The Deeps - Volume 1, Issue 1

Consent

Cynthia Zhang

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t say no either, but how could I? Cooper Feldman was golden haired and blue eyed, the kind of all-American football star every high school worships. Me, I wasn’t down with the TTRPG kids or the girls who wore cat-ear headbands, but I was hardly anyone noteworthy either. If anyone thought of me, it was of woolen skirts and knee socks, the kind too lumpy and gray to be considered anywhere near sexy.

How I caught his attention, I don’t know. I was only at the pep rally to complete my community service hours for the National Honor Society. Maybe it was the neon orange VOLUNTEER vest I wore or the glow of my hair under its plastic hairnet. Maybe he was simply bored.

Cooper walked up to the concession stand with two of his friends, all three varsity athletes. When I warned him against the spicy nachos, he grinned, roguish and unafraid, and ordered them extra extra spicy.

His friends howled with laughter as he choked on tortilla chips and sliced habaneros, face redder than the Tabasco sauce soaking into the paper plates. I had to bring him four cups of water before he recovered, and once he could talk again, the first thing he did was apologize for not listening to me.

By then, the other boys had long since abandoned him for other entertainment. Without their presence, there was something softer about Cooper, a sheepishness that turned him from shining boy-king into just another teenager with flecks of pepper between his teeth. He asked me my name; I told him. Then he asked me who my homeroom teacher was, what kind of music I liked, and whether I’d ever heard of this band called The Smiths. By the time the sun had set, he was offering me a ride home.

It blurs from there.

One moment he was reminding me to put on my seatbelt; the next he was pulling off the road onto the shoulder, the better to continue our conversation. At some point he laughed, so warm and bright that I could not help leaning into his light. His arms were warm and solid, and he smelled faintly of smoke and fall foliage.

At some point he kissed me, startling and wet. At some point, there were hands on my hips, rucking up my sweater and reaching down my skirt. At some point, I tried to protest. My youth group leaders had warned us against these situations, told us to guard our virtue as we would our lives, but they had not warned about this: the steel grip of his hands on my wrists, the way the car seats creaked with every movement, the sticky patches of half-dried soda on the seats.

“C’mon,” he pleaded, breath hot against my neck. “Baby, I need this, I need you. If you love me, you’ll do this for me.”

And, well. Love is patient; love is kind. I was not in love with Cooper Feldman, but I wanted to be. All the girls at school were. And here I was, a wallflower lucky enough to catch his eye. What else was I supposed to do?

There was a spare panty liner in my backpack. It helped soak up the blood, after.

•   •   •

I didn’t want to hear it. But rumors spread quickly in a small school, and as I walked down the hall from chemistry to honors English, kids openly stared at me. Is that—is she—I mean really, her? I thought she’d be—didn’t know he went for that—

Well, she’s got a nice rack under all those layers.

I kept my head down, ears burning. But what had I expected? I had let him do it—had broken all the promises I made to God and my church, had not guarded my virtue well but instead handed it over with the ease of Eve biting into an apple. I had sinned, and this was the price.

It hurt, when I waved at Cooper in the hall and he barely looked my way. It hurt, when I found the notes in my locker, SLUT written in red lipstick on notebook paper.

But what cut deepest was the pity. Poor girl, falling for the first pretty face to pay her a compliment, but such are the follies of youth. We are all only human, and the devil’s tricks are so many. Other girls—girls I had never talked to before, girls with piercings and bright lipstick and tube tops that rode up dangerously high—offered me smiles, sympathy. We know. We were there too.

It hurt, knowing that I was not the first. It hurt, too, to know that I would not be the last.

•   •   •

I didn’t want to think about it. I buried myself in schoolwork, signed up for every available volunteer shift at the animal shelter, practiced piano scales until our neighbors began to complain. With enough work, I was almost able to forget.

But then my period was late.

In the immediate aftermath of that night, I had not worried about pregnancy. Perhaps that was naïve of me, but Cooper had seemed so self-assured, so confident in what he was doing. Surely I was safe.

But when I turned to Google, the statistics told a different story. Pulling out, WebMD informed me, failed twenty-two percent of the time, making it one of the least effective methods of birth control. And even if fate decided to spare me, there were other complications to worry about: herpes and syphilis and gonorrhea, HIV and HPV and diseases with names I had no idea how to pronounce. After deleting my browsing history, I locked myself in the bathroom, using a hand mirror and my phone camera to compare myself to online images. Was that part swollen? Was the bumpiness there normal, or the beginnings of a rash? Was the nausea I felt in third period a sign of morning sickness, or simply a symptom of skipping breakfast?

In health class, at the end of a unit my parents only let me attend because it was abstinence-only, they showed us a video of a woman giving birth. The girls averted their eyes while the boys made gagging noises, but I found myself unable to look away. There was something mesmerizing about it, the way the mother’s body split open like cleaved halves of an overripe plum, blood and brackish water staining the white sheets beneath as she screamed and screamed. The terrified husband squeezing her hand, the doctor’s encouragement to push, and the wet, matted thing that slowly appeared between her legs—the blood so dark it was almost black, the head the size of a small planet, stretching the skin painfully tight as it pushed its way free.

I did not want to be a mother. I did not want to be a murderer either, but what other options did I have?

Sleep was hard. Food was hard, each bite choking me with the knowledge that it was feeding that alien creature within me. Despite all the time I put into schoolwork, I failed two math quizzes. My mother asked me if I was okay, and I said yes, because I could not bear the thought of her knowing what I had done, how I had failed her.

When my period came a few days later, it carried with it a tidal wave of relief.

•   •   •

I didn’t want to tell him.

But Pastor Gene had graduated summa cum laude from div school, won the Midwest Baptist Association’s award for Outstanding Youth Outreach three years in a row. More importantly, he was twenty-seven, with cornflower blue eyes and soft, boyband hair. When he asked a question, all the girls raised their hands immediately, eager to be the subject of his attention. Sixteen and a perpetual people-pleaser, I was not immune.

So when I stopped offering answers during Bible study group and lingering afterwards to ask questions, it was not long before he noticed.

At the end of Friday youth group, he pulled me aside. Took me into his office, a small room with barely enough room for a desk and two chairs and offered me a Diet Coke from the carton behind his desk. After situating us with our lukewarm sodas, he told me that he had noticed a few things and he was wondering if I was okay, if there was anything going on at home or school that was giving me trouble.

I stared at the desk. Rings of coffee stains darkened the right side of the table, where Pastor Gene must place his Starbucks cups in the morning. Atop a stack of books on cultivating devotion and how to lead a godly marriage sat a marble angel, white wings outstretched as it raised a trumpet towards the heavens. If I focused enough on these details, on the scratches in the wood and the industrial gray of the carpet, then perhaps none of this would be real. Perhaps Pastor Gene would give up and I could go home, wrap myself in my blankets and lose myself in YouTube compilations of rescue dogs seeing snow for the first time.

Ruth? Are you still with me?

Pastor Gene leaned forward, placing a hand on my knee.

Maybe the touch was innocent, a gesture meant to ground me. Maybe, in my weariness, I imagined the way his hand drifted, fingers slowly creeping up my thigh.

Maybe it was intentional. Teenager and an older man in a small room, no one else around to hear—you know how this story goes. Even holy men must struggle against temptations of the flesh.

When I resurfaced, the angel was in my hands, one wing chipped from impact. Pastor Gene lay still, blood pooling around his head like a halo and lapping at my shoes.

I don’t know how I did it afterwards—where I found the cleaning supplies or how I managed to muster up the presence of mind to use them properly. There was so much blood, and it had gotten everywhere—I scrubbed and scrubbed until my knees hurt and my eyes stung from the fumes, my cuticles red and irritated from bleach.

Even as I worked, I knew it was a temporary solution. I could lock the body in his office, but at some point, someone would come knocking for assistance. Eventually, the body would start to smell, and it was only a matter of time before the police started investigating.

Perhaps I should have panicked, screamed, cried from guilt and fear. Mostly, I just felt numb. All my life, I’d been taught that rapists were blank-faced strangers who ambushed girls in dark alleys, threatened your life as they held a knife to your throat. Rapists were not high school boys who lent you their jacket and bought you chips from 7-Eleven afterwards.

With a dead man at my feet and the phantom touch of fingers on my thigh, I was beginning to rethink that now. Was beginning to rethink a lot of things, really. The way Cooper had hugged me close in the car, holding me down with his weight, one hand around my neck in a gesture I had thought was affectionate—

I had spent so much time hating myself, thinking myself weak, sinful. It was a relief, truly, to turn that emotion onto someone else.

•   •   •

I didn’t want to do it. I know that must be difficult to believe, but it was true. I was sixteen—I wanted to go to prom and see movies with my friends, to get an A on all my finals so my parents would buy me a proper pair of headphones, the kind they kept behind the counter at the mall. I wanted to be a teenager, not a cautionary tale about the dangers of women scorned.

But these are not always choices we can make. My hands are bloodied and my body unclean, but there is still work I must do, one last task to accomplish before I can rest.

Setting the bait was easy enough. Cooper had ignored me at school, but a single topless photo was enough to get his attention, a string of eggplant emojis mixed with heart-eyes sent in return. I texted him my address; he responded with a single thumbs-up emoji. I unlocked the safe where my father kept the gun, then returned to my bedroom to wait.

You will hear about it on the news tomorrow, maybe tonight if they find the bodies quickly enough. I will be long gone by then as well, another penitent murderer hanging in a potter’s fields, and none of this will matter. The police will have their story, the reporters another, and I will be just another headline, a sad parable about everything wrong with society today.

I know that. I wish it could be otherwise—that it could all go back to how it used to be, when Cooper Feldman was just a handsome face I stared at during pep rallies and Pastor Gene a soft-spoken, kind-eyed youth leader we all tried to impress. But when God calls you for a purpose, asks you to make yourself a conduit for His Plan, there is nothing you can do except answer.

And so I go now, a cracked vessel, a crooked arrow bent into the shape of His Will. For God is good, and God is gracious, and God provides for those who trust in His hands—but as for the wicked, theirs is the fire and the fury and the grave.