The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

my lip, and my eyebrow, that comes out by itself the doctor said. You don’t have to go back to the damn hospital.” Sybilla spoke with a faint surge of pride.
    “Jesus, S’b’lla! Why’d anybody hurt you so bad?”
    Sybilla shuddered again, and laughed.
    “Why’d anybody hurt anybody ? Ask ’em.”
    “Some people sayin you’re in the hospital, or worse. Sayin all kinds of things.”
    “Yah? What they sayin?”
    So many terrible things Martine had heard, maybe she shouldn’t tell Sybilla. It was the worst part of something happening to you, that everybody knew about it. And if it hadn’t happened to you, or not in exactly that way, and people were saying it had, that was worse. You would just want to die if—certain things were said for instance at school.
    Any kind of sex-thing . Sex-hurt , humiliation.
    Girls felt pity for you but something else—a feeling you deserved whatever it was.
    Guys would not want to touch you. Or, they’d want to touch you real bad.
    “M’tine? What the fuck they sayin?”
    Martine noticed that her cousin’s breathing was thick and audible as if her head was stuffed with mucus. Her skin was fever-hot and she seemed short of breath as if she’d been running and not lying sprawled on this bed cooped up in an airless box of a room.
    “Well—an ambulance took you to St. Anne’s. Somebody foundyou on Sunday morning where you were ‘bleedin to death’—you been stabbed and left to die in the fish-food factory in the cellar. But I guess that didn’t happen?”
    “Nah I aint been stabbed. At least not that .”
    Sybilla laughed, and winced. Her fingers sprang to her jaw, that seemed to hurt her when she laughed. Martine wondered if Sybilla’s jaw was dislocated, her face was so swollen. Martine’s jaw had been dislocated when she’d been a little girl, in some shoving accident on the stairs where they’d lived at the time.
    “People sayin you were in the ER at St. Anne’s.”
    Sybilla shrugged yes, she guessed that was so.
    “They brought you there in one of them ambulances with a siren?”
    Sybilla shrugged yes. Guess so.
    “That must’ve been scary.”
    Sybilla giggled. Nah! It wasn’t.
    “Wasn’t?”
    Sybilla shrugged like she wasn’t remembering too clearly. Like whatever it was had happened in a kind of cloud, a haze-cloud that made you cough and choke at the time but then just drifted away and you forgot about it.
    “See, you tryin to stay alive , like. When you hurt bad you concentratin on getting the breath in, an the breath out, an back in again—just that, an that’s enough. You thinkin Jesus get me through this! No time for ‘scary’ or shit like that.”
    Sybilla snuggled close to Martine, and Martine hugged her like a little baby might be hugged. Sybilla wasn’t smelling too fresh—not just underarms but (maybe) stale-dried blood as well. Probably Martine wasn’t smelling too fresh either.
    Sybilla asked what people were saying about her at school and Martine hesitated before saying just that people were wondering where she was, and feeling bad for her.
    “What the teachers sayin?”
    “They askin us . We just sayin we ain’t seen you and don’t know nothing.”
    “Any cops come around?”
    Martine thought so, yes. But Martine didn’t want to tell Sybilla, for fear of worrying her worse.
    “There’s people over at your house, knocking on the door. Ednetta don’t let them in.”
    “What kind of people?”
    “I don’t know. White people . . . Not all white people but like that, like from the county or the city, ‘family services’ shit. You know.”
    “‘Social worker’ shit?”
    “Yah like that.”
    “Some female cop, ‘detective’—she been there?”
    Martine didn’t know. She hadn’t seen any uniform-cops at the house but then, she hadn’t been at Sybilla’s house every minute.
    Sybilla was breathing in that harsh labored way. Every so often she made a snuffling-choking noise like trying to clear her