I, Death

Tuesday May 8, 2012 - 1:19 AM

Okay, so that last post did work. And, unlike my previous attempts it didn’t disappear. I waited a full day because I wanted to make sure it didn’t delete after the fact. I know this sounds like I’m being paranoid, but the first few times I’d tried to post last week, I ended up losing the work. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention properly and missed a key step. But I’m sure I did it right, and Blogger just hung there, not resolving. And when I came back to it, the post was gone, missing, like I’d never written it.

That’s why I wrote the following entries down. By hand. And now that things are up and working again, I’m going to re-type them below.

Thursday May 3rd, 2012

At the end of English class today, Robbie asked me to hang back a bit because there was something he wanted to ask me. I was terrified. I thought that maybe he knew something about what happened to Monica, that maybe he was going to point a finger at me and tell me he knew it was me — that somehow, in my sleep, I’d gone and beat and raped her. Or that maybe Monica had been talking to him and told him this herself.

I actually tried to sneak out of the class, tried to just mix into the flow of students out of the room. But he reached right out and grabbed my arm. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back through the crowd. He’d done it so quickly, so forcefully, that I’d thought for sure that he was going to lay blame on me for what happened to Monica.

He held my arm, preventing me from getting away while smiling and making quick small talk with the remaining students filtering out of the class. When the last student left, he let go of my arm and closed the door.

“What’s going on, Peter?” he asked, the concern showing on his face as he leaned on a desk at the front of the classroom. “You’ve been acting really strange ever since you returned to school and Monica is back.”

As I rubbed my arm where he’d grabbed and held me, I didn’t know how to respond. “W-what do you mean?”

His eyes softened even more. He pursed his lips and looked me in the eye. “You’re feeling guilty about Monica, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer, but turned my head down and looked at the floor.

“C’mon, Peter,” he said. “You can talk to me, man. I think I know what you’re going through.”

My eyes started to tear up, I tried to hold back the sobs, but my voice repeatedly broke when I responded. “How could you . . . possibly . . . know . . . what I’m going through?”

"Because I've been there too." A strange look came over his face just then and he took a deep breath. “When I was a teenager, my girlfriend was raped at a house party. We went in together, the two of us, and then as we each starting hanging around with different groups of friends, I ended up heading off in a car with a few buddies to pick up some munchies. We did it all the time, go to a party together, split up, do our own thing, then get back together.

“Only this time, this time something happened while I was gone. These guys from another high school showed up. Nobody knew who they were, they just showed up, about ten of them, and crashed the party. A few of them picked a couple of fights with a few of the guys, and three of them ended up pushing their way into the bathroom where Sandy — that was her name — where Sandy was. She’d had a bit too much to drink and was in there being sick to her stomach.”

At that point, Robbie paced to the far side of the classroom and looked out the window facing away from me. “The three of them had her way with her. They, they pushed her to the floor, then two of them held her down while the third guy ripped off her clothes and raped her. Then they switched, and another guy took over. Then the third.