It goes like this: you’re six-two by the middle of eighth grade. You have broad shoulders and a strong jaw, and hair that flops neatly onto your forehead in a way other boys try to imitate. You are a bit near-sighted; this will keep you from being a pilot like your dad. You escape the ophthalmologist until your first year of college, when even from the front row of the lecture hall, the blackboard is too fuzzy to read. Your size and your grin get you called a natural leader. You have no choice, really, so you might as well play football.
Height, shoulders, jaw, grin. You’re everyone’s idea of Joe Quarterback. Although you don’t come from western Pennsylvania and you didn’t learn to throw a spiral from your father, and you prefer math to watching game tapes, you know it’s destiny. You know because everyone tells you. You don’t want to disappoint them; they seem so sure of it.
Once you’ve joined the team, people know who you are. You’re someone they recognize: you’re the high school quarterback. When your dad doesn’t come back from California when he’s supposed to, but calls to say he’s going to stay out there, with Sheila, and you spend the morning dealing with your mom, calming her down and trying to make her feel safe again, you get to school hours late and they don’t even care what happened. They’re just glad to have you there now, and they wave you off to biology.
You take a cheerleader to the prom; your mom takes pictures with a disposable camera and your little sister admires the cheerleader’s dress. You buy your sister a smaller version of your date’s corsage, and she is entranced by the way it sits on her wrist. The two girls pose together, one on either side of you.
You dance with your date and with a few of her friends. During a slow song she looks at you like a First Lady, beatific. After the ballroom lights come up the cheerleader takes you by the hand and leads you upstairs to a hotel room. Her friends and your teammates are already there; there is beer and Jack Daniels and wine coolers for the girls, and when the rest of them go out for ice, you and the cheerleader have quick, robotic sex on one of the beds. This had seemed like something the cheerleader wanted, but when it’s over she looks wounded and cold. You offer your coat and a glass of water. It is the least you can do, to the milliliter.
Colleges recruit you without even seeing your transcript. They raise their eyebrows at your SATs. You choose the school with the best math department. In the dining hall, you sit with the team. Other kids look over at your table, at you. You cultivate a sense of humor that makes sense to the rest of the players, a towel-snapping joshing sensibility. You are admired and respected, your coach tells you.
In your math classes people don’t know what to make of you. They think you’re putting them on. They don’t trust athletes, especially football players. You try to start a study group but the other guys look like they’re waiting for you to shove them into a locker or steal their girlfriends.
Your mom calls once a week. You tell her you’re lonely and she laughs like bells. Your sister goes to a different college because she finally got sick of being Your Little Sister all the time, but she puts a poster of you up in her dorm room. Your dad is hard to get a hold of, but he sends email and wants you to visit California to meet his new wife.
Senior year, you fall in love with a sophomore in your dorm. She is petite and blond, with bright brown eyes. She is majoring in physics. You can’t believe a girl like this exists, but maybe there are a million of them. You only care for this one. Her name is Joely and you can’t believe your luck.
You could play in the CFL or Europe, but you take a job near the college. You analyze data from the stock market and try to make predictions. You don’t care about the stock market, so it’s just numbers and trends. Patterns. You see Joely every weekend.
When Joely is attacked you don’t know what to say. The information you have is incomplete and static-scratched. Someone forced his way into her dorm room. It was ten o’clock on a Thursday night. Joely was doing homework for quantum. She fought him off, scratched him badly. By eleven she was in the student health center. She called you then, but you were out watching the basketball game at a local bar. By the time you talked to her, she had already talked to policemen and counselors and the dorm coordinator. She was just sick of it, she said. She made you talk about your day: you had tunafish for lunch; your boss complimented your performance; you spoke to your sister on the phone.
You can’t forgive yourself for the hours you spent at that bar, cluelessly toasting the team’s three-point shooting with coworkers. It seems cruel; it seems like what a jock would have been doing.
You visit campus on Friday, your arm around her feeling insignificant. Still, as you walk her across campus, you hold her tightly. Maybe he is out there and will see. Surely you are still someone people recognize. Surely your status, the role you have played on this campus, counts for something here, can in some way protect her.
This is why you believe the attacker was a stranger. You can’t believe that anyone in the campus community, to whom your name meant something – and who could think of Joely without thinking of you? – could have conceived of such a thing.
Your size and your skills could not protect her. You loathe yourself for longing to hear one of your teammates say, Don’t sweat it, you didn’t even play defense. And for the locker-room remarks that come to mind so easily, things that cannot be said, things that your teammates would’ve laughed at: Babe, if you wanted to be sexually assaulted, all you had to do was ask.
Math is as unhelpful as football: this surprises you. There is no logic to what happened. There is no QED. No way to predict what will come next. The attacker’s motives are unknowable: lust, or loneliness, or a fear that led to his need to overpower someone, even a five-four blond wearing Scooby-Doo pajamas.
An email announcement is sent out to the student body, warning them to keep their doors locked and to watch out for suspicious people. The College, says the email, is committed to being a learning environment that emphasizes the dignity and worth of every member of its community, and any individual found to have violated College policy on sexual assault will be subject to disciplinary action. Although the email doesn’t mention names – just says a female resident of Joely’s dorm was attacked by a male assailant – everyone seems to know that it was Joely. Her professors grant her extensions and ask if there’s anything they can do.
Her roommate puts a chain lock on the door. Her roommate has always been a borderline man-hater; you think this may put her over the edge.
This year’s starters tell you Joely hasn’t exactly sequestered herself and worn sweats all year, if you know what they mean. You say she’s her own woman, she can wear what she wants; they nod but don’t believe you. You see a flash of something in the running back’s eyes and you almost believe it was him; you are two seconds from jamming your hands into his chest and demanding a full reckoning.
You realize that people expect you to know how to be a man because you’re six-five and can hit a receiver in double coverage. At nearly the same moment you realize that Joely is protecting you from the details. She has not said how far the attacker got because she does not want you to be haunted by it. She does you the favor of not flinching when you touch her. You tell her, just let me know when you’re ready.
She has to drop two classes, including her favorite, quantum. This will throw off her schedule but she can still graduate on time. She has made a spreadsheet with her new courseload for the next two years. She is disappointed about dropping the classes, as if she’s failed at something, as if she hasn’t bounced back sufficiently to concentrate on relativity.
You tell your sister but feel weird about it, because it’s not your news. She sends you a stack of pamphlets, a canister of pepper spray, and a mix tape. She has a friend who was date-raped and she recommends therapy and Ani DiFranco.
Over spring break you take Joely to California. You introduce her to your father, and he says she’s beautiful. She has her hair up and is shapeless in her travel clothes, but your dad is right. Your dad’s new wife Sheila is different from your mom. During his long absences, she takes yoga retreats and language immersion classes. She calls your dad “flyboy.” She has jet black hair and green eyes. Instead of kids she has a pet bird, a brightly colored macaw. She lets it out of its cage, and it darts around the living room, and you imagine how this would horrify your mother. Your dad seems different but you’re not sure whether he’s changed or become more like himself.
Your dad has a scrapbook of your clippings, including your two mentions in Sports Illustrated. He tells you he is proud of you.
On the beach in Santa Cruz, you hold Joely’s hand and find a perfect sand dollar. You walk on the sand and sit on the rocks and have fried calamari and beers. You wish you could marry Joely right then and there, but you respect her spreadsheet and her plans, and you can wait.
When you and Joely go home you believe that you will hold on forever to the way it felt to stand with her on the beach. The way retreating waves pulling sand out from under your feet made you simultaneously less stable and more deeply dug-in. You resolve on the plane ride not to forget this, even when you have to work late and Joely has midterms and the nightmares still haven’t gone away. You are beginning to sense how hard this will be: harder than running bleachers, harder than graph theory. The stewardess brings Joely a blanket that makes her sneeze but she pulls it up to her chin and falls asleep halfway through the movie. You turn off her reading light and watch her, hoping like crazy that Joely will keep that serene look on her face for another hour, if only she will let her head rest on your strong shoulder and breathe.
© 2010 Jenn Stroud Rossmann
