Later, those boys told everyone at school what happened or, rather, a version of the story that made my name “Slut” for the rest of the school year. I immediately understood that my version of the story would never matter, so I kept the truth of what happened a secret and tried to live with this new name.
He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say.
With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. I could smell them and feel their mouths and their tongues and their hands and their rough bodies and their cruel skin. I couldn’t stop hearing the terrible things they said to me. Their voices were with me, constantly. Hating myself became as natural as breathing.
Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.
12
There is a before and an after. In the after I was broken, shattered and silent. I was numb. I was terrified. I carried this secret and knew, in my soul, that what those boys did to me had to stay secret. I couldn’t share the shame and humiliation of it. I was disgusting because I had allowed disgusting things to be done to me. I was not a girl. I was less than human. I was no longer a good girl and I was going to hell.
I was twelve, and suddenly, I was no longer a child. I no longer felt free or happy or safe. I became more and more withdrawn. If I had a saving grace, it was that we moved all the time for my father’s job, and the summer after I was raped we moved to a new state where I could have my name again and no one knew I was the girl in the woods. I still had no friends and I did not try to make friends, because how could we possibly have anything in common? I did not dare subject what I had become to the children around me. I read, obsessively. When I read on the school bus, my classmates teased me. Sometimes, they took my book from me and threw it back and forth as I flailed, helplessly, just trying to get that book back into my hands. When I read, I could forget. I could be anywhere in the world except in the eighth grade, lonely and holding tightly to my secret. I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.
At home, I tried to be the good girl my parents thought me to be, but it was exhausting. On so many occasions, I wanted to tell them something was wrong, that I was dying inside, but I couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t find a way to overcome my fear of what they might say and do and think of me. The longer I stayed silent, the more that fear grew until it dwarfed everything else.
I couldn’t let my parents see who or what I had become because they would be disgusted and they would discard me like the trash I knew myself to be, and then I would not only be nothing, I would have nothing. There was no room in my life for the truth.
I know, now, that I was wrong, that my parents would have supported me, helped me, and sought justice for me. They would have shown me that the shame was not mine to bear. Unfortunately, my fearful silence cannot be undone. I cannot tell that twelve-year-old girl who was so scared and alone just how much she was loved, how unconditionally, but oh, how I want to. How I want to comfort her. How I want to save her from so much of what would happen next.
I played the part of good girl, good daughter, good student. I went to church even though I had no faith. Guilt consumed me. I no longer believed in God because surely if there were a God, he would have saved me from Christopher and those boys in the woods. I no longer believed in God because I had sinned. I had sinned in a way I hadn’t even known was possible until I learned what was possible. It was lonely and terrifying to be unmoored from everything that had been so important in my life—my family, my faith, myself.
I was alone with my secret, pretending to be a different kind of girl. To survive, I tried to forget what had happened, those boys, the stink of their breath, their hands taking my body from me, killing me from the inside out.
13
Before this terrible thing happened, I had already started to lose my body. I was too young, in a sad semblance of a relationship with a boy who knew too much, wanted too much. I wanted too much too, but he and I wanted very different things. Christopher wanted to use me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward, of being the girl always on the outside looking in. When I met him, we had just moved to the area.
I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill. I was willing to do most anything if that boy would ease my loneliness. I wanted to feel like he and I belonged to each other, but each time we were together and then after, I felt quite the opposite. And still, I was drawn to him.
At the time I was, and would continue to be for many years, obsessed with the Sweet Valley High books. I read them voraciously because I was nothing like Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield or even Enid Rollins. I would never date a boy like Todd Wilkins, the handsome captain of the basketball team, or Bruce Patman, the handsome, wealthy bad boy of Sweet Valley. When I read the books, though, I could pretend that a better life was possible for me, one where I fit in somewhere, anywhere, and I had friends and a handsome boyfriend and a loving family who knew everything about me. In a better life, I could pretend I was a good girl.
This boy Christopher, so handsome and so popular, was my piece of Sweet Valley High in my well-manicured, suburban neighborhood. Certainly, no one could know this because he never acknowledged me at school, but I knew and I told myself that was enough. For many, many years to come, I would keep telling myself that the barest minimum of acknowledgment from lovers was enough.
We would hang out in his bedroom and flip through worn copies of his older brother’s Playboy and Hustler magazines. I studied these naked women, mostly young white blond thin taut. Their bodies seemed alien, unreal. I knew it was wrong to look at these women displaying such wanton nakedness, but I couldn’t look away.