On Tuesday, the following day, Alex and Heming walk side by side in shared misery, complaining about whatever bothers them at that particular moment.  

“Je suis très over this shit,” Heming said. 

“Moi aussi.” 

A cigarette drips smoke out of his lips as he turns to look at her, studying the darkness behind such light eyes. Is this what it looks like when you get older? Does the innocence slowly slip away until we’re no longer unscathed, and that’s what gives us away? Maybe “aging” has nothing to do with fine lines or crows feet but rather a semi permanent state of cynicism. Today, particularly, Alex looks older than twenty. 

“Be honest,” Heming starts, “Did you break up with Jones for Mack?” 

Taken aback but not surprised– Heming knows a bit about what Alex feels for Mack– she takes half a beat to center herself; they’re standing on Jean-Jaques Cours, about ten minutes away from where they’re supposed to be in five. The sun’s rays abandoned Grenoble for the day, making her feel only drearier. “No. You know I didn’t.” 

“I’m just saying if the shoe fits…” He says while raising an eyebrow at her.

“Well, maybe the shoe fits, but you’re wrong.” Alex lets out a heavy sigh, one that’s been building for a few months now. “Though.. I guess I could see what Mack thinks about it all. You know, now that I’m single.” 

Heming’s only reply is a mocking snort, as if he knows something she doesn’t. “Yeah, so about that. You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you,” his voice dips into a lower register, volume falling despite the fact that next to nobody in Grenoble speaks anything more than basic, hardly-functioning English. At the sound of it, Alex’s body floats above her once again as he tells her what happened that night of the Mako Discotheque. 

***

“Just take him home, you know I can’t. And I don’t want to, sooooo,” Alex slurred over the beating of a thrumming base: Party in the USA, by Miley Cyrus. Ironically, Italians love that song. Friday blues seeped into her blood like tequila, both sharpening and dulling her instincts. No, she should not go home with Mack. Yes, given his clear state of intoxication, he needs to go home. 

Heming rolled his eyes with a small smirk, nearly undetectable if she didn’t know it would be there. “Yeah, okay.” He turned to Mack, who sat slumped over next to Alex, his eyes shut and body flimsy. “Let’s hit the road, dude.” Mack’s eyes fluttered open at the vibrato of leaving that god-forsaken disco, and he stood up and started making his way toward the exit without saying another word. 

Alex gently grabs Heming by the arm before he turns to go. “Hey, Eli and I don’t have a key, so just make sure you’re awake when we get back so you can let us in.” Heming nods his head, confirming his understanding, and follows Mack out. 

They walk the half-hour home, and Mack’s near-limp forces him to lean on Heming for support. The night is quiet and daunting, whispering, glimmering, promising that things will go wrong. Mack hears nothing, whereas Heming hears a melody, chirping a confirmation of every bad idea that’s in his head, spiraling with the drip, drip, drip of alcohol in his blood. of At the apartment, Mack gets into his bed, pulling Heming in as well, clutching to him and laying across him. (Or, that’s how Heming tells it.) Clearly, Mack wants Heming, right? He’s asking for it? Absolutely. Listening to the hymns sung outside incessantly and compellingly, Heming knows Mack wants him. Both of them want what’s about to happen. 

The worst lies we tell are the lies we tell ourselves.

 Mack’s eyes are shut and his mind off, yet his body remains awake, signaling to Heming a sort of consent that wouldn’t be mustered by a straight boy sharing a bed with another man, not when he’s sober at least. Heming grabs Mack, pulling his clothes off until there’s nothing left but his socks. He assaults him repeatedly and quietly. With Heming’s hands and mouth, Mack, without even a slight awareness, forever loses the feeling of security in his own body, just as Alex did a few years before. 

Maybe it was the Adderall or the tequila or the sheer, blinding desire, but Heming continues until he falls asleep on top of Mack, leaving Alex and Eli screaming into silence outside. 

When Heming relays this to Alex, he doesn’t frame the story under the same objective lens Alex can see it from, but rather wears the spectacles of a selfish, fucked up person. A person who sexually assaults their friends. A person who lies. A person who will go on to shame Mack, telling him he wanted it. Her heart has dropped into the depths of her stomach, the weight of it too much for someone who is only as brave as she is. She pleads, questions, and judges. “But he’s the straightest guy I’ve ever met, Heming. How does what happened make any sense with that in mind?” 

“They’re all straight until they’re not,” he replies with a shrug and a drag of a cigarette. 

Dread seeps further into her. “Does he remember any of this?” 

“God, Alex, why do you ask so many questions?”

“I’m just trying to understand the context. It’s very… confusing, to be honest.” Each word she utters is carefully chosen and parsed through in her mind. If it weren’t, she’d have thrown up from hearing a depiction of what’s so clearly sexual assault. The most fucked up part, she thinks to herself, is that he told me out of gossip. Like we were school girls, giggling and chattering about boys. “Do you think he remembers?” She finally asks the question she’s been harboring since he first implied something happened between them that night. 

Heming let out a disbelieving chuckle. What a stupid question from such a stupid girl. “God, I don’t know.” When he looks at her, she does everything in her power to look normal, unbothered, cool, and collected. “Look, I get that you’re jealous because I got him before you had the chance to.” Bile rises in her throat. Instead of giving way to it, she drags on the cigarette, tasting the tobacco instead of the threatening taste of vomit. “But, to answer your question, I sort of hope he doesn’t remember ‘cause then things might get weird between us, you know?” 

Those were Heming’s famous last words. The last drop of respect for Heming drained from Alex’s body like the blood from her face. Mack doesn’t know Heming assaulted him. Mack doesn’t know. “Ah. Okay,” she said. But what she really meant to say was, “How could you put something so terrible onto someone you call a friend?” How could he tell her details of an assualt, thinking it was gossip? Because Mack doesn’t know what’s happened to him, and as Alex knows far too well, nothing to come is up to fate or design or God or whatever it is she decided to believe in on that given day. Mack’s story has been placed into her hands, despite knowing how much there is to lose: her best friend in the program, Heming, her friendship with Mack, her naive belief in the good of people, room to process her heartbreak, and her dissociation from what happened to her years before. To help Mack is to hurt herself in every way a person can cause themselves pain that isn’t physical. To help Mack means reopening her wounds and hoping he’s on the other side to help her stitch them up again. It means becoming someone to Mack that she wished she’d had when she lost her faith in bodily autonomy. No one was there for her, but she would be there for Mack. Still late to whatever bullshit mandatory event their program director forced on them, the pair leave side-by-side, but everything that makes Alex “Alex” is left in the alleyway, along with her hope for a turned corner, an end to the stormy weather that’s plagued her time in Grenoble. Walking alongside Heming, a pale ghost haunts him, indiscernible only to anyone who truly knows Alex. Despite what they believed to be a shared brain, Heming only sees the girl he knew, rather than the shell she’s become. 

All it took was that damn trip to Italy to uproot everything. In the months to come, Alex dreams of a version of her life if she’d never gone to Italy, never went to France, even. In these dreams, she’s happier, softer, and content. She romanticizes what seeing the French Alps might be like, unscathed by the tainted reality of the timeline she’s living in. The dream-like version of Alex lays beside Jones, hoping he’ll wake up and decide he wants to live the same kind of life she does: a life with travels and Manhattan two-bedroom apartments. Dream Alex remains untouched by the horrors of that week. And to think it’s only Tuesday.