Chapter 35. 2
For weeks, Raven refused to go to the party. As we were walking home after school on that Friday before Halloween, I tried one more time. Stopping at the corner where we turned our own ways, I practically begged her. Raven said no and accused me of being a sellout by sucking up to the Fun Bunch. I told her she was an asshole for not even trying. She told me to go fuck myself and stomped off. I tried to think of a strong retort, but the only thing that came out was “Well, you go fuck yourself too!” She flashed me a middle finger over her shoulder. I was hurt and angry but hardened my heart. I would go alone.
I worked really hard the next night to look like a cute kitten, hopeful of catching the eye of one of the Fun Bunch guys. Mom and my siblings weren’t around to help, and unlike so many of my peers, I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. Mom had been putting it off, citing the cost. I biked to the store and got supplies. Cheap black eyeliner from Walgreens went across my cheeks in long, thin lines to create cat whiskers, and I fashioned perky ears on a headband with pipe cleaners and cloth. I had on a white sweatshirt and a pair of white gloves that used to be my grandma’s. They were the one thing I was given when she passed.
I had to take the bus and walk the rest of the way to the party. The first person I saw upon arrival was Allison, also in a cat outfit but completely different from mine. Hers was jet-black, full-body, tight, and glittering with rhinestones. It came with a long, thick tail that Allison held in one hand and constantly swung around. Her hair was extra shiny, and she somehow had what looked like real whiskers glued to her face. A perfect black headband studded with more rhinestones sat on her head, pink cat ears rising in immaculate triangles. I overheard someone whisper that Allison’s parents had spent a fortune on the costume at the most expensive Halloween store in town.
After Kool-Aid-drinking and pot-smoking, someone suggested we all play Ghosts in the Graveyard, a game we knew from elementary school. For old times’ sake, they said, and the whole group of high and drunk teenagers spilled out onto Drake’s wide back lawn. It had wooded areas off to each side and sat nestled up against a lake.
We all laughed and chased one another around. It was fun, and I was actually enjoying myself and making a little headway with one of Drake’s friends, I thought, until Allison ran past.
“What a pathetic cat outfit, Jasmine.” She sneered with a cackle of laughter.
I felt a white-hot flash of anger, pure rage, mixed with humiliation.
Allison and I had never been friends. Not even close. She had looked down on me ever since about second grade for no reason I could tell other than our addresses.
She immediately turned her attention back to her friends.
“I’m an Allie-cat,” she called out, and people started yelling, “Hey, Allie-cat, meow!”
Embarrassed by my outfit, I ran to hide behind a tree that was off to the side, keeping an eye on her. Watching that long, thick tail run this way and that, hearing her annoying laughter, watching the boys trip over themselves to find her in the darkness.
And then, suddenly, she was running to hide in a spot behind a different tree near me, and Drake was following. They didn’t see me.
He tickled her; she giggled wildly. He pushed her against the tree and they started kissing—sloppy, disgusting kissing with heavy breathing. I crouched down, watching his hands running all over her.
“Drake, I’m a virgin…”
“Come on, Allie, tonight’s the night…”
Before I knew it, he was peeling off the catsuit, and to my surprise, she wasn’t protesting. He tossed the suit to the side, and it landed with a crunch on the dried leaves near me. I crouched farther back.
He was taking off his vampire cape and pulling his pants down. They resumed kissing, the perfect whiskers on her face starting to fall off, the headband tilting crazily to one side. He pushed her to the ground and forced her knees apart, and she said, “Drake, please be gentle.”
He didn’t reply. Allison made weird little noises like she was in pain. It didn’t seem all that gentle to me, but I was still a virgin too, and this was the first time I had seen actual sex take place.
Other kids were still running around all over the open backyard, laughing, and no one noticed what was happening in the dark by the trees. Drake gave a final grunt just as the buddy I had been flirting with yelled from the gigantic, wraparound back deck.
“Drake? Where are you, man? We’re going inside to do Jell-O shots!”
Drake jumped off Allison, pulled on his underwear and pants, grabbed his cape, and ran off without a word. She lay there naked and panting in the dark, her catsuit still away from her, crumpled on the leaves.
The backyard emptied as kids ran inside for the shots. Allison stayed still for a minute, catching her ragged breath, and then she turned her head to look for the suit. That’s when she saw me a few trees over. I think my white sweatshirt and gloves might have been illuminated by the moonlight.
“Jasmine? Is that you? Were you watching us?” She sat up and scrambled to cover herself with her hands while frantically reaching in the general direction of her costume, feeling in the dark.
I shook my head.
“You were, you crazy bitch.” Her right hand was covering her breasts as her left fumbled for the suit. “I’m going to tell everyone that you just sat there and watched us.” She paused and added, “We do it all the time, you know.”
I couldn’t help myself from firing back, “You said you were a virgin.”
“I didn’t say that. You’re a liar!”
And that’s when I snapped. I did. I can admit it. I think the fact that I already felt like I had lost Raven as a friend that night, that no one had helped me get ready when her parents spent a mountain of money on her, that I had to take the bus when she probably drove up in a Porsche, combined with Allison’s continued vitriol, pushed me over the edge. I grabbed for her catsuit before she did. I didn’t know what I would do with it. I think I planned just to run away so that she would have to be naked in the woods and somehow make her way back to the party, as ashamed as she had made me feel.
But she lunged toward me and growled like a dog.
“You are so fucked up, Jasmine. Your cat outfit is a piece of shit, just like you.”
And the next thing I knew, that long, thick tail on her outfit was being wrapped around her neck. I intended just to scare her, to make her lose her breath for a minute. I wanted to see her begging me, her eyes terrified, her hands on the tail as it roped around her neck, clawing at it. Me in the position of power for a change. It was like a grade school game where you make someone pass out. That was my intention. I didn’t think about what would happen after she woke up. How much trouble I’d be in. It just felt good to watch her writhe in agony for a moment.
The tail kept getting tighter and tighter and she was gagging.
By now, the party had moved entirely inside, and someone changed the soundtrack to thumping rap music. No one could see us; no one could hear us.
My arms felt like they didn’t belong to me. I was superhuman and powerful, out of control of my own limbs.
I noticed her face turning slightly bluish and her eyes bugging out, but it still didn’t register how close she was to dying. We had just learned about asphyxiation in health class, but none of the lessons came back to me in the moment. She was desperately clawing at the tail and trying to kick me. I pulled it even tighter.
And then, suddenly, before I anticipated it, she stopped gagging and went limp, her eyes wide and vacant, only two whiskers still stuck on her left cheek, the headband on the ground. She slumped over, her face falling into the dirt and leaves with a hard thump.
I stood, horrified, the tail and the suit still in my hand, her lifeless body in front of me. An incredible mixture of emotions passed through my body in that moment, a mix I had never felt all at one time, before or after: power, fear, horror, and, I had to admit, a tiny flash of joy.
Instinct took over, and I threw the rhinestone catsuit as far as I could toward the woods and ran to the other side of the backyard, where I had to stop to puke by a log, the thought of her face-first on the forest floor, her limbs splayed at weird angles, seared into my brain. I kept heaving until I had nothing left, wiping spittle from the corners of my mouth and trying to swallow away the horrible mix of Kool-Aid, alcohol, and stomach acid that was still on my tongue.
But as I sat down on the log panting, I realized exactly what I had to do.
I needed to pull myself together, go back into the party, act natural, and blend in. And I knew with complete clarity all of a sudden that Drake would take the fall for this. His sperm inside her. A clear rape and assault. It was him or me, and it wasn’t going to be me. I didn’t owe him anything. He had never been kind to me either.
Walking quickly back to the deck and slipping through the glass doors, rap music pulsating in my ears, I beelined for the snack table, downed a full glass of Kool-Aid, and gobbled cookies with frosted ghost faces until my mouth finally tasted better. Another glass of Kool-Aid and my senses started to dull. Soon I was on the dance floor, moving with more fervor than I ever had, waving my arms around wildly.
People began to ask where Allison was, but someone said they thought she had a curfew and was picked up by her mom and no one panicked. I stumbled back to the bus stop, throwing Grandma’s gloves away in the garbage can by the bus shelter. I got home after midnight and puked one more time before bed.
Allison’s body was found in the late morning, and Drake did take the fall, his future ruined. Her friends mourned like I had never seen. Over a thousand people came to her funeral in a megachurch that had to provide overflow rooms. I faked grief while I watched the real tears from my classmates flow and flow and never stop. Jealousy overtook me again. If I had died, I would have been lucky if ten people from high school had come.
I was never the same, of course. Nightmares, headaches, my grades dropped even further than they had been. I fell into a deep funk. I abandoned any idea of being near the Fun Bunch. I couldn’t even look at them anymore.
Raven and I never talked about our fight that Friday night, but we did move on, becoming friends again, cautiously at first and then more firmly as time passed. Raven, Anna, and I continued running around with the hardened crowd and got in trouble for shoplifting, underage drinking, and driving without a license.
For more than a year, I never told anyone what happened.
One spring afternoon our senior year, Raven and I were out back smoking cigarettes after school by the baseball field.
“I never thought I’d pass frickin’ chem,” Raven said, handing me the cigarette. “Asshole gave me a D-minus, but it’s enough. What a messed-up high school this is. So much shit has happened. I still can’t believe that bitch Allison was killed by her boyfriend. Stuck-up little snot walked around with her nose in the air like her shit didn’t stink, though. She deserved it.”
I looked at the concrete and said nothing, taking a small drag.
“You were there that night. You didn’t see anything?” Raven asked. We were just two months from graduation. I wanted to go to cosmetology school and move somewhere far from Madison, to start a new life away from these memories.
I said nothing, jiggling my foot nervously. Raven stopped smoking and cocked her head, looking at me quizzically.
“Jazzy?”
The boys’ baseball team was practicing in the distance, the sound of a bat hitting a ball and a coach yelling. I still said nothing.
“Jazz?” She looked worried.
Suddenly, I felt like telling someone, an explosion of a year and a half of secrets bursting from behind my ribs and making their way to my mouth.
It came out in a rush as Raven stood slack-jawed, staring at me. To be honest, I don’t know if she fully believed me. Maybe she thought it was a tale I was telling just to sound important. After all, there was no evidence for anything other than the fact that several eyewitnesses had seen Drake run off with Allison to the trees and not return for twenty-five minutes. DNA convicted him.
“You can’t tell anyone , not one soul,” I begged, suddenly not sure if I would regret divulging this.
“I won’t, I promise,” Raven said and continued to stare at me, eyes wide. “Holy shit, Jasmine. You’re my hero!”
We never spoke of it again. But I saw her giving me side glances in second-hour Spanish. She was trying to figure out whether to believe me, I could tell.
Two weeks later Senora Goldberg handed us a quiz on the geography of Mexico. She had put the major spots on there—Mexico City, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Tijuana—but there were smaller ones too: Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and a little fishing village called Puerto Escondido.
Raven leaned across the aisle from her desk to mine and whispered, “If we ever get enough money, let’s run away to Puerto Escondido, OK? Just you and me. Doesn’t it sound like paradise? Puer-to Es-con-deed-oh. I’ll meet you there someday.” She grinned.
“Puerto Escondido, yes,” I whispered back, looking at the map and how the town nestled up against the ocean, picturing a white sand beach and endless sun. It couldn’t be further from Madison, Wisconsin, in my mind or from the nightmares that still kept me up at night.
Raven, Anna, and I continued to hang for the rest of the semester, but then Raven met an older guy at her waitressing job and suddenly she was busy with him, and that summer was when I started having unprotected sex regularly and found out I was pregnant from one of the going-nowhere guys in our high school group. Mom was forced to pay for the abortion. After that, Mom told me I would have to do cosmetology school on my own. I only lasted a semester.
Raven moved with the guy from the restaurant to Atlanta but spent time back in Madison too. Her life was as transient as mine, and she worked her way through a series of hustles, drug deals, and low-level work. She never mentioned Allison again, and neither did I.
Now, as I sat on the plane by this Stephanie woman, I was thinking that Stephanie was probably in the Allison crowd of her high school. The popular group with the moms who bought them rhinestone catsuits and had their daughters’ hair and makeup done at a salon just for a party. I bet Stephanie had mountains of friends in high school and tons of friends even now to go with her piles of money.
I looked at Stephanie’s fingernails as she rested: a perfect manicure, each nail a pale pink. I had never had a proper manicure in my life, couldn’t afford it. Had to paint my own nails, and they were always messy. I bet Stephanie had spa days all the time, getting full manis and pedis, sitting in saunas and steam rooms and lying on tables for massages with hot stones. I’m sure she enjoyed facials where experts worked to minimize any wrinkles.
Her ID in my bra poked at me again, reminding me that I had her driver’s license but not her money. I needed those credit cards, needed the chance to disappear into her life if I wanted to.
When we got to the gate, I said, “Well, listen, Stephanie, wish me luck in Denver! Have a great time at your conference!”
“Thanks—have fun visiting your friend. Nice to meet you.”
She pulled down the old lady’s purse and coat and handed them back to her.