Saving Jazz (9 page)

‘They touched her,' I pointed to my own body — I couldn't say those words to my mother. It was like we were a bunch of depraved perverts — which I was realising we had been — but I couldn't say the words ‘they fingered her' to my own mother. It made me shudder in revulsion.

‘What?' Mum was white. ‘They did what?' She stood up and moved around the room. I sank further into the chair. I wanted it to swallow me whole, so I didn't have to say anything else. ‘Some boys sexually assaulted Annie? You were all drunk? You drink?' She looked at me as if I'd suddenly grown horns out of my head, as if she had never seen me before in her life. ‘I'm in shock.'

‘I know,' I felt like the adult explaining something elementary to a three-year-old. I watched as my mother's awareness of the world she lived in slipped away. I saw the fear and disorientation on her face as if she suddenly realised she'd ended up in a foreign country and didn't speak the language and had no map. ‘There were photos taken.'

‘Photos?' Mum sat back in the chair opposite me. ‘What do you mean?'

‘They photographed her when she was …' I was going to say passed out again, but I tempered it, ‘asleep. And they put them on Facebook.'

‘What?' Mum shook her head. ‘Why?'

‘I don't know — it's just what we do,' I said.

‘You do this?' Mum said. ‘Did you do this too?' It was as if the pieces slowly joined up in her head. She suddenly realised why I was telling her this unrelated story about a party and Annie. ‘What did you do?' And at that point her voice changed. My perplexed mother gave way to fear — and almost anger.

‘I did it too,' I said. ‘I'm in the photos, I touched Annie too. And now she's in hospital. She tried to kill herself.' The words spewed out of my mouth. ‘I'm in serious trouble, Mum.' I wanted her to hold me, comfort me. I wanted her to stroke my hair like she did when I was little and fell over, or lost my bear Binky, but instead she stared at me. She stared at the makeup I wasn't supposed to wear to school. She stared at the top button, which was undone on my uniform. She stared at my rolled-up skirt, my waxed and spray-tanned legs. She stared at the horns growing out of my head. She stared at me as if I was
a stranger, and then she put her hands to her face and she cried.

It was a bit of a blur after that. Miss Jones returned with Mr Fletcher. I sat watching them talk to my mother. I listened to them talk. I heard everything, I understood little. I guess it's difficult to comprehend a conversation when the whole time you are trying to fit in the pieces you know are going to bring you down. Everything I knew — and it became apparent I knew so much more than them — was so incriminating. I was the one who was about to undo everyone, myself included.

‘Tell us what happened,' Mr Fletcher said to me. He was so stern. So angry. I'd never had much to do with him. I wasn't a captain and I wasn't a troublemaker, so I'd never really had to talk to him before. But now I was a troublemaker of the highest order and suddenly I lost my will to speak. ‘This situation is serious, Jasmine. The police accessed Annie's computer last night. They have seen the photos,' he looked disgusted, ‘they have spoken to Jack and to Thomas.'

Tommy and Jack. I tried to move my thoughts
along. What had they spoken to them about, in particular? What had Tommy and Jack said? What did the police actually know? Who was I protecting with my silence? ‘And they want to speak to you. You're in serious trouble, Jasmine.'

I nodded. I knew I was. I had just needed to hear it. ‘What do you want to know?' I asked finally.

‘Everything,' he said and nodded to his personal assistant, Mrs Killarney, who picked up a pen and paper.

So I told him everything. Or nearly.

I was in Mr Fletcher's office all day. After I made my first confession, several others followed. The police arrived and I had to say it all again, but unlike Mr Fletcher, who let me talk, they kept interrupting me, asking me questions, grilling me over details, time frames, people who were there, who saw what, who sent messages — tiny, minute details of a night I had only a hazy recollection of. Mum sat in the corner and watched the stranger who was once her daughter talk about a life she had no idea ever existed. And every word I spoke pushed her further and further away from me. All I wanted was for my mum to sit next to me and hold my hand, but she wasn't prepared to hold a stranger's hand, to offer words of comfort and support to someone she was
just meeting for the very first time.

On the way home the silence in the car was unbearable.

‘Does Dad know?' I asked as we pulled into the driveway.

She nodded grimly. ‘He's terribly upset by this.'

His car was parked in the garage, he was home. What would he say to me? More importantly, how would he say it? Would he shout? Like he did that time I accidently smashed the Palladian-style window with a rocket ship I'd made. He really lost it then. ‘Thousands of dollars, Jasmine!' he'd exploded. Or would he talk to me in that soft voice, which was even worse than jump-scares in a horror movie, never knowing when his soft modulations would give in to raised tones? I felt ill. I walked into the house. I expected to see him at the kitchen table, but he wasn't there. He wasn't in the lounge room. The office door was shut. I knocked tentatively.

‘Dad?' I said softly.

There was silence for the longest while. ‘Not now, Jasmine,' he said curtly and, like a kicked puppy, I slunk away to my room.

In my room I looked at all the messages I'd missed while I was in Fletcher's office. Mr Fletcher had scowled at me when he heard the ping of my phone. ‘Turn it off,' he'd demanded as if it was the most pathetic sound he'd ever heard.

My phone was full of messages. Group text messages from kids at school:

Delete photos

Delete history

Cops involved

Jack and Tommy arrested

Jack and Tommy arrested? The cops hadn't said that. They'd mentioned possession of child pornography and sexual assault. They'd said stuff about investigations and enquiries — they hadn't said arrests. No messages from Jack. Where was he? Was he in prison? I couldn't even imagine it — I didn't know anyone who'd ever gone to prison. What did they do? Hold them in a filthy cell? Was juvenile detention like a prison? I so badly wanted to talk to Jack, but I knew he wouldn't be able to reply.

The cops had told me they'd talk to me again. Mum had asked if charges would be laid against me and the
constable had shrugged. ‘At this point we are gathering evidence,' was all she'd said. I wondered if I needed a lawyer — I had been in possession of child pornography too. And while my indecent assault of Annie had been ‘non-penetrative' it still was classed as a sexual assault. I looked around my room. Everything seemed so unfamiliar. So unforgivable. My parents alienated from me, no discussions, no strategies. I was so very alone.

Now I know what happened that night, I'll give you the facts. When I left the cooking class, this is what happened:

Annie pulled her phone from her pocket and messaged her mum:
Come and get me.
After ten minutes her mum texted back:
Wait until the end of school.
Annie replied:
No
and then switched off her phone. Her mum, sensing something hadn't been right all week, had no choice but to collect her. In the car Annie wouldn't speak, she stared stonily out of the window. She had been betrayed by everyone, me being the last person she ever suspected. She had been horrified when she'd seen what I'd done. At home she went straight to her room and messaged me. But as we all know, I didn't reply. On Facebook
she chatted to some people from the party, trying to find out if I was in the room when Jack and Tommy sexually assaulted her. In her mind I was the worst of them all. She believed I was the instigator, that I'd watched and encouraged them, that I'd taken photos and then over the last week I'd pretended to be her friend. No one could give her any satisfactory answers. But this was what she believed. She was betrayed. Abandoned. The last message she sent was to Tommy, who didn't reply, but it said:

You have no idea what it's like to be a girl

Then she went to the bathroom, took a handful of pills and tried to drown herself in the bath.

It's horrific.

But this is what we did.

With our stupid antics. Our stupid drunken antics. Our photos. Our obscene treatment of people. Our fucking sexual assault. We pushed Annie to believe that life wasn't worth living. That she couldn't take it anymore.

Her mum broke the door down. She dragged her from the bath. She breathed into her lungs. She called the ambulance. She tried desperately to save
her little girl's life. A life she suddenly realised she knew nothing about. The ambulance came. They got her to hospital. They got her on life support, but they didn't think she'd make it. They warned her family that even if she did, she might be brain-damaged.

This is what we did.

We nearly killed a girl. We shamed her. We assaulted her. We caused unspeakable damage. To her person. To the very essence of who she was.

Annie, I'm sorry.

I'm so, so sorry.

I have never done anything so terrible in my life. And I hope nothing is ever this terrible again.

I'm sorry for being a part of it.

I'm sorry for treating you that way.

But more than anything I'm sorry for being such a coward.

I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. Because Annie, I believe that if I had been, you wouldn't have done what you did.

And so I'm sorry to your parents. I'm sorry to your sister. I'm sorry for everything that your family has had to endure.

And I wish I could tell you this.

I wish I had the opportunity to tell you.

But I can't.

For that I will always be sorry.

Apologies for my absence, but getting to that part of the story was pretty traumatic for me. It's taken me over a week to get back out of that ‘headspace', with more than my usual share of counselling. Remembering how desolate everything was put me in a bit of a funk. But now I'm ready to continue on with what happened next:

I sat in my room and watched Facebook, the kids at school scrambling to delete incriminating messages and pictures. They were so foolish — the police already had Annie's computer. In this time no one posted about Annie. No comments came up about her attempted suicide, or the happenings that had led to it. Where this forum had previously been awash with real and fictional incidents stemming
from that night, now there was a collective silence that settled over all things pertaining to Greenheadgate. It was so cowardly. It was so repulsive and I couldn't do anything at all. I was an instigator of the whole terrible affair. I had no voice anymore.

My parents felt the same way about me. Voiceless. Not once that night did either of them come and speak to me. I burned with shame. My self-loathing hit an all-time high. Through my life, despite my looks, I'd suffered the same self-loathing most girls do: too fat, hair boring, boobs too small (yes, that one again), lurking pimple with the proportions of Mount Vesuvius — I'd despised myself plenty of times. But that night it was real. And I knew this was how Annie had felt. She had hated herself so much she couldn't bear to be herself any longer. She had taken the abuse, the insults, the betrayal, the shame, so far into herself that she couldn't find her way out. She had tried to just not be anymore. I shuddered. I contemplated: did I hate myself that much? Could I also do that? My parents had rejected me. My friends had blanked me. I had probably ruined my future. Those pictures, the
police said, were irretrievable and could resurface years later when I wanted to apply for a job, when I wanted to get married. The constable had said in her cold voice, ‘They will never leave you alone. When you don't suspect it, they will reappear and you'll be facing this judgement again.'

I would face this judgement for the rest of my life. Could I handle it? I must admit there were several moments that night where I thought I couldn't. Where I thought I should do what Annie did. But where she'd failed I'd succeed, because in my misery I knew neither of my parents would be banging down my door. If I actually attempted what Annie had, I'd see it through to the end. No one would save me. I can't tell you how much I cried that night. But by about one thirty in the morning I knew I had only one choice. There was only one option available to me and that was to save myself. Annie was right when she said to Tommy, ‘You have no idea what it's like to be a girl.'

But I did.

I will condense what happened over the next few months, for the sake of brevity, and give you what I believe are the pertinent facts to the next stage of the saga. Bear with me, dear reader, and should the need arise, comment on the bottom of the post if you feel I've failed to explain anything — I'll address only reasonable comments. Oh, and by the way, Lani Gray, you have been blocked from posting comments. You are a typical example of how hatred is spread in this world and this blog is about making amends, not providing you with another forum to perpetuate your petty-minded thoughts (if a single-cell amoeba is capable of having thoughts, I know that's hate in itself, hypocrisy right — so what, it's my blog).

I never returned to school after that day in Mr
Fletcher's office. I've been studying Distance Ed, but that is trivial and I can go into it later. I wasn't expelled — or excluded, or whatever the term is — but my parents made a decision to keep me home. It wasn't like they wanted me around them, but maybe it was more like a bit of parental protection — a part of me hoped so. The town had gone wild.