Curtain

Ella Boehme

Their laughter comes back to me every May. 

That laughter, I’ll never forget it, the way it lilted and screeched. I understand the opera singers that hit notes so high they shatter glass with only their voices. Since then, I’ve heard that’s a myth, but that day it seemed like shrill voices could have sent entire cities crumbling to dust. 

When I was younger, I attended a small school past the outskirts of a rural town. The entire student body added up to less than a hundred and fifty kids, kindergarten through eighth grade. The school itself was bordered by cattle pastures on three sides and sagebrush on the fourth. I often looked out the window during English class and saw horses trodding by, or cows staring placidly back at me, chewing their cud.  

The school grounds were surrounded by barbed wire fences (to keep the cattle and horses out, and the children in) and magpies and meadowlarks were often perched there. A few times, all the children were herded inside during lunchtime because a mountain lion had been spotted nearby by a farmer. While we were all inside, looking longingly at the outdoors, a herd of deer wandered onto the lawn and grazed there until school was out. Though the school was small and underfunded, the eighth-grade class raised money every year for a class trip. Five days on the Catalina Islands. The trip depended on us raising the money to go, and this year we’d raised enough to spend two nights in cabins and the remaining two nights camping by the beach.  

It was a warm May day, the first day of our trip, and after swimming I returned to the cabin. I was fourteen, the age where girls are supposed to start protecting each other. Adults wonder why girls of that age cry so much, and rage at the world, and keep their bedroom door locked–it’s because even if we don’t know it–we’re realizing that our bodies are not ours anymore.   

We become acutely aware that safety is an illusion. Our body belongs to the man on the bus with a strange smile, the boys in our class who can’t stop themselves, the car that honks, and the teacher with high heels who gives us old T-shirts from the lost and found to cover our shoulders. Somehow, our constant anger is irrational and childish. At least, I suppose, we’re still seen as children in a way. 

Girls are supposed to hold towels up to shield each other with a curtain; it’s a sign of trust to let someone do that for you, to know that they won’t let it fall. Until they do. 

I don’t know if it was an accident or not, but my friend dropped the towel. Suddenly, I was exposed to everyone in that room–laid bare, literally and figuratively–and I tried frantically to cover myself with something or anything, but my hands weren’t big enough to shield all of me. Not even close.  

Until then, I never understood the phrase “laughing like hyenas,” until I was drowning in it, and the fear I felt was comparable; they may as well have been carnivorous dogs, the way I cowered and waited for claws to tear into my flesh, knowing there was nothing to protect me. 

The world stretched, blurring at the edges. What was only seconds to them was hours to me, but I yanked the towel from the floor and covered myself, staring at them with betrayal, and all I could hiss out was “What did you see?” 

And the girl who always wore makeup, doubled over in her laughter, and said, “We saw everything.” 
Everything. 

I did the most childish thing, and I crawled onto the top bunk in the cabin and hid myself under the blankets and dressed there. No one would hold a towel for me again. I’d never let them. It was like being a little kid hiding in the dark of night from monsters, but this was the blinding brightness of day, and these monsters weren’t imaginary, they were my friends.  

The laughing eventually died down. Maybe they thought I was done being angry, that I’d pop my head up and act like nothing had happened. Somehow, they knew that as a child, I’d been trained to return to normal right after I was scared or hurt. They’d used that tactic mercilessly on me as school bullies, and I had always bounced back, but I wasn’t so quick now.  

One of them offered an apology, but I didn’t respond. I squeezed my eyes shut and hated her, hated all of them so much that my fingernails dug red crescents into the palms of my hand. In my mind’s eye, I was brave enough to jump up and punch them all in the throat, but I couldn’t do it for real. That meant they’d have to see me, and I never wanted to be seen again.  

The next day while I was alone, a boy cornered me on the trail. He was the only boy in our class, gangly and pale, and a little odd. I had never found him threatening until he told me what he was going to do to me the second I let my guard down, how he’d sneak into my tent and whatever he did, “I’d like it.”  

The words rotted down through my eardrums, curling around my brain even after he disappeared out of sight. I hiked until I found service and called my mom. I cried and asked her what I should do. “He’s harmless, really,” she said nonchalantly. “You could fight him off if you needed to. I wouldn’t worry about it.”  

What I didn’t tell her was that while his back was receding down the trail, he said over his shoulder, “Maybe I’ve already done those things to you, and you just don’t know.”  

And then again, the towel seemed to be torn away. Whatever illusion of safety had remained, however frail it had been, this shredded it and left nothing behind. 

Anyone who had met him said: He’s not right in the head, he’s a little off. He didn’t know what he said was a threat. He doesn’t know what to say. Poor boy, for not knowing, for being born that way. Poor boy. 

And the truth is, when I see him now and we’re both so much older, I always ask “how are you?” I had conversations with his mother when I was a cashier, when she’d come through my line. No matter what else she was buying, she always got an expensive bottle of white wine.  

She didn’t see me as the enemy, because when the girls in my class heard what he said, they were furious at him, and some of them told their mothers, and some of their mothers got angry at his mother. They took their daughters out of school so they would be safe from him. My mother didn’t do that. Unlike the other girls, I didn’t ignore him and pretend he didn’t exist whenever he came near me. I was always kind to him, even though I’m unsure if he deserved it.  

I remember, when the school found out, they let him stay home and they dedicated an entire day to teaching us about how to avoid sexual assault. We were held responsible, while his punishment was to stay home and learn nothing except what his mother told him, which was also nothing. 

The worst part, when I smile at his mother and ask how he’s doing, it’s not entirely fake. I know my classmates had bullied him that entire year, that he was the only boy, that he wasn’t as mature as the rest of us. There were so many excuses that could be made for him, to deflect the blame. I defended him from teachers and classmates, over and over again, and even when he turned on me with those words and threats that made my skin crawl, I couldn’t stop feeling sympathy for him. 

I have difficulty feeling sympathy for both of us at the same time, though. 

At camp, he climbed up on the cliffs high over the island after the teachers and chaperones knew what he’d said. My teacher climbed up after him and they exchanged words that none of us would ever know. Maybe it was a reassurance, maybe a plea to change his mind and calm down. I do know that once they came down from the cliff, the teacher laid the blame on us, on me, on our bodies for provoking that boy, and then for upsetting him when we held him accountable. Our fault. My fault. 

That’s the truth. That’s the real story.  

I lay awake that night, tightly gripping a rock I’d smuggled into my sleeping bag. I planned that if he was to come into the tent like he said he would, I would smash the rock into his skull. All of us girls wore three pairs of underwear and three pairs of pants that night; we dressed in them while we spoke, hushed, trying to reassure ourselves that this would stop him from reaching us. We all felt exposed.  

I escaped, and my mind left the camp in the darkness, walked up that winding trail and ventured out across the coastal brush and through the scrub oak, pushing through curtains of wild cucumber. I walked along the edge of the cliffs and stared down at the water – even at night – I could see the splotches of orange garibaldis. The dark waves rippled, and in the pitch black of night, the little bioluminescent creatures lit up the water. Just in spots, where the water crashes against the rocks or the shore, little bits of glowing pale green. It’s strange, because when I go back to my memory, the bioluminescence is pale green, but in all the photos online it’s pale blue.  

In the tent, I heard something outside, and my grip on the rock tightened. Someone was there, I heard footsteps on the gravel. The steps were slow, like a predator stalking, but they were there, and they sent my heartbeat into a gallop. 

I tried to go somewhere else. Back to that cliff over the night ocean, where the moon is just a thin sliver high in the sky, where the lights of the Southern California coastline are so far away.  

There was breathing, the way someone breathes when they’re scared, and my breath sounded terrified too. A shadow paused on the tent’s fabric, or had I imagined it? My mom used to say that faraway city lights looked like a jewelry box, twinkling silver, orange topaz, and pale gold. Across the water, the city looked more like a thin necklace. I stretched out my arms and let the night wind buffet me, it pillowed against my body, and I stepped off the edge of the cliff. I didn’t fall, I flew. 

My heart pounded so hard that I could hear the blood in my ears, my entire skull took the shockwaves like drumbeats. The rock dug red indents into my palm and fingers. Finally, whoever was outside the tent left, the footsteps grew further and further away until I heard the faint sound of a tent zipper opening and closing. 

Though my heart slowed down, I kept my eyes squeezed shut and flew over the moonlit Pacific, following the waves that glowed pale green.