Running Gag Climax

After Amelia K, "without a listener: a comedy"

Photo by Kateryna Ivanova on Unsplash

CHARACTERS:

• Main character: Girl. Girl says:

I am going to stop writing essays about It. I am going to be easy to love. I am going to stop smoking and hoping my friends text me, taking pills before bed that could knock out farm animals, waking up here, being fine.

Girl walks to room. Messy room. Why does Girl not clean her room?

Girl lays down and dreams about something happening to her. Girl lays down and dreams about something else not happening to her. 

• Supporting characters: friends. 

• Antagonist: Them. 

EXPOSITION:

This is not a story about sexual assault. I was sexually assaulted the last week of freshman year. I do not remember much of It, but still It plays through my mind like a VHS tape: skipping, repeating, repeating. I close my eyes each night and the piss-stench of his apartment hits me.

Girl asks one of her friends: Do you ever think about that day?

Friend responds: All the time. 

Girl doesn’t know if she believes her friend. Or if she wants to. She doesn’t know why it matters. And she doesn’t want to try to ask the others.

CONFLICT:

For a while, I believed that the best lesson I ever learned was that there is nothing I can’t do alone. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, a fact I only privately lamented. I made up for this to myself by learning to leave–just pack up and go wherever. It was a medicine I could take no matter how sick I was: reading maps and directions, haggling, doing all things by myself and recognizing danger when it came. I knew, I told myself I knew how to do it all until it took up scriptural residence in me. Keys between my hands. Look down when I walk in the city. Don’t drink with strangers. 
And yet I am stupid. And yet I have done all of those things, and look at where it got me.

When I came to college, all I wanted was friends. More than good grades, more than internships, jobs, more than anything. I adopted a personality I figured people would like and went out and did it. I did it all myself. I did it like it was easy. 
In reality, I saw making friends (having them, keeping them) as a balance beam: I wanted to be liked, but not reliant. I could still do everything myself. I could still go anywhere. These people were fun and I could always save myself. These things–these different lives, or facets of the one-were separate entities. 
I was argumentative and bitchy. I was loving. I wanted to be loved back, and sometimes, secretly, I wanted some sort of pushback to all my solitary schemes. This is the moral of the story: you can’t always be alone if you’re going to need saved.

(MORAL:)

You can’t always be alone if you’re going to need to be saved. 

They are sitting on a blanket, peeling down the straps of Girl’s dress. People walk by and avert their eyes. Ten minutes ago, Girl’s friends left her here. Girl was not not invited. Girl was not invited. It wasn’t an invitational leaving, yet she’s still here, drinking with strangers. 

Girl is drunk. Girl is peeled back fully on the school lawn, being dipped into and painted with, flesh and bone spilling out of her, and she begins to realize what is happening. 

You can’t always be alone if you’re going to need to be saved.

RISING ACTION:

Friend walks by and says: This is a public space. You all can’t be doing this.
Friend says: Riley, put your clothes on.

Days later, Friend will say: I’m so sorry.
Will say: I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Will say: It was just so shocking.
Will say: I should have known. You were crying.
Will say: I’m so sorry.

Girl: I don’t remember crying.

Friend will say: You were crying. I’m so sorry.

I always told my friends that I forgave them for that day, or that any forgiveness that needed to happen had happened long ago, or there was nothing to forgive in the first place. I don’t know which of those things is the truth, if any of them or all of them hold even an excerpt of my feelings on It. The reality was, I never considered forgiveness, but not because it wasn’t something I thought needed to happen. I was never mad at my friends. I didn’t ever think I should have been. The situation played out as It did, we did as we did, as we do, as we had always done. I wasn’t going to leave my friends, but my friends had left me and were content not remembering It. We would spool on as we were, knotted in the center, a distinct before and after in our respective friendships that only I could see. 

I have, at points, been slapped with the realization that it has affected them too, and I do not know how to rectify that. I can’t tell if this is mine to fix.

Girl is walking with Them to one of their apartments. Five or six people. Girl won’t remember. Isn’t she silly? 

Girl sees the boyfriend of one of her friends. She mouths “help me,” tries over and over, but he just stares, puzzled. Why is Girl with these people?

Girl is suddenly in the apartment, clothes off. But she was trying to beg for help. Why did he not help her? Why did Girl not run? She certainly could have.

Isn’t she silly?

CLIMAX:

I play around with this in my mind almost daily, many times–the double feature to the VHS, the haunting ending the writers decided not to go with.

I think, if I had went with my friends: we would have ended up in our rooms. Respectively. I am annoying when I am drunk. I would have sat and gabbed to my roommate about how I wished I were drunker. It would have been mixed up in the insubstantial days of freshman year, the days of starvation and substance abuse.  
I would not remember it today.

I think, if my friends had made me go with them: I would have been angry. I would have bitched for the five minute walk back to our building, said things like “I can take care of myself.” Lied.
We would have ended up in our rooms. Respectively. I am annoying when I am drunk. I would have sat and gabbed to my roommate about how I wished I were drunker. The next day, clear headed, I’d hear about It through the rumor mill and thank my friends for making me leave. It would have been mixed up in the insubstantial days of freshman year, the days of starvation and substance abuse.
I would hardly remember it today. Infrequently, I’d think of that spring, that unknown proclamation of ultimate caring and give it the sad smile reserved for bad news and memories of ASPCA commercials.

I think, if my friends would have realized: Sometimes I wonder if they did, if they had any suspicion. I’d like to imagine they had no idea. I like to imagine if they’d realized, someone would have come back for me. I would have gone back for any of them. I don’t know how they would have known or found me, but I like to imagine anyway. We wouldn’t talk about that day just like we don’t talk about It now, but I’d remember because I couldn’t save myself. 

Girl walks back into her building, down the hallway to her room. She has not seen herself yet, not yet seen the bruises she’ll fail at covering while she watches Them graduate in a few days. She walks by one of her friends, who gapes at her, wide-eyed. Friend looks like she’s seen a ghost!

Friend says: Are you ok? Girl nods.

Friend says: You don’t look it.

FALLING ACTION:

Girl runs. See Girl run! Run, Girl, run!

She is putting on her shoes in Their living room. They are not going to let her walk back alone. She almost cackles at the irony until Their reasoning hits her.

Most people, I’ve learned, get rid of the clothes from their Its–burn or shred them. I kept the button up shirt I had been wearing on for three days after–slept in it, wrapped my hair in it after showering and then slid it back over my chest until I was forced to cover myself further. 
To me, the shirt was an embodiment: I looked at it and saw it personified, thrown as I had been, crumpled on the floor with Them standing over me on all corners. I still pull that shirt out on days where the sun hangs crisp overhead. Sometimes I still wear it for days on end. I wonder if this is because I am poor and it’s a good shirt, or if I am lazy, or if it shields some other aspect of me, some fear, some knowledge that now I cannot fully see myself without It cloaking me. 
I wonder, sometimes, if I just like the stripes. 

Very close to It’s one year anniversary, I boarded a bus to New York and told no one. I packed the shirt. I thought, “if something happens, this coming day will not be as hard.” I figured I could save myself. Nothing happened, but the bus crashed in Jersey. I spent the weekend with the first friend I’d told at her new school where nobody knew anything that had ever happened to me. I put on my old self as a costume and laughed. On the train into the city as I left, I tried to catch my reflection in the window of the dark terminal. Girl is bleeding out. 

Girl bleeds for three days after.

RESOLUTION:

The first time I saw any of Them back on campus was just barely into the fall semester of my sophomore year, walking up behind me grinning cheek to cheek as I brushed my teeth. Almost midnight. Did not stop his stride. I watched my reflection make eye contact with him in the mirror and gagged on my toothpaste. My friend made a bed for me underneath hers in the building next door, a proclamation of ultimate caring. In another world, I never questioned her foreknowledge of It. I never watched her face or anyone’s numb at the sight of my upper body, never had to say “something happened.” Rewind the tape. Rewind it. Play it back.