Thief by Maureen Gibbon Page A

take a blanket
     under the dogwoods. Sometimes, in the night air, dogwood petals would fall on us.
    Keil Ward had wild blond hair and blue eyes that slanted up at the outsides— or maybe it was just his high cheekbones that
     made it seem that way. He was one of the men who flirted with me constantly when he saw me at the restaurant where I waited
     tables, and he always asked me to go out with him after I got off my shifts. This particular night, after Cree stood me up
     and a week before my seventeenth birthday, I finally said yes to him, and after my shift, it was Keil Ward who waited for
     me in the side hallway of the restaurant.
    When we walked to his truck he slipped his arm around me, and it thrilled me— he smelled different from Cree, and he was taller
     and heavier. I wanted to know what it would be like to touch him. I wondered what his shoulders and chest would feel like
     when we embraced, and I wondered what his mouth tasted like. He kissed my hair as we were walking and it felt good to have
     him pay attention to me. I didn’t see the other person sitting in his truck until he opened the door. Then I saw.
    “This is my friend Frank,” Keil told me. “You don’t mind if we drop him off , do you?”
    I paused for one second and then Keil was lifting me into the truck and Frank L—— was reaching for me.
    In truth, I didn’t know much about Frank L——. I knew his name and that he was the oldest in Joy’s family. He sat drinking
     every night at the bar of the restaurant, but he never talked to me. He looked a little like Joy, though I do not like to
     think of his face. He was twenty-seven, eleven years older than I was. Before he raped me, he kissed me and chewed at my pussy.
     Then he fucked me sohard he made small tears in my vagina, and the skin of my labia bruised and turned black. I don’t know if it would have made
     a difference to him if he knew I was a friend of his sister, if he would have gone through with it all.
    Even though Keil Ward set the thing up, even though he was the one who tricked me, I never called him my rapist. He held me
     for Frank, pushed the hair from my face when Frank wanted to see— but he didn’t fuck me. He didn’t hurt my vagina. I sucked
     his cock while Frank was fucking me, but that didn’t hurt. Keil’s jeans smelled like bleach and his penis tasted like medicine.
     He was the one who helped me get dressed at the end.
    In a couple days, it hurt to walk, and I knew I had to tell someone what had happened. So I talked to my French teacher and
     she took me to the hospital. That’s when I found out I had herpes and gonorrhea. But there was no gun, no knife. Just Frank
     L—— and his cock.

11
    AS IT TURNED OUT , Breville was the one who smelled me that day at the prison. I didn’t get the letter for a couple of days, but the evening
     after our first visit, he wrote me,
We’re deprived of smells in here, so maybe we’re more sensitive. All I know is that after you left I could still smell you
     on my clothes. I cannot tell you what it meant that you came to see me.
    I hadn’t worn perfume, so Breville must have smelled the lotion I’d put on after my bath, or my shampoo, or their mix on my
     skin and hair. Or maybe he simply smelled the me-ness of me. All I knew was that I felt alarmed and self-conscious about the
     whole thing. It made me feel funny to know my scent had such a profound effect on Breville, but I knew most of what I was
     responding to was Breville’s bluntness: he had smelled me. What ever the smell had been composed of hardly mattered— the scent
     was mine, and Breville now knew that intimate thing about me. I felt embarrassed. Vulnerable. It reminded me of being in seventh
     grade and the first time I let my seventh-grade boyfriend work his fingers up into my vagina. Afterward, when we were walking
     out of the woods where we’d fooled around, he told me, “I can smell you on my fingers.” I thought it was bad that my