LARDER MOUSE
We must go to Salette.
No one looks up.
The young master
has appeared then vanished
like so many times before
but now they feel his absence
in their open wounds
in the creak of the castle.
The stones will forget.
We women will not.
Ladies!
I summon Mother
when she instructs
the staff before a feast.
Betsy and Matilde
make no move,
but the younger ones
turn glassy eyes my way.
Gather cloaks and provisions—
only what we can carry.
We must reach
the convent by dusk.
Dawn is breaking.
On my own I could
make the trip in a day.
Weighed down
with so many others?
I’m not sure
we’ll make it
at all.
The women don’t argue
nor move with any speed.
I am glad of a task. In motion
I barely notice the blood.
I send the young ones
to check the stables,
saddle any horses
the soldiers haven’t stolen.
If there is one bit of grace
there’ll be a nag
to carry old Matilde.
Betsy and Zahra
will find makeshift cloaks
in blankets, table linens
anything to keep us warm.
Whatever they find
in these quarters below
for I will not send them
to the morgue upstairs.
That leaves me
to find provisions.
Zahra points me to the larder.
I push through a heavy door
then down a flight of stairs
to yet another door.
Who knew we kept our vegetables
and salted meats so well protected?
The room beyond the door is dark
and cool. It ought to frighten me
and yet there’s something in this place
that feels like safety. I hear
Your sister.
Your sister has come!
The voice belongs
to a kitchen girl armed
with a fire iron
and a ferocious gaze.
Your sister, she said.
Your sister has come.
But that must mean—
I push past the girl
and find behind her
folded into almost nothing
my sister. Alive. Helene.
She doesn’t want to be touched,
the girl insists.
Helene, I’m here.
She’s silent
and still as stone.
I clutch my sister
to my breast,
feel her heart race
in time with mine.
The girl hovers,
grip still fierce
on her makeshift weapon.
I’m here, love.
I cannot say
it will be all right.
It won’t.
Emilde is my sister’s
champion. I didn’t ask
her name but she informed me
as we carried Helene
up to the kitchen.
Young mistress!
Betsy wraps Helene
in the warmest blanket
they’ve found.
Oh, thank the saints.
Our little larder mouse!
Larder mouse!
She is the eldest daughter
of this estate, nobility
they serve. And yet—
Zahra tugs me aside.
She means no harm.
Your sister is wont to
hide away from parties,
revelry, inside the larder
with her books.
A seed of hope unfurls—
perhaps she was in the larder
the entire time. Perhaps
she never knew the horror.
But there has been no revelry here.
And my sister’s silence shrivels
the seed before it can take root.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Around the frat house.
For once Jess isn’t sprawled on my beanbag chair or my bed and I’m glad to be alone now that I’m the one shaking, heart pounding, falling apart.
I’d been sitting there in a coffee shop, doing something important to me, hanging out with a friend, working on my story, and that asshole thought he had the right to flip the tables. On me and on Jess. And the thing is, he does have the right. He was born into it. There are never any consequences.
How many girls on that campus are now afraid of what would happen to them if they spoke up? If they stood up for Nor? If they told their own stories? They have stories. This was a heinous thing, but also it happens constantly.
And not just girls. Anyone with less power, representation. The ones who are overlooked, shouted down on the most basic things—why would they risk speaking up when they know how that turns out, even for the privileged?
I could have written survivor profiles until the end of time, if I wanted to. If they’d made any difference.
The ones who stay quiet, thinking about speaking up, have seen what happened to Nor and now they’ll never speak. So the ones with power keep doing whatever they want. And the cycle continues.
Survivors need to know someone is in their corner. They aren’t alone. Football players don’t have all the power. Frat boys don’t have all the power. Or they shouldn’t anyway. And the only way to change that is to change that.
I grab my phone, scroll through several Husky hashtags for inspiration.
It’s so obvious I almost laugh. These dawgs deserve to be shamed. I compose a Tweet.
Everyone’s so quick to blame the victim, but maybe we should do some #DawgShaming. Craig Lawrence isn’t the only rabid predator at UW.
I look at it, knowing it’ll bring some trolls to my account, but hopefully it’ll get people talking. Survivors can share their stories. Predators will feel what it’s like to have no control. Of course, only my followers will see it. I built up some platform throughout the trial with everything I posted, but those are mostly people who are already on Nor’s side. I have to reach the others, the ones who are hiding, alone, the ones who most need a sword.
If I’m honest? I want to reach Craig’s supporters too.
My muscles finally unwind, like I needed to get this out, and now that I have, my body melts into the mattress. I add #PurpleReign and #GoHuskies and click Tweet.
* * *
—
The knock on my door the next morning is too insistent to be either of my parents. They’d come in if they really needed to wake me up.
“What?” I call, squinting against the light that
means the makeshift blackout curtain I put up to keep out news cameras has fallen down again.
“It’s Jess. Are you decent?”
Jess always texts first. And never before noon. I don’t know what time it is, but it’s not noon.
“Yeah?”
The door bursts open and in an instant, Jess is on my bed, their phone in my face. “I am not sure you thought this all the way through,” they say.
I sit up and grope for my phone on the nightstand. My notifications are out of control. Texts, DMs, Twitter mentions. I feel a little dizzy. I’ve written a few pieces that got a lot of attention. Not viral, per se, but shared by enough people with big platforms to make my notifications erupt.
Those were a fifth-grade science-fair eruption. This is Mount St. Helens.
“What is going on?”
“Does #DawgShaming ring a bell?”
Then I’m awake. My hashtag caught fire. This is what I wanted—attention on the issue, on the injustice. Light shining on the dark, festering places.
I scan through the hashtag. I see what I hoped to see—survivors opening up about their experiences. Some at UW, some at other universities and high schools. They’re not naming names, but I get it. That’s scary.
It’s all good, though, because the more open people are, the less stigma for victims, the more consequences for perpetrators.
Every now and then some (white, male) rando is in my mentions, calling me a bitch or a cunt.
Cunt: a word for “vagina” that originally appeared in anatomy texts as a clinical term. Only later did it become obscene; in 1785 it was defined as “a nasty name for a nasty thing” in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
But I’ve seen worse on the internet. It’s worth it to open up the conversation. So why does Jess’s face look like that?
“This is what I wanted,” I try to explain. “Openness, discussion. I don’t care if I get called a few names.”
Jess types something into their phone and shoves it at me. “Do you care if Nor gets dragged into it?”
My stomach flips.
There’s the familiar hashtag—#IgNorTheWhore—but there’s a new spin on it.
Obviously we can’t #IgNorTheWhore—she’s like an STI that keeps coming back! So I say we send her #ToTheDawghouse!! #PurpleReign
They go on like that, blurring into one another, piling into a tangled heap, all focused on punishing Nor, making her pay, turning what I thought was so clever, so thought-provoking, right back around so it terrorizes the victim yet again.
Only this time it’s definitely my fault.
* * *
—
“Sentáte, mija,” Papi says with a firm pat on my shoulder. “I’ll make some tea.”
I sit. Tea isn’t going to fix this. But at least he’s doing something, instead of scrolling endlessly through Twitter, like Mom.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “Why would you do this?”
“I was trying to help!”
“How does this help? Who does it help? Not Nor.”
“All the girls in this situation! This isn’t only about Nor, you know! We can’t just move on now that we got a guilty verdict and go, oh, that was justice! Because the sentence wasn’t justice! Not even a little bit.”
“Getting to trial was more justice than most victims see,” Mom says.
“And that’s supposed to be enough?”
“You take the win you get and you have a little gratitude! Nor is alive. We could have lost her. So yes! It’s enough that I still have both my daughters.”
“Well it’s not enough for me.” I’m on my feet. “But you just keep teaching fucking F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and whatever other goddamn toxic male shit you teach to reinforce this idea that boys are entitled to whatever the fuck they want!”
“Marianne,” Papi says.
“Don’t bother.” Mom takes her phone and flees to the bedroom.
I collapse at the table and drop my head to its cool surface. I feel like I should cry, but mostly I still want to scream. I want to rage and hurt someone, even if that someone is my own mother who’s done the best she knows how to keep our family together over the last year. Even her. Because everything she’s done? It hasn’t been enough. It hasn’t been enough for Nor. It hasn’t been enough for me.
Papi sits next to me, but I don’t look up. He strokes my hair.
I used to get these terrible tangles, and when my mom would try to brush them out, I’d throw fits and jerk my head away and generally be impossible. Finally she threw her hands up and said fine, look like a feral child, I don’t care. And I did, for a few weeks. Until I got tired of the matted hair and the looks from teachers and as a final straw, Zach Stein called me pube-head.
I wasn’t about to go back to my mom and admit that. So I went to Papi, working on a leak in our kitchen sink, his tools spread all over the linoleum. I brought my sparkly purple hairbrush and asked him to help.
He used to do his sisters’ hair, he told me later. When his mom got sick and couldn’t anymore. His friends saw him once, braiding the little girls’ hair and never let him forget it.
I didn’t know that then. All I knew was Papi wouldn’t need to talk about it. He would clear a spot for me on the floor and get to work. It was rough going. He got out a jar of coconut oil to help work through the tangles, but it was still a spectacular mess. Most parents would have given up. Better to haul the ornery kid to a salon and chop it off.
But I’d asked my dad for help and he was going to help me. We sat there together—it felt like hours—working at the knots, undoing what I’d done. Mom didn’t say a word the next time she saw my smooth, sleek hair. Who knows what happened behind closed doors. After that, my dad was the only one who ever did my hair. French braids, fishtails, big poufy bangs for ’80s day.
His touch on my hair is what undoes me now.
I only wanted to fix this but I’m making it worse. I’m a four-year-old with a hammer, trying to be Daddy’s assistant, destroying the intricate dollhouse he’d spent months building for Nor. Only this time it wasn’t a dollhouse.
Papi keeps stroking my hair until I finally stop sobbing.
“You need to apologize to your mother.”
“I know.” I hiccup. “How do I keep hurting everyone so badly when all I want to do is help?”
Papi covers my hands with his callused ones. “Creo que . . . we’re figuring this out as we go along. For the longest time I felt completely frozen. I knew if I let myself do anything, it would most definitely make things worse for Nor. Para todos nosotros.”
“How do you keep from storming the frat house with an AK-47?”
He passes a weary hand over his permanent five o’clock shadow. “A completely developed cerebellum helps. Also fairly inflexible views on gun control. And the fact that as much as I want to destroy that pathetic waste of oxygen and everyone who stands behind him, I can’t bring myself to put this family through any more than we’ve already endured.”
If I had more self-control. If I thought before I acted. If—
“When I met tu mamá, we were going to change the world with words. Me with poesía, her with novels. Grad school was this bubble where everyone believed words would be enough to save us all. But we got out and figured out words weren’t even enough to pay the rent. Forget saving the world. The thing was, I was okay with that. I realized I could still write for myself, I could still read and enjoy poetry. I could learn a trade that would support a family. It was enough for me. Es suficiente para mi.
“Pero mija, my lovely, headstrong Marianne, you act because to do nothing would crush you. I don’t think that will ever change. Espero que no. You won’t be satisfied by enough, and you shouldn’t be. You’re going to fail spectacularly in your life. You are going to crash and burn, mi vida, per
o, ay dios, what you’ll make of the ashes.”
His eyes fill with tears and he doesn’t try to hide them. He holds my gaze for a moment, then stands and kisses the top of my head. “I’m going to check on tu mamá.”
WIDE-OPEN NIGHT
Do you know
how to reach
the convent?
Zahra insists on walking
through the wide-open night
at my side, despite
her obvious pain. Despite
the space behind Matilde
on Minuit, the horse
I learned to ride on
as a child.
She leans on my arm,
her weight a welcome
tether to the earth.
I believe
the convent
is south.
I am
almost sure
we’re headed
that direction.
This I know:
each step carries us
farther away from the place
we’ll never truly leave.
Times I have left the castle:
To visit cousins
in Avignon.
To attend a wedding
in Anjou.
Times I have left the castle
without my father’s escort:
Some hours later
we enter a village.
The servants breathe
more easily in the world
they know but the walls
on either side close in on me
with only room for the stench
the waste, the mangled creature
rotting in the road.
At any turn a man
could ambush us.
I force down
panicked breaths.
Mademoiselle?
I do not answer Zahra.
I cannot explain.
She slips her hand in mine
and I don’t let go.