It Happens All the Time: A Novel

I stayed in bed for days after the party. I didn’t go to work, I didn’t eat. I didn’t leave my room except to shower, thinking that if I sloughed off enough skin, I might be able to erase the damage my best friend had done.

I’m sick, I told myself. I feel like I have a fever. That’s what it was. A sickness. Nothing else. My immune system attempting to incinerate the images flashing through my mind. If I just hid beneath the covers long enough, I might wake up in a day, a week, or a month, fully cured. I might be able to believe the night never happened.

I kept my eyes closed as much as possible, constantly trying to force myself to sleep. I took more Benadryl, relishing the black, dreamless oblivion the tiny pink pills brought about. But when I awoke, when I kicked my legs, rising to the surface of that fuzzy, self-induced sea of escape, all that waited for me was the weight of Tyler pressing down on my bones. All I felt was his strong hands, gripping, his knees forcing my thighs to open, the pain shooting through my pelvis like a flesh-tearing bullet, one that was now lodged inside my gut.

Why hadn’t I screamed? Why didn’t I hit and claw and scratch at him until he was forced to stop? Instead, I froze, I gave up and gave in, and let it happen. If I had fought the way I should have, if I had actually said NO, if I had shrieked it in his ear over and over again, he might have heard me. He might have stopped. The Tyler I knew would have stopped. I started to wonder if I had imagined saying anything to him at all. I’d been so drunk, maybe I only thought I’d asked him to wait? Maybe the only protestations I’d made were inside my head.

My parents hovered around me the same way they had when I was a teenager, trying to get me to talk, trying to force bits of food into my mouth. “I made you baked chicken and brown rice,” my mother said a few days after Liz and Tyler had showed up. It was close to noon, and my dad was at work. “No butter, just a little salt and pepper, a drizzle of olive oil. The way you made it for us.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. This was true. I knew my stomach was empty, that I needed the sustenance, but I couldn’t fathom putting anything other than water in my body. I felt certain if I did, I’d throw it right back up.

“Honey, please,” my mom said. I could hear the desperation in her voice.

“Maybe later,” I replied, which was the same answer I used to give her whenever she tried to get me to eat in high school. I lay in my bed in a ball, my knees brought up as close as possible to my chest. If I closed my eyes tight enough, maybe the memories couldn’t find me. If I made myself small enough, maybe I could just disappear.

“Your dad and I are worried,” she said, as she set the plate she carried onto my nightstand. “You need to talk to someone.”

“No.”

“We understand you don’t want to—”

“I’m not doing it, Mom,” I said, cutting her off. “So you can stop right now.” I didn’t tell her I was too afraid to talk to the police. I couldn’t stand the idea of being told that I was wrong, that my worst fears would only be confirmed—that this was my fault as much as his, and I was just a drunk, stupid girl who decided too late that she’d made a mistake.

My mom sat down on the edge of my bed, placing a gentle hand on my hip. “You can’t pretend this didn’t happen, Amber. Pushing it down is just going to make it worse. Tyler needs to be held accountable.”

“What about me?” I straightened my legs and rolled over onto my back, looking at my mother’s angst-ridden face. She looked as tired as I felt, and her eyes were swollen, too. “Aren’t I accountable, too?” She opened her mouth, like she was about to rebut what I’d said, but I held up my hand to stop her. “No, Mom. I’m serious. I totally led him on. I gave him every sign that I wanted to sleep with him. It’s not just his fault.”

“I know you think that’s true, honey, but you’re wrong. Even if you said yes at first, what matters . . . what makes what he did to you so wrong . . . is that you also told him to stop.”

I considered her words; the guilt I might feel about leading Tyler to believe that I wanted to have sex with him—hell, even believing, temporarily, in my drunken state, that I wanted it, too—didn’t make what he did to me any less heinous. It didn’t make it any less of a betrayal. I racked my brain, trying to remember the moment that the word “no” left my mouth, and couldn’t come up with it.

When I didn’t say anything, my mother tried another approach. “What about a counselor?” she asked. “Someone who knows how to help with issues like this? I can make some calls—”

“Mom! Stop it, please. I’ll be fine. I just need to rest.” I shifted so I was on my side again, facing away from her. I knew she was only trying to help, but there was nothing she could do. Nothing anyone could say to take away the lightning bolt of pain in my chest every time I took a breath.

“You can’t stay in bed forever,” she said, quietly.

“Watch me,” I said, and a moment later, she stood up and left the room.

•  •  •

But hiding in my room fixed nothing. As the hours and days passed, I grew antsy, unable to sleep as much as I wanted, and the antihistamines I took began to jack me up instead of knock me out. I finally forced myself to go back to work ten days after the party. Most of my bruises had faded by then, and my body didn’t ache as much as it had the first week. Still, I dressed in full-length black leggings and a long-sleeved, moisture-wicking shirt, not wanting to risk my boss or any of my clients seeing the ghostly yellow smudges of Tyler’s fingers on my skin.

I got to the gym early, around five thirty, thinking that I might be able to get in a quick workout of my own before my first client came in. I still wasn’t eating any solid food—the thought of chewing anything made me nauseous—but I’d managed to sip down half of a protein shake my dad made for me in the kitchen before I left, the same kind of shake he’d been bringing to my room for several days.

“You sure you feel up to this?” he asked, looking at me with an equal mix of fear and sorrow in his blue eyes. He was up earlier than usual, too, unable to sleep, he said—too many thoughts spinning in his head. He was still in his pajamas.

I bobbed my head and glanced at his right hand. His knuckles weren’t swollen anymore, but his skin held hints of black and blue. “Do they hurt?” I asked.

He flexed his fingers, and then curled them back into a fist. “Nah,” he said. “And it would be worth it, even if they did.”

I managed a small smile, and then hugged him. “I love you, Pops.”

“Love you, too, baby girl,” he said, and I knew he was fighting back tears.

Now, as I exited the locker room and went out onto the gym floor, I took several deep breaths, in and out, trying to steady my pulse. I felt shaky and a little weak, like I was recovering from the flu. That’s all it was, I told myself again. An illness. And now you’re going to get over it by focusing on what you do best.

I stepped onto the elliptical machine and started it up, setting a sixty-minute program for interval mountain climbing. My heartbeat began to pulse inside my head, and little by little, some of the tension inside me relaxed, which just confirmed that coming back to work was the right thing for me to do. I needed to bathe my brain in slippery gushes of serotonin. I needed to pretend that nothing had changed. I was still Amber, the girl who would soon sit for the certification test that would be the liftoff point for her career. I’d been foolish to get involved with Daniel, stupid to get sucked in by the false security of romance. I needed to focus on me and what I wanted for my life. Nothing else mattered. Not even what Tyler had done.

A few hours later, I was just finishing up my session with Doris when the front desk announced over the loudspeaker that I had a visitor. I felt myself go pale as I considered who it might be. Would Tyler really come here? After what happened at my house with my dad, would he take that risk?

“You all right, honey?” Doris asked with concern. She was lying on her back on one of the gym mats, going through a series of cooldown stretches I’d taught her. “Are you feeling sick again?”

“A little,” I said, thinking this would explain why I’d broken out in a cold sweat. I gently helped pull her to a sitting position.

“Maybe you came back too soon,” she said, grabbing a white towel from the floor and patting her face with it.

“Maybe.” I kept my eyes on the doorway that led to the reception area, posed to sprint into the ladies’ locker room if Tyler appeared. He wouldn’t follow me in there, would he? I wondered, and then remembered that I had no idea what Tyler was capable of. What sins he would be willing to commit.

I stood up and held out my left hand, encouraging Doris to do the same. “Where’s your ring?” she asked as she gripped my fingers with her knobbed joints and crepey, tissue-paper-like skin. I carefully assisted her up to her feet.

I didn’t answer right away, because I hadn’t thought about what to tell people about me and Daniel. I didn’t have a lie ready. “We broke up,” I said, deciding that I should keep to the simple truth. No one needed to know the details.

“Anything to do with that handsome best friend of yours?” Doris raised her white brows and gave me a knowing look.

“No,” I said, practically choking on the word. Tears sprang to my eyes and I had to fight hard to keep them from falling.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. But it wasn’t. Nothing would ever be fine again.

Doris put her hand on my forearm and squeezed. “It’ll take some time to heal, but I promise, you will get over it. You’re a strong young woman. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“Thank you,” I said, forcing a smile. I glanced at the clock, and saw that I wouldn’t have another client until noon, so that left me no excuse but to head up front and see who was waiting for me. “I’ll see you Friday?” I asked Doris, and she nodded, then headed across the floor.

Just then, another gym employee, Tucker, walked by me. “Hey, Tuck,” I said. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said. He was in his early thirties, and his wife worked at the gym as a trainer, too. They both competed as professional bodybuilders, and Tuck had recently reached a national level.

“Will you go look up front and tell me if a tall blond guy is standing there?” Please God, don’t let it be him.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Just someone I really don’t want to see right now.” Or ever, actually. I couldn’t believe I was thinking these things about Tyler. I’d thought we’d be friends forever. I’d thought he’d be the one person outside of my parents who I could always trust. Now, I worried if I saw him, I’d start screaming the way I did when he walked into my bedroom.

“Gotcha,” Tuck said, and then he made his way toward the entrance to the building. He was back less than a minute later. “No blond guy. Just a long-legged, pretty girl sitting on the bench, looking at her phone.”

“Thanks,” I said, and felt a shiver of relief.

“No problem. If that guy you don’t want to see shows up, you just let me know, and I’ll boot his ass out.”

I managed a smile, and then wove my way through the equipment toward the reception area. The girl’s head was down, intent on whatever she was looking at on her phone, and the sheet of her blond long hair covered her face. But when she looked up, I knew exactly who it was.

“Amber!” Heather exclaimed as she shoved her phone in her purse and leapt to her feet. She trotted over to me and we hugged.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, shocked to see my childhood friend standing in front of me. We had emailed a little after she moved to California, but as time went on, our communication lessened, until it ceased altogether.

“Seeing family,” she said. “My grandparents moved back here in January, but this is the first time I’ve been able to visit.” She pulled back and looked me over. I did the same to her, not surprised to see that she hadn’t changed much. She was still several inches taller than me, ballerina thin, and the angles of her bone structure still made it impossible to look anywhere but her sky-blue eyes. She wore a simple white sundress and tan, thin-strapped sandals. Her skin was golden, and her eyelashes were unnaturally long and black.

“Are those real?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

“My lashes or my tits?” she asked, and I laughed, something I hadn’t done since the night of the party. I looked at her chest, and noticed that her breasts did seem larger than I remembered. For a dancer, a flat chest was the norm—even the goal.

“Well,” I said, “now that you mention it . . .”

“Totally got my boobs done!” she said, laughing, too, seemingly oblivious to the stares of the receptionist and the few other gym goers in the immediate area. “And the lashes are extensions. I’m only, like, ninety-eight percent organic.”

I laughed again, thrilled with the sense of normalcy it gave me. I’d done enough crying over the past ten days to last me a lifetime. “So you’re visiting your grandparents,” I said, “but how did you find me?”

“I stopped by your parents’ place and your mom told me where you’re working.” Heather’s eyes roamed to the handsome, well-muscled young receptionist at the desk, then came back to me. “Nice décor. I can see why you like it.”

“Are you still in San Francisco? Are you still dancing?”

“Whoa!” Heather said. “Too many questions and not enough time. When are you off? Can we get a drink?”

My stomach rebelled at the idea of imbibing any alcohol, but I nodded. On top of working, spending some time with Heather while she was here would be an excellent distraction. A way to help me get back on track. “I’m off around three,” I told her.

“Should we get dinner, too?” Heather asked.

“Sure,” I said, knowing I still wouldn’t be able to eat anything. I’d have to rely on the tricks I’d used as a teenager, cutting up and moving my food around the plate to make it look like some of it was gone.

“Yay!” Heather squealed and hugged me again. “It’s so good to see you. I can’t wait to catch up!”

“Me, too,” I said, wondering how I would manage to make small talk without mentioning Tyler. I hoped Heather wouldn’t ask about him; maybe if I didn’t say his name, she wouldn’t, either. I’d fill her head with stories about school and Daniel, about the engagement and our recent breakup, knowing she’d get sucked right into the drama of all that. I wouldn’t say anything about the party on the Fourth of July. I wouldn’t tell her that since that night, my insides had felt like a jumbled mass of broken glass.

“Where should we go?” Heather asked. “I want tapas and fancy cocktails!”

“Poppe’s on Lakeway is good for that kind of thing,” I said. “Or so I’ve heard.” Tyler was the one, actually, who’d told me about that particular bar. He said I couldn’t leave Bellingham without trying their steamed mussels or fish tacos.

“Perfect!” Heather said. “Pick you up at your house around eight?”

I nodded. “See you then!” I said, trying to imitate her upbeat, lighthearted tone. Fake it till you make it, I heard my own voice saying, the same cheesy line I’d feed my clients when they told me they couldn’t finish their workouts. “Pretend that you can,” I’d urge them. “Pretend it until it’s actually true.”

I waved to Heather as she headed out to the parking lot, thinking that maybe that was what my life would consist of from now on—playing pretend, a carefully orchestrated performance, a contrived but lovely outside shell covering up the nightmare of fear and dysfunction underneath. Maybe my mother was wrong and I could find a way to push down what had happened. If I asked my clients to fake it, to push past the limits of what they thought they had the capacity to do, then I should be able to do the same thing.

That was what I told myself later that night as I stood in the bathroom, getting ready to meet Heather. Since the ends of my hair were still uneven from how I’d chopped it off, I pinned it up, leaving a few pieces loose to frame my face. I put on more makeup than usual: foundation, blush, a dark slash of red lipstick, black cat-eye liner, and lots of mascara. Turning my head from side to side, pursing my lips as I stared at my reflection, I was relieved to not look like myself. The girl in the mirror was someone else entirely—a girl encased in armor thick enough to repel any memory, strong enough to protect her from further attack. She was the only one I could trust.

Before I went back to my room to get dressed, I hopped on the scale, unable to deny the rush of pleasure I felt in seeing that the number had gone down. Ten days without solid food had been long enough for me to start feeling a familiar and airy, elevated sense of strength—the ability to deny my body’s primal, basic need for nourishment was a high better than any drug I could take. I told myself that my willpower had always been forged out of steel; the rest of me could be, too.

“Why don’t you girls just hang out here?” my mom suggested when I walked into the kitchen, where she and my dad were sitting at the table, sipping glasses of white wine. Their dirty dinner plates were on the counter, and I had to look away before the sight of the gristly, gnawed-upon chicken bones made me sick.

“Heather wants to go out,” I said, as I poured myself a glass of water from the Brita pitcher in the fridge. “I do, too.” That was what I was telling myself, anyway.

“We’re not sure it’s a good idea,” my dad said. He set his hands flat on the table, fingers widespread, as though he were bracing himself for an argument. “You’ve been through a lot, and you just started back to work.”

“Which was good for me, by the way,” I said. I chugged down the entire contents of the glass, my stomach temporarily sated. “The sooner I get back to normal, the better.”

My mom shook her head. “You’re pushing yourself too hard, Amber. You need—”

I banged the now-empty glass I held on to the counter, cutting her off, giving them a defiant look. “You don’t get to decide what I need.” I wished I’d never told them what happened at the party. I should have kept my mouth shut. The more people who know a secret, the harder it is to keep.

“You’re not thinking straight,” my dad said, his voice firm. “We just want to help you do the right thing.”

“You don’t get to decide that, either.” I heard a quick honk from outside, and I peeked out the kitchen window to see Heather waving at me from her white rental car, which she’d parked in the driveway. “See you later,” I said, grabbing my purse from the counter. My mom started to say something else, but I cut her off by slamming the back door.

Ten minutes later, Heather and I were seated in a booth at the small hotel bar I’d told her about earlier. The place wasn’t crowded yet, and the only music playing was some kind of jazz, low in the background, so we didn’t need to shout in order to be heard.

“Okay,” she said, taking a sip of the lemon drop cocktail our server had just delivered. “Tell me everything. Work, school, men. In that order.”

I smiled, and gave her the shorthand version of my history over the past nine years, since I’d seen her last, leaving out any mention of Tyler and the time I’d spent in the hospital. The only place I went into detail was my relationship with Daniel, telling her how we had dated, gotten engaged, and then, broke up.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Why? He sounds so perfect.” She paused, holding up her index finger. “Wait. Don’t tell me. There has to be someone else. For you, or him?”

The smile on my face froze, and I shook my head. “Neither.”

“Seriously? You just ended things with a hot, sweet guy who’s going to be a doctor?”

“Yep,” I said, reflexively taking a sip of the pomegranate martini I’d ordered when Heather had asked for her drink. I’d asked for it for appearance’s sake, just to have something to do with my hands, but now, the alcohol warmed my belly and eased the tension in my muscles.

“That’s nuts,” Heather said. “I’d kill for a guy like that.”

“He’s living in Seattle,” I said. “I’ll give you his number. Go for it.” I couldn’t believe the words as they came out of my mouth; they were something I never would have said before.

“Girl, please,” Heather said with a grin. “No way I’m settling for sloppy seconds. If you don’t want him, he can’t be all that great.”

“He is, actually,” I said, swallowing down a bit more of my drink. I’ll just have this one cocktail, I thought. I won’t do any shots. Definitely no tequila. “But I’m not ready to settle down yet. I’m too young. I want to focus on me.”

“I get that,” Heather said. She took a handful of the trail mix the server had set before us when we got there and popped it in her mouth. After she had chewed, she spoke again. “That’s kind of what I told my parents when I said I wasn’t going to college. My dad totally freaked. He had some weird idea in his head that I might follow in his footsteps and become an English professor, too. Which was crazy, because my grades begged to differ with that fantasy.”

“Why didn’t you want to go to college?” I asked, enjoying the there-but-not-there feeling the martini was giving me, especially on an empty stomach. I couldn’t believe I was just sitting here like any other twenty-something girl, having drinks and conversation with a friend. I wondered what hidden, dark circumstances the lives of the people around us might hold. Maybe all of us were walking around, pretending to be normal, when inside, our worlds were falling apart.

“Mostly because I was focused on being a dancer for so long. I thought I’d go to New York and join some prestigious ballet company and make a name for myself. And then my knee gave out and that dream was over, so I started teaching at a private dance school in Berkeley. I love it. It’s all I want to do, and even though I’m totally supporting myself, my parents are all over me to get a degree ‘just in case.’ ”

“In case of what?” I asked. “If dance classes are outlawed or something?”

“Exactly!” Heather said. “See, you get it. The studio owner already is grooming me to take over for her when she retires, so I’m saving as much as I can, and working on a business plan to present to the bank so I can get a loan. I researched how to do it on the Internet. I don’t need a degree.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t.” I paused, and allowed myself to eat three peanuts from the bowl of trail mix, just for appearance’s sake, chewing each of them slowly, happy that I didn’t have to fight the urge to throw them back up. Heather and I had been so busy talking, neither of us had mentioned ordering an actual meal, which was fine with me. It would be easier not to.

Just then, our server appeared again, as though my thoughts of food had summoned her. She held a tray with two more drinks in hand.

“We didn’t order those,” I said, looking at Heather and then raising a single eyebrow. “Did we?” I wasn’t drunk, but I felt tipsy enough that I figured I should ask, just to be sure.

“No,” the server said as she set the cocktails in front of us. “They’re courtesy of the gentlemen sitting at the end of the bar.” She nodded in that general direction, and the men sitting there lifted their pints of beer and smiled. They were older, in their mid- to late thirties, probably—suit-and-tie types who were likely married and looked like the sort to hit on younger women for sport.

“Awesome,” Heather said, quickly finishing her first drink so the server could take the empty away. “Can I get the fish tacos, too, please?” The server made a note on the pad she carried and then asked me if I wanted something to eat, too.

“No, thanks,” I said, and so she left, heading toward the kitchen. “I don’t know if we should accept those,” I went on, looking at Heather. It felt wrong, somehow, letting these strange men pay for our drinks, like we were giving them the right to the possibility of more than that.

“It’s just drinks,” Heather said, lifting the second cocktail up and smiling at the men, too. “It doesn’t mean anything else.”

I nodded, but I didn’t know how to tell her how wrong she was. That it’s possible for a man to interpret a woman’s initial permission as license to steamroll over any boundary she might set after that. That once a woman says yes, it’s possible a man might not give a shit when she changes her mind. He might tear off her clothes; he might bruise her body and send splinters of blistering fear into her soul. He might do this even if he’s someone she knows, someone she loves and trusts. And then she might end up in a bar with a fake smile plastered on her face, trying to act like none of it mattered, trying to believe, despite the agony deep down inside her bones, that she’s over what he did, desperate to pretend she’s safe.