Ivory Angel #10

Long. But I felt like writing.

Like lace clinging to the night, the rain falls. The pavement shines like ink, swimming in the night. Things are always damp in the springtime, you can taste it when it’s fresh and sharp in your nostrils, in your mind. Spring used to be my favorite time of year, but now it depresses me. Even the magnolia blossoms opening like pastel goddess-crowns cannot cheer me when I get like this. Spring is always the loneliest season, and the deer devour my rose garden, leaving broken stems in their wake. Early summer tastes like melancholy also. Same memories. Same helplessness. No excuses to wrap up in your security blanket and never face the world outside.

Some write to remember. Some write to forget. I write to grieve.

In real life, people who know me probably consider me a trifle boring. I never mush out endless monologues of self-criticizing muck. Not in living, spoken words, these I utilize sparingly, doling each out like care because they cannot be edited over and over again or taken back once uttered. So in real life, I am the shy one who sits in the corner behind golden glasses and a smile that most people confess to be a little creepy. Which is why I don’t smile much, I suppose. But the point is, nobody would ever cast me as a Sylvia Plath ready to leap off the balcony of her bedroom. I am the calm one. Passive. Rational. I take the tormented poets and bind them back together again, like a mother or a sister, without ever revealing the secrets or pain that tears me up inside. If I said anything about anything really serious, I don’t think anyone would believe it. It’s like the other night at the booth late night at Denny’s when “Jimmy” told everyone his stepfather had dropped dead of alcoholism right in front of him when he was six years old. No one believed him until he had said three times that it was true. And then we all felt like shit. I’m the same- people look at me and nobody believes I can be anything but outgoing, independent, and surrounded by lovers and friends who will always take care of me. Not that I ever need to be taken care of, I’m too strong for that.

I guess that impression is why some people say such stupid things to me. A guy at a party, trying to get my phone number, tells me that people with depression shouldn’t be allowed to be around normal human beings, because all they can do is destroy. “Those people will never be happy,” he says. He is completely sober and I wonder who invited him. I’d rather be talking to the cocaine dealer in the corner but he follows me everywhere. “Why let them spoil life for the rest of us?”

“I don’t think that’s very fair,” I say softly, my eyebrows angling gently downward. I have a calculus test tomorrow, so there is no drink in my hand. But there is the sound of the rain on the window, and on the fields outside. Little does Mr. Over-Anxious know that behind my perfectly calm exterior lurks a girl who is two weeks into her first crack at anti-depressant drug treament. “Doesn’t everyone deserve a shot at joy?”

Spring always depresses me. But there were other things that motivated me to see a therapist, to start trying to drive the blackness that continually coated my mind with ugliness. There were girls I thought who liked me, who were my friends, but who turned to be enemies. They’d been avoiding me. I’d taken a class specifically to be with them and suddenly they were rushing around corners, going someplace else. The only people I had in the world, and they didn’t even want to eat lunch with me, or work on group projects with me, or something. I was a leper. I was less than that. And then my old debate coach told me in a car ride late at night that my younger brother had not been kicked out of school for some minor violation of the zero-tolerance policy, but because he had multiple personalities, and one of them had threatened his old debate partner after she exposed him for what he was.

“No,” I said, over and over again. This was a little over one year ago. “I lived with him for sixteen years…I’d know, wouldn’t I? No, I don’t believe it.”

“He’s acting weird, different all of a sudden. Not himself at all,” the coach said. His car was blue and it had a new stereo. The dashboard thrummed beneath my fingers to Limp Bizkut as we circled rain-paved streets, IHOP’s sign like a neon vision of angelic effulgence over it all. “He was acting very strangely.”

“No,” I said. “No, I’d know. I love him so much. I’d know. How can you believe her over me?”

The coach didn’t press, and when I went to my mother and my friends, they all laughed it off and told me that it didn’t make any sense because I was from a real family. A good family. Nuclear, with a stay at home mom and three kids and a father who wasn’t an alcoholic and didn’t abuse people. Not a “When Rabbit Howls” scenario at all…besides, if something was wrong, I would have known. Because he’s almost a part of my soul, almost a best friend, almost everything in the world to me. And everyone said I was being silly and nothing spontaneously combusted and mom nattered on like things were normal and wouldn’t she be freaking out if there was really something to worry about? Wouldn’t someone feel something and do something? Wouldn’t any semblance of normalcy be shattered by this final revelation, would everyone be able to laugh and buy groceries and whatever when such a thing was known?

I woke up in my bed cold and shivering one night a week later with one thought in my head… What motive could the girl have to lie about this? Who had more to lose, and thus, had to hide? I confessed my suspicions to my mother about my brother. He had to be lying.

“Sometimes people are illogical, honey,” I think mom said in a dull voice. And then there were finals. My grades took a hit. I wasn’t focussed at all and I turned in a story late. I’ve never done that before, but my soul felt numb inside. There just wasn’t any more. And spring was coming. And spring always depresses me.

I threw myself into the night. My debate partner hated me. My grades were horrible. My dreams/goals were fleeing one by one as the prize writer, the one who won all the contests, received endless accolades, was judged to be below average by her creative writing teacher, had no friends despite all her efforts to the contrary, and now at last there was this final thing. I didn’t even have the goddamn power to protect the ones I loved, and so what was the point of all this? God had left me to rot and what was the point?

So I went out and walked the place where the campus rapists stray. At midnight and in the rain I paced block after block, solitary, alone, feminine, clutching a knife in my hand and daring someone to attack me. Suicide would leave too many questions. And I had made a promise to someone long ago. But if I died a hero, taking down some pervert with me, or at least getting enough of his DNA on me so that he’d get thrown into jail forever, never to harass anyone again. If my life wasn’t doing anything, perhaps my death would guarantee someone who wasn’t a complete failure, who didn’t taint everything she touched, safety and a chance at living unbroken.

But nothing happened. There was a woman walking her white husky and a crying girl on a cell phone who was scared because she was walking home alone. No men to kill me. No one to hurt to make up for the hurt I felt inside. I realized then that I was cold and wet and that maybe it was time to see a therapist. The doctor wasn’t too helpful. She would always focus things back onto my early childhood, as if that mattered to the least for my future, and give me helpful suggestions such as “you should make some more friends.” For this I pay $80 a session? I couldn’t make her understand what it was like for me- I couldn’t describe the loneliness and the sense of failure that pressed all around me, weighing down every inch of skin with tears made of lead and cement. So she prescribed things. She thought it would help me, but the pills I took just made me feel strange inside, like I was only watching my own life reel by without any real texture or depth and I just sat there inside my head with a silly smile on my face while someone more normal pushed all the buttons and made the body whir to life. I might have been a happier person, but I damn well wasn’t me.

“I despise any system,” Red Knight told me walking home, “that tells anyone that there is a normal, and that there is something wrong with you for not meeting some arbitrary standard. The pills never worked for me.” He was the one person I ever told outside my family about the pills because he had weathered the endless red couches, the fake diagnoses, and the endless rounds of treatment that could never cure the root problem. He knew what it was like to want to kill someone who hurt him as a child, and I knew it too. I just found out his younger brother has multiple personalities also. So much in common, alike in that we’re both children, playing at being adults and fooling the world, because both of us seem so much more self-sufficient than we really are. I don’t understand how he hasn’t lost his compassion or his ability to laugh, after all he’s been through. He’s faced worse, yet his sense of humor remains intact. “The biggest thing you miss out on by being female,” he declared, “is not being able to play with your own beard.”

“Well,” I grinned, “I can always stroke yours, instead.” And I proceeded to do so.

I stopped taking the pills soon afterwards, because I decided it was time to deal with things on my own terms and not hide behind some slivers of magical, white illusion. I haven’t been back since, not even when times get rough, which makes me proud. I can live without nooses or medication. I can be me, and I love that person.

Though not so much right now, when I am sick on the couch and I haven’t been able to sleep for so long. The nightmares are especially bad, lately. Rape. Torture. Death. Betrayal. Perhaps confronting the endless specters clawing at my mind will restore some semblance of sanity.

So I write so much. My words ooze over this blog and I can’t stop them from coming, from facing the devils and pulling them out, pain and all, one by one, and stick them here on the page before they dissolve into nameless shadows blurring every time I was ever happy in my life. I need to feel something more honest than this life I’ve been living because lately it seems like all of it is lies and dark eyes and late nights spent wishing for a little vodka or white wine. And the Spring-feeling lingers lately, the need for the season to change, for something to change, for all the bad times to pass me like the storms that gather. I feel restless and trapped and feral and in a bad mood all at once.

Spring has so often been the worst time. Layers upon layers. Everything bad to me has happened in the Spring or early summer. I think sometimes I must be able to sense the bad things coming, just because I know, I know that every spring/summer there is something dark coming and it’s waiting to devour me alive.

One Spring, You leave all your friends behind. Your friends of fourteen years. Your favorite hangouts, everything. There is nothing for you in the future. You don’t even get to say goodbye right because you’re already gone. They tell you you’re going in spring and just when people are finally starting to look at you as a human being and you might finally have found a place to fit in a small Mormon cattle-ranching community when your parents are vegetarians and want to live in an Earthship made completely out of rubber tires, you’ve made a place and it’s ripped away from you because your father decided the old job wasn’t good enough and he had a midlife crises and torn up all the roots transplanting you. You thought it was going to be Birmingham, Alabama. Thank God it wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama.

It was raining in the café the Italian Stallion took you. You watched Hellboy with him, together, in a nearly empty theater and you whispered like children during the film, laughing at impossibilities and bad dialogue. You had just made out two weeks ago. You were writing a 114-page paper and just needed some human company, preferably the other sex. He is saying something about computers in the café and you drift a little, ever smiling, because while this whole excursion means nothing to him it is something for you. You need a practice round. A little swing around the block before you’re back in the game just to test the smoothness of the waters. He’s leaving in three months anyway, maybe a senior fling with such a nice boy will teach you how to love again? Maybe it’ll give you practice and next year, next year you’ll finally meet someone who is interested in you for more than some late night action and maybe just maybe you’ll be able to settle down in peace. And this could be a little slice of this, and you want it more than anything, from someone, from anyone, from him.

And sitting there across from him and eating the fruit salad which tastes rotten I wanted to ask him if he’d ever hurt some girl he loved, if he’d ever ground her into the dust like it was nothing and apologized afterwards without ever really meaning it. Is this what all guys and girls do to each other? Is this how sentiment makes fools of us all? Maybe if he felt pity for me, he’d love me.

Spring was the season the children I was baby-sitting tied me down in the garden. There were three of them, and their father had just died and I was babysitting them while their parents held the wake at his father’s house. There were three other girls there to baby-sit too, part of my church group but they were upstairs playing pool and left me to deal with the kids. The children had down-syndrome and wide eyes and were stronger then they looked.

“Of course I’ll play your game,” I smiled. “How do you play?”

No silly girl no stay back don’t touch them don’t let them touch you not with their oh-so-innocent eyes and fingers back away run away run away please before the memories are forever branded into you…

They tied me to a pole in their yard, as a hostage. Then they began poking at me. With sticks. At first you know, it was like, whatever, but then it got really hard. And they could tell, so they found my sensitive spots: my kneecaps, the backs of my hands, my breasts, and they stabbed them hard with pointed sticks and I started screaming but the little blond angels of a minute ago just laughed and no one was around to hear me. Not even when they picked up a metal sprinkler head and started beating me with it, hitting my face, my chest, my ankles. I think there were other things too. A rake, a hoe. I don’t really remember. But I do remember claws sinking into my scalp and pulling out my hair in clumps. It fell into the damp grass next to the tears as I began to cry. It was this day I learned I had reverse-leukemia. I don’t bruise easily. I can have a metal stake thrown at my cheek with all the velocity an eight-year-old could muster from point-blank range and there will be no swelling at all. No proof that this wasn’t all some very bad dream.

Why doesn’t anyone come and help me? Where were the other girls? Surely they would come and check on me. Surely they could hear me screaming.

“We’re going to kill you,” the kids chanted, dancing around me. “You’re going to die. You’re dead already, ugly babysitter.”

There was another thing they did to me, one I don’t like to think about much. That thing I wonder if it was the one that messed me up. You try and put a name to one thing in your life, one moment where you suddenly died inside and have not quite been able to recover, not yet, no matter how many pills they give you to make you normal again. I wonder if this was that moment, or if it was earlier. How many times can a person define themselves as victimized? Is it really as bad the second time as the first?

I got free. Somehow, I untied the knots and began crawling inch by inch towards the house. I was trying not to let them see how injured I was, hoping the vultures wearing child-skin would leave me alone if I just stood up. But I couldn’t. And the children grabbed me around the waist and the ribs and tried to haul me back. So I pulled them off. I should have used my claws, my teeth, my feet, or my fists. I should have hurt them in my own self-defense, but I looked back on them and their eyes were bright and empty and they were laughing and I knew they had no clue what they were doing. An hour ago we had watched Annie, cuddling on the couch while I brushed the youngest one’s hair. Now she was hitting my tailbone with a piece of hard iron. This really was a game to them, and they didn’t know that my screaming was not an act, that the hair on the lawn was attached to nerve endings that burned and burned. And I couldn’t bring myself to hurt them. Because they didn’t know better. So I just tried to escape.

Fool. You want to know the truth? Don’t pretend the motive was holier than it was. Don’t pretend there was some kind of kind, beneficial pacifism on your part. You just knew that you were nothing. Your puny ass is not worth saving enough to ever hurt another person. Not even in self-defense.

I crawled in to the other babysitters, whimpering with the children still attached to my legs. They had begun biting my thighs. Their sharp teeth left tiny rips in my pants. I reached the top of the stairs and collapsed crying next to the door to the game room. The other babysitters just sat there, playing pool or air hockey or plucking up stuffed animals. I think I must have given a soft animal cry then, because someone looked over but no one did anything, and those tiny fists above me found all my sore spots and began punching me again.

Every inch of the crawl to the house and two flights of stairs with them pulling me down, hitting me, tearing at me, was sustained by the thought I just needed to get to the other girls and I would be safe and nobody else would need to get hurt but I could curl up behind their bodies and cry until I felt whole and safe again. That they saw me crying and sat around playing games was a betrayal on a level I wasn’t even ready to defend against. I was raw inside, and I knew the Good Samaritan would be dead now in real life. Mugged. Shot. Strangled for his kindness. Dead despite being good.

The girls finally gave up on their games and came out into the hallway with me. I was sprawled over the stairs, whimpering. One by one, the girls stepped over me, looking down at my face and my hair and my clothes, “Whoa,” was all one said as she walking by. She had short black hair and pouty, pretty lips. “What happened to you?”

I began to laugh then. Hysterically. Couldn’t they tell? Couldn’t they see the bald places where my hair was ripped out and the tears in my eyes and the children still kicking me? They stepped past it all, down to raid the family’s fridge of ice cream. “They’re trying to kill me,” I whispered, smiling madly as they went by. “Please help me.”

But the girls shrugged and walked down the stairs, and the children cried in triumph because they had won and there was no one there to stop them to do what they want. And I couldn’t hurt them. Not even now because they looked innocent even when they had my blood on them. And I love children so very much.

Then, I gave up. I didn’t try to be strong. I screamed and they finally realized I was being serious, and the girls frowned and said “oh you weren’t joking” and then the brother dragged me away to the bathroom and yelled at me, “Get away from them, they’re too young to see you like this!”

I started laughing again. I mean now I knew I had fallen through the looking glass. “Too young to see this? THEY DID THIS TO ME!” And the children were crying and everyone was looking away from me until the brother shoved money in my hands and sent me away like a cheap whore. “It’s not their fault,” he told me as he shut the door. It was white and very clean. “Their father just died. They’re just acting out. You don’t need to say anything to anybody, because they’ve learned their lesson and I’ll take care of everything.”

A five-dollar bill in my hand… for two plus hours of physical torture and memories that would haunt me for a lifetimes. How generous. But the stupid girl took the bill and didn’t press charges, because that was all she was worth anyhow. Five dollars and a slammed white door. It didn’t matter if she had been hurt because it’s not like it hadn’t happened before, and the children had looked chagrined. They’d probably have nightmares too. Though probably not as bad.

In the spring, things always seem so miserable. A year before or was it after? My memory is gray with fog. Layers within layers. Did any of this even really happen?

My first and only serious boyfriend had a cube face with all the edges rounded off. It was pale white and covered with acne and sometimes it got whiter when he got mad at me for something. And red when he was hot and passionate and needed to drive himself into me on the couch with a fervor I didn’t quite understand. I was a good little girl, and a Mormon, and only 16 years old.

A friend had called me out to go walking among the magnolias that day. Spring. He was back for the weekend from college and he had called me and it was now or never so I cancelled my day out with “Lenny”, because this friend was very special to me and I was secretly in love with him. More in love with him than with my own boyfriend. But I thought of myself as ugly and unimportant, and I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t find someone else in my high school who cared for me. And I was right, I didn’t. Lenny was my only chance for happiness, for feeling the connection that is supposed to develop between two people who love each other very much.

Only I didn’t love him. In fact, I despised him a little, because he touched me in ways that made me feel uncomfortable, ways that good little Mormons don’t allow themselves to be touched in, and he wouldn’t take his hands off even when I slapped them away or pleaded with him to stop it. His fat fig fingers were always searching, worming through my clothes. Even tight turtlenecks and coats, when I tried to put as many layers between myself and him as possible, his hands would still get in. He even touched me that way in public, as if him putting his jacket around my shoulders when I was cold was some kind of liberty to gain access to my tits.

It was kind of a cycle, I despised him for how dirty he made me feel, and he made me feel dirty because that was the only thing he could have of me, because he sensed I didn’t love him. I might have if he hadn’t been so physical, always pushing me into things I didn’t want to do, and told him so but he did anyway, but we’ll never know that will we? And he was nice enough, when he wasn’t pawing at me or looking at me as if he knew what a holy hypocrite I was. I should have left him, I should have dumped him right away because I knew he was scum… but he was the one shot I had. And I was lonely. All my high school friends had gone away. I was sixteen and hadn’t been kissed. I was fighting with my parents all the time over which college to go to, and I needed someone, someone to convince me that life was worth living. That I mattered. And later, there was guilt. He didn’t hurt me as much until the guilt made me shut my mouth, because I had qualified to high school debate nationals, and he was first alternate. And he was older than me. It was his last year. He had a right to go, and because of me, his dreams remained unfulfilled.

God I hated the way he smelled his mulish laugh his mouth covering me sliming me when he kissed…was that what you’d call it? It didn’t seem very much like a kiss and didn’t look like what you’d see on the movie screen or between parents or other couples. For one thing, he’d keep his eyes open, so when I would lean in and embrace his lips with mine I’d open my eyes a little only to find him staring at me half-lidded and bored with blue eyes that never blinked just sat there without emotion. No love or affection, just that lazy arrogance that infuriated me while leaving me uncomfortable. He never said he loved me or even liked me. We were taking a quiz together online and he said he’d never been passionately in love, with his girlfriend of a year over his shoulder. He wouldn’t do anything with me unless there was always the “hanging out” after. I was just a tool to be discarded, the only girl desperate enough to be his prey. Even when he came back from college, when he was dating someone else and came to visit he stuck his hands between his thighs and started retracing old habits and it was hard not to let him. He made the loneliness go away. I didn’t have anyone else.

I tried to tell my friends something was wrong with us, but they would laugh at me when I told him I didn’t like how Lenny made me feel on our dates, that he was always touching me and making me feel so dirty inside. They laughed at me because they could never picture the sweet valedictorian doing anything wrong or ungodly. I mean, he was a valedictorian, and a state champion of debate, and people like that don’t push boundaries and don’t hurt women. And so there must be something wrong with me. I must be exaggerating or bringing it on myself or something. I was a whore and deserved what I got.

Lenny would always apologize afterwards. His parents were getting divorced, his mom was in a sanitarium being treated for manic depression, he was struggling to raise enough money to go to college in Chicago, so life was rough for him, and he could do better next time, he promised. Promised on his hands and knees, next to me in bed or on the couch, perched on bike racks where I told him I wanted to go to my prom alone but he talked me out of it and told me he would never, ever hurt me again. The worst was when he’d get on his knees and take my hands and say, “Please forgive me. That’s what true Christians do.”

“I don’t know,” I whispered softly, “I don’t know if I can…” And then his hand was up my skirt the next day like nothing had happened, pulling the blood-red prom dress over my head even if I was trying to push it down. And I said no and he didn’t hear me or didn’t care because he wrestled me to the ground anyway.

But the first time he violated me was in the Spring and I had cancelled a date with him to be with a boy I loved, a boy I never saw, and who would just hold me when we went walking under the magnolias and didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. Even now, he is the kindest person I know. And he was the first person ever to call me beautiful, a word Lenny never used for me. Not even when he asked me to wear nothing but Saran Wrap to the prom. I was never beautiful to him. Some days I wish I could show him what I’ve become, just to spite him. Beautiful and sexual and surrounded by love. You failed to destroy me, and no one will ever love you truly because they will know you for what you are. You will die alone, and I will have hordes of people around me worshipping the ground I walk on because I dived into the crucible head first and came out stronger than before. Like steel. Like platinum. Like mithril.

This spring, this time, the first time… He took my hands. I was sitting on the couch, with him, and he was stroking my neck and he pulled me from the couch, licking his lips over and over. “Here,” he said. “Come.” That was all he said until I protested. He dragged me across the window and the little rain droplets made jagged patterns in the light. It pounded glass. Wardrums. A warning, a call to defend yourself.

I knew where he was taking me, though, and things hadn’t degenerated to the violent roughness that characterized the relationship later. I still thought…I still had faith in him. But I knew who he was and what his weaknesses were, and so I gripped the banister. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to bed with you.”

“Don’t be prudish,” he told me, stroking the inside of my arm. “I just need to stretch out.” He was six foot four, and the couch was very cramped. But something told me that going upstairs with him was a very bad idea. And I was feeling kind of sick and weak, so I didn’t want to have to push him off, because I felt on the verge of throwing up as it was. So I clung to the banister.

“No,” I said. “I like it down here just fine. I’m perfectly comfortable. You’ve never minded before.”

“Maybe I did.” Then Lenny didn’t say anything anymore, because he suddenly dived at me. His hands thudded against my hands, thudded like the rain, whacking my fingertips until he pounded them loose and he could pry them away. I was numb with shock…is he hitting me? It didn’t seem possible. Not then, but later it was always a game. Hit me and I’d open up. When I clenched my thighs shut, he’d hit me until I let go and his fingers would jab in and yank them open and he could do what he wanted. But tonight, he grabbed my fingers. I grabbed at the banister with my legs, linking around it, but he kept pulling and pulling until I thought my arms would come off and my legs came all apart, and then he dragged me upstairs to his room and locked the door behind us. We were both panting then.

Another night, when I said no, he gave me a reassuring hug and held my hands behind me and I didn’t realize he had a shoelace in his hand until he had wrapped it around my wrists and knotted it. Then he began touching me anyway. I wriggled free of the knots and told him he didn’t tie them tight enough. He laughed and said of course not, I would never do something you didn’t want. In other words, I wanted everything. It was all me, all the time. Didn’t he hear my whimpering? Didn’t he see me crying after when I begged him to never do that again, to just be my friend? How many times did I try to break up with him only to find his false promises, his words telling me how rough life made him do dumb things and things wouldn’t be so bad from now on and only he knew what I really wanted, only he had taken care of me? I was his first girl, didn’t I owe him something for being pure so long? I couldn’t break it face-to-face. He’d been kind to me, when he wasn’t hurting me, and I couldn’t bear to make him miserable. Not with his parents divorcing and his money problems and his mom being medicated. I was already damned for what we’d done, so why hurt a man who had only been kind to me, if a trifle overenthusiastic? It was my fault for tempting him. It was my fault for wanting it. I shouldn’t punish him for my lack of strength. It was only after I’d been with other boys, drunken boys who barely knew me as I sought solace in something short-lived, that I asked myself a question- if a drunk guy I met two hours ago stops when I say no, why couldn’t a sober valedictorian boyfriend? Then I learned how to hate him. And now I look back and this time I could hit them. I could hit them all to save myself because they are wrong and it is my body and it is my right.

His parents weren’t home that night. His walls were the cold, white kind lit by florescent lighting, and his bedspreads were faded tie-dye. The bed was narrow, and tie-dye isn’t exactly ominous. Innocent… hippie… happy. “See, this isn’t so bad, is it?” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

“Lenny,” I whispered, “I’m going to be sick. I’ll get you sick too, you shouldn’t touch me now.”

“I have a wonderful immune system,” he told me. “I never get sick.” And he pushed me backwards, away from the door, until I tripped into his bed and he was on top of me and held me down and was tearing at my clothes and pawing at me and I thought to myself “he’s right, this isn’t so bad…kind of feels nice…” But I said, “please let go of me no we can’t no please stop…” but he didn’t hear me anymore because his lips swallowed my mouth so that all that came out were queer moaning noises and I couldn’t even breathe. He was heavier than I was and he had been a wrestler once upon a time. I couldn’t get away from him, so silently I was being smothered.

Funny, I got my first kiss during that. It was a French one. Odd, that so much was done or I did without ever having being kissed. Funny, all the ways he touched me before I let him kiss me, because while it wasn’t hard to press me against a brick wall, trapped so he could feel my curves, my head and lips were mine and I always turned away until now because I wanted the first kiss to be something special. I wanted there to be love.

And Spring was also when your kindergarden teacher hit you years and years and years ago. When she told you that you were worthless, brainless, and you would die without ever accomplishing anything you dreamed about. You would lose your fingers just like she did and be old and die alone just like she did because you were nothing but undeserving brats and not anything like the good kids she taught at the other school. She took away all your toys and gave them to the kids at the other school because you were such a stupid child. You’d never grow up to be anything wonderful and because teacher said it was so it must be true. You were six years old and she kept hitting you that Spring, because you didn’t come to class on time and would stay out at recess behind the mound of tires hiding and praying that nobody ever made you go in. You learned to be very, very quiet then. To shut up in the face of authority and never resist anything, because what good did it do? You were nominated as leader of the class but you turned it down, hid in the corner and played with your crayons to keep from sticking out so much. Then maybe she’d stop telling you what a bad little girl you were. But you couldn’t even do that right, and sometimes she’d make you stay in from recess because you used the wrong colors and broke the crayons and could never, ever stay inside the lines.

“My bad little girl,” Lenny told me, stroking my hair before he went down on me.

“No,” I cried again. “Please stop it and let me go! Let me go!”

This was the one chance I had at happiness. The one man who thought I was worth anything. God, I was such a different person back then. Why didn’t I have faith in myself? Why didn’t I know that college would be so much better, that other years would be so much better, that boys did not always bring tears in the dark? Fool girl. Wasn’t your integrity worth something more than he could give you in a bed? But he was on the debate team too, had to see him everywhere you went, and that made things even more difficult. It was just easier to lie back and to take it than to sit with a year of hurt silences and everyone blaming you because he’d tell them exactly what kind of creature you are, you masochistic fuckerwhore.

I think I blacked out when he did it. I was so sick inside. I was going to throw up everything I ever ate. Without a word, Lenny buttoned up my jeans, afterwards. There was silence, except for my sobs. He didn’t acknowledge them, just rubbed my stomach and bit an ear lobe until I was wincing. “You’d better go,” he said.

I felt shaky all over, not quite right. Confused. What had he done to me, and why did I feel so good and so bad at the same time? My mom came to pick me up and I stopped crying long enough so she could drive me home, because I didn’t want her to know what a slut her daughter was. I didn’t even sit up front with her because I figured she could smell it on me, because I smelled like him and like me and like dirty ugliness.

The little children I was babysitting took their pointed sticks and found where the seams in my jeans had ripped and poked me down in my underwear. They poked up inside my vagina, and it still hurts sometimes, when someone tries to make me feel pleasure. I just laugh and fake it, oohohhyesyoumakemefeelgoodyesyesYES!!! What can I say? Why spoil a happy moment, a small respite from the nightmares you still have, the obsidian casing of loneliness that still encases your soul? Why spoil it with some dirty revelation that will just make the boy pity you and not understand you at all. Because you’re stronger than you were before. The girl that let people walk all over her is no more, replaced by a stubborn, taciturn writer who is damn sick of keeping silent. Because they win that way. I can’t go back and mend myself or time, but I can’t let them win again either by accepting the shame. By blaming myself for what I didn’t ask for. Never again.

The café. And dark. And happiness. And me seeking to build on a one-night stand. The Italian drove me home in his car and it was blue too and it had paint that almost seemed to sizzle in the damp moonlight. The clouds were beginning to roll away, now, and the corners of stars hit his crown of dark hair that I suddenly wanted to run my fingers through very much. Ask me home, I pleaded silently. Ask me home and love me like you did when we were drunk, only this time sober. There doesn’t have to be any emotion, but I want to be safe in the harbor of someone’s arms, because all I have waiting for me at home is a cold computer filled with 114 pages of Yugoslavian genocide. A thesis that no one will read, and that I don’t give a damn about. And the memories of half-dozen dark Springs.

“That was fun,” he said as I got out. “We should do it again sometime.”

“Yeah,” I grinned, and I reached over to give him a lingering hug. “Thanks for all the fruit salad.”

And I closed the door, and walked back under the magnolia trees, and he gunned out of the parking lot at 40 miles per hour. I’m still trying to decide if he really needed to get away from me that badly or it was just coincidence. Either way, we haven’t touched intimately since. Too bad, really. We could have had something fleetingly wonderful, but he’s back pining over the girl who host-friend slept with and I sit and stir drinks for him and sigh a little inside because I know it wouldn’t have worked anyway but I did want it to. Really.

“Doesn’t everyone deserve a shot at joy?”

I don’t need any pills now, but I still despise Spring, and the rain it brings. And I brood and write and pray and let myself, just for a moment, be something honest and tragic before the smile goes on and I waltz out to meet my less-intense friends, complete with perfectly applied blush, lipstick, and eye shadow. As someone respectable. Someone normal. Independence Day.

This time, perhaps I’ll remember my umbrella.