Unlovely (8 page)

"I know." It was true. Melanie
never got drunk.

"He asked me if I wanted to leave
the party for a minute to see the float that their frat had made for
homecoming. They were keeping it in a big shed behind the house."

"A homecoming float?" Claudia
asked, looking up for the first time from an article about how to accessorize
for the holidays. "Wasn't homecoming over a month ago?"

"They didn't know what to do with
it, I guess."

"It's weird they would hold on to
it."

"I don't know why it was there. It
just was," Melanie said, exasperation creeping into her voice. "You
do know that's not the point of my story, don't you, Claudia?"

"Right. Sorry. Keep going."

"Anyway, we were walking around in
the shed, talking, you know. Then he comes up right in front of me, puts his
hands on my shoulders and just sort of forces me down to my knees."

Melanie picked viciously at the flower.
"I told him that I didn't want to, and that I thought it was nasty, but he
unzipped his fly anyway, and then he grabbed my head. He said if I could do it
for John I could do it for him –"

"Melanie."

"– which was a lie, because I
didn't do that with John. I've only done it for one other guy, a long time ago,
and I didn't like it."

"Listen –"

"So when it was over he zips up and
says, 'Thanks.' He didn't even help me off my knees. We went back in to the
party, then he left me to go talk to a girl from one of his classes. No, wait –
first he got me another beer, then he took off.” Melanie laughed ruefully.
“God, Claudia. It was so humiliating."

Claudia waited to make sure Melanie was
done talking, then said, "Listen to me. Are you listening?”

"What? Yes, I'm listening."

Claudia lowered her voice, "I think
you were raped. If he forced you to do . . . that to him, you were raped."

"Oh, please. Don't be dramatic.”
Melanie shook her head. “That's ridiculous. I wasn't raped. I just didn't want
to do it. Besides, we didn't actually have sex."

"That doesn't matter. It still
sounds like rape to me. You should tell someone."

"I'm telling you, aren't I?"

"You know what I mean. He can't
just go around raping girls."

"Who else am I supposed to tell?
The police? I don't think so. My mother? She'd completely overreact."

"I don't know. How about your
cousin? What does she say?"

"She says Greg gets weird when he's
drunk."

"Your cousin is an idiot. Greg is a
rapist."

"He isn't. Really. I'm telling you
it's no big deal. It was just kind of gross."

"It's a big deal."

"Oh, come on. It's over and I'm
fine. Don't make a huge thing out of this. I just wanted to tell you about it
so you'd agree with me that it was disgusting, that's all." Melanie saw a
look on Claudia's face that alarmed her. "I want you to swear you won't
tell anyone. Swear it."

"Just because you say it wasn't
rape doesn't mean it wasn't. He forced you to do something you didn't want to
do."

"I told you this in
confidence." Melanie put her hand on Claudia's leg and held it firmly, as
if she were afraid her friend would jump off the bed to spread the news.
"Don't make me sorry that I did. It wasn't a rape. It was a horrible
misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding? Oh, you've got
to be kidding!"

Melanie looked close to tears.
"Come on. I told you something in private. Swear you won't tell anyone.
Please, please promise me."

Claudia sighed and shook her head sadly.
What could she do? They were best friends. "Of course I swear it. I won't
tell anyone."

"Good."

"Promise me you'll be more careful,
though."

Melanie wiped her nose with the back of
her hand. "I promise."

Sick as she felt about it, Claudia knew
she couldn't tell anyone even if she wanted to. What would be the point? If
Melanie wanted to, she would simply deny the whole thing ever happened.

Melanie never spoke of the incident
again, at least not to Claudia. Claudia, though, couldn't forget it. And oddly,
as awful as it must have been for her friend, the episode did have an
up side
. Melanie's sharing had confirmed just how crucial
Claudia was to her friend's well-being. Despite however crappy the rest of the
world might be, they had one another to rely on. Only one another. Claudia felt
even more closely bound to Melanie than she had before.

"I should have said something."

"Are you serious? This is what
you've been feeling guilty about?"

"Part of it."

"Claudia, I don't even think about
that anymore."

"It was wrong. I should have gotten
you help."

Dr. Phillips jumped in, "Did you
want her help, Melanie?"

"No. I just wanted to be able to
talk to her. I needed someone to confide in."

"Do you hear that, Claudia? She
didn't want your help."

"Sometimes people don't know when
they need help."

At Claudia's urging, as well as through her own sense
of self-preservation, Melanie became more circumspect about her sexual
partners. She even had a couple of hook-ups that turned into a series of dates,
almost actual relationships, and by the time Claudia and Melanie were juniors,
Melanie had abandoned the fraternity scene completely and settled down with one
special guy. Specifically, she had commenced a relationship with Claudia's
physics teacher.

Mr.
Fulko
was
thirty-nine years old and had been a teacher at
Mapleville
High School since he'd graduated from college. He was tall, fair and very
slender, he dressed in sweater vests and loafers, and he moved through the
school in a cloud of Polo cologne. When he was explaining a particularly
complex equation to his students, he would take off his horn rim glasses and
wave them around, like Clark Kent turning into Superman. All of the girls in
his class had a little crush on him until about mid-term, when the homework got
really hard and the tests even harder. Then Mr.
Fulko
was still cute, but kind of a jerk.

Melanie wasn't on the college-bound
track for science, so she didn't have Mr.
Fulko
for
class. They'd met through her work on the yearbook committee, where she was in
charge of making sure all of the clubs and sport teams were photographed for
posterity. Mr.
Fulko
, an amateur photographer, was
saving the students money by giving up a personal day to take the club pictures
himself.

Within a week, Melanie was sleeping with
him.

Claudia wasn't surprised when Melanie
told her what was going on, at least no more surprised than usual. She was used
to Melanie's behavior by now. She was disgusted with
Fulko
,
however, for breaching his professional ethics, and she was shocked at how
stupid he was. What was he thinking, risking his career in order to have sex
with a student, particularly one as immature as Melanie? Melanie was her best
friend in the world, but Claudia knew that anyone who'd slept with as many men
as Melanie had some serious emotional problems.

As if the sexual relationship and the
risk of inadvertent exposure by Melanie weren't bad enough, Mr.
Fulko
made it even worse by acting like some love-sick
puppy, writing sappy notes and composing execrable poems. Melanie would show
these missives to Claudia and then, after subjecting them to rigorous
explication, tuck them into a green calico-covered stationery box she kept on
her dresser. There sat the damning evidence, right there in a box on her
dresser, where Melanie's mother or father could easily find it at any moment.
Idiots.

Worse still, it seemed Mr.
Fulko
was keeping all of the correspondence he received
from Melanie in an even dumber place: his desk at work. Claudia discovered it
one day when she approached to ask a question about some homework; Mr.
Fulko
had opened his drawer to retrieve a pencil and there,
in the back, was a stack of folded notes with Melanie's handwriting visible on
the top.

The very existence of that pile of notes
not only reinforced Claudia's conviction that her science teacher was a moron
(what kind of fool leaves evidence of illicit behavior unsecured?), but also
mightily disturbed her peace of mind. Although she had access to the notes
Melanie received from
Fulko
, she was never shown the
notes Melanie sent to her lover. Every now and then Melanie would refer to
something she'd written to "Jim," especially when she thought she'd
come up with something exceptionally clever, but Claudia never actually held
these letters in her hands or read any one of them in its entirety. Rationally,
she understood that she didn't have any right to expect access to their
correspondence, but that was the very thing that bothered her. She wanted the
right. Claudia was being shut out.

When Melanie was sleeping around,
Claudia didn't feel threatened. She didn't approve of her friend's behavior,
certainly, but she did find some comfort in Melanie's dysfunction and her
dependence upon her. Until recently, Melanie didn't really have any other close
friends. She partied with her cousin Lisa, but didn't share things with her;
Claudia had been Melanie's sole confidante. Now Melanie had
Fulko
.
Now, unpleasantly, the relationship had become unequal and Claudia was in the
weaker position, the one who needed the friendship more. She had only Melanie,
but Melanie had another. Melanie was engaged in an actual affair with a man,
not just sleeping with him, and she was acting as if it were the most important
thing in her life. The ground was shifting under Claudia's feet.

Claudia wanted
Fulko
and Melanie to break up. She was weary of their winks and giggles, their lame
subterfuge, their lovers' secrets and private jokes. She hated any part of
Melanie's life that excluded her. Claudia already felt incidental in her own
home: Sylvia hovered but remained emotionally distant, and Tony was cool and
detached. She didn't want to be incidental to Melanie. She needed to be special
to someone – crucial to someone – and instead she felt forgotten.

"I never see you anymore,"
Claudia would complain.

"You're crazy. I'm right
here," Melanie would say. But she wasn't. In her head she was with
Fulko
.

Claudia couldn't get her mind off those
notes, and she began to wonder if Melanie really shared all of the ones she
received from
Fulko
, or if she were keeping some of
them to herself. Naturally, Melanie had a perfect right to keep them private,
but still, it seemed wrong. It just did. It was another sign of her pulling
away. And it was a particularly galling thing to do after all that Claudia had
been to her: Melanie's only true companion when no one else would even get near
to her. Didn't Claudia have some right to know what was going on in her
friend's life? They were like sisters. They were family. It was her obligation
to know.

It was a constant torment. Whenever
Melanie ran to Claudia clutching a new poem, or sat quietly in her bedroom
composing a verse of her own for Jim, Claudia felt a twinge of fear. She was
losing Melanie. She knew it.

She had to get a look at the letters.
Not all of them, of course, just a few. Just to reassure herself that this was
still a stupid, silly romance between Melanie and
Fulko
and that they weren't shutting her out, planning a life together that would
exclude Claudia. In fact, Claudia kept telling herself, that was probably what
she would discover: a glance at the notes would confirm that she was blowing
everything out of proportion. And once she knew that, she could calm down and
not worry so much anymore.

But how to do it? She could go to Melanie's
house and take a couple of
Fulko's
notes out of her
keepsake box, but it was risky. Melanie was the sort of girl who would lock her
bedroom door every night and spread the papers over her bedspread as visual
evidence of her romance, and then read them in order from start to finish. She
would notice if one of them was missing.

Claudia would have to rely on Jim
Fulko's
being somewhat less romantic, less likely to finger
through the notes every evening. It wouldn't be all that hard to get into the
middle drawer of his desk. It was just a matter of waiting for the right
opportunity.

A few days later, fortune smiled upon her. Claudia had
just stopped to ask Mr.
Fulko
a question after
dismissal, when one of the administrators dropped by from the office, fuming
about a discrepancy in the attendance forms. Mr.
Fulko
was obliged to excuse himself to address the problem, leaving Claudia alone at
his desk. Claudia quickly opened the drawer, took two notes from the bottom of
the pile and slipped them into her book. When Mr.
Fulko
returned, he found his student patiently waiting for him. He answered Claudia's
question and she left.

That afternoon, in the privacy of her
bedroom, Claudia finally pulled the notes out of her textbook. She'd been
sorely tempted to read them at school, but she'd decided that she would need to
have privacy and time to think. A bathroom stall was not the appropriate
atmosphere.

Claudia unfolded the first note. It was
on a piece of paper ripped from a notebook, written in blue ink in Melanie's
familiar, loopy handwriting. It was undated of course, so she had no idea when
it was written.

I'm feeling much better. Lisa took me to
the clinic on campus and I'm fine. Really. Don't worry and stop feeling guilty.
The whole thing was as much my fault as yours, probably more mine. Anyway, it
all worked out.

When will I see you? Will you pick me up
at the usual place? I can be there around six. If that's okay with you, change
the calendar on your door before 7
^th
period so I can see it when I
walk by.

You know I love you. I know you love me.
Nothing else really matters.

Mellie

Well, that was interesting. Claudia was
nauseated by the idea of a grown man sending love messages via a day calendar
to a high school student, but that was beside the point. Melanie had been ill,
apparently, and had shared nothing of it with Claudia. Ill enough to need a
visit to the campus infirmary, but not so ill that she'd told her mom and dad
or missed any school or seen her regular doctor. Claudia didn't want to jump to
the obvious conclusion, but the part about feeling guilty encouraged her to.
Claudia reread that section, then rolled her eyes with derision:
stop
feeling guilty
. Good grief.
Fulko
should be used
to feeling guilty by now. He was sleeping with a student, for Pete's sake.

Claudia unfolded the second note, this
one scribbled in pencil on the back of a page of Spanish homework.

I don't think we have anything to worry
about anymore. All of a sudden I got cramps and started bleeding. Mom noticed so
I told her I was having a really heavy period. She was worried at first, but I
told her it wasn't that bad and she left me alone. I can't tell you how
relieved I am – I'm sure you are, too. I know you were right and everything
would have worked out, but
it's
better that this
happened. I'm sure it is. I'm sad, though. I don't know. I've been crying a
lot. Hormones, I guess. I must see you later. Let me know when.

Claudia put the note down on her bed and
sat there staring at it. Assuming the second note predated the first, there was
no question: Melanie had been pregnant and had lost the baby. Pregnant. Oh,
this was bad.

Claudia worked out the chronology. The
miscarriage must have occurred fairly early in the pregnancy, but far enough
along to necessitate
a
once-over at the campus clinic.
Fulko
, that jackass, hadn't even had the guts to take
her to a doctor himself.

Well, of course not, unless he wanted to
go to lose his job. Ugh. What a mess.

Claudia was heartbroken for Melanie,
naturally, but even more than that, she was outraged by the betrayal. Why on
earth hadn't Melanie shared this with her? Obviously she was under terrible
stress and not thinking straight. But of all the pieces of news to withhold
from your only real friend! Claudia certainly had far more right to this
information than Melanie's pathetic cousin. Why hadn't she confided in her?

If Claudia had known what was going on,
she would have gotten Melanie to a doctor right away. She would have listened
to her and comforted her. What kind of birth control was Melanie using, anyway?
The last Claudia had heard, Melanie was on the Pill. You don't get pregnant on
the Pill, do you? What was that girl thinking? They were going to have to have
a long talk about this.

But wait. She couldn't just bring up
birth control out of the blue. She wasn't supposed to know any of this, or to
even notice that anything had changed in the way Melanie had been conducting
her life lately. Claudia realized that she'd put herself in a difficult
position.

She felt a rush of guilt. Maybe she
shouldn't know any of this. Maybe taking these notes had been wrong, plain and
simple. Had she just crossed a line? There was a reason Melanie had kept it all
secret.

Perhaps she should go to Melanie and
make a full confession, show her the notes, apologize and ask her why she'd
been so secretive. Claudia imagined the scene, imagined the shocked
disappointment on Melanie's face and realized she couldn't do it. No. Never.
Melanie might hate Claudia forever, and Claudia couldn't handle that. She
couldn't be alone, a faithless ex-friend. No. Melanie must never know that
Claudia had read her private correspondence.