Bluff
This work of fiction contains depictions of sexual assault; please proceed with caution.
Originally published in Sky Island Journal, Issue 27: Winter 2024
Bluff was the location of the wildest parties, partially because there was the tradition of “bluffing”: to fake-shove one of your buddies off the “bluff” at the most clever moment. The irony was that neither definition of “bluff” actually applied. It was a cliff, a hundred-foot plummet off an upward-tilted lip of earth adorned with clover and dandelions at the far end of a county park, out of earshot of the parking lot, even without the sea winds that muscled up the ragged face of the cliff and stirred drunken teenagers’ hair. And, therefore, faking a shove was more of a threat.
She’d been bluffed once. She went out there as a freshman, which, even among freshmen, was considered a pretty foolish thing to do. The crowd she rode with was peppered with other freshman clutching warm cans of Hamm’s like talismans, but mainly it was sophomores and juniors and even some seniors. Because she was appropriately wary of this crowd—these kids were good and cracked on an early Friday afternoon—she instinctively moved to the highest part of the “bluff” so she could observe. Of course, this put her back to the open air at the edge of the cliff. When a blonde senior girl distracted her by inquiring after her ethnicity (“Ohmygod your sooo cute what are you?”), a redhead rocker chick with a hatchet face and leather jacket grabbed her and shoved her hard toward the edge. The redhead had good purchase on her backpack strap, so she probably wasn’t in real danger, but nonetheless she shrieked, a spurt of piss got away from her, and she both vomited up her can of Hamm’s and began to cry when the redhead released her, disgusted.
She had come a long way since that freshman afternoon. She was a legal adult, however burdened with a handful of AP English essays before she could kick high school and the bad postcard town full of phony white people. She had lost her mother to a man named Ramon from Florida and her older brother to an IED outside Fallujah. She still had her taciturn father who tended the engines of the town’s luxury SUVs seventy hours per week, and her best friend, Arthur, and a string of ex boyfriends that got more embarrassing the more she reflected. And so she tried not to. She tried to be mindful and in the moment; she tried to breathe intentionally, like her Buddhist auntie had taught her. That’s what she was doing the night of the last high school party she ever planned to attend, back on the bluff on a late April night.
She had been there enough times with boyfriends, or Arthur, or on her own, that she knew just where it was safe to place her feet without danger of the winds whirl-whipping her into an ugly swan dive. She stared out at the obsidian ocean, seagulls like small triangles of cotton jagging about, using the winds for swoops and ascents. She tipped a cup of cheap red into her mouth when the hand slid around her hip like a boa. She’d known it would.
His plot for dealing with her after raping her in the bathroom at his parents’ Christmas party—she would always smell potpourri and asparagus piss at unwelcome moments—was to treat her like his girlfriend. Of course, she didn’t take to it. For months, she would slap him away, shout him down, spit at his giggles, but she’d found with time that all of that only made it worse. People believed that no guy so adorably smitten despite her rejection could be guilty of choking her out and having his way with her over a toilet. And it wasn’t like she was going to tell them—she’d seen what happened to those who spoke. And when she did stop protesting, when she let him put his arm around her in public, he believed victory. And he cooed cruel triumphs in her ear about what he would do next. This was the night that he would try.
His forearm was around her waist and his hand palmed her thigh. She sighed, as if in resignation, and ducked beneath his arm, coming face to face with him where he now stood on the lip of the bluff, his back to the sea and desolate song of the gulls. She faced him, and behind her she could hear the inane squeals of drunken girls and bravado of drunk boys boom in the thicket of Evergreens where the keg was planted.
The sickle moon lit one canine tooth as he sneered. She shook her head, as if at herself, and slid one hand demurely onto his crotch. Before he did it, she knew it would happen like this: his head tipped back in pleasure. She pushed hard but didn’t have to. His eyes snapped back in time to catch hers. She’d be lying if she denied the burst, then the flood, of dopamine that followed his going—his cry erased by the wind. She stayed and finished her wine but didn’t peer over. She knew she couldn’t see anything down there anyway, besides the lip of white caps and the dark violence of the rocky, sea-smacked shores.