I had no idea this could happen to me—the pure prey I had become, without leverage, without recourse. This encounter with power was shocking and wordless and I did not understand.
What next? My jeans were unzipped. I kept my hand clamped over myself and thought AIDS, pregnancy, STDs. I’d had “health class” as a fourth former, and I remembered. If I could protect my virginity, I’d survive this.
“Just don’t have sex with me,” I said softly, as clearly as I could without Mr. Belden hearing me, and at that point Rick shifted his hips away from mine and up onto my face.
One of my favorite love scenes in print happens to feature this just don’t construction, when the writer and cultural critic Maggie Nelson spends a first Christmas with her beloved Harry in a San Francisco hotel room: “Just don’t kill me,” she writes, “I said as you took off your leather belt, smiling.”
In which “just” means please, everything up to.
I don’t for a moment believe they thought this is what I meant. But I do acknowledge that I did not choose my words more clearly, or name my terms more favorably. I see that now. I have always been terrible at negotiation.
Rick laid his pelvis across my face and fucked my throat. Taz grabbed and rolled my breasts. I had to concentrate on breathing, with the cock in my throat, and I did not move any part of my body.
After Rick ejaculated, Taz said, “It’s my turn.” Was he speaking to me? If so, these were the first words he’d ever said to me. Rick picked me up and angled me so that my face was in front of Taz’s erect cock. It protruded blue in the light, and Rick put me onto it like I was a living socket wrench. Again I did not move my body. I worked on getting air into my nose and down into my lungs on the offbeat of his thrusting into my face, of Rick slamming me onto him.
Time got syrupy. I tried not to cry.
After Taz ejaculated into me, Rick let me sit back on the mattress and took his hands off me.
He said, “It’s your turn now.”
I got up onto my knees and pulled down my jacket, which they had not taken off. I zipped and buttoned my jeans. I remember thinking, I am completely dressed. As though something were still intact. But also this stood out for me, the illogic of it—that I was completely dressed. This was proof, wasn’t it, I asked myself, that none of this made sense? That we had not just fooled around, but rather that they’d treated me like I was not a girl, not even a person? I dropped out the window, and they did not try to stop me.
Technically, as discussed, in the lexicon of criminal justice what had just happened was felonious sexual assault and aggravated felonious sexual assault. But these terms belonged to a system of discovery and response that I did not know how to access—it might have been a language spoken on the far side of the globe. Nor did I possess a vocabulary of psychological valence—words such as consent and dissociation—that might have helped me to understand. I walked back to my room slowly, as though something might come clear.
What they had done, I told myself, was not that bad. I had gotten away without worse, without the worst. I was fine. But I was shattered. Why? What part of me was broken? I rehearsed it over and over:
I broke school rules and went to the room of an older boy. He and his roommate, one at a time, put their penises down my throat until climax. I left the room.
It was not quite right.
The problem is a flaw in the chronology. “I left the room” does not belong at the end of the tale. It belongs right after “older boy.” Because when they did what they did, I’d offered my body up to them in exchange for protection from greater theft. So:
I broke school rules and went to the room of an older boy. But there were two undressed boys there. I left the room. He and his roommate, one at a time, put their penises down my throat until climax.
Yep, that’s it.
The simplest way I can tell the story of my assault is to describe how the boys made me feel I was no longer a person. Their first violation was erasure. I walked back to my dorm along the main roads, shuffling beneath every streetlight, as though to force the school to acknowledge me. I waited for Murph or Sarge in the white Security Jeep to accelerate from the shadows and stop me with a shout. But the world was different now, or I was, and nobody did.
Or maybe the remedy I’m looking for is not a telling, after all. Maybe it’s a correction to that imbalance of power, a restoration of self to self. I went limp while I was in their control. Psychologists who study trauma and violence in all forms, across all criminal variation, identify responses like mine as normal, and have amended the old dictum to read “Fight or flight or freeze.” There is plenty of data. I was an ordinary possum.
In fact, I find it easier to try to imagine the boys than myself that night, even though I never spoke to them again. This is an exercise in fantasy, not empathy. If I can rehumanize them, I can offer myself something too. And I might not be wrong. I might find refuge in knowing, which is feeling’s poorer relation, but perhaps a place to begin.
For example, what if I consider them from the perspective of social class?
Neither of the men who assaulted me comes from a family whose name is carved on school walls. Think of them that autumn. How exhausting
