Chapter 1 #2
Now I could see Erin’s bed and her vanity unit and almost her whole room.
I used to spy on her now and then. I watched her removing make-up from perfectly unfreckled skin.
I watched her change out of her clothes into her nightgown.
I watched her in her most private moments.
When I wasn’t watching, I put the mirror back against the wall, on top of a shoe box.
And I put a large pink Band-Aid over the hole in my pink wallpaper.
You wouldn’t spot the tape unless you were looking for it.
The mirror had only hung six inches off the floor.
When Mom noticed and talked about re-hanging it, I told her not to bother, that I liked being able to move the mirror around.
One morning, I woke early and saw a shadow passing under my door, but there was no sound of footsteps.
I was immediately alert because I knew that Milo had stayed over the night before.
I got out of bed quietly and peeled back the tape on my wall.
Milo was in Erin’s room. I expected her to shout at him to get out, but they were fooling around, French kissing and more.
I was mesmerized and horrified and turned on.
It became a regular thing for me, to wake up early and watch them on the nights he stayed over.
They never made a sound. The guest room was downstairs behind the kitchen. I don’t know how they never got caught.
Sometimes, we would all be working in the study at home, and I would examine him, taking in his fair hair, his square shoulders, his jutting chin, his strong arms. I watched how he was with Erin; how physically comfortable they were together.
He would lift her up and throw her over his shoulder while she yelled at him to put her down even though she was clearly enjoying it.
They sat together, pinkie fingers intertwined.
They were inseparable. Mom insisted he was a good influence on Erin and it’s true that she was not slacking in the study department.
We all thought how Erin was lucky to have such a supportive boyfriend.
I wasn’t one of the cool girls in school.
I trained hard to be a cheerleader but never got picked.
My friends included Laquanda Rice, Tasha Danziger and Janet De Vere Kennedy (yes, she was one of those Kennedys, a third cousin or something).
I guess we were cliquey, but we’d been friends since kindergarten.
We didn’t deliberately exclude anyone from our group.
None of us had boyfriends and we wore our virginity as a badge of honour.
It didn’t stop us talking about sex, though.
We all knew the mechanics of how it worked from sex ed classes, but we talked endlessly about how it would feel.
Janet said it might be like having Pop Rocks down there, but I thought it had to be better than that.
The faces Erin and Milo made didn’t look like the ones you made when eating Pop Rocks, from what I could see through the hole in my bedroom wall.
Erin said we were obsessed. But we weren’t the ones with boyfriends in our bedrooms. I was ashamed to think my sister was one of the girls who was nearly doing sex.
I didn’t dare tell anyone. My friends and I talked about saving ourselves for our wedding day.
We were going to marry pop stars. We were all to be each other’s bridesmaids.
We prayed for the souls of the girls who we knew were having sex.
We went to Dad’s church together. We had taken a pledge there to be virgins until we were twenty-one years old, but we thought we’d be married by then.
We had posters of our dream boys on our walls – all the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, Will Smith and Leonardo di Caprio.
At sixteen years of age, I wanted to be an actress.
Laquanda said I would have to go to LA for that, but I guess I was more of a homebird than I thought.
California seemed far away, and besides, I wanted to be a Broadway star rather than a film actress.
Film actors, especially women, were often naked on camera.
There was less nudity on stage. Tasha said there was no money in acting and that for every Broadway star there were thousands of bit-part actors.
It didn’t matter in the end. I never made it on to Broadway.
Maybe things would have been different if it hadn’t been for Milo Kelly.
It was 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, 15 September 1999, when he called at the house.
I had come home from school on my own with a stomach ache and Mom had gone out somewhere with Erin.
The pain wasn’t so bad. I told him that Erin wasn’t home but that he could come inside and wait.
He wondered when they’d be back, but I didn’t know.
He said he’d wait a while. That wasn’t unusual.
He spent a lot of time hanging around waiting for Erin.
I offered him a coffee, and he accepted.
I didn’t even like coffee, but it seemed grown up to be sitting with Milo and sipping coffee.
This time I sat beside him on the sofa. He was more chatty than usual, asked me about school and my friends.
He was teasing me about wanting to be an actress.
He reached out to tickle me – ‘You want to be in Dawson’s Creek.
You want to kiss Pacey Witter’ – and then he grabbed me around the middle and the mood turned dark in a split second.
What happened next comes back to me in glimpses, like a series of photographs or glitchy radio static.
The sound of my shirt ripping. My panties dropping to the floor.
Staring at the vase on the sideboard, hearing my voice yelling, ‘No, no, no.’
Dad found me wrapped in a blanket on the sofa when he came home. I wasn’t crying yet. He was alarmed to see me like that and asked me what had happened. When I told him, in a robotic monotone, he called the police. He said I was in shock and made me drink a glass of brandy.
I was taken downtown, examined and swabbed and photographed, tested for pregnancy and all sorts of diseases including AIDS.
They looked at the bruises on my inner thighs that were caused by Milo’s thumbs digging into me, the marks on my wrists caused by his closed right hand, the cut on my head from where I’d banged it off the table trying to get away from him.
These sounds and images were scrambled in my mind.
I made my statement and answered the graphic questions.
The lady police officer and the nurse said I had done excellently, as if I had scored an A on some exam paper.
Dad had called Mom from the police station. Mom and Erin were at home when I got back after midnight, and then all hell broke loose. I often wondered if it could have been dealt with in a different way. If Milo had admitted it, everything would have been simpler.
Over the next week, Erin was hysterical and then that turned to anger.
I was sickened that she believed him over me.
She had known him for just over a year, and she had known me all my life.
But she was adamant I’d made it up and it hurt almost as much as the incident with Milo.
She had trusted him completely, but I remember overhearing some friend of Mom’s saying, ‘Well, what can you expect from a boy from Southie? I certainly wouldn’t have let him in my home.
’ I knew that was wrong. It wasn’t Mom’s fault for welcoming him into our house, and it wasn’t because he was from South Boston, but I was too distraught to defend her.
Everyone said I shouldn’t feel guilty. But I shouldn’t have sat beside him.
I shouldn’t have laughed when he began to tickle me.