What Happened To Natalie? by Sarah O’Connor
2020 Writing Contest Winner
HONOURABLE MENTION
Did you hear about what happened to Natalie? We know it was her even though the paper couldn’t print her name because she was too young, but Laura’s mom is a nurse and she was in the emergency room the night it happened. She wasn’t the one taking care of her but all the other nurses and doctors and paramedics that went in and out of the emergency room before the police or the newspaper people came in were talking about it. Because Natalie was “so young” and people thought what had happened was so sad, but they don’t know Natalie like we do. Laura’s mom tells her everything so she told us too and we told everyone else.
It’s not that we didn’t want to believe Laura, only that she lies sometimes. Like when she told us she had a secret boyfriend in Toronto who wrote her poetry and cut his arms for her when he was sad because he was so in love with her, or when she said her dad we’d never met was rich and going to pay for her tuition to some private school in Nova Scotia. We never told her we knew she was lying but we knew it, and it was fun to see what lie she’d tell next and then Izzy and Tricia would laugh about it on the phone later at home after school.
So when she told us that Natalie was raped at the park behind the school at two in the morning it just sounded like one of her lies, dramatic and crazy like all the ones she tells about other people for attention. But then Natalie wasn’t in school that day and then the next day we saw the little article in the paper. It wasn’t even a big front page story, Izzy found it on page three when her dad showed her the article, just a tiny rectangle on the side. It said that Natalie (using every other word except her name) had heard a noise in her backyard late at night and that she’d gone outside to check what it was. That instead of a raccoon or a kitten or who knows what the hell she thought would be outside there were three guys. We don’t know why they were in Natalie’s backyard but they were there and when they saw her they took her into their car and to the park and they raped her and then they brought her home. Izzy’s dad said he was glad she was smarter than the girl in the paper and Izzy cut out the article and showed it to us when she got to school.
But we knew for sure that Laura was telling the truth when Natalie’s cousin Bailey started telling everyone what happened, and she knew things that the paper didn’t say like how two of the guys were in their twenties or thirties but one was in his forties but he looked older. Or how Natalie was in the hospital for twelve hours but Bailey wasn’t allowed to say where, but we all knew it was St. Joe’s because that was where Laura’s mom worked. Or how when Natalie was brought back home the first person she talked to was Bailey, not even her parents but Bailey fucking Dolan. But it isn’t that surprising, Natalie was the only one who was ever nice to Bailey and she hated her as much as the rest of us.
But we’re very nice to Bailey now. We save her a spot at our table during lunch and Tricia lets her have her favourite red sequin scrunchie during gym, Izzy even lets her copy her religion homework and Izzy doesn’t even let us copy her homework and we’ve known her forever.
We do this and we compliment her and how we like her sparkling red nail polish she’s wearing even though we haven’t worn that colour since grade five and how we like that she wears two different coloured shoelaces as a protest against our boring uniform even though we really think it’s dumb. We don’t mean any of it, but we know it’s what Bailey wants to hear. So we tell her lots of nice things about herself that aren’t true but that she wishes were and then we ask how she’s doing, how Natalie’s doing and we use our most worried voices and wear our saddest faces. We tell her we’re praying for her and hope she’ll come back to school soon and then Bailey tells us more about Natalie and we keep it locked away in our brains so we can talk about it on the walk home from school.
Did you go to the park where Natalie was raped? We did at night just a few days after it happened when we were sleeping over at Tricia’s house, when her parents and brother were asleep and we went to the corner store to get slushies. We got them half off because we were wearing tank tops with our neon bras underneath and we put all of our money in our bras and let the old guy behind the counter see when we put our hands into our shirts and counted out our bills. He always gives us a discount when we come in dressed like that. He doesn’t look at us when we buy them, just stares at our chests and gives us the change and we put the coins in our bras so they press up warm against our skin and when we leave the store we laugh at him because he’s a pervert but at least we got cheap slushies.
We wanted to see if we could find anything: blood on the woodchips, a ripped piece of flannel from Natalie’s pyjamas, clumps of hair and semen and all those other things that crime shows and podcasts talk about. But we can’t find anything, we look and look but the park looks boring and normal and like nothing exciting happened here at all.
We wonder if we’ll find one of Natalie’s thongs. She wore them all the time and we know that because she always made sure the thong straps sat on the top of her hips so whenever she bent over or lifted her arms up or changed into her gym clothes we could all see it. We always talked about that, and the boys always stared. We think the teachers knew too because it was against uniform but no one wanted to send her to the office because that would mean the y were looking at her underwear and they’d probably get fired for that. We wear thongs too but only on Valentine’s Day, when we want to be sluts. We don’t want to be prudes every day in our baggy cotton underwear like Izzy who lies and says she just wears them because they’re comfy.
Laura says that’s what they give to all the girls who are raped, those cotton granny panties we make fun of, the ones our mom’s buy us to keep us little kids. Not the thongs and silk from PINK and Victoria’s Secret that we buy when we go to the mall when our parents drop us off, the ones that make you feel almost naked even when you’re wearing them. We stuff them in our purses after we buy them and throw out the bags so our parents won’t know. Laura says if you’re raped wearing those then they take them for evidence and give you the ugly granny panties, or sometimes Laura says they don’t give you any underwear and they just make you wear ugly nurse’s scrubs. That would be so embarrassing. We wonder how Natalie left the hospital, if she was wearing granny panties or scrubs. Laura says her mom didn’t tell her that and she doesn’t know how to ask her now.
Do you know where Natalie was raped? We don’t but we try to guess in the park. Tricia thinks it was on one of the benches because it would be easier but we tell her that the benches are too open and farther from the road and that if they did rape her there then they’d have to carry her and wouldn’t Natalie have screamed or something if they didn’t do it right away?
Izzy says she thinks it might have been in the kiddie structure because she found a tiny bit of caution tape there. We can tell she’s really proud of finding it but it’s just caution tape and even though it’s real police caution tape it looks just like the kind you can buy at the dollar store on Halloween so we don’t care. And we tell Izzy that the kiddie structure is too small to fit Natalie and three guys all at the same time so it would be stupid to rape someone in there.
Laura thinks that maybe it was on the slide and we all like that idea because that’s probably where it would happen if this were a movie. We know that Laura likes that and we don’t like that because she gets so annoying when she’s actually right for once and she’s been right a lot about Natalie so we hope she makes a big mistake soon so that we don’t have to listen to her anymore.
When we make sure we can’t find anything and we get tired of listening to Laura talk about all her theories and things her mom told her about the emergency room which we think are lies now because she didn’t tell us any of this before we go up onto the play structure. We have other things to say, more things we’ve heard about Natalie because we’ve each heard something earlier at school but we waited until tonight to tell each other and it will be more special to tell it in a circle on the play structure then on the ugly woodchips.
Tricia goes first like always and says she heard in gym class that Natalie was pregnant but Laura interrupts her because she heard that Natalie had an abortion. But Izzy heard about the pregnancy rumour in religion class too so Laura ended up looking stupid and it was just what we wanted because now she had to listen to us for a change.
We don’t know much about pregnancy or abortions because our school doesn’t tell us much. We know the basics, we aren’t stupid. We went on Tricia’s brother’s laptop once when he was working and found his porn and watched it. So we know about sex and we know how to get pregnant but we don’t know how fast it all happens. All our teachers tell us is that the best way to not get pregnant is to not have sex and that sounds stupid to us even though we’re all virgins anyways. We only had one person come and talk to us about abortions and it was from some forty-year-old woman who used to be a drug addict when she was our age and she got pregnant and had an abortion and now she couldn’t have any more babies. She told us how she gave her kid’s names, the ones she wanted to have who only existed in her head, and how she prayed to them and how she knew God forgave her for what she did.
Tricia wonders if Natalie will have an abortion or keep the baby. Laura thinks that she’ll have an abortion and that’s what she was really trying to tell us earlier but we don’t believe her so we don’t really listen. Izzy thinks she will keep the baby because her mom is the receptionist for the church where Natalie’s parents go and after everything that’s happened Natalie will probably do whatever her parents want. Tricia wants to ask Bailey but none of us think Bailey will tell us anything about that.
Izzy’s news is the best though and it makes us hungry, practically salivating with every word. She says that Natalie and her parents are moving, they aren’t even waiting for the house to sell. They’re going to live with some cousins in a town far far away where no one knows Natalie and no one knows what happened, and Izzy heard all this from Bailey herself while they were dissecting pigs.
Izzy doesn’t usually tell us good gossip because she’s boring but this is the best of all and we know it has to be true because Izzy never lies. It’s why we kind of don’t like her, because whether we want to or not we tell her things. We don’t remember the details but we know we tell her our secrets, our crushes, all the bad things we want to do and have done. We think we tell her because she looks so nice but we wonder what she does with all those secrets, we wonder who she talks to when she’s not talking to us.
We aren’t really sad that Natalie’s leaving, we never really liked her and we’d all just make fun of her if she came back to school anyways. Izzy says that Bailey’s very sad and almost cried into her fetal pig when she was telling her about it but we all agree that it’s Bailey’s fault that Natalie’s leaving. She didn’t have to tell us all about Natalie but she did. We wonder if her parents hate her, if maybe even Natalie isn’t talking to her anymore. We start thinking of things we can say to her at school on Monday, not things that are obviously mean, that the teachers could send us to the office for. But little things that seem nice but aren’t, Bailey’s always been easy to tease so it won’t take us long to come up with something.
Do you know where Natalie’s moving? We don’t but Izzy says she’ll try to find out and as we leave the park we try to guess where she might be moving, see if we can find it before she actually does. We go on her Instagram and look for her cousins and guess which places are the most Natalie places she’d go. We know if we wait long enough that Bailey will let it slip, but we don’t think we can be much more patient with her.
We leave the park and throw our empty slushy containers in the garbage can by the bench that Natalie might have been raped on. We’re cold now because there’s a wind and it’s cloudy and we’re afraid it might rain. We’re still just wearing our tank tops with our neon bras and there’s a little voice in our head that tells us we could end up just like Natalie. We could have a tiny article in the paper and be talked about in school, but we remind ourselves that we are not Natalie. We pretend we are different, pretend we are smarter, pretend that we are doing everything right, and pretend that will keep us safe. But because of that voice and because of the dark and because we are scared we stop talking about Natalie. We talk about the other girls, about how we heard that Kat Newberry blows guys behind the bleachers every Tuesday, or how Mr. Gale looks up our kilts in the library, or how Sienna McCoy is a dyke and we didn’t know if any of it was true but it was gossip and it was good and that was all we cared about.
Sarah O’Connor is a writer and playwright whose work has been published in the Hamilton Spectator and Incite Magazine. Recently her story “Jesse’s Room” was an honourable mention in Dawson City’s Authors on Eighth writing contest. Her plays have been performed at the Mind Play Theatre Festival and at HamilTEN, where her latest work, “The End of July”, is onstage April 3–5.