Page 26 of Save the Game

I’m afraid I can see where this is going; please let that not have been Max, please. Margot looks down at her hands, clenched on the back of her desk chair. She looks like she wants to cry, and the longer she talks, the quieter her voice becomes.

“Uhm, and, his friend had brought him in and told the cops that he’d noticed his clothes were messed up. His shirt was on wrong, and his jeans were ripped.”

“Margot,” I say quietly, but she doesn’t look up at me and she doesn’t stop talking.

“So…so they waited for him to be coherent enough to talk to, because you can’t perform any procedures without someone’s consent. My brother said that they were almost certain he’d been assaulted, because why would you roofie someone unless that’s what you were going to do? But they wanted to do a rape kit to get evidence, and so they got his consent to do one.”

I try to interrupt her again, but she talks over me. I don’t want to hear any more. I do not want to fucking hear this.

“And the exam proved that he’d either had rough sex or been raped. I guess they can’t definitively say one way or the other just based on the exam, but my brother said that the presence of the Rohypnol means it was rape, no matter what, because he couldn’t give consent.”

She stops, closing her eyes for a moment before looking back at me. I shake my head at her. Please, don’t.

“It was Max Kuemper and the friend who brought him to the ER was Marcos Rivera.”

I stand up, and immediately bend over as the blood rushes to my head and my stomach turns. Swallowing down the stomach acid that crept up my throat, I put a hand to my head and look at my friend. She’s sitting and watching me, eyes glassy with sympathy and something else I can’t name. I wish she was the kind of person to tell inappropriate jokes, laugh, and say she made the whole thing up.

“Oh my god, Margot. Oh my fucking god.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to freak out. This only makes it worse, though, because now all I can see is Max, lying beneath me in bed, gasping for breath and pupils blown wide with fear. I pace a few steps away and whirl to face her. “Who did it? If your brother told you so much information; did he also tell you who fucking did it?”

“They don’t know. Max can’t remember. No DNA matches off of the rape kit.”

“He can’t remember any of it?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “But…but the other night…”

“Luke,” she pleads, “just because he doesn’t have solid memories of that night—it doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember.”

“That makes no fucking sense,” I snap.

“Sit down and stop pacing around like an animal,” she fires back. “Think about it like this: when I was a baby, my mom was folding towels in her bedroom and I was playing on the floor; she left the room to put the laundry away in the bathroom and I crawled into her closet and somehow managed to get the door shut. She had one of those doors…accordion doors? They close like this.”

She mimes an accordion door in midair. I nod, completely lost as to the point of her telling me this story.

“Anyway, I started crying and Mom came back in the room and was freaking out because she couldn’t find me. I was only in the closet for a minute, tops, before she was able to think through her panic and figure out where the screaming was coming from.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “But you were a baby, right? You don’t remember that happening.”

“No, I don’t. And that’s exactly my point. I was terrified of the dark as a kid. There was a time when I had to sleep with the overhead light on, it was so bad. So, no, I don’t have memories of being locked in a dark closet, but I grew up afraid of it anyway. Just because Max can’t pick the guy who assaulted him out of a lineup, doesn’t mean he doesn’t subconsciously remember what happened. You said you were on top of him; you’re big and heavy, Luke, and you had one of his hands pinned to the bed.”

“Stop,” my voice cuts through the room, far louder than I’d intended. I stand, again, completely unable to sit still. I don’t need to hear her say the words for me to realize the truth of them: Max had a panic attack because what I was doing reminded him of being assaulted. “This is so fucked up, Go.”

“I know,” she agrees, and then as if reading my mind, adds: “It’s not your fault, though. You didn’t know, and you stopped when he asked you to stop.”

“Oh, great, it’s not my fault! I feel so much better!” I say sarcastically. I have the nearly irresistible urge to hit something. “It is my fault. I scared the shit out of him—you weren’t there, you have no idea how bad it was.”

“Right,” she says, and sits up straighter, staring at me hard. “And that’s why I don’t think you should see him again.”

“You sound like Marcos,” I mutter. “He told me to back off, too.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not surprised. How would you feel? If, while you were downstairs playing beer pong, your best friend was upstairs getting raped?”

I cover my face with my hands, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to take measured breaths. There is not enough oxygen in this room.

“Luke, I love you, you know I do. But you get bored with people faster than anyone I’ve ever met. This is what you do, you find a guy you like and you go all in for a week or two and then it fizzles out. I’m not trying to…slut shame you or anything, but that’s not the kind of attention Max needs. He needs someone who isn’t going to abandon him the moment another hot guy walks by.”

“I’m a world class piece of shit, huh?”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” she huffs. “But maybe you need to think about what the best thing for Max is.”

“Maybe I’m the best thing for Max.”

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