But there was a message on the machine when they got home that made Lindsey curl into a fetal ball on the couch.
“I can’t,” she wailed as Zach knelt beside her, brushing the hair out of her face. “I can’t!”
“Yes you can.”
She tried to imagine it-like every bad
“And you will. Come on.”
She thought of Brian and the games she had played leading up to that night. He hadn’t meant for it to happen that way, she knew it, but if she stood up and started
pointing fingers, he would be in just as much trouble. That weighed on her, but the thought of the things she’d done, the way she’d dressed, acted, instigated, the men she’d let feel her up, fuck her, use her-she pulled the sofa pillow out from under her head and pressed it over her flushed face to hide it.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, when Zach pulled the pillow away and made her face him. “It went all wrong that night, I know. It wasn’t supposed to…be like that. But I…I…” She closed her eyes, unable to look into his. “I went there to meet them.
I knew…I knew what could happen.”
“Did you say no?” Zach asked quietly, and she felt his hand in her hair again, stroking gently.
She remembered, and knew she had, clearly and unequivocally. She’d told them no over and over, and it just made things worse instead of better.
“Yeah.” She opened her eyes, looking at him through prisms. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve it. How many times had I said yes before that?”
“Don’t.” He shook his head. “I don’t care if you said yes until the very last minute, and then decided you didn’t want to. No means no. Period.” She laughed, a short, strangled cry. “But ‘no’ never meant ‘no’ before…”
“And why was that? Because no one ever listened to you when you said ‘no,’ did they?” He touched her cheek, his eyes pained. “Your stepfather didn’t listen. All the men who took advantage of you didn’t listen. Lindsey, baby, you’ve been saying ‘no’ all along. It’s just that no one was willing to stop and listen to what you actually meant.” Everything in her went silent as she stared at him, the slow realization creeping like cold fingers up her spine. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. All that time,
she’d been saying “No”-egging them on, sure, teasing them, trying her best to get herself or someone else hurt, she realized with a flush of shame-but she never once stopped saying, “No.”
“Okay.” She sat up on the couch, wiping her eyes, blinking back any more tears, and managed to give him a small, hard smile. “Let’s go.” She was going and, not just this one time, but now and forever, “No” was going to really mean “No.”
* * * *
“Ugh, did you have to make me eat waffles?” Lindsey held her stomach as they approached the pavilion. It was crowded with a sea of kids in black robes, but there were far many more parents and siblings, grandmothers and uncles. All she had was Zach-not that she was complaining.
“You wanted waffles!” Zach laughed, tugging at the tassel on her mortarboard- a blue and white thing with a gold “2008”-making it go askew.
“Yeah, well…now I feel sick.” She straightened her cap with a frown.
“You’re going to be fine.” He kissed her cheek, pointing to a sign that read,
‘Graduates’ with an arrow pointing down a flight of stairs. “I guess that’s for you.”
“How will I find you after?” She clung to his hand, hesitating at the top of the stairs.
“I’ll wait right by this sign.” He kissed her again, properly this time, a slow, lingering heat filling her middle to replace the nausea. “Now go, before they start without you.”
She went down the stairs and packed herself into the crowd, hoping to be invisible in the sea of black. There were nearly a thousand graduates-it shouldn’t be that difficult, she reasoned. And after today, she would be free, one rite of passage into adulthood officially taken, and more to follow-including the job she’d started two days ago, and school, which wouldn’t start for another two weeks for the summer session.
Finding a spot by the wall, she sat down and waited for the organization machine to take over. It would, eventually, and then this whole thing would be over. Until then, she was going to concentrate on not being sick. The waffles Zach had brought to her in bed had been thick and rich and beyond delicious, and the sex they’d had afterward had been even better, but now it weighed heavily in her middle.
The truth was, she didn’t want Zach to leave, and it was only a few weeks away now, looming large. She couldn’t picture being on her own, couldn’t imagine life without him anymore. He thought she was afraid of Smooth and Gritty-Robert Barnes And Donald McMillan according to the police report the prosecutor had showed her during their meeting with him. And she was, a little-they were out on bail, after all, and the trial had been so far in the future, nearly a month after Zach was due home, in fact-but no one knew where she was now.
