Many of you will have noticed that in the past few days, our little discussion group here has drawn the efforts of someone who craves attention from others. From what I can tell, he-or I suppose, less probably, she-checks the site one or two times a day for new posts from me, and then tries to respond with some sort of intimidating comment.
If you haven’t had the privilege of reading the artistic contributions of this particular writer, here’s a sample of the work in question:
Wait until you see what I have planned.
He should have made you bleed more.
I will show you damage.
I want to thank you all for the moral support you have shown me here. You give me courage and strength to continue to share my experience with you, and I hope it helps you in turn.
But whoever has been making these destructive comments deserves no attention. Some of you have tried to scold him or shout him down, but please just ignore him. I have been tempted to erase the comments, which of course I have the ability to do, but even that gives this person a form of attention-the knowledge that I digested his words sufficiently to decide to erase them, the accomplishment of being the one member of the message board to have his comments moderated.
And so I have left the words there on the screen-capable of being read by you or me-but hopefully ignored upon first glance. These are the words of a person who has his (or her) own shortcomings. His (or her) own secrets. His (or her) own insecurities. Whoever that person is, he does not have anything “planned.” He will not make me “bleed” or “show me damage.”
Because some of you loyal readers may have called the police in response to the activity of my website, I suppose law enforcement might become involved. But I will not delete the words. Nor will I stop writing my own.
I choose not to delete those heinous comments because they are a badge of honor. Those words constitute evidence that I am speaking truth-not to power, but to those who crave it, no matter what the cost.
I will not delete the words because I recognize they are an attempt to silence me, no different from that man’s words so many years ago, threatening to kill my mother and me if I spoke the truth.
The title of this post is “Never Tell” because that is the lesson I was taught by my abuser all those years ago. In my particular case, he made the threat explicit, but he didn’t need to. Never Tell is the universal, underlying rule that all survivors intuit and then internalize.
The phrase is beautiful in its efficiency, isn’t it? Two little words, but they convey so much more. Never tell. Or else.
But here’s the thing. When does it happen? When do we actually read in the news about women who are killed for daring to speak of the harms committed against them? It doesn’t happen, at least not here, where we are privileged to live in a modern society. Words have been used by these abusers to silence us for too long, but the cowards never follow through on their threats. They are the ones who are weak. We are the ones with strength.
They choose to threaten. I choose to call their bluff. I will not be silenced.
B ack at the downtown gym with complacent staff and a public computer, those words were inducing their own kind of threat. This endeavor was proving more difficult than previously envisioned. She had not only continued to blog, she had defiantly kept the threats visible in the comments section. Now she was raising the possibility of a police investigation.
Although it was tempting to reconsider strategy, there seemed to be no other option but to leave another response.
“I look forward to proving you wrong. I know your name. I’ve seen your family. And I know where you live.”
I n his rented room at the Tonawanda Motor Inn, Jimmy Grisco finished reading the last of the letters. He hadn’t thought about these things for fifteen years, but seeing the yellowed pages now had him remembering how he’d felt back then.
It was ironic. He’d been out for two months. He’d searched as well as he could-asking around, checking the phone book, that sort of thing-but had gotten nowhere. Then, yesterday, the prosecutor had hauled him into her office. Why is this person calling the prison? she wanted to know. Keep your nose clean. You got a second chance, James. Don’t be causing yourself any trouble.
And then he’d seen that note next to the lawyer’s computer. The name and phone number just sitting there for him, better than if he had planned it himself. He pretended not to see, but, man, how he’d started repeating those numbers in his head over and over and over again. Picturing the layout on a phone’s touch pad. Imagining the shape. Anything to keep that number locked up in his mind.
Finally he’d ended up in the courthouse elevator with that guy scribbling file notes with his left hand. He asked to borrow the pen, using his own forearm as a scratchpad. Fifteen years ago, when he’d gone in, a phone number could only do so much. These days? On the Internet a phone number could get you everything.
He packed the letters away into the same Adidas shoe box he’d stored them in all those years ago. He still couldn’t believe the police hadn’t paid more attention to them when they searched his apartment back then. Goes to show they didn’t really care about the whole story.
He’d found the shoe box in his uncle’s basement last month, when he’d finally gone through all the crap that had been stored there since his arrest. He had almost thrown it out. Now he was glad he hadn’t.
Chapter Nineteen
As Ellie was walking to her car, she spotted a kid in a Casden uniform on the corner of Seventy-fourth Street. He was smoking a cigarette. She recognized him from Julia’s Facebook page as her on-and-off boyfriend, Marcus Graze.
“You didn’t get the news flash? The mayor doesn’t want people smoking near schools.”
If the kid was fazed by Julia’s death or a police detective’s harangue, he didn’t show it.
Marcus Graze was only sixteen years old but carried himself like the thirty-eight-year-old investment banker Ellie had briefly lived with a few years back. Chest out. Shoulders down. Chin forward. The collar of the crested navy-blue blazer was turned up, just grazing his shaggy blond hair. If posture reflected self-confidence, this kid had it in spades.
He took a deep drag on his filtered Camel. “Don’t give me that Officer Healthy routine. I noticed you breathing it in. Go ahead. I won’t tell anyone.”
He leaned his body toward Ellie’s as he extended the cigarette toward her. She suddenly understood all those songs by men about teenage girls as temptresses.
“You’re sweet but half my age.”
“Older women know what they’re doing.”
“And Julia Whitmire didn’t?”
“Julia was cool.”
“All the money your parents are dropping on Casden and the best you can do is cool?”
“I can get fancy if you want. She was sophisticated. Tolerant. Inquisitive. Adventurous. Nonconformist. How about that? Sometimes simple’s better, though. If you knew her, you’d know what I mean. She was… cool.”
“Were you dating?”
He smiled, but with his downcast gaze and the accompanying sigh, the overall effect was more sad than cocky. “I don’t date. Julia didn’t date. We were fuck buddies. Oops, there I go again with the simple words.”
“It’s a strange way to talk about a girl you were intimate with, just a day after her death.”
“Julia would have said the same about me. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, if that’s what you were hoping to find.”
“Too conformist for you?”
“Yeah, if you must know.”
“Regardless of the terminology, don’t most teenagers still couple up?”
