Good Girls

There’s silence. I don’t know how long. We can hear the clock tick. We can hear Stevie’s tongue as he patiently sands away my fingerprints.

Then my dad says, “I’ll call the phone company.”

“Why?”

“To find out who was sending the picture around.”

“Can you do that?”

“I can try,” he said. His mouth was a thin, tight seam. “I’m sure it’s the boy.”

“Who?” I said.

He points at the photo. “This one. He probably had some friend take the picture.”

I sigh. “I don’t think so. He couldn’t have known.”

“Known what?”

That I would unbutton his shirt and spread it like a curtain. That I would slide his belt from his belt loops and fling it behind me.

But then, maybe he did know. Maybe he and everyone else could guess where it was all going and I was the only one who couldn’t.

“Known what?” my dad says again. “He couldn’t have known what?”

We used to play a lot of catch when I was little. I can still throw a baseball like a guy and my football pass has a decent, if wobbly, spiral. Good arm, good arm, my dad would tell me, grinning. Now my father is staring at me as if he has no idea who I am or where I came from.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Never mind.” My dad whips his jacket from the back of the chair and stalks out of the room.

“Audrey,” my mom says. “He’s just upset right now. He’ll get over it.”

“Sure,” I say. “Right.”

It’s clear my dad is not going to get over anything until he finds someone to sue. Or shoot. We spend Monday night in virtual silence while my dad does endless Google searches on laws regarding the transmission of photos over cell phones. My mom brings me tea and more tea and spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, exactly, she should say to me. We try to watch a new cop show—my mom loves cop shows and she got me hooked but the episode is about these boys who date-rape a girl at some exclusive Manhattan high school. Neither me or my mom can take it. We turn it off and go to bed early. I don’t sleep.

Tuesday morning and still we’re not over it, won’t be over it for a long long time. My dad leaves before me so that he doesn’t have to look at me. My mom, wearing her usual uniform of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, sits at the kitchen table staring off into space, a cup of coffee cooling in front of her. She looks like I feel. Dark circles, hair puffy and matted. The sun filtering through the cracks in the curtains highlights a web of wrinkles around her eyes.

“Did you sleep?” she asks me.

“Not really,” I say.

“Me neither.”

She stands, walks to the coffeepot, and pours another cup of coffee. She adds milk and lots of sugar, and hands it to me. I only drink coffee once in a while, but she knows I need it. I grab a yoghurt, a napkin and a spoon and we sit at the kitchen table. We’ve got two minutes before Ash comes to pick me up.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” she says.

“Me, too.”

“I don’t understand how someone could have been so cruel. To take that picture of you and send it around. I can’t stand it. Who could be that mad at you?”

“It could be someone who doesn’t even know me, Mom.” I open the lid on the yoghurt and take a spoonful. It tastes like glue. “It could be a random person who just thinks it’s funny.”

“Funny?” my mom says. She turns her mug around and around in her hands. “I want to kill whoever did this.”

“You mean you want to kill me.”

Her head snaps up. “Of course not!”

“Dad does.”

“Stop that,” she says. “Your dad loves you.”

“He still wants to kill me.”

“This is hard for him. For any dad. He doesn’t want anyone to take advantage of you.” She takes a deep breath. “Sex is a beautiful thing. If it’s with the right person. Was this…have there…been others?”

I don’t say anything. I get up, take the container of yo-glue and go to toss it in the trash. I see that the picture my dad printed at the store has been torn into little pieces and thrown inside, right on top of the cranberry-orange-oatmeal muffins.

“Audrey, I just want you to be careful,” my mom says.

I don’t say, Like you were? There’s a honk from outside. “That’s Ash,” I say. “I have to go.”

At school, anyone who hadn’t seen the picture has now seen it over and over again. I find a copy of it pasted on my locker. I grab it, crumple it to a ball, and throw it on the floor. I haven’t said a word to Ash all the way to school, and she hasn’t asked me to, but now I tell her about my parents.

She sucks her breath through her teeth so quickly that she whistles. “Scheisse,” she says. “How did they find out?”

“Someone sent the picture to the store. My dad brought a copy home. They thought that it was someone playing a prank.”

“How did they take it?”

“My dad’s mad. At first he thought someone, um…” I lower my voice. “Someone, you know, forced me or whatever, but I told them that no one forced me to do anything.”

“You should have said someone forced you.”

“Yeah, right. And have them call the police? I don’t think so.” I stuff my jacket into my locker. “My dad can’t even look at me.”

“What about your mom?”

“She’s trying, but she doesn’t know what to say. It took her till this morning just to say the word ‘sex’.”

“Jeez,” says Ash.

Cindy Terlizzi and Pam Markovitz walk by. Pam grins at me and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

Ash scowls, then sighs. “It’s bad now, I know. Really bad. But people will forget.”

“Yeah?” I say. “When?”