I pretend there’s an arrow on the floor, a neon arrow that says start here, and I follow that. Hold my head up. Keep my posture up. That’s all I can do.
56
ALI
It’s right before winter break. A dusting of snow on the ground. Everything so white and crisp. Blythe walks into Ms. Tap’s sexual assault group with me.
There are about ten girls in the room and they glare at Blythe. They are not happy Blythe is here. Anyone can see that. They don’t care that she did community service for spray-painting my sidewalk. She and Suki and Cate. They don’t care that she spoke to the police about Sean Nessel. That she’s being cooperative in the investigation. That she’s going to testify in front of a grand jury even though he gets to walk around free on bail until the investigation goes in front of a judge. Raj thinks he’s going to have to go to community college because no school will take him now. I say he takes a gap year. Makes it look intentional.
Blythe has come completely clean. After her article in the Underground went viral, she told the police all about the Initiation. I heard she went into the police station by herself. No parents. No friends. Just her and a lawyer.
Amanda Shire was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a sexual hazing ritual, and a conspiracy to commit aggravated criminal sexual contact. But it doesn’t seem fair that a girl, a woman now, should take the fall for all that. Even someone like Amanda Shire. She didn’t do this on her own. The Initiation might have been her brainchild, but she needed help implementing it.
At first, people didn’t even seem outraged about the Initiation. They said, It was so long ago. That girls like Blythe and Donnie agreed to be in that room with those boys. No one held their heads down. No one chained them up. No one sat on top of them. It wasn’t a gang rape. Alex Kramer, the guy Blythe was paired with, saw it as a hookup. That’s what he told people. Nothing more. He’s planning to go to law school now, someone told Blythe. This kind of thing will ruin his life. Someone said that to her without irony.
But then a reporter at The Star-Ledger who read Blythe’s article in the Underground wrote a front-page story about the Initiation. That fourteen-year-old girls were giving oral sex to eighteen-year-old athletes. That eighteen-year-old girls orchestrated it. There was an emergency school board meeting. Just the other day, I saw an article about it on CNN.com. Dateline is doing a story now. A letter went out from the superintendent.
Still, people want Blythe to pay. These girls in Ms. Tap’s group watch her carefully. Their eyes heavy, staring at her. They don’t understand how I could even talk to her after what she did. How I could forgive her. And I don’t forgive her. I don’t see it that way.
“Thanks for letting me sit next to you,” she whispers.
So much of what she and I have been through feels so far away. Maybe we were different people then. Maybe now, we’re more stripped down. Like we’re meeting each other for the first time.
I look at her and wonder if I know Blythe. Really know her. I don’t, of course. The Blythe I knew wouldn’t have sat in this room. A room full of girls with stories to tell. A girl whose cousin molested her at six years old. A girl whose boyfriend held her down. A girl who woke up naked not knowing what happened. There’s a girl from last year’s Initiation here too. There will be more girls like Blythe here.
* * *
Ms. Tap wants to see me after the session. Blythe walks out by herself. She waves to me. I wave back. There’s nothing more than that.
Ms. Tap takes my hand. “Ali, I just want you to know that this is one of the proudest moments of my life, being around you. That knowing you has changed me so much.” She starts to cry. She makes that weird guffaw sound when you’re trying to suck in tears.
It hurts to hug her, because no one wants to be the girl who changed everyone. It’s too much weight. I would have liked to be the girl who did nothing all year. The invisible girl. The girl with a collage book filled with pictures of a boy she didn’t know shoved under her bed.
On the wall, a shadow. It’s like someone is making bunny ears in a film projector, except this is more triangular and pointy. It floats back and forth like a chime. It’s three little paper planes hanging from the ceiling.
I reach up and touch one of the wings of the plane. It dangles back and forth in this easy way in this innocent place with paper planes and goofy stuff that childhoods are made of.
* * *
In the hallway outside Ms. Tap’s room, Sammi sits on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting for me.
“I saw Blythe walk out.”
“We don’t have to talk about her.”
“No, I think it’s good if she can be real.” Sammi waits. Thinks about this. “Can Blythe Jensen be real?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. I don’t know.”
I look through the rectangular windows out onto the soccer field. The season is long over.
“It’s hard for me not to still hate her.”
“I know,” I say. “Do you mind if I don’t hate her?”
I know this sounds weird to Sammi. I know this would sound weird to anyone after what she did. But something in Blythe changed.
“Oh, I know you can’t hate her,” Sammi says, laughing. “Maybe you’ll love her, hate her. But you’ll never just hate her, hate her. I’ve accepted that already.”
I want to say a lot more. Defend myself. Defend Blythe.
But I don’t want to talk about Blythe anymore. I want
