Boy Toy (36 page)

"Ms. Cresswell?"
Bang!
went the gavel. "Ms. Cresswell! Keep your client quiet or—"

Cresswell shot Eve a deadly look, but Eve shot back one just as deadly. Cresswell stood up. "Your Honor, I apologize. My client has just informed me that she wishes to change her plea."

Whispers of shock filled the courtroom. The judge slammed his gavel down three times before everyone quieted down. My heart jumped with each crack of the gavel. I stared at Eve. She smiled at me, a sad smile.

The judge had the jury taken out and called the lawyers and Eve to the bench. Everyone forgot about me—I could hear everything from the witness stand.

"I won't tolerate grandstanding, Ms. Cresswell."

"This isn't grandstanding, Your Honor. Against my advice, my client wishes to change her plea."

"Your Honor," Purdy complained, "to switch to an insanity plea at this stage is an obvious and blatant abuse of—"

"She's not switching to an insanity defense," Cresswell said quietly. And then the words that changed my life forever:

"She's pleading guilty."

My courtroom experience ended almost as soon as it began. They no longer needed me to testify, because only one person would be testifying: Eve.

In exchange for some sentencing considerations, Eve agreed to "allocute," which I was told meant that she would stand up in open court and describe everything she'd done wrong. Which is how my entire life's sexual experience ended up on the Internet, couched in clipped, formal, sanitized language that made it seem as dirty and as evil as bleach water.

My parents wouldn't let me into court that day. Dad went because Mom said she didn't think she could handle hearing Eve talk about how she had molested me. When Dad came home, all he would tell Mom was "It's over. It's over, Jenna."

Mom cried in relief.

He was wrong, though. It wasn't over. It couldn't be over.

The therapy started almost immediately.

Other than sending me to Dr. Kennedy and taking a stab at some other forms of therapy, my parents didn't know how to deal with me in the first few months after the trial ended so suddenly. on the one hand, I was the victim. That's what everyone kept saying. They wanted, on some level, to coddle and protect me.

But on another level...

On another level, it enraged them that all of this had happened, that Eve had collided with our lives and that I hadn't done anything at all to help out with damage control.

I wasn't allowed to make or receive phone calls. I wasn't allowed out of the house unless it was with Mom or Dad or to go to school. And I had to come home right away. I couldn't tell if this was for my punishment, my protection, or for both.

My prospects of playing baseball were looking grim as the new season approached in eighth grade. I'd missed the entire seventh grade spring season and eighth grade Fall Ball. My fear of my parents' anger went to war with my panic at missing
another
season, and the panic won out, just barely.

I asked them if I would ever be allowed to stay after school for baseball practice, ever be allowed to play ball again at all. They looked at each other and Mom said, "We'll see," and that was that.

A few days later, they allowed me to go to baseball practice. The coaches and teachers watched me every minute I was on the field or on the bench. Mom told me that I was going to be watched, that I wasn't even to
think
about slipping away for even a single second. I was to tell my coach if I had to use the bathroom, and Coach would send someone to go with me, as mortifying as that was.

I was under surveillance constantly. But at least I got to play baseball.

When I returned to school, I was still the Ignored Kid. Everyone walked around me, looked through me, pretended I wasn't there. Which was fine—I didn't want to talk to anyone anyway.

Things changed when a kid bumped into me in the hall one day.

I can't explain what happened. I had always been ... quiet. Always mature and calm. But when that kid bumped into me, something broke deep inside. It was like I had a gyroscope inside my body that kept my balance, kept me on an even keel. And when he bumped into me, that gyroscope spun and tilted, trying to find the center of gravity between anger and acceptance ... and failed. And broke forever.

I screamed and shoved him into a locker and punched him twice. Just twice. I remember that distinctly—once in the gut and once in the mouth. I didn't break anything, though I did bust his lip and cut my knuckles on his teeth.

He stood there, half ready to collapse, held up by the lockers, a look of fear and bewilderment in his eyes, his bloody mouth twisted into a shocked gape. And I felt a sense of relief and calm wash over me for just a second, a relief and a calm I hadn't felt in
months,
a tensionless bliss that hadn't existed since before I went to Eve's apartment. I wanted to hit him again and again and again, to keep that feeling alive, to pound the bliss in with my fists.

Some kids pulled me away from him. I earned my very first suspension and thereafter heard mutters that I was crazy, that Eve had made me nuts. Not just from students, either. Teachers, too. Some were sympathetic, murmuring that the "poor kid" was "dealing with what she did to him."

Others just looked at me, ever after, with worry. And angst. And fear.

***

That year, I got into a lot of fights and beat the crap out of a lot of people. I probably should have been suspended much more than I actually was, but I did my best to fight outside of school and to tease events so that the other person ended up being the aggressor and provoker, letting me claim self-defense.

The truth is, I never particularly cared who I was fighting or even why.

I also took out my aggressions on the baseball. My batting average plummeted to .286 that year, with twenty-one at bats and a measly six hits; not bad for the majors, but pathetic against Little League pitching. My slugging average was an unbelievable .762. I wasn't hitting everything, but what I
did
hit never came back down to earth.

Other kids, older kids, baseballs—I was beating the hell out of them all.

One day, the world turned them all around and sent them back to me.

I was in the backyard, practicing my swing. A big cherry tree grew right on the edge of our property in back, and I had climbed up to the low branches and tied a cord there, at the end of which dangled a ball. I had drilled through the ball and sunk an anchor in there to tie the cord to. It dangled just low enough to be in my strike zone.

The point wasn't to hit the ball
hard,
but just to get used to watching the ball and practice the form of my swing. I would push it out and it would come flying back more or less randomly and I would keep my stance, watch the ball, and swing away.

Zik's parents still wouldn't bring him over and my parents wouldn't let me go over there. And none of the kids in the neighborhood would even look at me (and I couldn't look at them), so this was the best way for me to practice. The only way, really.

It was getting dark and the world was getting quiet in that way that the world does when the sun starts to go down. The back porch lights were on, though, so I had plenty of light to see by, and I just kept whacking away at the ball, completely absorbed in it. I didn't want to go back into the house, where I would either listen to silence or to my parents arguing.

I didn't hear footfalls. I didn't hear anything until he said, "Hey."

I stopped swinging at the ball. I turned around.

"Hey," George Sherman said again.

I remembered the night before I'd gone to the police the first time, standing in the basement, needing to pee so badly as I waited for the phone to ring.

I flickered and when I came out of it, George was saying, "...listen to me!" in a voice like a stone that's been heated until it hisses and sizzles.

"I'm listening." My voice cracked. It hadn't done that in months.

George's hands were clenching and unclenching in time with each other. His eyes were narrow and red. "I can't believe what you did to me. You ruined my life. Do you even know that?"

I flickered again. Eve's leg, cocked—

"Answer me!" George took a step closer to me, and even though I had a baseball bat, I was suddenly terrified. He seemed like a giant, so much taller than me. All I could think of was the Xbox games we'd played together. I was seized by a vast, almost uncontrollable urge to ask him whether he'd ever beaten the game with the dinosaurs.

"
Say
something! You fucking ruined my life! Why did you do that? Why did you have to do that?" A tear slipped down his cheek.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice shook and cracked again.

"Sorry?" he exploded. "Sorry?"

I flickered. I was in Eve's bed for a single, glorious instant.

And then the baseball bat was in the air, jerked from my grasp, spinning as it tumbled, then dropped to the ground ten feet away. I watched it land.

And George started hitting me.

He was taller than I was. Stronger. He wasn't in good shape—all those days and nights of video games and nothing else—but he was a man and I was a boy. I tried to protect myself, throwing my hands up between us, trying to block his blows. He backed me up against the tree—my head smacked into it, hard, and the next thing I knew I was down on the ground and George was crouched over me, his face a twisted mask of rage, pounding me again and again and again.

I imagine that he could have beat me to death right there under the cherry tree in my own backyard if only he could have managed to keep his mouth shut.

But instead, he couldn't seem to stop screaming, bawling at the top of his lungs, as if it wasn't enough to hurt me with his fists—he had to batter my mind with words, too. "You little fucking perv! This is your fault! You ruined my marriage! You fucking piece of shit!"

I heard something above his cries. One of my eyes was already swelling shut, but through the other I could see Dad only a few yards away, the back door standing open. He must have heard the commotion from inside.

I wanted to yell out,
Dad! Help!,
but I couldn't catch my breath. Dad stood there for a second, frozen, as George kept hitting me, popping my nose. Blood ran down my face.

And then Dad finally moved, tackling George off me. They struggled together as I lay no more than a foot away, dazed, battered, staring up at the darkening sky through the branches of the cherry tree. George's words rang in my ears, echoing over and over.
Your fault. Fucking perv. Piece of shit.

Mom was there suddenly. "I called the police!" she yelled. "I already called 911!"

George and Dad stopped wrestling. Dad got up first, watching George carefully as he used the tree to support his way to his feet. Mom came over to me, cradling my head in her lap. "Oh, God. Oh, Josh, don't worry. They're sending an ambulance, too. Don't worry. They're coming."

My nose was bleeding. My mouth was bleeding. Both eyes felt puffy and swollen. My stomach and chest ached.

George heaved his breath, glaring at me from under the tree. Dad stepped closer to me.

"You maniac!" Mom yelled, holding me tighter. "You're an adult! He's just a child!"

George's fists tightened again. Dad took a step closer. I thought it was all going to kick off one more time.

"He fucked my wife!" George wailed. "He ruined my life!"

"Your wife was a goddamn whore!" Mom screamed, and to this day, the most shocking thing about that evening to me was hearing my mother say such a thing in my presence. "You should be beating up your wife, not my son! He's a
child!
She abused him! He's
innocent!
"

George stared at her like she'd just told him the earth is flat and she had proof. "Oh, really?" he said. "Is that what you think? Really?" He reached into his pocket. Mom shrieked and Dad jerked forward.

But he wasn't pulling a gun out of his pocket. It was a cell phone.

I recognized it. My parents couldn't, but I did. It was Eve's.

George flipped it open and dialed a number, then pressed another key to turn on the speakerphone. We all heard a voice start to ask for a password. George interrupted it by punching in the number.

A second later, my voice came out of the cell phone, loud and clear:

"Hi, it's Josh." Mom looked down at me in shock. "I can't wait for two Saturdays from now," I went on from the past.

After a brief pause, my voice continued: "I love you."

Those words. The words on Eve's card. The words I spoke to her on the phone. The words my mother said I couldn't understand.

"Innocent, huh?" George said, and cried like a baby.

A second later, sirens sounded in the air.

I made my third return to school a couple of days later, owner of a puffy lip, a swollen jaw, and a black eye. Two fingers on my left hand were broken—I wouldn't be playing baseball for a while.

No one knew what to make of me, and I didn't blame anybody.
I
didn't know what to make of me.