Sarai Walker - Dietland

A 2-train pulled into the station and I settled into one of the orange plastic seats. The man sitting across from me was shrunken and old, and I could see myself reflected in the glass above his head. I stared at myself, Plum in Alicia’s dress, a bruise forming above her lip. The woman in the glass stared back.

Girls Will Be Girls

The 7:30 a.m. Metrolink to Los Angeles Union Station was due. The girl weaved between the waiting commuters. The women and men, staring into their newspapers and phones, took no notice of her. She should have been getting ready for school, this lone girl on the platform, a shawl wrapped tightly around her slender body. Her feet were bare, but she didn’t feel anything; she couldn’t. Her body didn’t belong to her anymore, not after the attack, not after so many people had seen the photos online. Soon, she would leave her body behind.

When the women and men on the station platform looked at her with their morning eyes, they saw a girl, but not that girl. Her identity was a secret, but they had all read about her, even if they didn’t know it. She’d been dissected before she was dead.

As the train approached the station, the girl felt it in her feet before she could see it. “Stand behind the line,” the man on the speaker said, but the girl didn’t stand behind the line. She rushed forward, and leapt.

La luz se fue.

The girl liked to ride around in cars with boys, that’s what they’d said. Did you see how she dressed? Slutty-ass bitch. She sure didn’t look twelve.

Luz lived with her grandmother in a house on the outskirts of Santa Mariana, an hour north of Los Angeles. Her mother had been away from home for more than a year. If her mother had been around, Luz wouldn’t have been riding around in cars with boys—she would have had to stay at home and do her homework every night and forget about sneaking out—but it was her grandmother who was in charge, half blind and hobbled by arthritis.

On television, a local resident said, “Where was this girl’s mother? This is her fault.”

With her mother serving as an army medic in Afghanistan, Luz was largely unsupervised and went where she pleased. This didn’t go unnoticed around the neighborhood. She was a girl who had wandered away from the safety of the herd, a feral girl, easy prey. Did you see how that girl was dressed?

It happened in an abandoned apartment, on a dirty mattress in a bedroom with no curtains on the windows. A classmate’s older brother, a man named Chris, had invited Luz to a party. Chris and his friend Lamar picked her up. They drove her to the apartment, but Luz could see there wasn’t a party, just a group of men standing around, waiting. Chris told Luz to take off her clothes. Come on, Lamar said, we know you’ve done it before. He said if she didn’t do it, he would cut her. He had a knife, so she undressed and lay down on the mattress in the middle of the room and that’s how it began. Chris went first, then Lamar, then the other men, taking their turns one after the other. Luz stared at the ceiling, not wanting to see their faces, and waited for the hours it took to be finished.

On television, the mother of one of the accused men said, “That girl let them boys run a train on her.”

When the men left, Luz was alone in the apartment. She crawled into the hallway and pulled herself up. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about what had happened; they said if she told anyone they would kill her.

It was Chris’s little sister who told. She saw pictures on her brother’s phone of Luz naked on the mattress. There were photos of Chris on top of Luz, and photos of Lamar on top of her, and photos of other men she didn’t recognize. The girl posted some of the photos online and shared them with her friends. She told the principal, hoping Luz would get into trouble. Slutty-ass bitch. The photos of Luz and the men circulated throughout the school and on social media.

The principal called the police. The faces of Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson were the only recognizable ones in the photos, but the police counted at least four other men who’d been present. When questioned, Martinez, twenty-one, and Wilson, twenty-three, said the girl had consented to sex. They said she’d told them she was eighteen. She liked to ride around in cars with boys, they said. She wasn’t a virgin.

In the newspaper, one of the mothers of the accused men said, “That little girl lured my son to the apartment.”

After their arrest, Martinez and Wilson gave up the names of the four other men, who were also arrested. The local news media covered the case. A community leader said young men of color were being harassed by the police. Threats were made against Luz, the slutty-ass bitch who’d gotten the guys into trouble. Social Services was considering moving her to foster care in another part of the state until her mother returned home, but it never came to that. One morning, Luz made her way to the Santa Mariana train station, wrapped in a shawl.

On television, after Luz had jumped in front of the train, a pastor from the local church said, “Why wasn’t this girl’s mother supervising her? That’s what I’d like to know.”

Luz’s mother returned home from Afghanistan to bury her daughter. Martinez and Wilson were released on bail, but the other men had been on probation and remained locked up, luckily for them. Soon after Martinez and Wilson returned home, they disappeared. No one had seen them in more than a month.

Every day for twelve days, the editors at the Los Angeles Times received a video via email. The videos, each titled “Death Porn,” were shot in grainy black-and-white and featured a different man sitting in front of a concrete wall. There was a tiny shard of light to illuminate the scene, just enough to differentiate the man from the shadows. The men were unshaven, naked, and sweaty, their hands and feet bound with rope.

Twelve men, twelve videos.

The men in the first two videos were immediately recognizable to the newspaper’s editors as Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson. They both pleaded to be released, writhing and moaning against the concrete and restraints. A female voice, off camera, sexy, said, “Do you like pain?” Then the screen went black.

Each of the videos played out in a similar way. The men had been kidnapped over a period of a month, taken from their homes, offices, or hotel rooms, their disappearances reported by wives, mothers, coworkers. There was no trace of them, until the videos began to arrive.

The third video featured the star player for a Super Bowl championship team. He’d been accused of raping two women in two separate incidents, one in Miami, the other in Seattle. In both of the investigations, the police officers had asked for autographs and posed for photographs with the star athlete, who said the sex with the women had been consensual. No charges were ever brought, but he was suspended for three games by the NFL. On Super Bowl Sunday, millions of Americans ate potato chips and drank beer while watching the man throw a ball around a field. They clapped and cheered for him. On a visit to L.A., he went missing.

The next two videos featured two European soccer stars who’d been accused of paying an underage teenage girl for sex—a prostitute, the media had labeled her. The players denied the accusations, but the claims against them and media interviews with the girl had engulfed two of Europe’s leading soccer clubs. Prosecutors eventually declined to press charges, but the scandal only grew wider in Europe, involving other athletes and even more underage girls. While in Los Angeles to play an off-season charity match, the two soccer stars went missing.