Chapter 34

“You can still walk!” he complained when I opened the door.

“Very cute. It’s my shoulder that’s the problem,” I said dryly, “not my hips.”

“Your shoulder looks good. Not perfect yet, but it’s healing up nicely. Better than I expected, to be honest. Let’s work it out, push it some and see how you feel,” he suggested and we went out to the clinic where he pushed me a lot harder than he had before.

By the time we were done, I was in a lot of pain, but I also felt like we were making big strides for the first time. He cautioned me to let him know tomorrow if there were any side effects and let me go for my third appointment of the day.

Victoria let me in and sat me down before bringing up my chart. “There are no broken bones,” she said, giving me some relief. “There looks like some extensive bruising though.” She took out a tongue depressor and shone a light down my throat. “Have you had pictures taken of the injuries?”

I nodded a little. “Last night,” I said softly.

“Alright. Tell me about your symptoms,” she said, eyeing me critically.

“My voice is a little hoarse, when I talk, it feels like I can feel the vibrations at like ten times the intensity. It hurts to swallow and I find myself coughing a bit.”

She nodded. “Okay, you’ve got some serious bruising on your throat and neck and I can hear the change in your voice. I recommend you try to eat cold things. Ice cream is ideal, but most frozen treats will do you some good. That’ll help with the swelling some.”

She returned to her seat and faced me across the desk. “Now, let’s talk about how your day went.”

“Well, it started with the arrests of the people that paid to rape my girls. School was mostly a farce through the day. No one was paying attention all morning because of the arrests. Then early lunch period went fine. I called you, talked to the usual crowd and was texting to Emma when class changed. I finished with her and the baseball team was there.”

I paused to cough some and swallowed painfully. I’d used my voice too much today. “I told you all about what happened with them last term and what they said at lunch. I guess it also kind of bugged me that Tricia went to sit with Cheryl. Things with her took a kind of sour turn last night.”

“Oh? What happened?” she wanted to know.

“She tried to start a conversation about how I’d treated her in front of the other girls.”

“How did you react to that?”

“I reminded her that the only condition I’d placed on my consent was that she was certain she was ready. Since she obviously wasn’t, if anyone was sexually assaulted, it was me, since she got my consent under a premise that wasn’t true.”

“It’s called Intimate Partner Sexual Violence,” she confirmed. “Using coercion to obtain sex is one of the practices that fall into that category.”

I nodded. “Well, I felt like all the other victims I talked to after the fact, unclean, betrayed, humiliated...” I trailed off. “I know she didn’t do it on purpose. She wasn’t TRYING to hurt me. She’s just so damaged that she might never be ready to pursue a relationship like that.”

“That’s possibly true,” she said sadly. “I want you to know that you did nothing wrong, Matt. You’ve described to me what happened with Cheryl and if she says she’s ready, then you can either follow through on her request or not. Neither of those choices was wrong, regardless of the outcome. That’s on her. If she’d shown any distress you would have stopped.”

“She stiffened up the next morning when Lana and Beck were there and I stopped right away,” I confirmed. “As soon as I realized she was uncomfortable, it all came to an end.”

“Then there’s nothing more you could have done,” she said gently. “As for the baseball team, you and I need to talk extensively about your anxieties and the triggers you’re hitting.”

“Honestly, the school is my biggest trigger right now. All last semester, the student population was openly hostile to me. Walking into a bathroom or around a corner makes me itch to have a knife or a gun or my shield.”

She nodded. “Maybe we should look into a school transfer then,” she suggested and I shook my head.

“No,” I argued. “If I do that, I abandon all my friends, all the girls who look to me for support and I let the rest of them have the satisfaction of running me out of their school. I won’t let them have that and I won’t turn my back on my girls.”

“You’d have to face Cheryl again every day at lunch,” she reminded me.

“Each of those girls did the same every day of last semester with their attackers,” I pointed out. “I can draw strength from them and try to live by their example.”

She smiled. “I think you should tell them that,” she told me proudly.

I thought about it and nodded. “I think I will,” I told her.

“You’ll continue to run into triggers like you did today, but if you continue to recover at the rate we’re seeing in the x-rays, then physically, you should be fine in a few weeks rather than a few months and that should lift a lot of stress off your shoulders.”

I nodded. “I hope so. I’m looking forward to getting back to normal.”

She nodded. “Speaking of your x-rays,” she started, “How did you enjoy your experience this time?”

I decided to screw with her just a little bit. “Ingrid is a remarkable young woman and we’ve agreed to see each other again.”

She blinked, the smile fading from her face as she studied mine. “Really?” she asked finally.

I nodded. “We talked a great deal and in the end, we were delighted with each other. She even told me that I managed to surprise her. I wasn’t what she was expecting.”

“I get the feeling that you’re choosing your words carefully,” she said suspiciously. “What really happened?”

I chuckled a little. “We made a bet,” I told her. “If I could get a doctor other than you to order an x-ray of me having sex, then she’d be the other party on film. I told her I wanted to hang it on the wall in a light-box. She agreed.”

“Other than me?” she asked, surprised.

“She referred to me as your precious genius, so she might have believed you’d indulge me in the name of science,” I said lightly. “I called Samantha.”

“Naturally,” she said, amused.

“Samantha wanted me to know that I owed her, so I gave her a late Christmas present.”

“What present was that?”

“I told her the age of consent in Hawaii is 16 and to book her vacation accordingly. She knows my birthday from my charts.”

“Did a little research, did you?” she asked dryly.

I shrugged. “Seemed prudent,” I admitted. “I think I might buy a house out there. I get the sense that I’ll be taking a lot of vacations to the islands for a few years.”

“We’re straying from you and Ingrid,” she prompted me.

I nodded. “Well the bet was that if she lost, she’d confess her deepest fantasy and we’d act it out. If she won, I had to wear panties for a month and prove it to her daily.”

“Do I get to know what her fantasy is?” she asked playfully. “I KNOW Samantha would put the order in for you.”

“I turned her down,” I said simply.

“Why?”

“Because today was a terrible day for me and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have sex and because she would have felt obligated to follow through on the bet, but her heart wouldn’t be in it. I don’t want a partner who’s not there with me in the moment.”

She nodded. “I’m very proud of you for putting the brakes on. She’s very attractive. You must have been tempted.”

I nodded. “I left it to her discretion,” I said. “I told her that if she decided to change her mind to get my number from you, but that I wouldn’t bring it up ever again if I didn’t hear from her.”

She nodded. “She may call. She may not. I’ll bet she’s intrigued.”

“She asked me to stop by and say hi,” I told her “and she DID admit that I was different than she expected.”

“That’s almost universally true for you,” she agreed. “We can talk about your week a lot more tomorrow when you see me. I want you to pay close attention to how you’re feeling through the day tomorrow. I suspect you’ll find that you’re angry and feeling anxiety most of the time and that’s another symptom of PTSD. I think you should also know that I contacted Marlene Garrett’s doctor after we spoke and told him that he needed to get her HIV status determined because of the possibility of exposure during last night’s scuffle. I told him that yours had been negative and that you’d been screened in the last thirty days. He called me an hour ago and confirmed that her rapid test was negative. They also blood tested her in Alaska and she was clean. So unless she managed to have sex on the plane, you’re good. Go on home and we’ll talk more tomorrow.”

I nodded and left her office, walking back to the entryway of the hospital and out into the night. It wasn’t as late as I’d expected, but then, I still had police to talk to.

I walked home slowly, not knowing what was going to be waiting for me when I got there. I knew the girls were cooking up something, but I had no idea what. I glanced around the street and noticed a strange car parked down the block, but didn’t stop to investigate further. I let myself in at Patty and Dan’s, figuring everyone would be there for dinner.

“How’d everything go for you today?” Patty asked, coming to take my coat.

It was just her, Dan and I and that threw me for a loop. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked.

“We ate,” Dan told me. “The girls said they had a project to work on for you and they’d be next door. They said you had a rough day.”

“Yeah, kind of,” I admitted and told them about the baseball team without revealing what they’d done with Beck.

“You’re gonna get a lot of that,” Patty warned. “People are going to come back looking to make up and not all of them are going to apologize.”

I nodded and sat at the table while Patty brought me a plate. “I know. What they did though, it was some of the most personal attacks. I’d really been hoping they’d come to me and clear the air so we COULD be friends again. Sitting down and telling me they were willing to forgive me was one slap in the face too many.”

“Well, you need friends,” Patty said gently. “As smart as you are, you still can’t get by without other people.”

I nodded. “I have friends,” I said, thinking about the girls. I trusted them. We had things in common. I knew that they’d suffered like I had. “I don’t really want to make new ones. I’ll always wonder what they might have done to me last term, or what they might have said. I’m feeling a little better after some time away. Victoria said I’ll continue to have days like this. She said it’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So much shit happened to me that the whole building feels like a trap, you know?”

Dan and Patty both nodded. “High school isn’t pretty,” Patty said. “When we were going, it was practically a death sentence to come out as gay. When there was even a hint of it, the school turned into a shark attack.”

“Yeah, I guess some things never change,” I sighed and shrugged. “Victoria’s talking about taking me out of school.”

That surprised them both. “What about the study?” she asked. “That was one of the cornerstones of the research.”

I nodded. “She’s more concerned for my well-being. I told her I wasn’t willing to abandon the girls. They got through all last term without having to change schools. I told her I’d draw strength from their example. She wants me to tell them that.”

Patty nodded. “I think they’d like that,” she said with a smile. “You should go next door and talk to the girls though. They’re worried about you.”

I nodded and looked down at my plate which I’d somehow managed to empty while we talked. I got up and tried to get my head on straight. I was all over the place, happy one minute, enraged the next and morose in between. I gave them each a hug before I put on my coat and boots and headed home.

When I got inside the house, the girls were all clustered around the dining room table and everyone had cellphones and laptops in front of them working on something. In addition to Gina, Lana, Beck and Emma, Tricia and Jessie were there

I approached them and looked around curiously. “How’s it going?” I asked softly.

“Good!” Gina said brightly and looked around. “I think we’ve mostly got a plan to keep you out of trouble.”

“Do I get to know what the plan is?”

“It’s not that complicated,” Jessie said. “One of us sticks to you like glue all day every day when you’re not in class.”

“That’s going to make trips to the bathroom interesting,” I said dryly.

“Dibs on that job,” Beck said, making everyone laugh. I remember her mortification the first time we shared the bathroom while she was on the toilet. How things had changed.

“Mom and Lilly upstairs?” I asked. They nodded.

“Your mom has some lesson planning to do,” Emma informed me. “She heard about your day too. You didn’t tell me it was that bad.”

“It was worse,” I said simply. “I would have killed them if I hadn’t left. I WANTED to kill them. Dr. Spencer says I’m suffering from PTSD and a lot of it is focused on the school and the people there. She suggested pulling me out of school altogether.”

That met with some alarm. “What?!!?” Jessie blurted, stricken. “You’re leaving school?”

“No!” I said quickly. “She suggested that there were too many triggers there for me to continue. I told her I wasn’t abandoning my girls. You all need me. I’m going to continue to be there for you.”

“That’s sweet of you,” Tricia said carefully, “but what about what you need?”

“I told her I’d be fine. I’d find the strength to deal with it. I have a bit of a strategy, but I think all of the girls should hear about it ... except maybe Cheryl. She’s one of my triggers now. Dr. Spencer agreed with me that what she did was a sexual assault.”

“Really?” Tricia asked, surprised.

I nodded. “It’s called Intimate Partner Sexual Violence. It’s a category for any form of assault between intimate partners. It can range from outright rape to coercion and lying to get sex apparently. I looked it up on the walk home.”

“She didn’t LIE,” Tricia pointed out. “She was just ridiculously, tragically wrong about being ready.”

“I know. I never thought for a moment that she did it on purpose or wanted to hurt me, but I WAS hurt and humiliated and used and betrayed and a host of other emotions. Mostly I felt unclean after she started.”

The other girls nodded. They’d had the same feelings. We would have continued the discussion, but the doorbell rang at that point, so I went to answer it.

There were two cops standing there and I nodded. I’d expected them to be here to take my statement. I showed them in and went upstairs to get Mom. I wasn’t having any conversation like this without a parent present.

We sat in the living room and I started my phone recording while I told them what had happened from my perspective.

They asked a few questions and then left, saying that it wasn’t going to be an issue. They did tell me what injuries she had though.

“Her jaw was broken in three places, 6 teeth knocked out, broken nose, broken cheekbone, shattered orbital socket, two broken wrists and a shattered pelvis. From what the doctor said, she’s got your boot print stamped into her vagina pretty clearly and she has two cauliflower-ears. You don’t believe in going half-way, do you?”

“After what she did? She got off easy. I don’t think anyone would have missed her if I’d snuck a punch into her throat and crushed her trachea.”

“Maybe not, but it’s better that it didn’t happen like that.”

“I agree,” I said with a nod. “I’ll leave that to her cellmate.”

“You’re sure she’s guilty?” the other officer asked.

“Beyond all doubt,” I told him. “She deserved to live in extreme pain until all the people she hurt go to their grave of extreme old age. If I had a way to inflict crippling arthritis on someone, I’d give it to her, because nothing in the justice system can compare to what she did to people who trusted her.”

“Harsh,” he said. “What did she do?”

“She organized a party for people from school. She filled them full of drugs and then sold them off for the next three days to be raped while they were semi-conscious. She was the mastermind according to her accomplices and made bank off their misery.”

He nodded. “That would do it,” he said, understanding a little better. “I know I’d feel the same if someone I knew was treated like that.” They said goodbye after that and I went back to the dining room to sit with the girls for a little while. Mom disappeared back upstairs.

They’d come up with a surprisingly complete plan for keeping me isolated from people they said were bad for me. Everyone seemed to know someone that had pulled some dirty pranks on me last term. Emma was a little disgusted at the details of some of them. “They made you clean up your locker after that?” she asked, revolted when she’d heard about the feces.

“And after the animal blood and after the vomit and after the piss,” I confirmed.

“I know that the football team made a contest out of who could do the worst thing to him,” Jessie said. “I heard two of them talking about who was going to win it one day just before Halloween. They said Vance was gonna take the prize. I don’t know what he was supposed to do, but it was bad, whatever it was.”

I shrugged. “I really don’t care about the details,” I promised them. “I don’t need to know what each person did or wanted to do. If you girls tell me someone’s bad news, then I trust your judgment.”

“I’m putting Cheryl on the list,” Gina said. “I’m sorry Tricia, but after what she did, she doesn’t get within ten feet of him again.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think that she should talk to Matt any time soon,” she agreed.

“She’s still a mess?” I asked delicately. I didn’t want to pry for information, but I also wanted to make sure that she was getting help and other than her problems with me, she was doing okay.

“She called me after she left here last night. I’m not sure that you want her around ever at this point. She’s refusing to see you as anything but a villain at this point.”

I nodded. ‘Just another brick in the wall, ‘ I thought bleakly. I took a breath and let it our before speaking. “That’ll hurt her some day,” I predicted. “Dr. Gionetti will eventually get through to her and start cleaning up the damage in her head. Then she’ll realize how badly things ended. She’ll likely need her friends more than ever at that point.”

Tricia nodded and the look on her face told me there was more. “That’s not the worst of what you have to tell me though, is it?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “She won’t see Dr. Gionetti since you know her,” she said.

That made me deeply worried for her, her baby and Tricia. “Is she looking for another counselor?” I asked.

“No, she says she knows what happened and she’s not talking to a stranger about it,” she winced, waiting for my reaction.

I ran my hands through my hair and closed my eyes. “Okay!” I said finally, putting my hands down and shrugging. “That’s her choice and her decision. She’s on the list though. No contact whatsoever. I don’t want to talk to her, see her or receive notes from her. I’ll block her on all my social media tonight and I’ll cut her out of the support group. I’ll send out an email to the other girls and let them know.”

“Let us handle that part,” Beck said. “We’ll do it face to face.”

I nodded. “I have just one more thing to say about Cheryl. I’m worried about you Tricia. She’s not well. She’s capable of seeing me as an enemy, she may come to view you with suspicion. Try not to let your guard down around her. Honestly, I’d prefer to keep you far away from her, but I don’t control you or who your friends are, so I’m not even going to ask you to. Just be careful. Carry your pepper-spray when you’re at her place and be aware that she’s unbalanced and not willing to get help.”

She nodded. This made her miserable being caught in the middle and I hated that. “As of now, we don’t talk about Cheryl. It’s fine to mention that she’s on the list of people that don’t get access to me, but we don’t ask Tricia for information, we ask her not to give Cheryl any on us and we generally pretend like she doesn’t exist. That sound good to everyone?”

“It sounds fine to me,” Lana said and Tricia relaxed a little bit.

“I don’t think there’ll be any problems,” she said. “Thanks for not asking me to choose.”

I nodded. “That would have been a shitty thing to do to you,” I said. “I try to be better than that.”

I decided we needed a change of topics and told them about Saturday. I invited Jessie to come along.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked brightly.

“My father’s meeting someone new and wants some support,” I said lightly.

“So you’re gonna bring all your girls and me?” she asked. “That’s not gonna be weird at all.”