Where Monsters Dwell (20 page)

“Hey, how’s my date doing?”

“Pretty good,” said Felicia, in a tone of voice designed to tell him that she’d probably have just as good a time somewhere else. Shaun caught on. He was good at those kinds of subtle hints.

“Actually, this party is pretty tame. What do you say we go for a ride?”

“Haven’t you had too much to drink?” she asked.

Shaun downed the rest of the bottle and tossed it on the grass.

“Just a bottle or two,” he said.

Felicia laughed.

“Well, please drive carefully. I have no plans of saying hi to my dad at work tonight,” she said.

“I always drive carefully, you know that,” said Shaun.

*   *   *

First they drove a long way up the river and out of the city. Shaun drove a BMW. It was an older model, probably because his parents didn’t want to spoil him, though they certainly could afford to. They stopped in an isolated spot under a railroad bridge. Down the slope they could make out a dark section of the James River. As soon as the engine was turned off they started to make out. Shaun tried to feel her up right away, and she let him. But when his hand moved down she pushed it away. He refused to be stopped, and made a new attempt to reach between her thighs and under her short skirt. Then she twisted away from him.

“I want to do it, but not in the car,” she said. Felicia could see that he was aroused as he sat straightening his collar, which she’d been grabbing a minute ago. Suddenly she wasn’t sure how good he really looked.

“Okay,” he said. “We can go back to my house. My parents are at their summer house and won’t be back till tomorrow.”

Her chest tightened. She felt something that resembled the sound of the river below them as it surged past, like a somber melody in the landscape. But in a strange way, she still wanted him.

Shaun drove slowly along the meandering road toward town. There was nothing to see but the beams of the headlights and the dark of the night. It almost looked like the lights were pulling them forward. On the radio Chris Isaak was singing his hypnotic song “Wicked Game.” As they started seeing houses again, and the song ended with the depressing words “Nobody loves no one,” Felicia realized that she no longer had control over the situation. She should have asked Shaun to drive her home at once. Why she hadn’t done that, she had no idea.

*   *   *

At half past eleven they parked in the garage at the Nevinses’ house next to an empty spot and a small Japanese car. They went straight up to Shaun’s room. It was big, with a corner window and a view over a yard full of trees that shielded the room from the neighbors but apparently not from the sunshine during the day. There was a double bed in the middle of the room, and it reminded Felicia of her parents’ bedroom. All except the temperature.

While the rest of the Nevinses’ house had been air-conditioned, it was hot in Shaun’s room. The AC was turned off in here, and the window stood open so that the heavy, humid air came in from outside.

“I sleep best when it’s hot,” said Shaun.

Felicia smiled.

“If you think it’s too warm in here, we could take off some of these clothes.”

Felicia gulped. Then she said, “You’d better turn off the light.”

Nothing felt right anymore. They undressed in the dark. Shaun quickly and efficiently, as if getting ready to go to bed for the night. Felicia slowly and hesitantly. She fumbled with her bra. She felt stressed, and for a moment was afraid that Shaun, who was already naked and lying beside her in the double bed, would try to help her. If he had she would have panicked. But he just lay there, as motionless as a shadow in the dark, and she couldn’t see whether he was looking at her or had closed his eyes. Finally she got the bra off, but she kept her panties on. Then she lay down next to him and leaned over to kiss him. He didn’t kiss her back. Instead he grabbed the elastic of her panties on one side and pulled until it snapped.

“That’s better,” he said, and she didn’t recognize his voice. He yanked at her panties a couple more times, until he got them all the way off. Then he laughed and tossed the torn panties on the floor. All at once she felt the drops of sweat on her skin turn ice cold.

“No, I don’t want to,” she said, sitting up in the bed.

“What is it with you, anyway? All girls like sex a little rough, don’t they?”

“No, we don’t,” said Felicia, feeling her voice quaver. She didn’t sound as confident as she would have liked.

“Don’t tell me you’re leaving?” said Shaun. “I’ve heard that you’re a regular prick teaser. But you know what? You’re not gonna tease me.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Couldn’t believe that she really had intended to go to bed with this idiot lying next to her. She turned over to go. But before she could get out of bed, he sat up and grabbed her hair with one hand. He quickly stuck his other hand between her thighs and shoved a couple of fingers into her vagina. A searing pain filled her whole abdomen. He hurried to pull them out again.

“Goddamn, you’re as dry as toilet paper. But if you don’t want to screw, then you’d better give me a decent blow job.” He turned her around by her hair.

She screamed. It was rage and fear. But she thought she sounded like a kid. Then she said, “Damn it, stop pulling my hair. I’ll do it, all right?”

“That’s better. Fucking skank.”

Felicia was shaking with anger, but she held back her tears. That fucker wasn’t going to see her cry. Now she just had to do it, and then she could go home.

She bent down and opened her mouth. He put his dick in. His thrusts were rhythmic and hard, and every time he was pulling out it seemed that he was sucking something out of her. He moaned each time. Then he came. She wanted to turn away, but he held her head and made her take it all in her mouth. But she didn’t swallow. When he was emptied, he released her, and she fell back on the bed. She got up as fast as she could. Grabbed her dress off the floor and pulled it over her head. Then she put on her shoes. Shaun was lying on the bed with his hands clasped behind his head.

“I hope it was as good for you as it was for me,” he said with a laugh.

She still had the semen in her mouth. She spit it out and hit him square in the face.

“Fucking piece of shit,” she said, calm and cool. Then she turned and ran out of the house. She was relieved that he didn’t come after her.

19

Felicia walked all the
way home to Monument Avenue Park. She was shivering all over despite the warm night, alternating between rage and an almost paralyzing feeling of emptiness, which several times made her stop short. A question kept surfacing, over and over: How could she have been so wrong about a person? Nice eyes, sort of. But a sick asshole. And she had just let him do it. What did that make her?

When she entered her family’s apartment on the second floor, she saw that a light was on in the living room. Her father had come home from the swing shift. He was a policeman and sitting right there, but there was no way she was going to tell him that she’d almost been raped. She just couldn’t. It suddenly dawned on her that Shaun knew that too. He knew she would never go to the police. He knew she’d never tell her own father about it. This thought made her feel even more nauseated. She sneaked past the living room archway and into the bathroom. There she stuck a finger down her throat and threw up, trying to do it quietly, so her father wouldn’t hear. She wasn’t worried about her mother. She always fell asleep with sleeping pills in her bloodstream. After throwing up, Felicia brushed her teeth. She rinsed her mouth and spit out the water at least twenty times before she slipped out of the bathroom and into her own room. Dad is going to think I came home drunk, she thought. But what does it matter now?

That night she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, sweating and freezing at the same time. She thought everything was ruined. Soon she’d be eighteen, and she was supposed to graduate from high school in a few weeks. But now she wasn’t sure she’d be able to go back to school. The thought of seeing Shaun Nevins again was intolerable, of course, but she didn’t know if she could look her friends in the eye either. Not after this. A strange mixture of shame and rage filled her when she thought about Susan and Holly. In a way, she’d retained her virginity but had lost everything else. She was due to start college in the fall, meet new friends, maybe find a new boyfriend, and travel. But how was she going to face all that now?

At five in the morning she crept into the bathroom and stole two of her mother’s sleeping pills. She fell asleep soon afterward and slept until late morning. Neither of her parents woke her.

A rushing sound noise had settled in her ears. It reminded her of the sound you hear in big conch shells, which people say is the roaring of the sea. The trembling in her hands had subsided to a sort of numbness. The nausea came and went, and each time she tried to get up from the bed she felt dizzy. Like a hangover in reverse, it got worse as the day progressed. When Felicia still hadn’t emerged from her room for Sunday dinner, her mother came in and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. Her hand felt ice cold.

“Are you sick, Felicia?” she asked, genuinely concerned. She must have noticed that there was no sign of drunkenness in her daughter’s room.

“I just don’t feel good,” replied Felicia, hoping her mother would stop stroking her hair before she burst into tears.

“Do you want me to bring your dinner up here? We’re having roast veal.”

“No, I have an upset stomach. But a glass of water would be nice,” she said.

Her mother came back with the water and let her stay in bed for the rest of the day.

*   *   *

She stayed home sick from school for three days. She stole pills from her mother to get to sleep at night. By the fourth day some of the vertigo was gone, but not the numbness. She had begun to appreciate the numb sensation, and wanted more of it. She wanted it to seep from her fingertips and the outer layer of her skin all the way into her nervous system, so she wouldn’t feel anything. Right before she fell asleep, after taking a sleeping pill, she felt like she was floating away. That was how she wanted to feel. On the fourth day she pretended to be well and went off to catch the school bus. But she was planning to meet her neighbor, Brad Davis, the pothead.

As usual, he stood waiting for the bus as he did some small deals with teenagers who needed something to fortify themselves on an early Thursday morning. Felicia gave him a friendly hello for old times’ sake. Oddly enough, he was the first boy who had kissed her. Or maybe she had stolen the kiss from him, since he was too shy to do anything like that. It happened in the tree house in the Davises’ backyard, when they were around eight years old. The kiss had felt wet and nice and Brad had been so happy with the kiss she had stolen from him that he gave her a lollipop the next day. They had never kissed again, but they stayed friends. Until they were around thirteen, that is, and Brad got zits and started smoking weed, while Felicia got her tiny boobs that never got any bigger and started reading poetry. But they still said hi to each other every morning at the bus.

Now Felicia went right up to Brad. The decision had been made in advance. He gave her a surprised look when she handed him twenty bucks. Their hands hadn’t been close to each other in years.

“I need something to calm me down,” she said.

“Got the jitters about finals?” he said.

Felicia gave him a confused look. She’d completely forgotten that final exams were next week. And the week after that was the graduation ceremony, where they would get their diplomas and stand there wearing a gown and a cap with a tassel, and Holly would give the commencement speech in front of all the parents.

“The strongest you can get hold of,” was all she said.

“It’s going to take some time,” said Brad.

“I’ll come back tomorrow morning.” Then she went back to her brick apartment building. But she didn’t go up to the apartment on the second floor. Instead, she went down into the basement. She made her way to a room at the end of a corridor. On the door into the room, childish letters were painted in bright colors: “Secret club! Admission only to Holly, Susan, and Felicia!” Felicia still remembered when she painted those words eight years ago. Inside the walls were painted with princesses and horses and stars and planets. There was a table in the middle of the room with a candle burned all the way down in a bottle covered by hardened drips of wax. Along one wall was a sofa beneath a basement window that allowed daylight to seep through a gap in the flowered curtain. Felicia Stone, soon to be eighteen, lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling without the slightest hope that she could fall asleep. At noon she heard her mother leave the house to go to her part-time job at the branch library. Then she sneaked up and stole more pills. She took three pills, realizing that it was only a matter of time until her mother noticed something.

Brad would have to come through.

*   *   *

He did.

Valium has an anesthetic effect on most people, and if you take more than the recommended dose, your emotional life can really be paralyzed. Felicia got enough Valium from Brad to get her through finals and the graduation ceremony. She lied to her girlfriends and told them everything was fine, and that nothing had happened between her and Shaun Nevins, even though he had probably blabbed to the whole school about it. She told her friends that she no longer cared about sex, and wanted to wait until the time was right. In her own mind she thought that would be never.

Luckily she wasn’t in the same room as Shaun during finals, and she got a seat far enough away from him at graduation that she wouldn’t ever have to look him in the eye again. He eventually disappeared on a Eurail vacation, then to some Ivy League college in New England, and she stayed behind in Richmond with her pills.

In the weeks that followed, the anesthetizing effect that had helped her get through the last terrible days started to diminish, and she began taking the pills with beer or bourbon. She spent hours in the basement, half wasted from pills and alcohol, while her parents thought she was at Holly’s house, and Holly thought she was at Susan’s, and Susan thought she was at home.