The Shape of Family Read online

  Karina had let her friendships with Claire and her other Botany Lab friends lapse last year, as she spent all her time with James, and now she was ashamed to admit they had broken up. She had staked everything on it—the love she suspected she didn’t deserve in the first place, and now she knew she had been right. And so, she found relief from her pain as she always had—by herself, alone on the bathroom floor, coaxing out the deep crimson drops along her inner thigh, where now, no one would ever see her again.

  * * *

  With a gaping hole at the center of her life where James used to be, Karina began spending more time at the Botany Lab alone, helping Professor Choi rework the irrigation system before the lab group started up again. On a Friday afternoon three weeks into the fall term, to avoid returning to her empty apartment, Karina was still at the lab at five o’clock.

  “Karina, you shouldn’t still be here!” Professor Choi bellowed when he came around to lock up. “Come on, it’s the weekend—go have some fun!”

  Karina cried all the way home as she rode her bike into the wind, tears splattering across her face. After getting home, she sent Claire a message: Hey, what’s up? A moment later her phone rang.

  “Karina!” Claire squealed. “How was your summer? I need to hear all about it. Summer school was so boring. This place was a ghost town. I couldn’t wait for everyone to get back. How’s everything? How’s James?”

  Karina felt the tears prickling behind her eyes. “Gone. We . . . broke up.” She began to cry again, biting down on her lower lip.

  “Oh, Kar, I’m sorry. Guys can be such assholes,” Claire said, making Karina smile. “What are you doing tonight? Come out with us. Patrick and I and some friends are going out for cheap pitchers, then dancing. We can pick you up in an hour, okay?”

  Karina was relieved and even a little excited as she spent the next hour washing and blow-drying her hair, applying makeup carefully and choosing her favorite pair of skinny jeans and a flowy blouse that fell over one shoulder. She could be attractive when she made the effort, she told herself as she examined her final image in the mirror. Had she stopped making an effort? Is that why James lost interest? As she put on dangly earrings, she banished all thoughts of him for the night.

  When Claire arrived, she gave Karina an extended hug, then introduced her to Patrick, whom she’d begun dating over the summer. At the bar, they met up with Patrick’s friends and some of their Botany Lab group, who all greeted Karina warmly without asking where she’d been the past several months. Patrick was a life-of-the-party kind of guy, always telling funny stories and refilling everyone’s beer glass. He didn’t seem like the boyfriend type, but he was clearly enamored with Claire. Karina couldn’t be sure how many glasses of beer she consumed, due to Patrick’s constant refilling, but she soon felt lighter and happier than she had since returning to Santa Barbara a month ago, or maybe even since leaving campus the spring before. All that heartache and pining all summer! Where had that gotten her?

  “So, why’d you break up with your boyfriend?” Henry, one of Patrick’s friends, leaned toward her. Henry had been relatively quiet this evening, at least compared to Patrick’s boisterous behavior. Karina turned to him: he was cute, with sandy brown hair and warm eyes. He smiled at her, a boyish, flattering smile. A smile that said he was interested in her answer.

  “What?” she asked, cupping her ear to block out the din of the bar. She’d heard him but didn’t know how to answer.

  “Claire said you just broke up with your boyfriend and need to have a good time tonight.” Henry’s impish smile was tickling something inside her.

  “Ah,” she said, nodding. The way he’d phrased it made it sound like Karina had had a choice in the matter, as if she’d made the decision that devastated James’s life, rather than the other way around. She liked this version better. “Yeah, well.” She paused, shrugging the shoulder from which her blouse fell. “He was an asshole.”

  “Enough said.” Henry grinned at her. “Sounds like you need to do some celebrating. I’ll be right back.”

  When he returned to the table, he was holding a round bar tray loaded with half-full shot glasses. “What’s this?” Patrick boomed, sliding glasses across the table until everyone had one in front of them.

  “In honor of Karina’s independence,” Henry said, holding up a glass. Karina looked around the table of people, all of them holding a shot glass, wishing her well. A warm feeling of belonging engulfed her. She intended to drink the shot in a single gulp as Patrick did, but she could only manage half the liquid (tequila, she later learned), which burned her esophagus and immediately made her dizzy.

  “Bottoms up, Karina!” Claire yelled. “You’ve gotta finish it all or it’s bad luck.”

  Karina lifted the glass to her lips and threw back her head, guzzling the rest of it down to hollers and cheers of approval.

  * * *

  Karina awoke the next morning in her bed, uncertain how she’d gotten home. She craned to see the alarm clock and was shocked to find it was nearly noon. Moving her head just that small amount was painful, as if heavy bricks were clanging around in her skull. She closed her eyes and tried to keep her head still so the pain would subside.

  Some of the night before came back to her. The bar, the pitchers of free-flowing beer, the tray of tequila shots, then another. How many shots had she had? She could still taste tequila in her throat, that sharp, astringent flavor, the burning sensation on her tongue. Her stomach suddenly lurched and she barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting, realizing as she knelt in front of the toilet that she was naked. Grateful, for once, for her own apartment and bathroom, Karina rinsed out her mouth, splashed water on her face and found a bottle of Advil behind the mirror, which reflected her smeared eye makeup. She moved slowly back to bed, stepping over her purple blouse and skinny jeans inside out, entwined with her panties.

  Images flickered through her mind: Henry’s face above her, him unbuttoning her jeans, her slapping his hand away, pushing his shoulder, writhing and twisting underneath him. Oh god, what had happened last night?

  She did know one thing that had happened, by the familiar burning sensation in her vagina. Oh god. She reached around to her lower back and touched the smoothness of the patch, right where it should have been. Thank god for that, so familiar it had become a part of her body. She had applied the last patch out of habit, before realizing she might not need it anymore. Karina closed her eyes and fell back asleep for a while, until she was awoken by her phone ringing. She reached down to the floor and pulled it from underneath her jeans.

  “Well, good morning!” Claire’s chipper voice came through the line. “You certainly were the life of the party last night. I didn’t know you had those dance moves.”

  “Mmm,” Karina moaned. “Claire?”

  “Henry was sweet to take you home. He is cute, girlfriend. And such a good guy. Patrick’s known him for ages. We’re all going to that diner near the highway for pancakes. Five bucks for a tall stack. You in?”

  Karina clenched her eyes closed. “I can’t,” she said. “I have a big paper to work on.”

  “Okay,” Claire said. “We’ll miss you. Especially Henry.” She giggled. “Hey, next weekend we might go out to the harbor waterskiing. You should come.”

  Karina murmured something to get Claire off the phone and turned off her cell before tossing it on the floor. Why hadn’t she said anything? And what was she supposed to say? I can’t remember what happened last night because I drank too much? I think Henry might have forced me to have sex? I lost control of myself and everything that makes me me? Claire might not even believe her, given her loyalty to Patrick and her impression of Henry as such a good guy. And she’d seen Karina doing those tequila shots, flirting with Henry at the bar. Maybe Karina was also to blame. Had she led Henry on? Had she really told him no? She rolled over onto her side, folded her knees up to her chest and cried quietly until she fell asleep again.

  When she woke again mid
-afternoon, the pounding in her head had subsided. She took a long, hot shower, scrubbing every part of her body until she felt clean. Afterwards, she took her supplies from the bottom drawer of the bathroom vanity, lay everything out on the counter and took extra care to swab all edges of the razor blade with disinfectant. The release she felt as the blade cut into her skin was immediate, and she remained sitting on the closed toilet seat, a trickle of blood down her inner thigh.

  She fell asleep on the couch Saturday night and woke panicked the next morning, recalling fragments of a bad dream. She’d been in the middle of an ocean, swimming from island to island, trying to find a place to hold on, but each island dissolved into sand when she reached it. After Prem’s death, Karina had stopped worrying about something bad happening to her, since nothing could ever be as bad as losing her brother. This was faulty reasoning, she now realized: Prem’s loss had damaged her so irreversibly that she had never found her equilibrium again. Every loss she suffered now hurt her more, not less, stealing more of what little remained of her. But still, there was something left, something worth preserving. On Sunday evening, Karina pulled out a notebook and turned to a fresh page. She needed a plan.

  Should she tell someone what had happened with Henry? She recalled the presentation at freshman orientation about the dangers and temptations they would face: fraternity hazing, alcohol poisoning, sexual assault. Karina, like most freshmen, heard little of it. It was like trying to feed broccoli to a group of children peering into a candy store. They might have choked it down, but only to get on with the real reason they were there: freedom, independence, a chance to make their own choices and chart their own lives forward as adults. Karina had heard the stories of girls who had come forward on campuses all over the country to report sexual assault. They carried mattresses across campus, they were called sluts, they had to tell their stories over and over, losing some of their dignity and privacy every single time, to a bunch of adults who only cared about their endowments and football stadiums.

  Her mother didn’t even know about James or that she was sexually active, so this would definitely be too much for her. Dad understood that college kids drank and might have sex, but he would get angry, vengeful, lash out at the school and Henry and make a big deal of the whole thing, which was not what she wanted. What she wanted was for this to go away. She wanted to forget it ever happened, to have no lasting effects on her life of this one bad night, this one lapse in judgment, this one reduction in her defenses.

  “Izzy,” she wrote at the top of the page. She would call her tomorrow.

  “Student Health—STDs,” she wrote next. Shit. She’d been so careful her whole life, holding off through high school, waiting until she found someone she loved, someone who loved her. A tear dropped onto the page and she brushed it away.

  “Job,” she wrote last. She wanted what her old roommate, Stephanie, had: a schedule so busy she barely had time to study and sleep. No free time to go to bars or pancake houses or waterskiing. No downtime to think. No empty hours to fill.

  Night came quickly, and though she was tired, Karina had trouble sleeping. Every time she was close to dropping off, images of Henry ran through her mind: him laughing with her at the bar, pushing her onto the bed, dancing up close to her at the club, her elbow banging into the wall as she tried to squirm away. Finally, she took her duvet out to the living room couch and slept there all night.

  The next morning, on her way out, she dropped a bag containing her favorite jeans and purple blouse down the incinerator chute.

  25 | karina

  OCTOBER 2014

  Karina’s phone rang and her father’s smiling face appeared on the screen. She deliberated for a moment before sending the call to voice mail. She wouldn’t be able to avoid him forever, but right now, it seemed like the only thing to do. Her mid-term grades had just been posted and they were the worst she’d ever received: one B, two C’s and a D. She had a tougher course load this year, and she’d been struggling to focus in her advanced science and math classes since the term started, falling further behind. Yesterday, she’d received a notice reminding her of the minimum requirements to maintain her scholarship. If she didn’t pull her grades up by the end of term, she would be on probation, and after the next term, her scholarship would be revoked. The thought of having that conversation with Dad was something she just couldn’t face.

  Karina’s scholarship covered her tuition each semester, but she had to call her dad every month for money for her other living expenses. He always transferred the funds right away, but he waited for her to call first so he could talk to her once in a while. During her freshman year, she’d enjoyed those conversations. When she was done with an exam or paper, she would lie on the bed to call him and spill out all the details, in sheer exhaustion and relief of being done. Once she began to spend all her free time with James, those calls morphed into what her calls with Mom had always been: short, obligatory conversations providing assurance that everything was fine and her grades were good. This year, after the breakup with James and the incident with Henry (as she now thought of it, unwilling to give it more import in her life), she’d been avoiding calls with Dad altogether, trying to get by with text messages and email. If she had to hear that thin layer of concern in his voice, always there just below the surface, she was afraid she might crack. Karina was trying to form a new life, a new skin over the scarred one; she had to be protective until it grew strong enough to shield her.

  Something else had happened in the last few weeks: she had lost Prem. She could no longer picture him growing older alongside her. Either she had reached the limits of her imagination, or she had crossed over some threshold into adulthood and left him behind. Whatever the reason, losing him again was a rekindled pain that bore fresh guilt.

  * * *

  After a few weeks of looking through online ads and biking to interviews, Karina found a part-time job at Natural Foods Market, a store about two miles from campus that sold organic produce, whole-grain foods, and other natural products. It was a quarter of the size of a typical grocery store, and the produce department, where Karina worked two evenings a week and Sundays, was the star. During her shifts, it was Karina’s responsibility to ensure her section was stocked with fresh and appealing produce. She encouraged customers to smell and touch the fruit and offered free samples. It was one of her favorite parts of the job, to pull out a small knife, like the one she’d once given Prem, from her apron pocket and slice a perfectly ripe pear or a fresh, tangy apple. The customer was unfailingly pleased by the gesture, and usually impressed enough with the flavor to make a purchase.

  This was the first time that Karina had done any kind of work that engaged her body more than her mind, and she found some relief in it. Time passed quickly at work and left her with little energy for anything but her studies. She began to feel like a visitor on campus, going there only to attend classes. She eschewed the library, campus eateries, anywhere she might run into James, Yoga Girl, Henry or even Claire, who had texted her a few times to invite her out again. Once in a while, she met up with Stephanie to study, but with few other friends left, Karina no longer socialized and the penance of this felt appropriate. She cycled between her classes, her job and her apartment, where she continued to sleep on the couch, still unable to return to her bed.

  Karina had originally sought the job to stay busy, but the money turned out to be an additional boon, enabling her to fund her own living expenses and avoid calling her father. She used her employee discount to stretch her two-hundred-dollar weekly paycheck to buy groceries and was learning a lot about food preparation at NatMark, like how to roast marked-down overripe tomatoes and blend them into a rich paste for sauces and soups.

  One day in the break room, some other team members were trying to convince her to join their Sunday night potluck. Karina felt warm in their camaraderie, so when her phone rang and it was Dad, she answered impulsively. “Hi, Dad.” It had been several weeks since they’d spoken live
, only exchanging text messages during that time.

  “Honey! Hi! I was beginning to wonder if you’d been swallowed up by the library.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled into the phone. “Sorry, it’s been really busy.”

  “How’s that calculus class going, still tough?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. Calculus was trending at a D. “I think I’m going to drop it. I’m the only sophomore in the class and I think it’s just too advanced for me.”

  “What? No, honey, don’t drop it. We’ll get you a tutor. Do you want me to find one?”

  Karina paused, annoyed by his intrusiveness. “I don’t want a tutor, Dad. I don’t want to take the class. I just . . . it’s just not the right class for me.”

  Her father chuckled, which chafed her more. “What do you mean, not the right class? It’s the next math class in the series, right? You’ve always been strong in math. Maybe you just need a little extra help this time.”

  “Dad.” Karina spoke through clenched teeth. “I’ll figure it out for myself. Okay?”

  The pause on the other end of the line brought her some satisfaction, as she imagined him recoiling. “Gotta go, Dad. I’m in the library and can’t be on the phone.”

  “Okay. Bye, honey, I—”

  She ended the call and jammed the phone into her back pocket as she left the break room to begin her shift. A few minutes later, a text appeared from him: I trust you know what’s best for you. Just here for you, whatever you need. Also, sent bank transfer this morning. Love you. Karina shook her head and replied with a quick smiley face emoji.

  * * *

  A month after she began working at NatMark, one of her colleagues went on an African safari, and the store manager put Karina in charge of receiving deliveries in the back and ensuring all the produce on the floor was in good condition. Karina enjoyed wearing the rubber coveralls over her clothes and dealing with the forklifts and pallets in the back, so different from the cerebral work her parents did, which she’d always been expected to do as well. Though her grades hadn’t improved much, Karina asked for additional hours at NatMark, gravitating more to her job and the feeling of being good at something and valued for it. As her earnings increased with both her promotion and hours, Karina became intrigued by the possibility of gaining full independence from her parents.