Page 1

I am really fucked up.

That was my last clear thought as hands forced me up the stairs. Below me, the sounds of the party faded into buzzing thumps, punctuated by an exhilarated scream, the hammer of running footsteps, a distant splash. Above, the staircase narrowed into darkness. Maybe that was my fault, though. Through the fog, I was starting to think that last line of shots had been overdoing it.

At the top of the stairs, the hands propelling me stopped long enough to throw open a door, and then they forced me into deeper darkness. The door clicked shut, and then everything sounded farther off. The smell of laundry detergent mixed with the musk of weed, and I had a moment of doubt. Had I been smoking? Then the hands were on me again, shoving, turning.

One of them caught me by the chin, steadying me. The fingers were cold against my face.

After a moment, a voice said, “You said you wanted to get fucked.” Another pause, the silence of waiting. And then, “Jesus Christ.”

It was hard to make out more than a shape in the darkness, but his voice sounded young—cocky, with an eagerness he couldn’t quite mask, and a false note to it. Trying too hard, I thought about telling him. You’re trying too hard. That gets you every time.

But I was still struggling with the words when he made an impatient sound and grabbed my shirt. He yanked it off me—yank, yank, yank—and I wanted to laugh, wanted to say, Slow down . But I was too deep, and all I could do was try to stay upright as he alternated between grabbing my arm to keep me on my feet and letting go again to try to get the shirt over my head.

When the shirt was finally off, he pushed me onto the bed. The air whispered against my spine; my skin felt tight and hot. He was back a moment later, dragging my shorts off. They made a soft, rumpling noise as he flung them aside. His hands were still cold when he spread my cheeks and ran a finger between them.

“Commando,” he said. “Good bitch. And you shaved your pussy for daddy too.”

The daddy thing, I thought as he manhandled me up the mattress. I guess clichés are around for a reason.

When the door opened, the sounds of the party swelled again, and ambient light washed into the room, but my eyes weren’t focusing right, and from where I lay face down on the mattress, all I could do was guess at the shapes: nightstand, dresser, television.

“Shit.” That was someone else. “You weren’t kidding.”

And then a third guy. “He doesn’t look too good.”

The first voice—Daddy, I thought with a giggle—said, “He’s fine. He wants it.” His hand cracked across my ass. “Don’t you, bitch?”

The slap stung, but like everything else: from a long way off.

“Uh, bro…” That was the third voice.

“What?” And then another slap landed. Heat rolled through my body, and I moaned. “He wants it.”

The silence from the third man was the only answer.

Finally, the second man said, “Fucking get it.”

Daddy hocked a wad of spit between my cheeks. His fingers followed, one pressing in, and then, almost immediately, another. It was too much, but the burn felt like it was happening to someone else, and when I tried to pull myself across the bed, his knee landed on the small of my back, pinning me in place.

Laughing, he asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”

Another wad of spit followed. A third finger. Spit again. And then the withdrawal, nothing.

He slammed home, and I screamed.

A moment later, his hand wrapped across my mouth. He was already moving again, hips jerking against me. The first moments seemed to last forever—the pain, the sense of impossibility, that my body could never do this. He was lying on top of me, his thrusts short and jerky and amateurish. One of those cold hands wound through my hair, yanking my head back, baring my throat.

“You like that, huh? You like that, bitch?”

Like bad porn, I thought, over the slap of his body against mine. The pain was losing its edge, shrinking to discomfort as my body adjusted, accepted him, let him in. And from an even more distant place: Who taught this boner how to fuck?

And then his hand was around my throat, squeezing.

“Fucking cock tease.” It was almost a whisper, hoarse and verging on out of breath. Cardio, bro, I thought over the tap-tap of his nuts. His fingers opened, flexed, tightened again. “That’s what you are.”

My vision narrowed to a sparking, fizzing storm of black and white. I twisted, my body remembering to fight even though my brain was offline, but his weight pressed me into the mattress. His breath was hot on the bare skin of my shoulder. I smelled my ass on his hand. The music thudded in my joints.

He grunted, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

His body slackened. His hand loosened around my neck. A high ringing noise started, and it was a while before I understood it was in my head. When he pulled out, the pain returned—not sharp, like before, but the burn of raw skin and stretched muscles. Something wet and cold pressed into my shoulder and skidded along the bare skin there.

“All right,” he said, trying to catch his breath. He caught my hair again and yanked my head around. The men waiting were silhouettes, and then I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the light, weak as it was. “Who’s next?”

“What the fuck’s wrong with his face?” the second one asked.

The third one said, “What happened to him?”

They’re called scars, I thought with fractured clarity.

“Who cares?” Daddy said. “His ass is fine.”

“That’s messed up,” the second guy said. “I don’t want to look at that.”

Daddy slumped next to me. I could feel his chest rising and falling. And then he said, “So, it’s a bag and tag.”

The second guy laughed. “What?”

Springs creaked as Daddy rolled across the mattress. Bedding whispered, and then a soft thump. And then something cold touched my face again, fabric dropping over me. Daddy pulled the pillowcase down and tucked it into place.

“Bag and tag,” he said again, and this time, he was the one who laughed.

“Well, fuck,” the second one said, and he laughed too, and then the only sound was the buzzing music below and the jingle of his belt buckle.

They took their turns, even the one who had kept saying, “Jesus.”

My body rocking into the mattress. The smell of the pillowcase’s detergent, and then my saliva when it caught in my open mouth, gummed to the wetness of my tongue. The musk of unfamiliar bodies, and low guttural noises, and fingers biting into my flesh.

And then it was over.

The sound of a can being opened broke the stillness.

And then the first one said, “Give me some of that.”

There was more, but my brain had detached from the rest of me, and I was too far gone to make sense of the words. Jokes. Giving each other shit. Riding the high of the fuck. They sounded like they’d won the state championship of train-running. An old part of me that I’d almost forgotten thought, I want to say that to Emery .

I wasn’t sure when they left. I slept—passed out—woke. The room was still dark, and the house was still thrumming with music. I dragged the pillowcase off my head. The aches seemed more intense, and a wary voice warned me I wasn’t quite as deep anymore; it wasn’t exactly words, more the gnawing sensation that, at this rate, I was in danger of sobering up. I was still messed up enough, at least, that the thought of turning on the lights only sparked a far-off echo of my usual panic. I found a lamp, squinted against the sudden harshness, and picked up my clothes. A door connected to a tiny ensuite bathroom, and I carried my shirt and shorts in there. It wasn’t until then that I realized I still had my shoes on. What a bunch of gentlemen.

There was too much light in the bathroom, hard to avoid myself, impossible not to see. I sat on the toilet and got as much of it out of me as I could. I thought, Thank God for PreP. And later, when I cleaned up with toilet paper (a few dabs, all I could stand), No blood.

I was dressing when I saw the tally. Magic Marker. Three uneven lines on my shoulder.

Fucking juveniles.

I turned off the lights and left the room. I took the stairs slowly, my legs stiff and unresponsive. Music roared up at me, louder and louder until the only competition was the occasional scream or shout. A young crowd, I thought as I got to the bottom of the stairs. A lot of college-aged kids. Early to mid-twenties. My phone said it was a little after two.

When I got to the bar, the bottle of tequila was gone. Pretty much everything was gone—college kids. A few cans of Red Bull. Some Cokes. I stretched my back and thought, I should go home.

Instead, I spotted an open seat and dropped into it. It was a nice chair—the upholstery clean and soft and new, the padding just the right degree of firm. It was a nice house too, done in a nautical theme with shiplap siding and white paint and decorative rope ties and lamps that looked like they were meant to hang off a dock. On the sofa next to me, a trio of kids were hunched over their phones, sending each other texts about me. I could tell because they kept giggling and trying to look like they weren’t aware of me. Two girls and a boy. The boy held a joint between his forefinger and his thumb like he was the shit.

“Bro,” I said, and the guy looked up at me. Guy. Nineteen. Twenty, tops. He tried to look away again, but I said, “Can I get some of that?”

He glanced at the girls, who were covering their faces, trying not to giggle and still pretending they were looking at their phones. Then he grinned and passed me the joint.

The rule was: stick to shots. Tequila doesn’t show up on a drug test.

I thought of their bodies on me. The pillowcase over my head. More of it came back to me, details bubbling to the surface. At the end, when it had been too much, and that was how I’d nutted: a hand on my neck, forcing my face into the mattress, and one of the boner bros growling at me, Stay down . The body is weird like that, I thought, and I took a hit. I held the smoke and let my head fall back. The body likes what it likes. And the body remembers.

A hand clubbing me on the side of the head.

The grit of the linoleum under my hands and knees.

Stay down.

The smoke slipped out of me slowly. I blinked to clear my eyes, took another hit, and passed the joint back.

All three of them were looking at me now like I was something that had crawled out of their nightmares. I was, I guess. Old. Fucked up. My face. But something in the way they watched me told me they knew what had happened upstairs. Or suspected.

“Guess I’m a little out of practice,” I said and tried to smile.

The girls dissolved into laughter, and they got up, still laughing, and staggered away. One of them looked back, and whatever she saw, it made her laugh even harder. The guy examined me and then stood. He sounded like every twenty-year-old who thinks he’s made it when he said, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

After the party swallowed them, I sat there, waiting for the weed to work. People moved around me. Voices blended together until it was all one voice. My face was hot. My eyes were dry, and I wanted to close them.

But somehow, I got myself upright. And, one hand on the wall, I made my way to the front of the house. When I stepped outside and the door shut behind me, it was like the night drank up the sounds of the party, and the sudden stillness was deep and pure. A dark, unfamiliar landscape stretched out ahead of me. The summer heat had eased, and the moon hung in a nimbus of humidity.I had a vague memory of parking down the road, walking under trees. So, the car was out there, somewhere, and I started down the porch steps.

I’d gone maybe a hundred yards, following the line of cars that stretched down the drive and out onto a county road, when I heard an uneven footstep break the stillness. Even buried under the shots, even under the haze of the weed, instincts took over. Maybe those guys had decided they wanted more. Maybe—like a surprising number of guys—they’d realized they liked it, having someone they could hurt, someone who couldn’t talk back.

But then the footfall came again, and a solitary shape emerged from between two cars. The moon lit him from behind, so at first, all I could see was blond hair that looked like ash in the night, one pale shoulder, a tiny jockstrap that sagged on one hip. Like the rest of the dumbass kids here, he was young—he had that lean look of guys who haven’t quite left adolescence behind.

And then he stumbled into one of the cars, put out a hand to brace himself on the window, and I saw the blood. He left a handprint of it on the glass.

“Hey,” I said. The word was rough in the silence. “Are you okay?”

He turned. And for one long, impossible moment, it was like looking in a mirror. Even under all the blood, shards of glass sparkled in the cuts and gashes, catching the moonlight. His eye was a red ruin. He stared at me, not seeing me, and took another step. And then he fell.

I dug out my phone and stumbled into a run.