molesting her for three years before she finally ran away because her mother didn’t believe her. That she’d lived on the street by doing things I didn’t even want to think about. That she’d been puking when she first got here—dope sick from
withdrawal. I’d watched her struggle to get herself out of bed in the morning. She’d been in a psych ward once for slitting her wrists. Her scars were inside
and
out.

She was walking down the hall now, but she looked back to where I stood, like a deer caught in headlights.

“My stepfather—he’s not winning this time.”

I could see from her eyes that she meant it.

*     *     *

The counselors tried to get us ready to go back to the “real world.” We had to learn how to deal with “life on life’s terms,” they said, and they spent quite a bit of time helping us figure out exactly what they meant by that.

What it meant in a nutshell: You can’t avoid
shit.
Using drugs or alcohol isn’t a fallback position. Hiding out isn’t an option. Stuff happens and you have to deal with it. You run, you lose. Your best thinking got you here. And
here
is not a place you have to end up again. The choice is yours.

It was time to grow up.

There was something I had to do before I could go home, and the longer I lived in that place, with those girls and those counselors, the more I knew it. Gail agreed. I had two letters to write and one secret left to let go of—one lie left to own.

No matter how scared I was to do it.

No matter what might happen when I did.

I took out two envelopes. I addressed one to Matt and one to Cassie.

Then I began to write.

Pale green and crimson buds speckled the tree branches like confetti. In our yard, next to the decrepit barn, an apple tree blossomed. Petals from its fluffy white flowers lay strewn across the grass like an untimely, delicate snow.

Will stood on the porch, his eyes following me.

“I won’t be long. I’m just going to see Cassie,” I said.

“Want me to tell Mom?”

“I told her,” I said. “She’ll be right back. She just went down to the store to get some milk.” I turned to go.

“Katie . . . ?” Will had been my shadow all morning, sticking so close that if I stopped in my tracks he’d practically run into me.

“I’ll be back in an hour, Will. I
promise
,” I said gently.

“Okay,” he said, but his eyes were uncertain.

I wheeled my bicycle out of the barn, brushed the winter’s dust off the seat with my hand, and climbed on. The air in the tires was low. The rubber spread out slightly on the pavement
under my weight, but I didn’t care. I had arrived home just the night before; I needed to see Cassie.

The sun shone warm on my head, but the air was still cold. The wind blew hard against my face and through my hair as I pedaled toward the lake, goose bumps rising on my arms.

Cassie was expecting me. She was in her yard, digging up flower beds with her father; she looked up and waved. Not one of her usual enthusiastic waves, but a somber, one-hand-up-by-the-shoulder-then-straight-back-down waves, the kind you give a passing car in Westland when you don’t know who’s in it. She laid down her spade and walked slowly toward me.

Her father smiled and said hello, then looked back at his garden. I climbed off my bike and leaned it against their fence and Cassie and I walked away from her house, farther down the quiet road toward the deserted public beach.

We’d never had a real fight before, and my heart was racing. Cassie stared at the road ahead of us, avoiding my eyes, my face. Neither of us said a word. The five minutes it took to walk to the beach felt like eternity.

“I’m sorry, Cassie.” My voice cracked and I cleared my throat. We were sitting side by side now, legs dangling off the dock.

She just nodded, flicked a toe in the water, and studied the little ripple she’d set off.

“I don’t know why I did it. I know that’s what you want to know—why I did everything I did—but I can’t explain it.”

She still didn’t say anything, just played with her toes in the
water, then finally shook her head. “That’s not it,” she said, so quiet I could barely hear her.

“What is it?”

Cassie stared straight ahead. Her lips trembled.

“Tell me, Cass—”

She held one palm up to stop me from talking. Whatever she had to say to me, I could take it. I knew that now. I could see how hard it was for her, too.

“Do you know how scared I was when I came home last summer and you’d been in that car accident?”

I shook my head slowly.

“
Very
.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “
Very
scared. All I could think was what if you’d died. . . . I couldn’t handle that.” She flicked the water again with her toe.

“But then I thought, well, why dwell on it? It’s over. You know? She didn’t die. . . .”

“I’m sorry, Cass—”

“You remember last May—it was maybe a whole year ago—after that party at Cheryl’s camp? You were so drunk you could hardly walk, and I had to drape your arm over me just so I could get you into the house that night. You didn’t make it to the bathroom, you know—you peed your pants. I never told anyone you did that, not even you. I didn’t know if you would remember in the morning. I was hoping you wouldn’t.” She took her feet out of the water, pulled her damp legs up to her chest, and hugged them in, chin on her knees. “I brought you back to my house that night. I was scared to leave you alone. My mom turned you
on your side in case you threw up again so you wouldn’t choke on it. . . .

“My mom thought you had a drinking problem back then. She said that people who get in trouble when they drink or do drugs have a problem.” She laughed once, without humor. “I told my mom,
It’s just what kids do
. Totally defended you.

“
Do
you
do it?
my mom asked me. I had to say no. I mean, I never had. She knew that.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t
want
you to be in trouble, so . . .”

“What?”

“So I convinced myself that you weren’t—that you
weren’t
in trouble.” She stared out at the water. Tears ran over her freckles like tiny rivers, and she let them. They sparkled in the sun and dropped off her chin. “I’m
so sorry
about that. For letting you down.”

I was stunned.
“Cassie.”

“I feel like such a loser.”

“Cassie, you are the
opposite
of a loser.”

“I know you were mad at me in rehab. You weren’t really hiding it, you know?”

I dug in my pockets for a tissue, found a crumpled one, and handed it to her.

“I came to apologize to
you
for that, Cassie. And believe me, you don’t have to explain to me how you can deny something that’s right in front of your face—how you can pretend something isn’t happening when it is.”

Cassie smiled weakly. “I guess you know a little bit about that.”

“Are you kidding? I’m an expert,” I said. I pulled my feet out of the icy water and rubbed the cold flesh with my hands. “Listen to me, Cassie. Nothing,
nothing
you could have done would have changed me. It wasn’t your fault.”

She tilted her head toward me and studied my eyes; she could see that I meant it. “That’s what my mom said,” she said softly.

“She’s right.”

“So why were you mad at me?” she asked.

“I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at myself. I was just mad at myself.”

*     *     *

We were quiet on the walk back to her house. It was a relief that her parents’ cars were gone, that I wouldn’t have to talk to them.

We stood on the McPhersons’ lawn, newly green. Cassie bit her lip. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“What’s going to happen to Alec, Kay? I can’t stand it, seeing him at school every day.”

“Nothing.” I looked at my feet.

“That’s not right.”

“I know, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Cassie dug her foot into the soft earth of a flower bed. “My mom says the state has to investigate because you’re a minor.”

“I talked to them.” My eyes scanned Cassie’s familiar yard, then focused on the lake. The deep blue water shimmered in the sun. “There’s no proof, no physical evidence. It’s his word
against mine. With my drinking and everything . . . going to court would be like suicide. Even Gail agreed.”

“Gail?”

“My counselor. And my mom talked to Ron Bailey about it. Mom says he’s livid, but he agreed. They’re right.”

“I’m sorry, Kay. Sometimes I just want to kill Alec.”

“I want to kill him all the time.”

*     *     *

Inside her empty house, we made sandwiches and opened a bag of chips. Cassie grew quiet, moving around the kitchen without saying a word, her eyes on the tile, on the food, anywhere but on me. We sat down with our plates in front of a large window overlooking the lake, but she didn’t eat a thing; something was on her mind.