But before I knew what was happening, I started feeling sick and needed to throw up. Clark started
steering me toward the ladies room, but something happened, and it was like I was in a series of timelapse
photographs. One minute I was stumbling around like some drunken floozy, the next I remembered
being carried over his shoulder while he made excuses for me. Then came some sleazy hotel room, a bed
with an evil green spread.
I remembered crying, saying, “I want to go home, Clark. I want to go home!”
But as my voice steadily rose along with my panic, Clark threw me down and covered my mouth with his
hand. He put a small box cutter to my throat and said, “Shut up or I’ll fucking cut your throat, bitch.”
Most of the night after that was a fuzzy kaleidoscope, but I remember Clark telling me he’d hunt me down
and kill me and my family if I told anyone. He’d said he’d killed other girls for having a big mouth and
that his dad owned the police. The next morning I woke up sore and bleeding and alone in that dismal
little hotel room.
I only ever told Stefan, who’d had to come pick me up because I had no idea where I was and had no way
to get back to campus. On the drive back, he said point-blank in the coldest voice I’d ever heard, “He
gave you a roofie and he raped you. That son of a fucking bitch raped you, didn’t he, Iz?”
“No,” I told him. I was working hard to keep from breaking down into hysterics, and I didn’t want him
using that word. Rape was stuff that happened to the loose girls at college. It didn’t happen to girls on
their first date, to virgins. It didn’t happen to girls like me. “No, I consented.”
“Sure you did.”
“I did.”
“Let me take you to the ER, Iz, or the police. They can get DNA samples. They can find him.”
“No. I just want to go home.”
“You have to report this! You have to turn him in!” He was working himself into a rage.
“Take me home, Stef, please! Later. Please! I just want to go home.”
I was shaking, and I desperately wanted a shower. I wanted to pretend the last twenty-four hours was all a
dream, that it didn’t happen.
I didn’t want to get involved in this. It was obvious the guy had money. If I made a fuss, he’d come after
me, and then it would be his word against mine. He could probably hurt me. Or worse, he could hurt my
grandmother.
Oh god, I couldn’t let my grandmother learn about this. She was the one who raised me after my parents
died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She was so proud of my grades, so proud of my common sense. I
couldn’t let her see me like this. Like some victim.
So no, I didn’t tell anyone, even later on. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
I wasn’t proud of that. You always hear about victim guilt, all that crap, but the reality of it was, when you
actually experience it, things looked different. Things aren’t all black and white, right and wrong, like
everyone says. It’s hard to be brave. It was too hard for me.
And besides, my grandma had recently had a serious heart condition. She’d already had two stents put in
She didn’t need the extra stress of seeing me this way, not on top of losing her son, my dad, the way she
had. If she found out, it might kill her, and she was my only family now.
With a sigh, I padded back to the bathroom and just stared at myself in the mirror in the dark. I didn’t like
putting on bright lights anymore. I’d always hated my body—I was short and stocky, with huge, double-D,
basketball-sized boobs, which sounds good in theory but are just plain awful for buying clothes and
looked all wrong on me—and not for the first time, I desperately wished I could trade bodies with one of
the tall, willowy college girls I passed in the hallways all the time. I wish I had their lives.
I picked up my lipstick off the vanity and added to the list of imperfections I’d started writing on the
mirror. Under Too Short and Too Fat I wrote Mousy Hair. Under that, I added Stretch Marks. I had a lot
of them since gaining weight over the last few months. As I set the lipstick down, I saw the scrap of paper
that Stefan had given me lying on the floor. I figured it must have fallen out of my things as I was
undressing.
I added Disorganized under Stretch Marks, then went to pick up the paper.
I didn’t want another job, frankly. After what happened last year, I’d quite the coffee house job I’d been
doing so I could put my head back together. But student loans were piling up, and I couldn’t live off
Ramen for the rest of my life. On top of that, my grandma was going to need another surgery soon. Poverty
and the threat of being thrown out of college was forcing me back into the workforce where I didn’t want
to be anymore.
I looked at the address and the time of the interview that Stefan had gotten me. It was tomorrow, Saturday,
at ten in the morning. He’d underlined the word sharp. I thought about what Stefan had said about Dr.
Dorian Michaels. What little I remembered of him was a cold and aloof man. But he was gay, so it was
obvious I didn’t have to worry about that.
“This is important, Iz,” I told myself. “This is part of Operation Putting Your Shit Back Together.”
I nodded. I’d always been very good at talking myself into anything.
Before I went to bed, I gave my grandma a call and we chatted for a few minutes about everything and
nothing. Then I got into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin. And like I had for the past year, I cried
myself to sleep.
***
Read an excerpt from The Dollhouse Society: Charlotte by Eden Myles:
I held up my badge and said, “Detective Charlie Hu, NYPD.”
The big, blocky cop guarding the crime scene looked me and my partner over, then nodded in a silent,
Lurch-like way, and raised the yellow crime-scene tape so Rodriguez and I could slip underneath it.
“What did they get him from, the goon squad?” I said, jamming my thumb back at Lurch as we headed
down the rain-slick alley toward the group of people collected around the victim.
“Be nice, Charlie,” Roddy warned me.
Vince Rodriguez once said I was five feet and a hundred pounds of pure sarcasm. I was never sure if I
should take that as a compliment or an insult. Roddy was tough as nails and twice as mean as a cornered
junkyard dog in the right situation. I loved him to bits. He’d been my partner for going on six years, and I
knew that, whatever he thought of my personality, he always had my back.
We came upon the first of New York’s Finest, and he moved aside so I could see the coroner bent over
the vic. The coroner—Bigby, by name—was a tall, thin, angular man wearing a yellow rain slicker
flecked with rain. Everyone I had ever known called him Biggs.
I shook the rain out of my ponytail and off the back of my black leather jacket, wishing I had thought to
take a slicker from the back seat of our unmarked car instead of being in such a hurry. “What do you have