My knowing is granted in shades. The first is me dressed as a schoolgirl Britney Spears taking shots of vodka off our wooden dorm dressers.
The second is browned out: me drunk and seated on a folding table somewhere in Brooklyn. My roommate bottle-feeds me water. She tells me how badly she wants to dance.
“Will you watch her?” she asks the man standing next to us.
“No,” he answers.
“Okay,” she tells me, “he’s going to watch you.”
I slither down the club’s stairs and call my friend to come and get me. I yell to him that I do not know where I am. A boy, a stranger, tells me.
“You’re lying,” I say, “I can’t be stranded on Nostrand.”
I know that next morning I am hung-over and tired from waiting outside the club until four am for her. I know that I never saw her leave.
This morning I wear my red polka dot dress and the white Keds I routinely borrow from her side of the closet. She has not come home.
When I think of me knowing, I think of me in the polka dot dress and how she has not answered her phone in twelve hours. When she walks in, I am mad and I am yelling. I tell her I could have gotten raped. She is sorry. She is so, so sorry.
She says, “You have every right to be mad.” And I do, but only for a few moments. Only until her phone rings and I learn what has happened. She tells me she spent the night at a stranger’s apartment. When she woke up he was inside of her. She tells him to stop. Or, she thinks she told him to stop. Maybe, though, he did not.
Outside, I call my boyfriend. He asks me if it what happened was violent. I tell him I do not understand the question.
“Was there a gun to her head?” he asks.
No, I agree, there was no gun.
In March we dress ourselves to go out. We wear black, because we are in New York or just because we now know we are not in California.
I see her pull at her panty lines in the mirror.
“Just don’t wear underwear,” I say.
“I’m never listening to you when you tell me not to wear underwear. Look what happened last time.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“He might’ve given up if there’d been an extra step.”
I want to tell her there is little we, the drunk and young, can do. I should tell her, as the magazines have told me, that it did not matter what she wore or that she trusted a stranger.
Forget, I tell myself, that your Asian roommate dressed as a Chinese take out box. That she scrawled “thank” across her breasts and “come again” across her underwear-less vagina. Forget the terms objectify, preventative measures, buddy system.
Forget chances. Forget it was the leaver and not the left.
Scarlett Grace McCarthy is an undergraduate Dramatic Writing student at NYU. Her writing has received awards from YoungArts, Scholastic, Bennington, Hollins University, and The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, among others. Follow Scarlett on Twitter at @scarletttini.
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