Page 5

When my phone goes off with a call from her, I freeze, staring at it. The eternal flame of indignation constantly burning inside of me has been more than dampened in the past month; it’s gone out. Whatever happened to me, it served exactly the purpose it was meant to. I’m not scared, exactly. What I am is empty, carved out, lost. I haven’t even felt anger in the past month, mostly just an unsurprised neutral that I’d finally received definitive proof that there’s no such thing as justice and that girls are a consumable resource. Fighting against that has been what kept me going, kept the long, searching finger of depression from penetrating too deeply. Now that it’s in, it’s taken hold, flipping open the lid of a pit inside me that I thought I’d managed to close for good. One that takes all the things I feel and absorbs them, reducing everything to a blank nothing.

When I see Becca’s name on my screen, there’s a flicker of feeling inside, something like hope. I was pretty sure I was permanently ghosted, my former best friend finding the in crowd preferable to the girl who outs them. I fall back onto my bed, finger visibly shaking as I tap to take the call.

“Hey,” I say, somewhat breathless.

“Hey,” Becca says, her voice super flat. “I still have a copy of your house key. Thought you’d want it back.”

“I guess, if you’re that level of done with me,” I say.

She huffs into the phone. “Do you still not get what you did?”

“What I did?” I repeat, feel something stir inside. The memory of what anger used to be. “Don’t you mean what happened to me?”

“Nothing happened to you, Ava, that’s the thing,” Becca says. “You said yourself the rape kit was negative and there was no sign of—”

“Nothing happened?” I repeat her words again, my voice going higher. “I woke up in the middle of a field bleeding without any underwear on.”

“Bleeding from your back,” Becca says. “You’re twisting words so that things sound worse than they actually are, just like that shit you posted.”

“I posted the truth,” I hiss.

“Let me fact-check you on that real quick. Because I’ve got the screencap.” Becca continues, reading aloud. “Just became a statistic. Don’t think it won’t happen to you. And there’s pictures. Mostly of your back, but there’s a shot of your IV, too.”

“That’s to show the bruises on my arms,” I say tightly. “It’s called documentation.”

“It’s called false accusation,” Becca fires back.

“I didn’t accuse anyone,” I say. Even though I’d wanted to, even though I’d typed out Micah Harding’s name, prepared to tag him. Because you don’t just wake up with rape drugs in your system, a boy standing over you, and something wet on your thighs and immediately search for alternate explanations. But you also don’t link someone to a felony and put them on blast without proof—which I didn’t have—something Mom reminded me of in the ER while she googled slander and tried to balance supporting me with protecting us all from a lawsuit.

“You made a point to say you were drugged,” Becca spits back at me. “You used the word bleeding five times—oh no, wait, there’s six. And you didn’t just say there was a nurse, it was a sexual assault nurse and—”

“And what the hell does that sound like to you?” I yell, a surge of emotion escaping the pit as I sit up, something inside me pulls taut, anger chasing tension as a swell of emotion builds. “You don’t know what it feels like—”

“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” Becca’s voice is back to being dead and cold, and I realize what I just did.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Becca, I didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t mean to what?” she asks. “Forget that I actually was raped?”

The string of emotion snaps. I feel it let go, falling back into the dark center that holds me together, while also tearing me apart. My hand goes to the hollow at the base of my neck, where my collarbones don’t connect. There’s a warmth there, but not a comforting one; it’s like turning over coals, looking for embers. Becca was my only friend, and a surge of panic rips through me at the thought of losing her.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper again. “No, I didn’t forget. I just—”

“Do you know what a false rape claim does?” Becca goes on, her voice now thready with emotion. “It makes those of us who speak up less believable. You weren’t lying about one thing; you did become a statistic that night, one that can be used against any other girl that says something from now on because you just made he said/she said a lot less reliable on one end.”

This is why Becca is so pissed at me. It’s not because she won’t hear anything bad said about her new boyfriend, Murph, and his bros. It’s because she thinks I undermined everything she went through freshman year, opened the door a little wider for those who would take advantage. But there’s still enough of the old Ava inside of me to push back, because all I can think of is Widow’s voice from this morning, telling me to stop apologizing.

“I’m not sorry,” I say. “Because I didn’t do anything wrong. I said what happened to me, and I didn’t accuse anyone.”

But I forgot the crucial fact that I live in Bethington now, and that everyone knew where I was that night and who was there; all the boys whose bad behaviors I’d ever drawn attention to. All the boys from the right families, with the right kinds of talents to go far—if there was nothing holding them back.

“That’s the thing, though, right?” Becca says. “You said what happened, but you don’t really know what that was, do you?”

My mouth clamps shut; my mind goes blank. There is some comfort in the nothingness, a reprieve of numbness when I allow it to have its way.

“Ava?” Becca asks, and if there’s concern in her voice, I don’t hear it.

I hang up.