Free I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom Page A

one on top of another. The people who live here are bricked in. The driver turns his face to mine. He’s not in a hurry.
    “Are you sure this is where you want to go?” It’s so calm in his car. “I can take you somewhere else.” But I’m already racing ahead in my thoughts, wanting to see Bill, afraid of what I’ve done. I thought about asking the driver to take me home, my parents lived less than ten minutes away. But they’d be mad—I’d broken my curfew. How would I explain my car gone, my clothes, purse, the blood?
    The dark-haired man in the car had all the time in the world. I could have told him that three years ago, my son had bruises on his legs, but hadn’t fallen. That sometimes the past appears right over the present. That I had a ribbon-thin dress like a flag, red with blue inside, and I slept in it after Tommy died. That I almost hadn’t given him away. And if I’d kept him, maybe he wouldn’t have died. Instead, I say, “Yes.” Open the car door.
    Bill’s front door isn’t locked. There are men’s bodies sleeping on the carpet in the living room. I bump into them walking to Bill’s door, push it open. He’s not happy to see me. He runs his hand through his hair. I know it’s soft. He won’t look at me. “I can’t stand to be in the same room as you,” he says. I’m a little surprised that he’s not at all concerned about the cutting, the blood. But he’s not.
    “I can’t go home now,” I said.
    “If you’re staying, I’m leaving,” he said, bending over into his closet, grabbing a gym bag. He leaves. I can’t believe it. His room is nothing without him. Even my ribs are distressed at his leaving, rising and falling.
    I wade through the bodies on the floor, go into the kitchen. Smash a juice glass in the sink, terrifying one of Bill’s sound-asleep roommates. He levitates from the couch like a cartoon. I can’t stop giggling at his fear. I giggle back to the bedroom, Bill’s room, shut the door. Take a piece of the glass to bed. Glass edge resting on my wrist. But I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to die. I can die in the morning if I still want to. Then the bedroom door is pushed open. The now-awake roommate comes in. The bed is in the center of the room. He’s touching me. “I just want to make you feel good,” he said.
    “No,” I said. “No. No.” But for a moment, I wonder if it’s possible. Can he make me feel good? Can I feel good? By then, it’s too late. I don’t seem to be in charge of my body anymore.
    Years later, I’ll tell something of this story to a woman in a small, windowless room. She’s a spiritual therapist who befriends me, who counsels me at no charge in her office. The telling will make me sick to my stomach, the feeling that I am trash—body crumpled, and a hard wall that I bump against. “What if it wasn’t you?” the woman will ask me. And sometime after that telling, I’ll be in a fancy grocery store that had expanded to include a liquor section, video rentals, a dry cleaner drop-off. At the dry cleaner counter, a girl will be standing in the yellow store light, and I’ll think, “What if it was her?” Instantly, the hard wall gives way.
    When I imagine it’s her he rapes, I know she can’t stop the rasping, like sandpaper inside. She’s forgotten how to lift her hands. She doesn’t think about the broken glass, about using it as a weapon. How she could cut him to make it stop. It’s as if her arms are sky. She can see him through a window, and then he’s gone. I want to go to her, and say I’m sorry. It’s all I can do, even now, not to walk over to her in the store that no longer exists, and touch her face. I’ve never seen her face—she’s in profile, the counter far from the front door, the registers where I stand. She’s waiting on a ticket, or her clothes. But if I walked over, she’d turn, look up.
    The Monday-morning light is shady. Skirt and angora an inside-out tangle on the floor. I swallow dry.