“It’s okay,” I said tentatively. “I’m so sorry, Owen,” I whispered with more confidence; the warmth of his hot face radiated against my thighs. It felt good to do what was expected of me, but something about my comforting of him wasn’t right. I had been cast as the loving and concerned girlfriend, but I didn’t want the part.
After Owen left, my mother said to me, “I’ll never forget what you looked like, his big head in your lap.” She’d witnessed something theatrical. “Poor Owen,” she added.
When I started hanging out with Sadie and the other popular girls, they scoffed if Owen approached us. “He’s kind of gross, Emily,” they’d say. I didn’t like the way they looked at him, but it also felt good to have someone say I shouldn’t be with him; their disapproval gave me permission to avoid him. I began to feel more confident about ignoring his texts and less afraid of abandoning him.
After I finally broke up with Owen—or rather, after I escaped him—I was riddled with guilt. Food was unappetizing. I couldn’t sleep, knowing Owen might show up at my parents’ house or hurt himself to spite me, which he had threatened to do. My phone buzzed late into the night with text after text. He was relentless. He’d sit in his dad’s blue VW Bug across the street from my house, just in sight of the window of my living room. The blue stood out unnaturally against the foliage of the street; it was the same color as his eyes, both milky and crisp at once.
By the time I was fifteen, Owen had stopped parking across the street. One night, I made plans to go drinking with a group of girls who weren’t really my friends. I’d never spent time with them outside of school. They were cooler than me, or at least it felt that way. They all lived in big tract houses with walk-in closets and parents who never seemed to be home. We got ready for the night at one of these houses, in a pink room with a full-length mirror, watching ourselves and each other as we tried on outfits. One girl used a Sharpie on our arms to tally the shots of vodka we were knocking back. I remember tripping over a pile of clothes and looking down at the black lines that started at my elbow and traveled down to my wrist.
The next thing I knew, we were in a dark parking lot next to a car that smelled like leather. A grocery store’s sign glowed in the distance. My mouth was slick and my stomach felt tight and I could not stop throwing up. I could not hold myself up. The girls exchanged looks, annoyed, as they held my hair back from my face. The boy who was driving us must have called Owen, because suddenly his truck was there and he was pulling me off the asphalt and dragging me away. I’d not spoken to him in months. I squeezed the arm of one of the girls and tried to conjure the words to tell her he was not safe, but she’d already turned away. He’d come to claim me, and they thought of me as his.
I woke up with Owen on top of me. I was in a small bed in a blue room. I tried to use my arms to push against his chest, to force him off and away, but I was too weak and too drunk. My vision flickered with ghostly white shapes and blue light. My mouth felt like cotton and I could taste the smell of his skin. I wanted it to be over but I didn’t know what to do, so I shut my eyes tightly and made small noises, the noises I thought women were supposed to make during sex.
Why did my fifteen-year-old self not scream at the top of her lungs? Why did I whimper and moan softly instead? Who had taught me not to scream?
I hated myself.
The next morning, I walked up my parents’ driveway in clothes that were not mine, and mumbled two or three words about being tired. I got in the bath and made the water as hot as possible, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I lay there for a long time, watching my skin turn red from the heat. I was barely able to move; every limb felt impossibly heavy and my whole body ached. It was a bright day and the light in the bathroom was yellow; the walls seemed high and I felt tiny. The blond hairs on my arms stood up straight against the faded black Sharpie lines.
I slept deeply that night. When I woke, I found I was a new and different version of myself. I dressed carefully, ate plain toast, and sat quietly next to my father as he drove me to school. I looked ahead out of the window, my seatbelt on, hands delicately placed in my lap. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened that weekend with Owen. This is what you do. This is the beginning of how you forget.
What felt like a lifetime later but was closer to a year, Owen texted me again. He was no longer at my school, and I had a new boyfriend and a different set of friends. He wrote long paragraphs, manic blocks of texts that arrived on my phone with a whoosh. He told me he’d been in and out of rehab for heroin, that he’d lost twenty pounds, and that a girl from another high school had accused him of raping her at a party. “Things have been really bad,” he said. “I shouldn’t be alive.” I didn’t respond. I was afraid that if I replied, he would somehow draw me back into his life.