Listen to the author reading this story:
“Wait, I don’t understand,” Megan chews on her pink straw. “So, that guy assaulted you? That’s what you’re saying?”
“What? No.”
We’re in the bar above the Clermont Lounge and the smell of her daiquiri’s making me sick, like the Bath & Bodyworks roll-on glitter I used to lick off my wrist when I was 9 or my mom forcing sunscreen onto my face.
“But, that’s what you said. You let him kiss you even though you didn’t want to. And then he stuck his hand up your shorts.”
“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t like — that’s not the point of the story,” I say.
“Oh, okay.”
The velvet-clad room gives me a fizzy, candy-coated feeling. Like Dorothy in the poppy field, except they’re playing that song I listened to every day in the summer of 2003. Megan looks a little too chic in her 501s and white T-shirt. Then again, that’s why I hang out with her — because she’s tall and single-black-coffee skinny. Sitting next to her, I feel like we should be gossiping on a morning show in Chanel suits.
I’ve actually never been raped. But I don’t like to tell people that. It sounds too braggy and untrue. I’ve just been lucky.
But then Megan is saying, “So what’s the point of the story?”
“That I took some loser who didn’t even know who Stanley Kubrick was to see A Clockwork Orange and he got up and walked out in the middle of it — after he was on fucking Facebook the entire first act.”
“You said he invited himself.”
Well, yeah, Teddy was always inviting himself places, like the time he walked me back to my dorm after lunch. “You’re not going to invite me in? I want to see what your room looks like,” he’d said. So I stood in the kitchen of my apartment-style dorm, front door in sight, as he did a turn around my tiny bedroom.
“He said the movie was weird,” I launch into the story again. “I mean, not really. Violent, yes. A little avant-garde, maybe. But it isn’t like Begotten weird. It isn’t Gummo or Eraserhead or Jacob’s Ladder or Salò or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls or August Underground. It isn’t even The-Human-fucking-Centipede.”
The novel’s way weirder, the author literally invented a new language for it. In high school, I printed out a key from Wikipedia so I could translate. I did that at 16 but a grown man can’t watch a Kubrick film without looking at Facebook?
“And then, he asked if I wanted to leave too. ‘Do you want to go?’ You mean, do I want to get up and leave this movie that I’d been planning on coming to all week? The film Roger Ebert called, ‘an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning’? Malcolm McDowell almost lost an eye for that film. Did I want to leave — was he serious?”
“But then after he left and didn’t come back, he still waited for you outside the theater. You went back to his dorm.”
“And he got us lost on the way.”
“Why’d you go if you hated him so much?”
I shrugged. “To spare his feelings? Because I hadn’t come up with an excuse to leave yet, and I didn’t know how to say no at the time.”
“Or he didn’t know how to hear it.”
“He just kept smiling like he hadn’t walked out on me in the movie. No matter what I said or did, all I got in return was that smile that felt like a scream.”
“It’s always the nice guys.”
The first time a man made me feel threatened, I was 12. He was a 40-something friend of my mom’s who tried to introduce himself to me in the kitchen. But I was being a brat and said “okay” or something equally sullen. The thing I remember — other than what he said (Please don’t ignore me, in a way that implied the Please did not make it optional) or the look in his eyes as they shifted over my body or that he made me shake his hand like we were both adults — was the smile on his face. Like checking out a middle schooler was the most genial thing in the world. I didn’t have a lock on my bedroom door at the time, so I had to shove a cheap Limited Too chair under the handle.
“Once we got to his room, he started changing because we were gonna go to the bars — but then he just wouldn’t put on a shirt. He stood there talking to me without a shirt on, flexing his muscles.”
That was when I realized he thought I was gonna fuck him that day he invited himself up to my dorm. Even though I hadn’t even wanted him there.
“He still thought I liked him. God, I was so embarrassed to be with him, in that room, right at that moment.”
“And then he kissed you.”
People begin to get the late-night munchies and we’re enveloped in the smell of fried oil and hot butter and Fernet. I watch Megan pick at the red nail polish she chose because the name made her laugh. Communists in the Summer House.
“If the everyday relationship between men and women is this constant push-and-pull where we have to throw up boundaries just to see if they’ll cross them — ”
“Someone on Twitter called it ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist,’ I think.”
“— then some men you meet and just immediately know: That guy’s a fucking creep.”
Like this guy I’d see at parties sometimes in my early 20s. Charlie would always try to hit on me. I entertained it once because I was in a good mood and he asked mid-conversation if I wanted to “go over there?” When I turned to look, he was pointing to a pitch-black area of the driveway with an overgrown one-car garage. Did I want to go to the rape corner with him? No, I didn’t.
One night my friend Annabelle said, “I’m going to fuck Charlie tonight,” before a party at his house. The next day, she told me that after they had sex, she threw up in his bed and he slept on the couch while one of her girlfriends took care of her. She’d been completely blackout when I’d left the party in an Uber. But I’d tried to put her in a car. But she did say she wanted to fuck him.
But my friends were always telling me stories like this. A rogue’s gallery of sex crimes. Like Claire, who was drunk and “all of a sudden” realized she was having sex with some guy she met at a show. Or Sarah, who had a threesome with a friend and their Spanish teacher. She told me how he’d fucked her in her roller skates. Betty Ann, who had sex with her boyfriend because he wouldn’t stop asking and she was afraid to keep saying no.
The first time a boy actually touched me I had just turned 18, not even a year before I took Teddy to A Clockwork Orange. It was a guy I’d had a crush on in high school, though he was a freshman in college at that point. We ended up making out on the floor of a dark room. He asked if I wanted to have sex. Tired, heartbroken over a different boy and little more sober than before, I sighed and “No” slipped out. Even then, some reflex in the back of my mind kicked over. What if he gets mad?
He said okay like it was the most natural thing in the world and rolled off me. I slept with my head on his shoulder. I didn’t see him again until years later at a mini reunion between mutual high school friends. We immediately fell back into our flirty banter but nothing happened that night either — though that time, I would have said yes.
Megan grabs the bartender’s attention. “Another one please, love.”
“Yeah, but the movie thing bothered me a lot more,” I tell her.
“So you’re saying the only thing worse than being a predator is being boring?” Megan asks.
“I’m saying there was nothing interesting about him from start to finish.”
The playlist changes over to the song I was almost named after. We’re interrupted by a man so drunk I’m surprised he can even see us. It must be something like instinct that makes him bother us.
I let him slur his words at us for far too long before I say, “I think you should go home, honey.”
Anger rears in his sloppy demeanor. “Oh yeah, sweetheart? Why’s that?”
I don’t know why, but I go with the honest answer. “Because we’re asking you to.”
He stares at me with his glassy, half-closed eyes and sags under the weight of all oppressed men. Then he stumbles off, yet another victim of female cruelty.
Lauren Loudermilk is a writer and editor based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in Paste, Travel & Leisure, swim press, and more, and she holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. You can read more of her work at Suburban Gothic on Substack.