Angela’s shaky recorded voice fought the drunken whoops and chatter of the surrounding college party as I listened to her message on my phone: “You can tell how upset I am by the fact I’m calling you.” Things had fizzled between us after I slept with the boy she liked. I’d liked him too; I just hadn’t talked about it as loudly or as often as she had, and I’m the one he picked. At least that night—the next day he wouldn’t even meet my eyes. It didn’t matter; she never forgave me.
After listening to Angela’s message, I told the others at the party what she’d said, because I had to. I told them, “My friend said her friend was raped and murdered outside a nightclub.” They just gazed at me silently, like they hadn’t even heard, like I hadn’t torn through the skin of the world and revealed its festering innards. It was as if I didn’t exist, and did they think I was just trying to get attention? I have no idea what they thought, because they didn’t say anything, they just stared at me with bullets for eyes.
So, I left and went to my dorm room, and I sat on my single bed’s faded quilt, I examined the dust whirls on my un-vacuumed floor, and then I called Angela back. She told me the whole story. I tried to listen, tried to do what I could, which was nothing, and even though I didn’t know the dead woman the story unfolded in my imagination, and I pictured it moment by moment and it was unbearable. Even though I hated Angela, I wished I could do something. But I couldn’t.
Angela said: “They drove around in her car afterwards and they went to a party and bragged about it and laughed at her last words, and do you want me to tell you what they were?”
And I said no. Because I knew if I heard them, I’d hear them forever and they’d become a part of who I was. But not knowing made me imagine what the girl had said, lying there in a trash-stained alley behind a nightclub, her body torn and throbbing, getting the same message I got third hand mainlined into her veins for the last few seconds before they shot her in the head. Did she beg? She must have begged. Could she have been defiant, maybe got off a zinger that lodged in one of their minds and maybe it multiplied like a cancer and made him see who he really was and want to die as well?
Angela told me she put a bottle of Ouzo in her friend’s grave because her friend had loved it when she was alive. And she just wished her death hadn’t been someone else’s choice. And the people who did it were caught and were going to trial. I never found out if they went to jail.
You can make any plans you like. You can have a life overflowing with friends and family who love you, but still men can grab you outside a nightclub where you’ve gone to have a cigarette and rape you in the back seat of your car and then shoot you and leave your body there and that’s how your story ends.
Two weeks after Angela’s phone call I was walking with a friend at night, kicking puddles and warping the streetlights’ reflections, feeling skinless in the dark, a bit insane for daring to go outside. A group of boys drove by and yelled something out the car window, a blur of twisted silly-putty faces. I spat at them, and that helped, somehow, for a little while. That helped.
Twenty years later I watched a music video and saw a girl flop into the back seat of a car and her legs dangled out the door and the whole thing came back and repeated in my head over and over for hours like the return of a chronic infection, like a burning, corrosive rash.
I wonder what she said to them. Her final words fall like poetry magnets in my mind, forming sentences, breaking apart, coming together again. What could she have said?
