But he held on, giving her breast a hard and painful squeeze, twisting the flesh. When she pulled away for real he took her wrist and yanked her close, saying, “What do you mean, what am I doing? You’re standing here coming on to me with your bullshit about getting into Yale.”
“Let go,” she said, but he didn’t.
“No one else here is going to fuck you, Blue Streak,” he continued. “It would have to be a mercy fuck. You should be grateful that I was into you for two seconds. Get over yourself. You’re not that hot.”
Then he let go of her wrist and pushed her away as if she had been the one who had been aggressive. Throughout all of this Greer’s face had turned warm and her mouth had gone as dry as a little piece of fabric. She felt herself swallowed up once again inside the usual feeling of being unable to say what she felt. The room was eating her up—the room and the party and the college and the night.
No one appeared to have noticed what had happened, or at least no one was surprised by it. This tableau had taken place in plain sight: a guy putting a hand up a girl’s shirt and grabbing her hard and then pushing her away. She was as inconspicuous as Icarus drowning in the corner of the Bruegel painting they’d studied on the very first day of class. This was college, and this was a college party. Pin the Tail on the Donkey was being played, while several people chanted, “Go Kyla, go Kyla,” in monotone to a blindfolded girl who held a paper tail and took lurching baby steps forward. Elsewhere, a boy was softly puking into a porkpie hat. Greer thought about running to Health Services, where she could lie on a cot beside another cot that perhaps now held the girl from Woolley with diarrhea, the two of them having started college so inauspiciously.
But Greer didn’t need to go there; she just needed to leave this building. She heard Darren’s mild laughter pattering behind her as she moved quickly through the crowd, then out onto the porch with the groaning swing in which two people lay clasped, and then down onto the college green, which, she could feel through the heels of her boots, was still spongy from summer but already starting to turn brittle at the edges.
She had never been touched like this before, she thought as she began a shaky speed-walk back across campus. In the hard, dark night, alone with herself in this new place, she tried to figure out what had happened. Of course boys and men had often made rude or lurid comments to her, the way they did to everyone, everywhere. At age eleven Greer had been muttered at by the bikers who hung around the KwikStop in Macopee. One day in summer, when she’d gone there to buy her favorite ice cream bar, a Klondike Choco Taco, a man with a ZZ Top beard had come close to her, looked her up and down in her shorts and little sleeveless shirt, and made his assessment: “Sweetie, you’re boobless.”
Greer had had no way to defend herself against ZZ Top, no way to say anything spiky or do anything to stop him or even just call him out. She’d been silent before him, sassless and undefended. She wasn’t one of those girls who seemed to be everywhere, hands on hips, those girls who were described in certain books and movies as being “spitfires,” or, later on, “kickass.” Even now, at college, there were girls like this, fuck-you confident and assured of their place in the world. Whenever they came upon resistance in the form of outright sexism or even more generic grossness, they either vanquished it or essentially rolled their eyes and acted as if it was just too stupid for them to acknowledge. They wasted no thought on people like Darren Tinzler.
On the college green now, people walked together in the resuscitative air, having left parties that were winding down, or heading toward other, smaller ones that were just starting up. It was the middle of the night; the temperature had dropped, and without a sweater Greer was cold. When she got back to Woolley the girl with the popcorn was asleep in the lounge, cradling her big plastic tub, which now contained just a cluster of unpopped corn kernels at the bottom like a congregation of ladybugs.
“Someone did something to me,” Greer whispered to the unconscious girl.
Over the next few days she would repeat a version of this to several conscious people, at first because it was still so upsetting, but then because it was so insulting. “It was like he felt he was entitled to do whatever he wanted,” Greer said on the phone to Cory with a kind of incensed wonder. “He didn’t care how I felt. He just thought he had the right.”
“I wish I could be there with you now,” Cory said.
Zee told her she should report him. “The administration should know about this. It’s assault, you know.”
“I was drinking,” Greer said. “There’s that.”
“So? All the more reason that he shouldn’t be messing with you.” When Greer didn’t respond, Zee said, “Hello, Greer, this is not tolerable. It’s actually pretty outrageous.”
“Maybe it’s a Ryland thing. This wouldn’t happen at Princeton, I don’t think.”
“Jesus, are you kidding me? Of course that isn’t true.”
Zee was innately, bracingly political. She had started with animal rights when she was young; soon after, she became a vegetarian, and over time her depth of feeling for animals extended toward people too, and she added women’s rights, LGBT rights, war and its inevitable flood of refugees, and then climate change, which made you imagine future animals, future people, all of them imperiled and gasping, having run out of possibilities.
But Greer hadn’t yet developed much of a political inner life; she only felt sickened and reluctant as she imagined filing a report and having to sit alone in Dean Harkavy’s office in Masterson Hall with a clipboard on her lap, writing out a statement about Darren Tinzler in her overly neat, good-girl handwriting. Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?
Greer thought about how victims’ names were kept out of sexual assault reports. The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was vivid and imaginable. Compared with something like that, what had happened here was small potatoes. And then, once again, Greer thought of her own breasts, which could also be described that way. Small potatoes. That was the sum of what she was.
“I don’t know,” Greer said to Zee, aware of a kind of familiar vagueness sweeping around her. She sometimes said, “I don’t know,” even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.