Echo Bridge (3 page)

“And he’s my best friend. And I’m your friend. So really, what’s the difference, Courtney? Come on. Don’t be a tease.”

He held my wrists together with one hand. I had always wished I were taller, and the sensation of my wrist bones grinding together in Hugh’s fist reminded me of this. It seemed incredibly unfair that anyone should have such a physical advantage over anyone else. He pulled up my skirt and pushed my legs apart with one of his knees. “Please, Hugh,” I said, and I hated how weak and wavering my voice sounded. Like I had already given up. “Please don’t.” The hand that wasn’t holding my wrists was on me now, in me. Already I wanted to die. I was begging. “Please don’t do this. You’re hurting me.”

“I like that word, ‘please,’” Hugh whispered. “But,
please
, Courtney. Shut up.”

I tried, then, to wrench my hands out of his grip. He spun me around easily, like we were dancing, and pinned my arms behind my back. Now I was really helpless, my hips pinned between Hugh’s bulk and the marble countertop, my arms bent so my hands were at my shoulder blades.
Not happening not happening not happening this is not happening to me
. Hugh had one arm between us, reaching down to unzip his pants.

That was when I started screaming. It was a last-ditch attempt to get out of there, but even caught in the rising tide of panic, I knew no one could hear me. There were too many rooms between us and the party, too many people talking and laughing downstairs, too many songs cued up on Melissa’s iPod in a speaker dock loud enough to fill the whole first floor with music. In the mirror, Hugh rolled his eyes and covered my mouth with one meaty hand. He squeezed my jaw so tight I couldn’t even bite him.

Then it was happening, really happening, and he was watching, he was actually smiling in the mirror. I closed my eyes. This is a role, I told myself. It’s next year and I’m already at Tisch and this is someone’s stupid student film. This is happening to the girl in the movie. I’m just playing her.

When he was done, his grip relaxed. His weight went slack against my body, and then he stepped away and zipped up his pants. I backed away from him, my arms aching from the way he’d been holding them, trying to maintain a defensive posture and straighten my clothes at the same time. I had started to cry somewhere in the middle of it, and for some reason this made everything so much worse. I might have been stoic and unflinching, and slammed Hugh’s head into the mirror in his post-coital moment. I might have been Charlize Theron in
Monster
. Instead, I was puffy and red, sniveling and cowering by a toilet.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered.

“Don’t be like that,” he said. He reached out and held my shoulders. “Half the people out there have messed around with each other. This is what we do.”

“I said no.”

“C,” said Hugh. His grip tightened. “Drop it. No one can hear us. You don’t have to worry; it’s our secret.”

“What are you talking about?” My legs were shaking so hard I wasn’t sure I’d stay standing if he let go of me. I couldn’t imagine which was worse: Hugh having this secret hold over me, or everyone knowing. I felt dizzy.

“I won’t tell anyone. About how you dragged me up here after Ted blew you off in front of everyone at the poker table.”

I stared at him. Then I bent over and threw up in the toilet. Hugh left, and I locked the door and sat down against it. I wanted to shed my skin like a snake, leave behind everything that Hugh had touched, like I could shed the bruises and the shadows and be a whole new person.

During the winter of my junior year, I had been cast as a rape victim in a play. A senior named Lila Horton (aggressively emo; head of our Amnesty International chapter) had been doing an independent study in directing, and she’d chosen Pinter’s
One for the Road
. It’s a play about the trauma of political prisoners, and it was a controversial choice—Headmaster Farnsworth was not thrilled and tried to force Lila to pick something different. The theater teacher, Mr. Gillison, went to bat for her, and a compromise was reached: we would do the play, but the flyers and programs would carry an “explicit material” advisory. Lila was thrilled—she was Making a Statement. I was Gila, my dress torn, my body covered in grease paint bruises, flinching under every gesture made by my interrogator, local warlord Nicolas (Rodney Fairchild, who fancied himself a ladies’ man and who was playing John Proctor opposite me in
The Crucible
). As I sat in the Lewis’ guest bathroom, black marble tile and plush towels closing in on all sides, the only thing I could think about was how wrong I had played Gila. I pressed my forehead against my knees. My Gila had been so reactive, so twitchy and jumpy. This, I now knew, was wrong: Gila would have been stone-still, her self buried so deeply that whatever might happen to her body didn’t matter anymore.

I didn’t have a tiny room where I could lock my soul away from my body, but I was in a tiny room where I could lock out Hugh, my friends, Ted, and the entire party. I didn’t know what face to put on that would hide what Hugh had done to me. I spent the night under a towel in the bathtub. When Ted and Hilary came looking for me, I refused to open the door, and they assumed I was still drunk and angry with Ted for brushing me off. Eventually they got tired of knocking and went away. I didn’t unlock the door until morning, when the clamor in the backyard had finally ceased and the gray light of dawn spilled over the windowsill. Then I crept out, through the sleeping bodies filling Melissa’s house, and walked all the way home.

What made me craziest, at first, was not telling anyone. I desperately wanted to, as if saying it out loud would diminish the horror, but at the same time, I was terrified of what would happen if I did. I didn’t want to tell my parents—they were very hands-off, having expended all of their energy on my older siblings, and I knew it would break my mom’s heart and that they’d both blame themselves. And I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else without telling Ted first, because he was sure to find out no matter whom I told, and I didn’t know how he’d react. At the very least, I’d break up the group of friends I’d had all through high school while everyone chose sides, get Melissa in trouble for having a kegger at her parents’ house, and ruin senior year for all of us. And what proof did I have that I hadn’t wanted it? I was afraid of the man-eater image Hugh had implied I gave off. It was true that my clothes and demeanor were intentionally inspired by my favorite screen seductresses: Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, both Hepburns. But reflected in Hugh’s icy eyes, I felt over the top and garish. I felt like Natalie Wood in
Splendor in the Grass
when she wears her pink dress and new bobbed hair to the dance, all tarted up and crazy. I couldn’t help feeling like if I came forward, and it was Hugh’s word against my own, his harsh vision of me would become infectious, and everyone would see me that way: my family, my teachers, my friends, and especially Ted.

So I acted like everything was normal. I read
Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography
and Marilyn’s
My Story
and
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman
. I memorized my lines for
The Crucible
. I drafted the statement of purpose for my Tisch application. I turned in a history paper on the Industrial Revolution in the British Isles a week early, because I couldn’t sleep and needed to do something with my nights. In public, in the student lounge between classes with Melissa and Hilary or while getting lunch in the refectory (“cafeteria” just wasn’t formal enough for Belknap Country Day School) with Lindsay Stevens, I felt like I might go full-on Frances Farmer and start screaming, tearing at my hair, rolling on the floor with mashed potatoes and gravy dripping down my face. I only felt safe with Ted.

There was so much I didn’t know, then.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Ted and I both had last period free, and we spent it in the back of his Rover at Echo Bridge, Belknap’s answer to Inspiration Point. Once part of an aqueduct that carried water from Lake Cochichewick in North Andover into one of the reservoirs that ring Boston, the bridge was partially hidden in the woods and consisted of a series of small brick and stone arches on the sloping banks, with a single large arch leaping the Souhegan River. On one side of it was Aqueduct Park, in a neighborhood of large Tudor-style houses, but coming from school, we took a small dirt road that turned off Riverview Street and ran past a few small, shabby houses, coming to a dead end in a patch of woods. A narrow footpath lead through the trees down to the bridge, with a series of stone steps descending from the top to a wooden platform below, where you could yell whatever you wanted and hear the eponymous echo. Upstream, the river was calm and flat as a mirror, but downstream the river cut through Polk’s Gorge and ran rough and white for maybe a quarter mile before calming again, eventually merging with the Charles River downstream in Newton. I liked the bridge, which wore moss like shreds of a green velvet gown and was covered with spray-painted proclamations of love and hate and pride, but Ted and I tended to stay in the car when we went there. With the backseat laid flat, there was plenty of room to stretch out, and parked down by the woods, it was fairly private.

It was just over a week after Hugh raped me, and I was keeping all my clothes on. Ted and I had been sleeping together for months, but I was afraid that if he saw me naked, he’d know everything, as if my skin was covered with Hugh’s fingerprints. But in the back of the car, wrapped in Ted’s thick, sinewy arms, listening to his heartbeat through his shirt, it felt like no one would ever hurt me again. Unfortunately, Ted was confused by my newfound chastity.

“Court,” he asked. “What’s going on with you?”

I gazed into his eyes, which were a dappled green, like new leaves in the sun. He had a hand on my cheek and looked at me with concern. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Hugh.

So instead I said, “You’re going to be late for soccer practice.”

Ted twisted around so he could see the clock on the dashboard. I lay back and admired his broad shoulders and the tendons in his neck while he craned over to check the time. I thought about his big fists pummeling Hugh’s face in. I thought,
Tell him
. But even now, I can’t say that if I had, it all would have turned out differently. I sat up and smoothed stray hairs back into my French twist.

“You’re right. We gotta go. But I need a minute, unless you want to give me a hand with this?” Ted grinned at me and gestured toward his pup tent. I felt like exactly what Hugh had said I was: a tease. I took a deep breath and reached for his belt buckle.

“You’re so romantic,” I said, kidding, as I unzipped his fly and reached in. If there was one thing I’d learned from reading biographies of my favorite actresses, it was that humor was an excellent tool for distracting an audience from your discomfort.

“You’re so sexy,” Ted breathed. He pulled me close and ran his lips down my neck, from my earlobe to my collarbone, and slipped one hand under my sweater, tracing the edges of my bra with his fingertips. I closed my eyes and managed to shut the world out for a moment: Hugh, Tisch,
The Crucible
, everything outside the doors of the Rover meant nothing, as Ted whispered my name against my neck. Abruptly, he pushed my hand out of his boxers and finished himself off, wiping up with a filthy soccer jersey that was in the back of the car with us. He gave me a good long kiss, then fastened his pants and climbed into the driver’s seat. I followed into the passenger seat, straightening my gray wool miniskirt and pulling on my tall black suede boots.

Ted stopped at the Kwik Pik for a Gatorade, then drove onto campus, dropping me in the circular drive in front of the main schoolhouse before driving across campus to the gym.

“See you after practice,” he said, kissing my forehead. Ted chauffeured me everywhere. I had a license, but I hated to drive and had no car of my own, and I figured it didn’t matter. I was headed for New York City, where it was perfectly normal for an adult to have never even sat behind a steering wheel.

I slipped out of the car and wrapped my Burberry trench coat around me, regarding the schoolhouse before walking up to its heavy, wooden double doors. Belknap Country Day was a vast stone mansion, formidable but not gloomy, its peaked roof scattered with white dormers that housed faculty offices. The campus had originally been the country estate of the Thistletons, one of the blue-blooded Boston Brahmin families. I paused under the large portico and gazed out between the columns and across the sloping lawn at the green athletic fields and woods beyond, thinking maybe I’d go for a walk before rehearsal began. I’d started smoking in secret since the night of the party, and the woods around campus offered plenty of cover. Before I could, though, Hugh Marsden’s black Lexus GX pulled up. I had to stop myself from cringing.

Hugh honked, and I looked at him reflexively. He grinned, waved, and winked. I looked away from him, then back at the car. A blond girl with a compact, athletic build was climbing down from the passenger side, laden with two tennis racquets, a large gym bag, and the trademark backpack of any good Belknap Country Day Student: a deluxe model from L.L. Bean in unisex teal, straining around a stack of textbooks, with a nickname Magic-Markered onto the reflector strip in spite of the formally embroidered initials. MOLLY. This was Elaine Winslow’s little sister, who was a slightly shorter version of Elaine and played tennis instead of golf. They had another sister in the lower school, a seventh grader, and together they appeared as a matching set. They had actually been models for a company that made high-end silver knick-knacks; they were the girls in the photographs that come in the picture frames when you buy them. The Winslow sisters had always reminded me of
The Stepford Wives
. But Molly had surprised everyone that fall by auditioning for
The Crucible
and landing the part of Mary Warren, the maid who ultimately damns John Proctor as a witch. I was even more surprised to see her climbing out of Hugh’s car—Molly wasn’t the same as the sophomores Melissa had spit on at her party. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Molly at a party, period. But there she was, climbing out of Hugh’s car while he leered at me.