Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam
TW: Sexual Assault, Alcohol Use
“I thought it was excellent.”
“You’re such a liar.”
“No, I really did!”
“You’re lying, babe.”
“Why is it you always think I’m lying when I say something nice about you?”
At that, Harper looked up from her beer and into his eyes. She wished she couldn’t, but she could always tell the second he lied. He was too readable—at least to her.
“What did you really think?”
He sat up straighter on the bar stool, and anxiously ran his fingers through his long hair. He fiddled with the rims of his glasses, then pushed them higher up onto the bridge of his nose. When he knew that time had run out, he looked back at her, and immediately folded, “It was very messy.”
“It was very messy?”
“All first drafts are messy.”
“But you said it was very messy.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Ok, I did a little. It was messy, Harper, what do you want me to say? That doesn’t mean it isn’t important or isn’t good. It’s a draft, they’re supposed to be messy.”
She looked back down at her drink then, and tried her hardest to stop the tears before they started. No one had ever criticized her stories that harshly, and though she knew that the work deserved it, it still hurt. Badly.
“I didn’t say that I didn’t like it.”
“You basically did by calling it very messy. You left thirty-four comments on it the first time you read it, and another twenty-eight the next time.”
“Most of those were grammatical.”
“Whatever.”
The silence stretched between them then. Harper looked out the window over Ben’s shoulder as he pretended to follow the hockey game on one of the televisions over the bar. Harper crossed and uncrossed her legs under the high table, then smoothed the fabric of her dress out against her thighs.
She suddenly felt very much like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum in a public place. She looked around stealthily to see if anyone was listening in on their conversation, and was surprised to find the bar was nearly empty. When had it gotten so late?
“I’m sorry, I asked you to edit it and now I’m taking offense. That’s not fair.”
“It means a lot to you.”
“That doesn’t matter. I asked you to edit it.”
Ben sucked in a deep breath and slowly looked down into her waiting face. Harper wished she could be a few inches taller for this conversation. “I just think you’re capable of so much more. I’ve read your other stuff, and you have the insight to talk about this in such a meaningful way, and I just want you to get all you can out of it. Genuinely.”
Harper ran her finger along the edge of her empty glass. She couldn’t look him in the eyes.
“I could also be completely wrong. It’s your story.”
“Yeah. It is my story.” Harper couldn’t help the bite in her tone. Somewhere far away, a small voice in her head cried over and over that she would regret acting this way tomorrow morning. Harper was positive that the voice was mistaken, and that she had never been as level-headed or insightful as this moment now.
She swiveled her head to seek out the waitress, and without a word passing between them, Ben turned and ordered Harper the drink that she had just been thinking she wanted. She pushed the love that reared up inside of her to the fringes of her mind, and focused instead on fanning the anger.
It was her story. It hadn’t happened to him. It hadn’t happened to anyone else. Yes, maybe it was messy. But it was her mess. It was hers.
“Harper, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean for you to take it like this.”
“We should go.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“What did you want to get across in it?”
What had she wanted to get across? She didn’t know anymore. At first, she wanted to just figure out what she herself felt. It was still foreign to her, this feeling that she woke up with each and every morning. She kept expecting it to go away, because that was how life worked, right? Sometimes things hurt, but then eventually they stopped hurting. Bruises healed. People moved on.
But this feeling, this all-encompassing dread, stayed. It hid in Harper like a hideous parasite. This wasn’t just a hurt, but rather a vicious sickness that burrowed down through her very skin. It was a feeling that she longed to escape, but she also couldn’t not talk about—not bring up seemingly every other moment—no matter how hard she tried.
“I wanted to show what it felt like to go home after it happened.”
“That’s not what I read from it, but I could’ve read it wrong.”
“Ok.”
“I got more that it was about life in general after it happened.” As soon as he said it, Harper knew he was right. He really was a great editor. “I’m serious, you just need to hunker down on a few points and I think, in a couple more drafts, it’s going to be spectacular. And I mean that in a ‘worldwide’ spectacular sort of way.” He raised his glass back up to his lips, and Harper wondered if he did it because he wanted a drink, or if he just needed an excuse to break eye contact, to not speak for a couple of seconds. When the glass hit the table again, he looked conflicted. She practically already knew that the next words out of his mouth would be, “Let’s go home.”
Of course, home didn’t mean the same thing to the two of them. This had been a point of contention since the moment they first met. In Manhattan, uptown and downtown meant a long-distance relationship.
The night air took Harper by surprise the second she stepped out into it, and in that moment she knew that she had had too much to drink. Fuck. She resented how often she played the role of the sloppy, self-indulgent artist.
As she turned away to begin the trek uptown, Ben’s hand reached out and stopped her, “Harper, I’m walking you home.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you are not.”
“I want to spend time with you anyway. It’s not only that I need to walk you home.”
“I just want to walk myself home.”
“Harper, I’m walking you home.”
The frustration choked her then, and in the pavement cracks she could make out another man’s smile. She scuffed her toe against the concrete and willed herself to be less weak—to be the kind of person that walked themselves home and then…nothing. To lock the door and go to sleep.
She wasn’t that person, obviously. She knew that that was impossible for her, and, looking into his face, she saw that Ben knew it, too. He gave her a small, melancholy smile in an attempt to bridge the divide that she had created between the two of them, and suddenly Harper was furious.
“It doesn’t fucking matter. The night you walked me home, I got fucking raped anyway.”
Harper regretted saying it. She regretted it the second the words breached her lips. Maybe she regretted it even sooner than that, but she found it impossible not to say.
It was the cruelest thing she had ever said in her life.
“Ben, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s ok.” He wasn’t ok.
“Ben, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s ok if you did.”
“No, I didn’t, I swear I didn’t. I didn’t mean it, Ben.”
“I would have.”
“What?” Harper realized then that there were people on the street other than them, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care who heard what anymore.
“I think about that constantly, you know. I think about the fact that I walked you home every single day. And it still happened. I was with you that night, and it still happened.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Even if you did something differently, it still would have happened.”
“If I would’ve invited you to my place, it wouldn’t have.”
“I would’ve said no.’
“You wouldn’t have.”
“I could’ve.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“It’s not your fault.” Harper had never considered this. It had never occurred to her that Ben would have opinions of his own about what had happened. She realized then that she had never thought at all about how it affected him. Her face burned with shame and self-loathing, and she didn’t fight as he pulled her along beside him.
They were descending into the subway during this, and Harper’s final words could’ve gotten caught up and taken away by the wind. Odds are, they weren’t. Odds are, he heard her and kept moving straight ahead; focused on when the next train would arrive. He was always focused on getting her home. She loved him so much then. She loved him more than she loved fresh coffee or the smell of verbena or the color blue. She loved him more than he would ever believe.
“The fucking train is delayed.” His shoulders slumped, and he pulled Harper to the very end of the station. She looked around, but there was hardly anyone else there. Was she being loud without knowing? It was likely.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She buried her head in the crook of his neck and shut her eyes tight.
The train came then. It shook the ground beneath their feet and swallowed up all the surrounding noise. When the doors opened, he took her hand and pulled her inside the car. Though her feet screamed at her to walk home, she followed him. She knew he was right. And she hated that. He held her hand in both of his for the entire train ride.
When her stop arrived, he gently pulled her to her feet, and guided her out of the car and onto the desolate platform beyond. The quiet unsettled Harper. The buskers had long since left the underground behind. The usual accordion notes lived only in her own mind now, so she was the only one to hear the haunting and lonely tune echoing through the tunnels.
“I don’t want you to go home alone. What if something bad happens?” Harper felt idiotic and hypocritical for feeling this way after her previous outburst. Goddammit, she hated herself sometimes.
“I’m ok.”
“You take the 1 to 72 and then you take the 3 all the way down, remember?”
“Yes, Harper, I remember.”
“If the train isn’t coming at 72 then you can also wait until 42. Worst case scenario, just take the 1 the whole way, okay? Sometimes the trains don’t run at night.”
“I know how to get home.”
“I know you do.” She could tell that she was acting completely irrationally then, but she couldn’t help herself.
“This is where I leave you.” He smiled, and clasped her hand in his one final time before slowly letting his fingers unclutch, and retreating down the tunnel and deeper underground. He would never kiss her in the subway. Ben would never do something so public and grotesque.
Harper waved a few more times as he traveled further down the platform. He returned her waves until he couldn’t anymore, until the ceiling and floor colluded in swallowing him whole. Harper waited at her spot one level above him until the train came. He couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t see him, but still she watched until it pulled all the way out of the station. Only when the silence persisted, and she was confident that she was the last remaining person underground, did Harper breathe a sigh of relief and exit out into the night.
Reese Alexander is a sophomore at Barnard. She is an English major, and plans to concentrate in creative writing. Reese is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and her two favorite triple word phrases are Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Pumpkin Spice Latte.