Page 57 of Resilience

Trouble was always when Athena felt her difference most keenly. She’d been forgotten.

When she felt strong enough to brave the chaos again, she opened the door.

Her mother was standing right outside, hands on hips, frown in place. When Athena stepped out of the bathroom, Mom grabbed her face and looked her over carefully. Then she asked, “What’s going on?”

“I’m okay. Just so freaked out I got sick.”

“Vomiting sick?”

Athena nodded. Then Mom put her hands on her shoulders to hold her in place and studied her some more.

“When are you due, Athena?”

In the time she needed to lift her hands, ready to ask Due where?, Athena figured out what her mother meant, and her hands froze.

Her period was regular-ish, heavy on the ish. The window of possibility for its start was about four days, but when it arrived, its duration was predictable: four days, the first one light, the second heavy, then tapering off over the next two.

Tracking the start was a pain in the ass, and tracking apps were creepy data mines that no woman should use—with a tech-security father and a private investigator mother, Athena had gotten ALL the lectures and didn’t use apps that collected data about her actual biology. She used the first spots in her underwear as her indicator of her period. Inelegant but effective.

Now Athena cast her mind back, trying to think what she was doing when she’d had her last period.

It was before Sam’s birthday. She remembered being crampy while they were talking about it.

She pulled her phone from her jeans and checked her calendar. Even assuming it was running late, she should have had it by now.

That shithead. He hadn’t used a condom, had he? He’d not only raped her; he’d made her pregnant.

She wasn’t surprised, exactly. Her extremely detail-oriented mother had brought up the possibility almost as soon as she’d learned what had happened. She wasn’t upset, exactly, either. She had perfect clarity about what she’d do about it, and her life wouldn’t change a jot. But oh, she was pissed. That fuckhead!

When Athena met her mother’s eyes again, she didn’t need to make a single sign. Her eyes apparently did the signing for her. Mom took a big breath and let it out. “Go sit for a minute. Stay close. I’ll be back.” With that, she strode up the hall, leaving Athena and Blanche to follow.

Her head a vortex of rage and worry, Athena returned to the party room, but she didn’t sit. She found a space near the hallway and stood there.

Her worry was all for Sam. Her rage was for Hunter. She wanted to turn his stupid skinny dick inside out.

With a moment alone to think, the last moment when this result of it was a question without an answer, Athena discovered that she was a little surprised by her reaction to what Hunter had done. She was a ball of rage and offense, but she wasn’t traumatized. At first she’d felt some shame and frustration for being unable to fend him off, but her fury had throttled shame within the first few days. Before the cabin, her experience with rape had been mostly from media, and from her mother’s story of what had happened to her, so she supposed she’d expected that, if it ever happened to her, she’d be traumatized, that her trust in humanity itself would have been shaken to the ground.

But she wasn’t. Maybe her general suspicion of humanity itself provided a shield from trauma. She wasn’t one of those people who believed everyone was fundamentally decent. She thought most people were fundamentally selfish assholes, so maybe she simply wasn’t surprised Hunter was capable of rape.

Her anger was directed straight at Hunter, and with so narrow a focus, it didn’t get in her way. It was a thing that had happened, a thing she had to deal with, but it didn’t seep into the rest of her life.

The idea that she might be pregnant because Hunter had raped her pissed her all the way the fuck off, but it didn’t make her panic. She didn’t despair or feel sorry for herself. She felt fury. White hot. Hunter had felt so entitled to her body he’d thought it was okay to jump on her when she was sleeping and fuck her without her consent. And he’d done it without a condom.

Yeah, making him quit his job was not enough. She wanted that asshole to bleed.

Mom was back, signing “Come,” and grabbing Athena’s arm. She pulled her back to the bathroom and handed her a pregnancy test kit. She’d been gone like two minutes, and Athena was pretty sure they didn’t stock test kits in the convenience shop.

“Where?” Athena asked.

“Basement. We keep them in the stored med supplies, in case one of the girls needs one. Go on. I’ll wait out here.”

Athena took the box, went into the bathroom—leaving Blanche with her mother—and got down to the business of taking a pregnancy test.

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~oOo~

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