That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

through the saw grass. She follows it until she finds a sandy spot that seems secluded. She pulls up her dress and does her business. When she stands up, the world spins again. Maybe I’d better sit down, she thinks, and finds a patch of sand, smooth as a fresh sheet, tucked into the curve of a dune. The night air is soft against her face, the sand is cool underneath her, and the stars are brilliant overhead, so close it looks like she could touch them. She lies back and wishes for Poe to come and find her, like she’s Sleeping Beauty and he’s the prince who will wake her with a kiss. She lets her eyes slip shut. When she opens them again, there’s a boy on top of her.

“There were three of them,” she told Michael, as she stood on the deck, looking out at the ocean, seven years after that terrible night. Her voice was dull, her shoulders hunched, as she watched the waves roll in and out; not stopping, not seeing, not caring. “One was on top of me. One was watching. And one of them…” She swallowed hard. “He was holding me down. And laughing.” It was the laughter she heard in her nightmares, the boy’s shrill cackle as he held her wrists and the way he’d chanted “Sloppy seconds!” He’d had a face as round as a pie plate, a snub of a nose, big round eyes, prissy, pursed lips, and brown hair combed back smoothly from his high, waxy-white forehead. There was something doll-like about him, like he’d been carved out of wood, then painted, and was waiting for someone to turn him into a real boy.

She could see him, looming above her: his smooth hair disheveled, his rosebud mouth drawn into a sneer, how, every minute or two he’d use his left hand to hold her wrists and his right hand to stroke himself roughly through his shorts. She could smell the sour cloud of beer that hung around his face. Worst of all, she could picture the face of the boy watching from the tall grass, his mouth hanging open and eyes wide and shocked. She’d waited for him to come save her, but he never did.

Michael pulled her gently against him, and she let herself lean into the warm bulk of his body. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, his voice a pained rasp, like it was his heart that was breaking. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

She nodded, and breathed, and made herself tell him the rest. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. I was a virgin.” She remembered the pain when the boy tried to jam himself inside, how he’d spat on his hand, then smeared saliva between her legs, how she’d felt like she was being torn right in two. She remembered the dry, hissing noise her hair made against the sand as she tossed her head and bucked her hips, trying to free herself. She remembered the smell of the fire and the ocean; the sight of the sky, the moon obscured by a raft of clouds, cold and indifferent, a million miles away.

“When the first boy finished, he got off me, and then, before the second boy could get on, I hit him.” She made a fist, to demonstrate, remembering how her hands had tingled after the boy released them, the meaty smack of her knuckles on his cheek, how the shock had traveled right up her arm and how the boy had yelped. Then she’d been moving, shoving her way past the watcher, stumbling through the saw grass as it sliced at her calves, the laughing boy so close behind her that she could feel his breath on her neck. She heard someone say, “That’s enough. Leave her alone,” but she didn’t look back, she kept going, running until her thighs burned and she had a stitch in her side, turning her head every few steps to look behind her for pursuers, holding her ruined dress around her; her panties gone, abandoned back on the sand. She remembered realizing, as she’d dragged her poor, bleeding, hurting body up the Levys’ beach stairs, that nothing had gone according to plan. She’d be going back to Boston in two days’ time, and she still hadn’t been kissed.

Michael put his arms around her and held her, and Diana felt herself rocking like a ship riding at anchor as his body kept her in place. When she finally raised her eyes, she looked for disgust in his expression, but she could see nothing but sorrow. Her throat ached and her eyes felt gritty.

“Wait here,” he said. He got up and went inside, and got her a glass of water, and watched over her as she sipped.

“So,” she said, and cleared her throat. “That’s what happened. That’s why I can’t be here in the summertime. That’s why I dropped out of college. That’s why…” Her voice trailed off. She knew she could never put words to how that night had changed her, reshaping her sense of the world and of herself, turning her from an aspiring artist and writer to a custodian and a waitress. Nor did she want to hurt him by implying that there was something dishonorable or wrong about a working-class life. She couldn’t say any of it, any more than she could get back everything she’d lost that night, that summer.

“It’s just that I feel so stupid!” she said, in a loud, ragged voice.

“You weren’t stupid. Don’t say that! It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I did. I trusted him. Poe. I thought he…” Her voice caught and broke, and when she spoke again, all she could manage was a whisper. “I thought he liked me,” she said.

She drained the water in breathless gulps. Then she sat, with Willa at her feet, and she waited for the world to crack open and swallow her whole, the way she’d