Mercy

Mercy's friend Caroline tells her over sandwiches in the park that she was raped by one of Mercy's dear friends at a party two years ago. Watch out for her, she says, watch out for her.

She believes Caroline, of course she does, but she thinks about consent and what it means to consent and how can a 5'2, 100 pd person rape anything or anyone espeically a 5'7 150 pd person.

That doesn't mean it didn't happen, Patrick #1 says, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. People can rape others, its really easy.

O really? Mercy says. It's really easy to rape someone?

O, you know what I mean, c'mon Mercy.

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Mercy keeps having dreams of water, of plunging into dark and menacing waters and plunging so far that she can't find the surface again, and the feeling of dropping into nothing, and sometimes her mother is there underwater with her, her mother is there and she can feel her and see her like a ghost or like a mermaid. She is there, not too close, as if up against glass, as if inside of an aquarium looking out, smushed and undefinitive. She is there and then she is not and Mercy always has an end to the plunge, she feels the pull that drives her back to the surface, but there is no surface, at once in summer water and under winter ice. She is under ice. Mercy under ice.

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Patrick #1 never called her his girlfriend until the very end of their relationship and even then Patrick #1 wouldn't actually say it. Now that they have been broken up for awhile and they are best friends with a weird relationship, Patrick #1 wants to reminice and remember and feel nostalgic for the fact that at one time they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Patrick #1 is the first real relationship Mercy ever had, her first real boyfriend, even if he wouldn't admit it. In high school boys just wanted blow jobs and she slept with her first girl when she 17 but if you would have asked her she would have told you she was straight or bi-sexual, she certainly wasn't anything else. In college she missed the boat in dating all together. Now, in her late twenties, she had Patrick #1 for 1 year and 5 months. 1 year and 5 months of Patrick #1 not admitting that Mercy was his girlfriend. 1 year and 5 months later, Patrick #1 tells her how great of a girlfriend she was. Patrick #1 has not had a girlfriend since Mercy. Because, Patrick #1 is gay gay gay her daddy says to her, that boy is gay as the day is long, child.