Good Girls. Laura Ruby
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the back of a chair. As if there were a person inside, he pats the shoulders of the jacket. He doesn’t look at me.
I am sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, counting the scratches in the wood. There are a lot of scratches. Most of the stuff we have is old or cheap or both. My parents love flea markets and antique stores. Not too long ago, my mom thought about opening her own vintage clothing boutique, until my dad reminded her how much she hated the business end of business.
“Where did this come from?” my mom asks. Not me, my dad.
“Someone sent it to the store e-mail address,” he says.
My mom turns to me. “Is this why you seemed so depressed before?”
I nod.
“What happened? Is someone playing a joke on you? Did someone dress up like you?”
For a minute I think about saying, Yes! A joke! It’s just a big joke! But I shake my head no.
My mom’s fingers brush the edge of the paper on the table. “So this is you?”
My eyes on the floor, I nod yes.
“From Saturday night?”
More mute nodding.
My dad’s hands tighten around the shoulder of the jacket. “Did someone force you to—”
“No, Dad,” I say. “Nobody forced me.”
“I don’t understand,” he says. “How could someone take a picture? Did you let them?”
“No!” I say.
But my dad doesn’t stop. “Is that what’s going on at parties now?”
“John…” my mom says. “Let her talk.”
My dad snatches up the picture. “Who is this?” he says, jabbing a finger at the naked chest floating above my hair.
“Nobody you know,” I say.
My dad’s jaw quivers like I just smacked him. “Nobody?” he says.
I’m not crying. It’s impossible that I’m not, but I’m not. I feel cold and hard, like marble. An Audrey-shaped statue sitting at the kitchen table. Stevie the marmalade catdog jumps in my statue lap and licks my statue fingers. I barely feel his teeth as he nibbles.
My mom’s lips are moving, forming words and then biting them back. Finally she says, “Is this your boyfriend?”
I almost laugh, but my marble mouth just isn’t that mobile. “Sort of,” I say. “Not any more. I broke up with him.”
“Christ!” my dad says. He stares at me. “Tell me that you at least used protection.”
“We didn’t need protection,” I said. “I mean, not for that. I don’t think.” I can’t believe I’m saying it as I’m saying it. This is not embarrassment. It’s not humiliation. It’s something deeper and darker and more awful, like a giant black hole of spinning saw blades.
He looks like he has a bee caught in his throat. “You don’t need…”
My mom gives him a warning look and he clamps his mouth shut. She says, “So you were…with your boyfriend, and someone took the picture. Do you know who did it?”
“No,” I say. “I have no idea. Somebody must have snuck up on us.”
My mom nods again as if she understands, but I can tell that she doesn’t, that she’s completely out of her element, that she’s gearing up to call in the professionals. They didn’t do this in her day, maybe, or they didn’t have the physical evidence. No digital cameras or picture phones. No e-mail or blogs or instant messages. No photographs to send to other people’s dads. “Who else has seen this?”
“Everyone.”
She winces. “Oh, honey.”
My dad says, “What do you mean, everyone?” He’s frowning so hard and so deeply that his dark eyebrows bunch up in folds over his nose.
“They’ve been sending it from phone to phone at school. All day today.”
There’s silence. I don’t know how long. We can hear the clock tick. We can hear Stevie’s tongue as he patiently sands away my fingerprints.
Then my dad says, “I’ll call the phone company.”
“Why?”
“To find out who was sending the picture around.”
“Can you do that?”
“I can try,” he said. His mouth was a thin, tight seam. “I’m sure it’s the boy.”
“Who?” I said.
He points at the photo. “This one. He probably had some friend take the picture.”
I sigh. “I don’t think so. He couldn’t have known.”
“Known what?”
That I would unbutton his shirt and spread it like a curtain. That I would slide his belt from his belt loops and fling it behind me.
But then, maybe he did know. Maybe he and everyone else could guess where it was all going and I was the only one who couldn’t.
“Known what?” my dad says again. “He couldn’t have known what?”
We used to play a lot of catch when I was little. I can still throw a baseball like a guy and my football pass has a decent, if wobbly, spiral. Good arm, good arm, my dad would tell me, grinning. Now my father is staring at me as if he has no idea who I am or where I came from.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Never mind.” My dad whips his jacket from the back of the chair and stalks out of the room.
“Audrey,” my mom says. “He’s just upset right now. He’ll get over it.”
“Sure,” I say. “Right.”
It’s clear my dad is not going to get over anything until he finds someone to sue. Or shoot. We spend Monday night in virtual silence while my dad does endless Google searches on laws regarding the transmission of photos over cell phones. My mom brings me tea and more tea and spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, exactly, she should say to me. We try to watch a new cop show—my mom loves cop shows and she got me hooked but the episode is about these boys who date-rape a girl at some exclusive Manhattan high school. Neither me or my mom can take it. We turn it off and go to bed early. I don’t sleep.
Tuesday morning and still we’re not over it, won’t be over it for a long long time. My dad leaves before me so that he doesn’t have to look at me. My mom, wearing her usual uniform of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, sits at the kitchen table staring off into space, a cup of coffee cooling in front of her. She looks like I feel. Dark circles, hair puffy and matted. The sun filtering through the cracks in the curtains highlights a web of wrinkles around her eyes.
“Did you sleep?” she asks me.
“Not really,” I say.
“Me neither.”
She stands, walks to the coffeepot, and pours another cup of coffee. She adds milk and lots of sugar, and hands it to me. I only drink coffee once in a while, but she knows I need it. I grab a yoghurt, a napkin and a spoon and we sit at the kitchen table. We’ve got two minutes before Ash comes to pick me up.
“I’m so sorry about what happened,” she says.
“Me, too.”
“I don’t understand how someone could have been so cruel. To take that picture of you and send it around. I can’t stand it. Who could be that mad at you?”
“It could be someone who doesn’t even know me, Mom.” I open the lid on the yoghurt and take a spoonful. It tastes like glue. “It could