At the church they come at us from behind some buildings, blurry eyes and walking strange, into the car crying like children: I look at their faces and see them children, babies with skinned knees, only Bette is crying that she can’t have babies now, any babies,
You’re okay, you’re okay. I’m turned around in my seat. You’re safe.
For a while they just breathe and choke; their faces rainy windows. One of them slumping out of consciousness against the window. People at the stoplight think something is going on.
Tell me what happened-
I can’t believe he’d dose us, one of them says, we’ve known him since we were in fifth grade-
He keeps saying, oh, that’s not my shot, that’s your shot, she says, and I think he’s being friendly, you know, being polite, and then I wake up in his bed and he’s on me passed out—and my pants are undone—and then Ainsley’s in the bathroom on the floor and Kyoko, and they won’t wake up and they didn’t want to get up—
And he said he’d been on the McCormick yesterday, but it was full when we got there-
Where were his parents?
They’re out of town—
Is your friend okay?
She shakes Kyoko, my dentist’s daughter: Imma kay, imma kay, she says. Presses her face against the glass of the window, and I turn up the air.
Should they eat? I ask him.
Probably not, he says. His sunglasses with the light on them; the going-down sun. The light in their faces, I can see that their hearts are all moths, beating against grey slatted grab of their ribs: throbbing for the light coming down with the air they breathe.
At the house they keep repeating their story, dumbfounded still, but calming down. Kyoko throws up. She barks like a seal. I keep checking on her, make sure she doesn’t pass out. Every time she’s got her arms wrapped around it, smiling gently at me. Imma kay, she tells me.
All right.
Ainsley hugging me tight. I stroke her shiny hair.
Oh, here’s a little bit of barf, I say, picking it out. She smiles.
Bette woke me up saying we had to call you guys. Call Johnnie and Pauline, she said, call Johnnie and Pauline.
Little girl I know so well and yet not at all: a loving stranger to me. But I’m such a good judge of character! she’s wailing, and I’m thinking how this is part of it, part of the wheel: she grows up and I am given myself ten years ago, a girl becoming in another woman’s arms. It was my youngest aunt held me, tiny pretty with red nailed hands: smoking cigarettes and wearing black underwear in the morning (my mother wore soft ratty things).
Part of becoming whole is putting another girl together again: pieces of Ainsley fitting into what is gone from me.
I didn’t have anything to eat today, she says suddenly, through my hair.
Are you hungry?
Not yet.
I’m such a mom, I say, trying all the time to get you to eat.
Yeah you are! she says, hugging me again. Paulie, she says softly.
Kyoko mumbling on the sofa. This is not normal, she says again. This is weird.
Yah you’re weird, says Bette, walking past Kyoko unfazed, and they’re going to be all right.
But this is unending, Kyoko says. Bette takes her onto our bed, until I think she probably shouldn’t be lying down. She goes back on the sofa, slanting there with her black eyes closed looking like my dentist’s daughter, until she lurches up for the bathroom again.
She only had one shot, Ainsley says.
It probably wasn’t mixed evenly, he says. She had the biggest dose.
I hope I can still have babies, Bette says. He has that STD, you know, and all these girls can’t have babies.
Your pants were on?
Yeah, she says.
It’s hard to pull off somebody’s pants. You ever do that? Play limp? —and if he had gotten them off, he wouldn’t have got them back on. He passed out.
Yeah, she says, thinking. I’m gonna get him so bad.
Yeah, Ainsley says, we’ll ruin his life.
Someone like that, I say, shouldn’t get to keep his dick.
They laugh.
You should get your buddies to hold him down—you can carve RAPIST on his face, so everybody he meets will know.
Yeah, they tell me, but we want to do it ourselves. We’ve got to do something ourselves.
Only not violently, they say.
Violence is not the answer, says Bette. She touches Kyoko to make sure she’s still awake. Hey honey, she says.
Cats on the floor in yellow lamplight and Kyoko whispering on the sofa. The sisters tempt him outside for a cigarette. Their smoke, smelling stale and somehow like leather, drowses back on itself through the screen door. Unrolls itself like something living.
After a while they’re texting their friends about it, they’re talking about how they’re gonna get this guy. Ainsley showing me pictures of her favorite pipes online. She wants one looks like a mermaid. Have you been on here? she’s asking me.
She’s telling me about mushrooms and talking her friends sober, about someday maybe working in Africa, taking pictures and helping the people. About finding old wedding dresses in bins at garage sales: and then Johnnie and Bette are coming through the door bringing tacos and another girl.
They’re getting ready to go again, Kyoko still sick, Ainsley hugging me saying she’ll call later, let us know she’s okay, that they’re all okay.
Even as she says it we all know the call will be tomorrow, asking can we get her something, and that way Sunday too. Then on Monday cigarettes and boys and French fries: high school forever and ever amen until the day they are eighteen.
