I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl.

I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head. Irrationally, viscerally, in a way tied more to memory than possibility.

I have to resist the urge to self-mythologize, to paint my own journey as harder than everyone else’s just so I can give myself credit for getting out. I’m allowed

What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)

She springs, but she hesitates slightly, doesn’t push off with the legs of a ten-year-old but with legs that have been told what they are until she believes it.

I’d love to be one of those people who complain when things change. But no one around me was changing; here was my entire high school, preserved in amber. The only thing changing was my vision—like the first time I put on glasses and looked in wonder at the trees, and felt inexplicably betrayed. Those clearly delineated leaves had been there all along, and no one ever told me.

I was angry—I was shaking—and I was certain now that my anger had less to do with loyalty to Jerome or concern over his reputation than with the stunning contrast between this easy online outrage and the outrage any one of us should have felt for years over people like you, people like Dorian. It was like seeing someone hanged for stealing gum when down the street someone else was robbing a bank.

How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.

It was the only thing that would make this all better, in part because maybe it was an overreaction, and what could people want beyond an overreaction?

Now, in the ravine, I felt that time was porous, that the girl from 1995 could somehow reach through, exchange her breath for mine. She had woken up back then by stealing my breath, my heartbeat, from this present moment. In exchange, she’d handed me her asphyxiation, her organ failure, her descending oblivion. Here they came.

How could any woman truly be shocked by predation?

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

The image I kept returning to was of a tangled necklace chain. In one of the more normal moments of my later childhood, my mother taught me to rub a chain with olive oil, then take a long, straight pin and start working on the tiniest of gaps, the place with the most give. Once one thing loosened, another could loosen, another. I always felt claustrophobic at the start. But over time I’d learned patience, learned the reward of breathing through my discomfort.

I’ve always preferred to hedge against optimism. But hope—wasn’t that how Omar was staying alive? Knowing hell might one day end?

You just have to roll with the abuse, otherwise you’re a crazy bitch.”

She’d died six years earlier, shot by a different man. One she’d forgiven again and again, just like she was supposed to.

All we did was take from each other and from the earth and from ourselves. Maybe her point was that we couldn’t help it. Right now, I needed to take from Beth, who didn’t deserve it; and from Robbie, who did.

I think about this a lot. When someone asks if I liked boarding school, I can no longer base my answer, my judgment, on the people I knew. Once, I might have thought of you. I might have thought of any number of people who weren’t what I once believed. But I can still love the place itself, as a place, as smells and echoes and angles of light, as surfaces etched deep with their own history.

These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that’s survived.

Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light.