How do you think, man.
Jesus fucking Christ.
You probably thought I was kidding. Or exaggerating, deluded, just being dramatic. It’s all right; I’ve heard it before. She’s making it up. She’s just looking for attention. Everyone knows that Ouellette girl is a sack of lying trash. These are, of course, good churchgoing people we’re talking about. Salt-of-the-earth, New England working folks. It’s hard to believe in such casual cruelty unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
But now you have. Now you know. Visit beautiful Copper Falls! Where the air is clean, the beer is cheap, and the local cops will slut-shame a girl at the scene of her own goddamn murder.
His name is Adam Rines. The blond with the crooked little almost-smile, Mister How Do You Think. And despite what he wants everyone to believe, I never slept with him. I never slept with any of them, except Dwayne, and that was different and later on. Much later. It had been a good five years by then, since that early summer day, the moldy shingles of the hunting shack moist between my shoulder blades, the jeering of six ugly boys ringing in my ears.
How do you think, my ass.
I’ll tell you how. Or you could even guess. All it takes is a little imagination. Like this: Imagine that you’re thirteen years old. Ninety-five pounds and not yet a woman, but not a little girl anymore, either. Imagine your body, all gangly arms and knob-kneed legs that never look right no matter how you arrange them together, and your hair, a ginger-colored mess that’s always lank and dirty, the ends all uneven where you had to cut it yourself with a pair of dull scissors. Imagine your ignorance: a mother long dead, and a dad who just doesn’t know, doesn’t realize that a thirteen-year-old girl is old enough to need a bra, and a box of maxi pads, and a conversation about what they all mean. He doesn’t see you growing up.
But everyone else does. They see what’s happening to your body. They see it even before you do.
Imagine.
They caught up to me while I was riding my bike home on the last day of school, five dusty miles, my backpack so heavy that I had to get off and walk every time I hit a hill. There were a half dozen of them. Some of them were older, and all of them were bigger. I left the bike in the road, front wheel spinning. I ran into the forest ahead of them and tried to disappear between the trees, but they caught me. Of course they caught me. I counted myself lucky afterward that pulling my shirt over my head was all they did.
I’d had that mole forever. You couldn’t miss it, raised up like it was and so dark against my skin. I knew it was ugly—even then, I was careful not to let the other girls see it during those quick-change moments in the locker room after gym class—but there was nothing I could do to hide it that day, backed up against that falling-down shack a hundred yards into the woods with my arms raised out in a T and a boy leaning hard against each of my shoulders. I couldn’t even see past the hem of my T-shirt, stretched tight over my face, damp with sweat and spit. I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and one of them jabbed a finger against the dark blemish below my breast, hard enough to make a bruise, making a disgusted noise while he did it.
They all saw it. And the ones that didn’t see it, like Adam Rines, all heard about it. It was its own local legend, my mole, growing in the retelling like the giant prehistoric carp that was supposed to live down in the deepest part of Copperbrook Lake. I still remember that first time with Dwayne, when I stepped out of my dress and stood there uncovered like he wanted, letting him look at me, he gazed at that dark spot and said, “I thought it would be bigger.” I said, “That’s what she said,” which I thought was a pretty solid comeback, but Dwayne didn’t laugh.
Dwayne never laughed at my jokes. Some people thought I was funny, but not Dwayne Cleaves. My husband was like a lot of men. Always making noise about how he loved comedy, but no sense of humor to speak of. All but the dumbest jokes would go over his head, and the ones he liked best were always at someone else’s expense. He loved, I mean loved, those prank-call radio shows, where the hosts would get someone all riled up with a fake story, dragging it out while they got more and more upset, and only come clean after the poor bastard totally fucking lost it. God, I felt sorry for those folks. Not that I have any business giving out marriage advice under the circumstances, but if this sounds like your man? Don’t marry him. Because he’s an idiot, and probably mean to boot.
Of course I wasn’t smart enough to take my own advice. Not that I had options, either. The boys weren’t exactly banging down the door of Pop’s trailer to take me on dates or give me a diamond ring. Dwayne would never have admitted we were even together if not for what happened that summer after graduation, and you could feel the shame coming off him in waves—that crawling, squirming humiliation that’s so potent, everyone else gets embarrassed for you. It was thick in the air the day we got married. People looked at their feet and grimaced when he said “I do,” like he’d just shit his pants in public. That’s the thing about being an Ouellette in Copper Falls: just being next to you is embarrassing. Like those sad maids in India. Untouchable.