Jodie’s mouth opens in a little surprised ‘o’. “Dead? What do you mean dead?” She asks as she turns around. “Holy fucking shit.”
Neither Jodie nor I am shy. We’re dancers, used to performing and being in the public eye, at least on our campus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jodie speechless until today.
My best friend takes a couple of hesitant steps closer to the bed. “What am I looking at?” she gasps. “If this is a prank of some kind, I swear it isn’t funny.”
I don’t know how I kept myself relatively together until now. Her shocked tone is the straw that broke the camel’s back, and my tears break the dam, running hot and fast down my face.
“It isn’t a prank, Jo-Jo. I just woke up, and he was dead. His head was under the covers and I fucking kicked it. I kicked it. I?—”
Jodie grabs my biceps before pulling me into a tight hug. “It’s ok, babe. It’s ok. I’m here now. We’ll figure this out.” She pulls me back to look at me again. “Just tell me what happened. I can’t help you if I don’t know what we’re really looking at. Did he try to hurt you? Did you have to defend yourself from him?”
“He was like that when I woke up, I—” I stop in my tracks as the realization hits me that Jodie thinks I did this.
Her first question was if I killed my hookup in self-defense. That confirms my fears that this looks bad.
If even my best friend thinks I’m responsible for this scene worthy of a slasher movie, what will the police think?
I cover my mouth again. The tears are now coming so fast that I can’t even breathe, let alone speak.
Jodie pulls me into her arms. “It’s ok, Taryn. As long as you’re ok, we can figure the rest out.”
I tell her everything I remember, which isn’t much. I start with coming up here with Tim last night and end my story with the panicked text I sent her.
“Do you still think I did it?”
There’s a moment of hesitation on Jodie’s face. “Honestly, sweetie, I don’t know. I’ve known you since sheer luck made us roommates freshman year, and you’ve been my best friend ever since. The Taryn I know wouldn’t hurt a fly. But if you were roofied… that shit can induce psychosis. Remember what happened last year to Laura Hamilton?”
That’s the girl who was found naked in the middle of the interstate.
“What am I going to do? When the police see this…”
Jodie grabs my biceps again, a determined look on her face. “That’s if we call the police. And you’re right, this looks bad. But there’s another option.”
I blink a couple of times, attempting to clear the fog in my head. “Is there another option?”
“The way I see it, we don’t have to call the emergency services.” She nods her head toward the king-sized bed in the middle of the room. “Tim, over there, is beyond help at this point. Right? I don’t know what happened and I don’t care. Besides, if he’s the one who put a roofie in your drink—and you didn’t hang out with anyone else last night—he deserves what happened to him. Fucking rapist.”
I start shaking uncontrollably. “Do you think he raped me? I mean, I wanted to hook up with him.”
Jodie’s jaw ticks as she pulls me into her arms again. “That’s a difficult one. You were consenting to having sex with him, but did he bother trying to find out? No, he made sure you were in no shape to tell him that you wanted what happened between the two of you. So as far as he knew, he raped you. Plain and simple.”
She’s right.
I shudder still in her embrace. What a fuck up of epic proportions. I have no idea how my first time was because I can’t remember it.
“I don’t even want to think about consent.” I admit to Jodie. “All I want to tell myself is that I wanted to sleep with him. I can’t believe that he drugged me. He was so nice to me. Witty, funny, even a little sweet. I felt comfortable coming to his room and not frightened at all. I actually liked him, or I would have chickened out.”
My best friend sighs. “Yeah, I know. I’m proud of you for sticking to your guns and going through with it. But we’ll talk about that part later. We have a problem. I think we shouldn’t call the cops. We should just go.”
“You want to leave?”
Jodie nods. “You’re my best friend and I know you aren’t a violent or dangerous person. But the cops don’t know that. And I hate to hurt your feelings, but this looks really bad, Taryn. They’re going to think you did it. No one knows what happened but me and you. And Tim, I guess, but he isn’t going to tell anyone. Right now everyone in the house is still asleep, probably still drunk. We need to get out of here before people start waking up. If they see us, we’re fucked.”
My bottom lip trembles as I consider her plan. “And then what?”
“We pack our apartment, get in your car and drive as far away from here as we possibly can.”
I rub my temples with both my hands, wishing my head stopped throbbing. “What about graduation?”
