Touch (14 page)

“Sort of. He’s a patient of Doctor Atwood’s. He does that all the time. That’s probably why he goes to her. It’s probably some nervous thing.”

I can tell that Joan’s gone back to thinking of Phlegm Man as a disgusting health threat. But now she doesn’t want to say so because the poor fellow is seeking help from someone in her own profession. But she does speed up again, to pass him as quickly as possible. In less than a minute, we’re at Doctor Atwood’s.

“Thanks. I can walk home,” I tell Joan, and jump out of the car. I ring Doctor Atwood’s bell and go in.

“Maisie,” says Doctor Atwood. “Sit down. Sit down.” Then she says, “The tissues are right there by the couch.”

I’m crying so hard that for a while I can’t even speak.

Finally I say, “Can I have a do-over? I need to tell you what happened. I need to start everything over from scratch.”

The story, the parts of the story, don’t come out in order, one thing after another. Nor does it make total sense. But for the first time, with anyone—with Doctor Atwood or Joan or the principal or even myself—I try to say, to
really
describe,
exactly
what I remember.

I start way back, with that day I came home from Wisconsin. I start with that day I went to Shakes’s house, and I saw the guys noticing that I had breasts. I start with how, right then, I half knew (even though I didn’t want to admit it, really) that things would never be the same. I should probably start from preschool, but I think Doctor Atwood understands. I’ve probably said enough about that already.

Then I tell her about trying to be friends with the guys over the summer. I tell her about trying to pretend that nothing had changed, and how it didn’t ever quite work.

I take a deep breath. Then I begin to talk about those mornings on the bus with Shakes. How first everything was an accident, or seemed like an accident, and then it turned into stuff we were doing on purpose. I’m crying really hard now, because it’s so sad. I try to explain
how much it meant to me, and how good it felt, and how much I cared about Shakes and how much I thought he cared about me. And maybe he did care about me, but not enough. He cared about his friends more, or anyway, he cared more about looking tough in front of his friends.

That’s the part she needs to understand in order to understand how, on that day the others asked to touch me and Shakes didn’t stop them, I was so shocked, it was as if everything inside me sort of crumpled and disintegrated. It was as if I’d broken a limb or gotten burned or fallen. That’s how much it hurt. I really
was
in shock. I didn’t know what I was thinking, let alone what I was saying.

I thought,
Fine. Who cares? Go ahead and touch my boobs, if that’s all this is about.
I’d thought Shakes and the other two guys liked me for myself. But if it was all about my breasts, I didn’t care about any of it. Let them touch my boobs if that was all they really wanted. Why should I care? What did it mean?

When they asked if they could touch me, I asked for some time to think it over, and then I said, “Okay. Fine. Have fun. Go ahead, touch them as much as you want.”

I told myself it was no different from their touching
my arm. But it was. Of course it was. It wasn’t as if they were touching my arm. It felt really creepy and it made me hate them, even though they were my friends. Then it made me hate myself, and it made me hate my body more than anything else. It was as if I were watching myself, as if I’d zoomed up to the roof of the bus, from where I was watching them act like morons, like those drunken frat boys on the
Girls Gone Wild
shows. I realized my friends were nothing but boys, they’d never be better or different from that. Even Shakes was getting into it.

“Did Shakes hold your hands down?” asks Doctor Atwood. “Did he keep you from resisting?”

It shocks me back to her office.

“No,” I say. “I
didn’t
resist. I told them they could go ahead and touch me if that was what they wanted. I don’t even know if Shakes was one of the ones who was actually touching me. But it
was
happening, and he was definitely part of it. He was there. He didn’t defend me. I hated him as much as the others and finally I hated them all so much that I told them it felt good. I wanted them to hear the hate in my voice. I wanted to
be tougher than the kind of girl who would say, ‘Stop it, please, boys, stop it.’ I wanted to be tougher and braver than that.

“But still, I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I wouldn’t have told on them. Because even after what happened, they were still my old friends. I didn’t want to get them into trouble. And besides, there’s a code of honor. Kids don’t rat each other out. You just don’t do that. And even when Joan got involved and we went to the principal’s office, I was ready to tough it out.”

“Until…?”

“Until I heard that part about the money. And it suddenly hit me that they could tell that lie about me, that kids who’d been my friends since preschool and who I thought really liked me could invent nasty stuff like that just to save themselves. I was just so
angry
. I began to think I couldn’t have let them do it unless someone had been holding my hands. Otherwise, I would have punched them and scratched their eyes out. I knew I must have said no, even though it seemed like I was saying yes. In my heart I
meant
no, even if that’s not really what I said. And that’s when the story started changing.”

“No one said anything about money?” asks Doctor Atwood.

“No!” I say. “Haven’t you been listening to one word I’ve been saying?”

“To
every
word,” Doctor Atwood says. “I just want to make sure.”

“It’s the truth,” I say.

Neither of us speaks for a long time. I’m still crying and honking into the tissue and dabbing at my eyes.

“What do you want to do now?” she says. “You don’t have to answer right away. Or even today. Take your time. Take as long as you need.”

At first I was nervous about telling the truth, especially now that I finally knew what the truth
was
. What would people think of me when they found out I hadn’t struggled and resisted, but I’d just caved in and told the guys, “Sure. Go ahead. Whatever.” I assumed that everybody was going to come down really hard on me for accusing the boys of molesting me, of touching me against my will, of forcing me to do something as if they didn’t
know that no means no.

Joan and Cynthia were especially upset, but the weird thing was, they seemed less mad at me for having lied than for having weakened their case by lying and then trying to set things straight. And Joan really got bent out of shape when I told her I was determined that we drop the charges. Maybe she and Cynthia thought they were going to go down in some history books as crusaders for women’s rights, or something. The dreaded hearing or trial I’d been dreaming about for so long never took place, and they canceled the deposition in Cynthia’s office. Joan still tried to persuade me to go forward with the suit, because apparently it’s still an offense to touch a girl’s breasts whether she wants you to, or not. No means no, but, as it turns out, yes also means no. Even if I did tell them it was okay, it
wasn’t
okay. So everything was still pretty complicated.

For a while the school wanted us—that is, me and my dad and Joan and Chris and Kevin and Shakes and their parents—to all get together for a big meeting. Doctor Nyswander had gotten the idea from something they did in countries where there had been a revolution
or a dictatorship, and innocent people had been put in prison or killed. At the meeting, I would talk about what happened, and how I felt about it, and the boys would talk about why they did what they did, and how sorry they were, and everybody would kiss and make up and go home happy. I half wanted it to happen. I would have liked to hear Chris and Kevin admit that they’d ruined our friendship because they were so jealous of me and Shakes, just as I would have liked to hear Shakes admit that when the others made him choose between them and me, he didn’t have the courage to choose me. But I knew they were never going to admit any of that, so it was fine with me when enough of the parents objected and the meeting didn’t happen. Instead, the boys and I all had to write essays—as punishment, I guess. They had to write on the theme of “Respect.” The title of my essay was supposed to be “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” I had a hard time with it, because the truth was, even after I’d admitted to lying, I still didn’t feel all that liberated. So I just wrote down the first thoughts that popped into my head, and handed the essay in. I don’t know if anyone ever actually read it.

Everybody, I mean everybody except Cynthia and
Joan, was happy to see the whole thing go away.

Shakes’s mom got married that June, and they moved to Delaware. I was sorry to see him go, but on the other hand, it solved a lot of problems, not having to see him every day. It turned out that Kevin is really good at math, so he got sent away to a special math school in Philadelphia, and I haven’t seen him anymore, either. Without Kevin and Shakes around, Chris has turned into just another guy, and I guess I must have turned into just another girl. I was no longer the girl who asked the guys to find kids who’d pay to touch her. Word got out that part hadn’t happened. And I think all the kids felt a little ashamed of themselves for being so quick to think it had.

They were supernice to me for a while, and then that stopped, too. After that, I’ve been just a regular kid, like any other.

I’ve done well in school since then. That is something that has stayed with me, so maybe I should be grateful to the guys for turning me in that direction.

But I’m not grateful. I never was. I wish it hadn’t happened.

But just like Joan kept saying at the time, it was
part of my education. And I learned from it, I did. I’ll never again be able to watch TV or read the newspaper and hear someone say such and such a thing is true without remembering those awful months. I still believe that there’s such a thing as the truth, and I still try never to lie. And yet I can never forget how certain—and then how uncertain—I was, every time I told and retold the story of how some boys, my former best friends, touched me on the bus.

Jacket art © 2009 by Gustavo Marx/MergeLeft Reps, Inc.