“Kristen,” I whispered. “What do we do?”
Her expression drooped toward the floor like melting wax. She crawled over my knees and toward the bathroom, and the retching sounds were so loud, I thought crazily that the noise might wake the neighbors. Never mind the deadly battle I imagined these walls had just absorbed.
I gathered my limbs and climbed to my feet, swaying for a second before following her. I willed my own nausea to freeze in place as I rubbed her back.
“Oh, Emily, I was so scared,” she wailed into the toilet bowl. “It was so sudden, he was being too rough and—the look in his eye…” She gave up trying to talk and I swiped at the tears surging down my own cheeks, hot and raw. I knelt to hug her, our torsos shaking in tandem.
The realization was like a car tearing toward me on the road: You have to step up. You need to pull it together. We haven’t got much time.
“Okay.” I skated my thumb across a tear on her cheek. “We need to think.” I tipped my forehead against hers, exactly as she’d done for me that night in Cambodia. “We could…we could call the police?”
Alarm blazed in her eyes. “Why would the police here be any better than the police in Cambodia? I’m not going to prison in Chile.”
“We’ll tell them what happened.”
She glanced toward the living room—so much blood—and shook her head urgently. “They won’t believe us.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You could barely communicate well enough to get us checked in.” Her eyes glistened. “The cops will throw us in a cell until they can figure out what’s going on and…and…”
Something rushed up through me, a shriek or sob or bile. “Kristen, this is insane.” My heart beat like a drumroll and my breath sprinted past it, tight and quick and too high up in my ribs. My lungs were on fire, squeezing like two fists.
Concern bloomed on Kristen’s face. “Breathe, Emily.”
Inhaler, I mouthed, unable to muster even a whisper. She bolted into the living room and returned with my purse, and frantically I dug until my fingers closed around the periwinkle plastic. I lifted it to my lips and inhaled the tiniest stream.
Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Exquisite relief as the vapors worked their way into the air sacs. Seven. Six. An internal release, like a tourniquet loosening. I finished the countdown and took another eager dose, puffing my chest and noticing Kristen’s worried expression, her hand on my arm. Rust-colored speckles mottling her skin. We locked eyes as I counted down a second dose, time frozen for ten infinite seconds until I exhaled again, loudly.
“I’m okay.” I pulled away from her. “I don’t understand. How could this happen again? Wasn’t once enough?”
“I don’t know, Emily. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Are you…do you think it’s something I did? That I was asking for it somehow?”
“No! No. That’s not what I meant.” My thoughts were all jangly, coming out wrong. Still, it tugged at me: Were we somehow attracting this kind of awfulness? Putting something out there to lure in the quick-tempered and dangerous? I didn’t think it was Kristen’s fault, not at all. Yet the coincidence couldn’t be ignored. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police? I can…I’ll walk to reception, maybe someone’s still there.”
“No one at the hotel speaks any English.” She touched her fingers to her chin, smeared the blood there. “How will we explain it? What happened?”
I fished around for the words, but my brain was blank. Kill, die, attack, rape—the only translation I could pull up was sangre: blood.
“We’ll act it out,” I said, “show them your injuries.” My palm crept to my neck, where eggplanty bruises had sat swollen and angry for weeks after Phnom Penh. I looked at Kristen’s throat and saw nothing but Paolo’s blood on her alabaster skin. “What did happen?”
“He attacked me,” she said again. She shrunk inward, hunched her graceful shoulders. “He…he got handsy and I told him to stop and then he pushed my shoulders against the wall and I said, ‘Hey!’ and he said, ‘Cállate, puta’ and…” A tear leaked out. “He shoved me again so that the back of my head crashed into the wall. And I was fighting back and he started to close his hands around my throat. And I was terrified, obviously. Afraid for my life. So I reached out and grabbed whatever I could find and my hand closed around a bottle of wine and I swung it, hard, to get him away from me. I swung it without looking—I wasn’t aiming for his head.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said after a moment. “That’s…that’s self-defense.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. “It was last time too. They won’t believe me. No one believes victims. We’re stupid Americans. And I’m wearing booty shorts and a tank top without a bra and we got drunk of our own accord and I took this guy back to our hotel. Willingly, I invited him to my room. We talked through all this in Cambodia, Emily. Do you think it’s suddenly changed?”
I swiped my hand under my nose. She wasn’t wrong—all those how-to-stay-safe-while-traveling articles warned us not to dress provocatively, talk to strangers, leave a friend unchaperoned, bring an unvetted man into one’s room. Though I’d wrestled with the hornetlike thought after Cambodia—Was it something I did?—I couldn’t let Kristen do the same.
Oh my God. How had this happened twice?
Her eyes popped open. “Remember what I said about Amanda Knox? Everyone attacked her—the media, the goddamn Italian police—because she liked sex and didn’t behave the exact way they wanted her to after a tragedy. Now, she’s a freaking pariah. Her name is synonymous with scandal. This would be a front-page story for months—it would ruin our lives.”
Kristen was right. As always. The horror stories were still fresh in my head: the kid locked up in Acapulco, the woman imprisoned in Argentina. And this was my chance, my turn to protect her like she’d protected me after Cambodia. To finally repay her for what she did for me. I was so tired and confused, and Kristen seemed so sure.
She and I had gotten tattoos together in Vietnam, tiny lotus flowers on our inner ankles. It was her third tattoo but my first. In the second before the tattoo gun had stung my flesh, the artist had looked up at me: Ready?
I felt that same wild rush now, the dark finality. The weight of the moment’s irreversibility.
“I…I guess we need to get rid of the body, then,” I said. “And clean up here.”
“Okay.” She nodded slowly, pulled away from me. “Okay, let’s think.”
“It’s dark.” I leaned against the tub behind me. “That’ll help us.”
“You’re right. That’s good.” She sat back. “Cover of darkness.”
“We’ll wear black.”
“Good.” She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “But what the hell do we do?”
I reached out and flushed her vomit. We listened to the gurgle.
She glanced at me. “Can we drop it off a cliff?”