Diane was in shock, numb in that special kind of reaction people have to something so awful that the mind simply refuses to comprehend any longer. It was the kind of glazed-eye numbness that could linger for days or longer… but Diane knew that she didn't have even hours to wallow in the luxury of not thinking. She was at home again, somehow, and she had survived… that much she was grateful for, though her legs were still wobbly from Red's brutal ravishment and between them there throbbed the aching phantom pain of something still shoved between the ravaged lips of her vagina.
Trembling and wanting a drink or a cigarette or a pill, anything to calm her nerves, she made her way to the bathroom and switched on the light.
"Oh, my God!" she gasped as she saw herself in the mirror. There, staring blankly back at her, was the shame-branded face of an adulteress. Her lower lips still bore the bloodied traces of her flesh-biting passion and her cheeks were tracked with the still moist streaks of her tears.
I have to do something before Don gets home, she thought fearfully, shaking her head in a, near-futile attempt to force her mind to function normally again. I can't let Don see me like this! He'd know from just one look… he'd know what I've done!
She turned on the water in the bathtub full force and splashed a handful on her cheeks to hide the trail of her tears. With her fingers still trembling, she undressed quickly, tip-toeing out of the bathroom only long enough to pour herself a drink from Don's rye whiskey. She hated the stuff but she needed all the courage that she could muster to face the rest of this night, even cheap courage from a bottle.
Diane looked at the pile of soiled clothes on the bathroom floor before she dumped them all in the hamper. She hated them – she wanted to light a match to all of them, for they reminded her painfully of the shameful thing that she had done. In her giddiness, she fantasized that if all the clothes that she had worn to Red's were gone, then somehow the act would vanish from her memory.
A glimpse of rational cognition sparked in her jumbled thought and she realized, with alarm, that she was totally incoherent even in her own mind. What would she be like when Don came home? Would she even be able to talk to him without breaking apart?
Suddenly she remembered something that she had thought of on the drive home and she went into the hall to the full-length mirror, turning slowly and bending from the waist for a better look at her lust-damaged young body.
Jesus, look at the bruises! If Don sees those, I'm a goner!
Afraid and nervous, she climbed into the tub and let her bruised and battered body slide beneath the soothing warm water. The bath had an amazing tranquilizing effect on, her nerves and for a few moments, at least, she enjoyed the luxury of a soothing respite from her nightmares.
Her mind reeled with countless images, as if somehow her unconscious suspected that flooding her with a million jumbled thoughts would save her from the torment of remembering the events of this night.
Most of her thoughts were of Don, of the first weeks they had enjoyed together, and she got the uneasy feeling that, like a drowning person, the best of her life was flashing before her eyes…
"There's a whole bunch of 'em, Diane! Three or four at least, and they've all moved into the old Raynor place until those new apartments are finished out by the school." Lou Ann Ledbeuer, the town's closest runner-up for the title of tramp, was wide-eyed with joy at the prospect of three new men in town. She had to be… because all the rest of them had had her and now no one would go out with her unless it was a sneak-date or a dark drive out to Johnson's Pond for some back-seat loving.
The teenage blonde was wiggling out of her pleated skirt, part of her cheerleading uniform, and her girlfriend Lou Ann was waiting for her. Diane was called a lot of names by some of the others for palling around with a girl like her, but she didn't mind. She knew that Lou Ann had her own peculiar set of problems and she liked her despite her trampish behavior. She had tried to change her, subtly at first and then more forthrightly, but nothing seemed to work. So Diane, in her fashion, merely shrugged and still kept her as her girlfriend.
"I don't really care, Lou Ann… I'll leave the new boys in town to you. That's your department." Diane often teased her now, but it was good-natured kidding, the kind that can pass between friends without hurting.
"They're not boys, they're men… all of them! And they don't know anybody in town. Wow, I wish I could meet them!"
"Why don't you stop by the Raynor house and tell them you're from the Chamber of Commerce," Diane teased.
"Do you think that would work? I mean, does Evansboro even have a chamber of commerce?" Lou Ann was half off the sofa with enthusiasm. Diane laughed until she cried.
"Lou Ann, you're too much… you really are! Listen, if you really want to meet those guys, just go over there – in the daytime, and tell them you'd like to welcome them to town, that's all. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you do it correctly."
Lou Ann didn't answer, but Diane could see from the glazed look in her eyes that her suggestion had struck home… or a home run, more likely. She didn't see her for three days; in fact, no one saw her except in the two morning classes that Lou Ann took as part of her Distributive Education program. She worked in the afternoons at the dime store, but she missed work for three days running and they were on the verge of firing her when Diane finally ran into her downtown… in the company of three men whom she had never seen before.
One of them was driving a sporty new Chevrolet convertible and Lou Ann was in the middle up front. But it was the quiet one sitting by himself in the back who caught Diane's eye.
Was it love at first sight, she would ask herself later. No, but it was at least hope… the hope of some chance of something lasting and special between them. He was nothing like the guys that she knew from town. He even talked different, not running all his words together like the rural types around here did. But he wasn't from up north… Lord knows, Mama would have fainted dead away if she had gone out with a yankee boy, 'cause everybody knew what they were like with Southern girls. They only wanted one thing!
His name was Don, Lou Ann told her later, and for days Diane was afflicted with that same ailment that seemed to plague her girlfriend almost all the time. Only it wasn't the same kind of general malady that Lou Ann had… hers was more specific. Don Willard, to be exact.
He finally asked her out, through Lou Ann's prodding, she suspected, though he never admitted it, and when he took her home – on time, with no arguments – Diane knew that he was the man for her. No hot breath in the face, no pawing and grabbing, just a gentle kiss on the lips like in the movies… and when she went inside to bed, her knees were wobbly with teenager love!
A year later, after she finished high school, they were married, and again like the movies, their marriage was consummated on their wedding night, in a resort called South of the Border in South Carolina.
He never asked her, then, whether he was the first, and she volunteered nothing, though the truth was that she had lost her maidenhood to a smooth-talking basketball player from another county hardly a month before she met Don. She eventually told him, and it pained her to see that look of despondency on his face, but he got over it and the subject never came up again.
But this… this was no one-nighter with the captain of a neighboring basketball team. This was adultery… and with a man as disgusting as Red Collins, it would kill Don if he found out! No, it had to be her secret, her lifelong cross to bear.
Don must never know, never!