His hammy fist encircled my wrists and jammed them against the wall over my head—like I was a witch tied to a pyre. I remember this moment in impressions: his hips pinning mine against the wall, his dick pushing up against his shorts. The smile on his sweaty face, the cruelty in his eyes as I started to scream. His free hand lifting in slow motion, then flying up against my mouth. The back of my head slammed into the wall again, harder this time—the same sharp crack from that time with Ben, eight years earlier—and I saw a flash of fuzzy white.
He paused then, and I stopped struggling. Scuba diving—that’s where my mind went, zooming off as if underwater. Kristen had wanted to try it in Vietnam years earlier, and I’d said no because I’d read once that divers die not from running out of oxygen, but from disorientation—they panic and remove whatever’s in front of their nose and mouth. That’s what I thought of as Sebastian concentrated all his weight into my jaw: something in front of my mouth, something I desperately wanted to rip away, but I knew I was screwed either way.
He’s going to kill me.
“Emily!”
We both froze. He turned to look at the door, and though I couldn’t turn my head, I felt the pressure ease. Anger surged as I parted my lips and bit down on a knob of calloused flesh, harder and harder until the tang of iron hit my tongue.
“Fucking bitch!” He released my wrists and stepped back, clutching his bleeding palm. The lace of my underwear cut into my thigh as I brought my knee up, and I surmised from his groan that I’d hit my target. He grabbed his crotch and fell onto me.
A clanging sound and his body moved again, and I scrambled out from under him. Kristen stood above us, chest heaving, teeth bared, a real-life Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was clutching a heavy standing lamp like a bat, and as I scooted back on my butt she swung it again, and with a sickening thunk it connected with Sebastian’s back. He collapsed to the ground, his head thudding against the floor an inch from a leg of the metal bed frame.
I saw my fury echoed in Kristen’s gaze; for a moment, we locked eyes. Then I detected motion before I could even process it.
“Stop. Stop. Stop.”
I see it in flashes, as if through a strobe light: Sebastian’s head up against the bed frame. Three kicks, four, blood staining the metal leg and pooling into the cracks in the laminate floor. I grabbed Kristen and dragged her away and into a hug. We leaned against each other, shaking.
We stayed like that for a while. Seconds, minutes, possibly hours. Motorbikes streaked past the cheap drawn curtains, a flash and a roar. Sebastian was still. It was Kristen who pulled away first. Her eyes were clear now, narrowed. Her voice was strong.
“We have to get out of here.”
She thought aloud, walked us through our options. She floated the idea of calling the cops: This was clearly self-defense, after all. But our guidebook had brought up the difficulty of working with police here, and I knew from that time with Ben that reporting assault—a move I’d considered then and several times in the months afterward—is more complicated than most people realize. The last thing we wanted was to wind up in a Cambodian jail cell, passports confiscated, accused of murder. We’d seen Brokedown Palace and read about Amanda Knox.
I was shivering and incoherent, but Kristen was magnificent. She checked for a pulse and, finding none, made a plan. Preposterous luck amid an otherwise unlucky night: The barely manned front desk hadn’t looked at our passports when we’d arrived, and we’d prepaid in cash. The bartender had overheard a “Nicole” and a “Joan.” Sebastian had been traveling for nine months, on an open-ended vagabonding tour—and like us, he was proud to eschew social media or regular phone calls home.
We’d weigh down the body, she announced, and heave it over a nearby cliff into the rushing river below. Cover our tracks. Leave Phnom Penh before anyone knew anything was wrong. I felt numb, the tingly kind, as if someone had hooked me up to an IV of Novocain. Kristen and Emily would never dispose of a body, but somehow, Nicole and Joan could. They did. The ensuing hours were a movie montage I will my mind to never, ever cue up. They were grueling and cruel, leaving me sore for a week, but Kristen was tireless, her jaw set, her expression determined. I did exactly what she told me, and miraculously, it worked.
When it was done, we took a bus to Laos, silent and sleepy the whole ten-hour ride, and spent the last few days keeping a low profile in a two-star hotel there. I don’t remember the flight home, the cab ride from the airport, the sleepless night before I returned to work. I kept seeing Sebastian’s skull, dented where it’d met the bedframe’s leg, blood forming an oval like a ruby-colored speech bubble.
I was a mess. My brain felt fuzzy and opaque, coated in black mold. At night I fell into gnarly, restless ten-hour sleeps, and during the day I burst into tears at random. Some mornings I slept through my alarm and wandered into work midday, my eyes puffy and unfocused. I went entire days without eating, then woke in the night with my stomach cramped and empty. My manager warned that if I didn’t get it together, they’d need to let me go. I stared at him blankly, too broken to care.
Sebastian shouldn’t have died: I didn’t support the death penalty and certainly didn’t fancy us vigilantes, taking justice into our own hands. It was an accident, self-defense that went too far. But I didn’t regret getting rid of his body instead of calling the police; I’d come to believe it was our only choice. I did a deep dive on Americans who’d been arrested overseas—across the board, their lives were ruined. A woman from Oregon spent years awaiting trial in Argentina for fatally pushing her pickpocket into traffic. A jailed spring breaker from Virginia insisted he had nothing to do with an attack on a restaurant hostess in Acapulco. So many travelers battling to get home or whiling away their youth in dingy cells. Horror stories, the sickening thrill of that could have been me. But though the stories took the edge off the guilt, they didn’t relieve the trauma, the unfairness of it all. Why had the universe wedged us between Charybdis and Scylla’s sharp-toothed barbarity?
Shortly after we’d returned home, I told Kristen I wanted to talk to a therapist. Patient-client privacy, I reasoned. I knew she’d talked to a therapist as a kid, after her parents’ death, which made her the only person I knew who’d seen a shrink. I liked the sound of a paid, impartial, sympathetic ear. I was having nightmares, panic attacks, painful echoes of the helplessness, the all-consuming fear.
“I’m so sorry to say this,” she’d told me, the call tinny from its nine-thousand-mile journey. “But I don’t think anyone should know the connection between us and that guy.”
“Even if I lie about where and when and…and how it ended, obviously?”
A very long silence. “That’s not really how therapy works.”
“Didn’t it help you, though? When you were going through something…traumatic?”
“I was a kid—I’d lost my parents, and my grandparents had no idea how to talk to me. So Dr. Brightside helped me, like, learn some coping mechanisms. But you’re resilient, Emily. You’re strong as hell. I know you.”
A long silence. Finally: “Was her name really Brightside?”