There’s no escaping the story, partly because mainstream media outlets screw up—they chastise the bone-headedness of the rapists’ inadvertent cell phone confessions, as if that were their primary misstep, and sympathize with them once they’re convicted (at least one year in a youth correctional facility, along with the requirement to register as sex offenders).

What a shame, commentators say. Such bright futures. They don’t talk about the girl’s life. And so of course people react.

For a week we read pissed-off op-eds revealing new details, or new permutations and interpretations of those details, and the same resounding cry for responsibility and rectification. How do we fix this?

The story becomes an emblem, one of those times where the name of the event replaces the event, or the series of events of the event, until the particulars aren’t as important as the name—Steubenville—and what it stands for—rape culture—and we feel the sun setting on the particulars, which include:

Asphalt, the grain of tar digging into a girl’s knees as she knelt on the street and puked up booze. A circle of boys stood over her, jostling each other and laughing. She was making a mess, so one of them pulled off her shirt, out of the way of the vomit. Another waved three bucks around and said he’d give it to anyone who peed on her. They laughed, but no one took him up on it.

The backseat of a car—leather or vinyl or fabric?—where the girl lay sprawled, legs splayed, while a boy she’d had a crush on stuck his fingers in her vagina. His friend craned around to get a good look, filming it on his phone.

A dark orange floor—carpeting or linoleum?—and the legs of two boys in sports shorts, hands clasped around the girl’s ankles and wrists, lifting her a foot into the air, her head tipped back, hair dragging on the ground.

A basement, where the girl was stripped. More fingers in her vagina, more photos. A boy slapped his penis on her naked hip. A boy opened her mouth and tried to fuck it.

Texts and tweets:

“Where you at?”

“We’re hitting it for real.”

“Song of the night definitely is ‘Rape Me’ by Nirvana.”

“Did you [expletive] her?”

“LOL, she couldn’t even move.”

“Hey buddy, you want to send me that pic because you love me?”

Video:

“The dead girl”

[laughter]

“Is so raped.”

And then the dead girl woke up.

***

Asphalt and upholstery make up so much of teen sex. Teen rape. The dark bits between the two.

After Steubenville I find myself shying away from packs of boys. Nice boys, for all I know. A group of them shuffles in front of me, headed towards the subway, hollering and jostling each other the way boys do, big grins on their faces. Clean cotton tee shirts just washed by their moms, baseball caps with the brims pressed flat. One of them catches sight of me and moves closer to his buddies to let me pass. But I don’t want to pass. I don’t want to get close. I slow down so that I’m barely walking. It doesn’t matter that I’m late.

I do this a lot with groups of men. I cross to the other side of the street, give them a wide berth, hold my head high (which I’ve read deters assault) but don’t make eye contact (which I’ve read encourages assault), and if they yell I keep moving. I walk with big sturdy strides because I don’t want to look like a hurt sheep. This one’s a kicker.

I don’t really register the exhaustion of vigilance anymore, or the frustration of having to be vigilant when all I want is a damn pint of blackberries, remembering that along with grocery store comes don’t get raped!, but sure, I’m thirty-one and I’m used to that. It’s the boys that make me sad. I’m a teacher and a tutor. I like kids. I don’t want to be scared of boys, because it’s not about the boys—or not just about them.

***

When the girl woke up the next morning she felt, at first, confused. Where was she? Where were her clothes? She was naked, and she didn’t remember how she got that way.

She knew the boys who lay around her, still passed out, but she didn’t know the basement or the couch she’d apparently slept on, its strange fabric. She touched her hair, which felt matted with something. Her clothes, when she found them, were stained.

Somehow she made it home. She went home across the river, back to her own bed and bedroom, remembering nothing.

And then the chatter started.

“If that is [semen] on you that is [expletive] crazy,” a friend texted her, referring to a photo of her that was making its rounds online.

“I hate my life,” she wrote back. “I don’t even know what the [expletive] happened to me.”

She tried asking the boy whom she liked (the one who’d first stuck his fingers in her, though she didn’t know this yet).

“Nothing happen last night,” he wrote back. “You gave me a hand [job] and that’s it.”

“That is not all that happened,” she responded. “Tell me the truth now.” And, later, when he still wouldn’t comply, “Why would you let that happen? Why wouldn’t you try to help me?”

***

I didn’t know Anthony before I climbed into the backseat of a car with him, and he didn’t rape me. It’d been a pretty harmless night—just kids making the rounds of a Virginia town’s parking lots, picking one place and then another to settle for a while, playing music from car stereos with the doors open, bold kids sitting on laps while the shyer ones bummed cigs off each other—Newports, Marlboro Lights. We were sixteen-year-olds full of malt liquor, parked in cul de sacs. No bad intentions.

Anthony was quiet and wiry, skinny arms sprouting from a well-worn band tee shirt, some old metal group, its black fabric soft enough to bury your face in. Dark hair, brown eyes, an attempt at stubble. Moody and thus smart, in my estimation.

My friends disappeared into a house up the street, but he hung back, asking if I wanted to hang out. I was a virgin dork who never had boyfriends, never even got crushed on, as far as I knew. Did I want to hang out? Please.

We’d just settled into the fuzzy backseat of a sedan when he said he liked to bite, and was I ok with that? Well, I didn’t know. I’d read Clan of the Cave Bear and Stephen King, young girl dark stuff with sexy bits you could earmark and read again later. So, biting? I guessed that was ok—I thought of Skinemax, sexy moaning, a little black lace: spooky, kind of cool.

“I like that too,” I said, and his eyes lit up like Christmas.

The first stab of pain was muted by surprise and St. Ides. He had my lip between his teeth and was chewing it like veal, huffing deep breaths of pleasure. He moved on to my chin, and then my neck.

I did not then, and do not now, possess a poker face. I grimaced and flinched away until my shoulders bumped against the window. But I didn’t shove him off. I thought, somehow, that I was supposed to let him continue for as long as I could stand it. I’d never been told how to value my physical pleasure or lack thereof. It didn’t occur to me as a possibility.

And Anthony, getting sweaty now, didn’t seem to notice or mind my discomfort. He was happy to accept that generosity.

A hand disappeared, and then his penis was out, quivering in the air. He released my neck from between his teeth—relief, thank god—and grabbed the back of my head, pushing me towards his lap. Like he couldn’t believe his luck. But my lips were swelling, they didn’t feel like my own anymore, in fact I was blinded by a throbbing that wasn’t bound to one location, but rather was searing from inside my face, my neck—everything above my shoulders a constellation of pain—and here was his penis, pink and skinny and long, almost pointed, like a hot pencil. I couldn’t put it in my mouth.

I was up and over his lap in seconds, the door hanging open as he yelled, “Hey!” The grit of stones poking my knees as I crouched in a ditch and puked.

And here, suddenly and mercifully, was a friend, a good friend of my best friend, in fact, standing above me. She must have seen me fall from the car. I could see the lights of the house behind her, where my best friend must be. I attempted a smile, sitting up on my knees. She smiled back.

And then she lifted a camera. Snap.

***

Poppy Harlow stands outside a courthouse in Ohio wearing a bright red suit, as red as her name, speaking into a CNN camera. Her long blonde hair is perfectly blown.

“It was incredibly emotional,” she’s saying, “incredibly difficult…to watch… These two young men had such promising futures—star football players, very good students.” She blinks her eyes and nods her head forcefully every three words, as if to punctuate. Star football players. Very good students.

Poppy is very sad for the boys. “[They] literally watched as…their life fell apart,” she says. “One of the young men…when that sentence came down, he collapsed! He collapsed”—and here she folds her body forward, to illustrate the tragedy of it all, jerks forward like she’s been socked in the gut—“in the arms of his attorney. He said to him, ‘My life is over. No one is going to want me now.’”

Poppy doesn’t mention the death threats the rape victim has been receiving from local teenagers.

Later, two girls, 15 and 16, will be charged with “aggravated menacing” of the victim; a teenage boy who suggested that God would do the punishing (not him—he would just pray for it) is not arrested. There were other tweets, lots of Whores and Alcoholics tossed around, but there’s not much that can be done about those either, not legally.

“You ripped my family apart,” writes a cousin of one of the boys.

***

I never saw the photograph, but I saw my reflection in mirrors: amphibian, my swollen lips like purplish slabs of liver. For the next week, as the photograph was passed around the neighboring high school where the Saturday night kids went, I wore turtlenecks. I told my mom I’d tripped running up the stairs and slammed my face. Isn’t that stupid?

Turtlenecks, a beat up face and a story about falling: I’m not sure if there’s anything more cliché than that. I’m not sure what could be more obvious than that—lord, girl, come on—but no one said anything. No one asked questions. As if an unspoken contractual blindness bound us. And at the time, that felt like a mercy. I’d sort of asked for it, so he hadn’t done anything wrong. Better to forget it.

***

A week after the original sentencing, one of the boys makes an appeal. He says he didn’t know what he did was rape. He says he doesn’t want to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. His lawyer says that his “brain isn’t fully developed,” that “a person at seventy-five years old should [not] have to explain for something they did at sixteen.”

My ex and I sit in my new living room and argue about it.

“I don’t feel bad,” I’m saying.

***

There was one Monday, years later, when Anthony the Biter crossed my mind. I was sitting in a cubical at my temp job, fresh off the bus to New York City, squinting dispiritedly at a long list of names to be fed into a spreadsheet, when I decided to look him up, no doubt from boredom as much as a dark-edged curiosity.

And there he was, making a face on a social media site, a grown-up who’d gone to music college in Boston. So I wrote him a message. Something like, Do you remember. It was a bad time for me. I’ve felt weird about it always, though it was brief.

It didn’t take long to get a response:

Sorry? Had we met?

***

“I don’t feel bad,” I’m saying, “because she’ll live with it for the rest of her life too. That seems like a fair trade.” I’ve gone from zero to sixty in seconds—one second—the second my ex started defending the boys. Pedal to the metal, cylinders firing, all systems go, I want to break someone. I want to palm the back of someone’s head and push his face, rhythmically and repeatedly, into a wall. Let’s see some skin on brick, hear some teeth crack, motherfucker.

“They’re children,” my ex is saying. “You say you believe in rehabilitation.”

And I do, usually, essentially—I want to—but there’s an ugliness brewing in me that’s larger than anything I can justify. Because it feels like nothing ever goes punished, nothing’s made right, and why is it that finally when we get some justice we have to argue for it? Why is it that a man who loves me still argues for the rights of rapists?

Which is a flaw in my logic. I’ve never told anyone—especially not lovers or boyfriends—about what happened that night fifteen years ago. And I wasn’t raped; it wasn’t even sexual assault, not really, was it? (Or was it?) Besides which, we’re talking about Steubenville. We’re talking about people I’ve never met. It only feels like I’ve met them. And what’s that worth?

***

One of the Steubenville boys ends up being sentenced to two years (his friend gets one), which some people feel is too much, and some people feel is not enough. And I don’t know—both sides seem right, and wrong.

Throwing boys in jail won’t make them kinder, more engaged, less likely to abuse; it won’t stop some boys from raping and other boys from prizing their pleasure over the discomfort of another person. It won’t stop girls from tweeting or showing off photographs of victims, and it clearly won’t stop adults from perpetuating the whole cycle in the first place.

But a lot of us have bad memories and friends with worse. We live with rape statistics like “1 in 6,” “600 per day,” “60% unreported,” “98% unpunished,” and we become so famished for rectification that we’re carelessly voracious when we get it, or when we feel like we do. We’re a bunch of beggars stumbling on a crisp fifty.

***

After the trial ends, Steubenville mostly fades from the news. There are other, valid, things to think about—gay marriage, gun control, two bombs in Boston. The weather turns warm, which feels like a reprieve.

There are small waves when the boys’ football coach, who knew about the rape but didn’t say anything, lest he lose his players, has his contract renewed—two years, no problem—but mostly, it seems, people are tired of Steubenville. Like we’ve talked and written and fought about it enough, and it’s meant to go now. The whole thing. As if we did our duty the weeks we considered it, and we wish to be absolved of the responsibility of thinking about it now, this blight we carry.

I feel it too. That I should let it go. I do want to. Why beat a dead girl?

Related Posts:

• “A Tragedy of Choice”
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• What I Learned In Homemaking
• The Cave
• The Sacred and the Profane

Take off your hat, dip your crown just enough to let me know I am respected and acknowledged.

Let me pass without trial.

It’s an easy thing.

Let a girl walk past without trial.

But not this past Sunday. The Lord’s Day.

I keep finding myself telling myself it was a small thing. But small things don’t make you feel sick or shamed. Small things don’t linger days after.

Perhaps because it was a small thing connected to a larger thing. A larger thing buried deep until it is not.

***

He was, he is, an old man. Probably late sixties, early seventies. I met him a week before—the uncle of a close friend of mine who was in town for bereavement. We all had drinks. Talked. Laughed. It was an evening. It was fun.

There are questions now:

Was I too nice?

Was I too friendly?

Did I smile too much?

Did I say inappropriate things?

These questions always turn to statements:

I was too nice.

I was too friendly.

I smiled too much.

I said inappropriate things.

My fault.

My fault.

My fault.

***

I didn’t see him again until Super Bowl Sunday. The same friend’s house. The party you could hear from the street.

He caught me outside. I was alone. I am always alone in these moments. Even when there are others present. Even when they are standing feet away. It is an invisibility that somehow infected me.

Infected me so early.

Blanket forts.

He stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. His hand went on my shoulder, and he stopped me.

I could tell he was drunk by how he spoke too close to me.

“I like you because of what you said in there.”

When I tried to step back, his grip held.

What I said in there was nothing that came out of his mouth next.

What came out of his mouth was not the most horrible thing I had ever heard. I have heard horrible things. But what came out of his mouth spread immediately over my skin. His intense proximity. What came out of his mouth was paired with his hand holding my shoulder.

It was all of this. It was not just words.

The words were only:

“I like how you said, ‘Even split-tails like sports.’”

“I like how you said, ‘Even cunts can like sports.’”

Stand back from this scene.

Raise your camera. Take a photo.

Do not ask anyone to smile.

Look at the photo. Look at it all.

***

Later in the kitchen, when I turned and he was there, and the small herding of myself back towards the sink. Away from the crowd. Away from everyone. But still so close.

Invisible. Again.

He changed what he said earlier. He dropped all formalities. I did as I had outside. I stayed polite. I smiled. I even laughed. Do not upset the monster. Respect your elders. Do not acknowledge anything real is happening. Cave yourself.

Cave.

Cave.

Cave.

 ***

I have a motto. A motto I built early in my life. It’s not written down, but I see it on flags sometimes. The flags are only raised in moments like these: If you make it less than what it is, it is not what it is.

That is what my brain does. My little girl brain.

The flags make everything okay. They make big things small. Small enough for a little girl to not be as scared as she should.

This time:

“You split-tails love sports.”

Close, again.

“You are a sports cunt, aren’t you?”

Close, still.

“Sports cunt.”

I went back to the place I always go. I don’t know where it is, but I know it is there because I see myself coming out of it. It’s a blind spot. I don’t remember what happens there, I only recall “the getting away.” I remember “surviving.”

“Surviving.” I want to laugh.

Even now, so far from girlhood, I feel so dirty. This thing that happened that was nothing (WHYDIDNTYOUSAYANYTHING) that I had no part in (YESYOUDID) that was with someone I “knew” (YOUWANTEDIT) sent me back to a place I’ve visited so many times. It is a cave. A time-cave filled with little girls, bigger girls, teens, young women, and old women like me. We all bump into each other in the dark. Nobody can see each other because nobody will let the others see. We all think we are alone in the cave, but we are not. We are, sadly, never alone. The cave is the place we go in our blind spot. The cave wants to help us, but it cannot. It can only cry and watch.

***

Photograph by Lev Radin.

Related Posts:

• So Raped
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• What I Learned In Homemaking

In a guest post for Racialicious, Hannah Green uses an Indian performance of The Vagina Monologues as a jumping-off point for ruminations on sexual assault and women’s rights, in both India and the US. A preview:

Dolly Thakore, one of the stars of the show, told me that she was happy to have an opportunity to perform in cities where The Vagina Monologues had previously been banned at a time when rape and child molestation were at the forefront of discussion in India. Dialogue about violence against women is opening up across India, and this play is a part of that.

Related Posts:

• So Raped
• The Sacred and the Profane
• Holy Orange
• Tramp
• What I Learned In Homemaking

***

During the last period of the day, the students who played sports walked to the back of the gym and toward one of two doors, one for the girls locker room, one for the boys. Girls like Tina A. didn’t play sports. They sulked toward study hall, making fun of the required white shorts and light blue shirts we all had to wear. I played tennis. While I warmed up my serve or volleyed with an easy-going teammate, the boys practicing on the outside basketball court in their tank tops and shorts would openly stare at me and nudge each other between lay-ups and pass drills. I had no idea why they were looking until one night, Jeff T. and Ron G. called me from Jeff’s house. I sat on the edge of my bed, the base of my cream and gold Princess phone on the floor, its coiled cord pulled taut, the heavy handset pressed close to my ear.

Boys had called me.

“You have the biggest bush in the eighth grade,” Jeff told me, in a tone I would one day recognize as lust. “And the nicest tits,” Ron countered. I had often heard boys in Algebra II or in the hallway outside of Honors English make rude comments about how Carrie Little’s name should be changed to Carrie Big or how flat-chested Amy Saunders remained after the summer. I was relieved not to be in a category of complaint or ridicule but I was surprised to hear these boys had given more consideration to the hair under my shorts than I had.

It was the first of many phone calls, and I probably hung up on them, but not after feeling both embarrassed and a little flattered. For the most part, I ignored their confessions and grinning stares because I was afraid of what might happen if I let them hold for too long.

On the first day of seventh grade, Ron G. was the tallest boy in my first period class and wearing a Mountain Dew t-shirt. My mother never allowed me to wear t-shirts to school and jeans only on Friday, so in my experience, Ron, as he took his seat in the front row, carried with him a tinge of the forbidden. By high school graduation, he would be married with two small children. Jeff was the first boy I French kissed, an agreed-upon appointment established by a note passed during Texas History.  In the school annual, his dimples give him a look of innocence he does not deserve.

***

I am writing here of interrupted memory.

I do not recall how I ended up doing what I did behind the gym with those boys, who initiated the afternoon ritual, if a note was passed to me by an eager boy during Algebra, a folded piece of paper with a small triangle sticking out with the word, “Tug,” written in determined pencil. Perhaps, and I suspect it was something more along these lines, a tough girl in tight jeans, maybe even Tina A., had tired of the way my matching sweaters and skirts, my penny loafers and pink lip gloss stood against the coarseness of her Joan Jett anger, her untied shoelaces and effortless flip-offs. I would not come to know the word ingénue or its meaning for years. My mother called girls like Tina “dirty,” and those girls called me “bitch,” not for what I did, but what I didn’t consider. I’m sure Tina dismissed and taunted me for being what she had never had a chance to be herself, and I, curious about her hard edges and thick eyeliner, felt that stepping into the dark recesses of her territory was the only way to ensure she never threatened mine. In short, I was afraid of her, of what she knew, but I was also afraid of my own not knowing. I was afraid of why those girls were considered losers just because they played a different kind of game.

***

Mrs. Andrews’ class was fourth period, lunch period, an hour and a half divided between A, B, and C lunches. While the first hour of our class ended, and Mrs. Andrews told us how to apply our toenail polish before we took a bath so that any polish on our skin would soak off or be easily removed, the boys from B lunch had finished their dry chicken fried steaks and gathered in front of the gym. I looked beyond Mrs. Andrews, where she stood before us with her hands on her hips, to where the boys stood, and watched as one shot out beyond the huddle then chased the one who had pushed him, saw them toss their heads back in laughter, unaware that their post-lunch ritual was being observed.

I was always staring out windows in school, wondering what might be going on beyond where I was and what I knew. I’d watch the lone girl clutching a folder to her chest as she hurried to class, the basketball coach strutting to the gym, the choir teacher’s husband bringing her lunch. I could exist in two places at once.

***

It started between fifth and sixth period, when I’d rush from the stuffy classroom of Mrs. Richmond’s Algebra II to the locker room for tennis practice. The boys in Algebra always leaned out of their desks to check out the visible panty lines through Mrs. Richmond’s tight, cream pants. Forget quadratic equations and solving for x, those boys were all bush, all the time. A thirteen-year-old girl could only feel like a blank slate compared to Estee Lauder and voluptuousness—a blank slate that could be carved upon by the desperate, probing fingers of quickly developing boys whose voices, muscles, whiskers, and sour scents hinted at something darker. I didn’t want to fall prey to the threat; I wanted to control it. How little I understood, how naïve it was of me to think I could.

Even so, for a period of about two months in the spring of my eighth grade year, I met one boy at a time behind the gym, just outside the door to the girls locker room. The sidewalk back there was the edge of the campus, against it only an expanse of empty field. All the tennis players, football and basketball players, every cross country member knew about my daily make-out sessions and deferred by going through the gym to the locker room, even the girls, because behind the gym, I was letting some guy I knew only by name or the fact that the year before he had sat behind me in Physical Science to French, feel, or finger me.

The first was Ron G., who had to lean down, almost doubling over to reach my five-foot frame. Jeff T. got a turn, so did an extremely developed, held-back thug named Bruce who was known to go with Tina A. There were dozens of others. A family friend, a boy I had been afraid to kiss only two years before in his backyard, got the longest turn, a whole week and felt ashamed, I could sense. Most boys had bad breath or too much Polo cologne or were too timid to do more than kiss or were too aggressive and fast and so only got one brief fling before I moved on to the next one.

I’d step into the locker room and change into my white shorts, the light blue t-shirt before heading out to the tennis court. I’d stand at the base line waiting for the first serve, the boys lurking on the basketball court, our shared secret like a lob, a ball high in the air. Eventually, it would come down or be hit back with a force that made it impossible to return.

And then, it stopped.

Maybe someone who lived in the houses across the street from the athletic fields saw what no one at the school could see or even think to see and called the office. After all, the kids who made out were usually office workers who ducked into teacher supply closets. They were the couples who openly defied Mrs. Andrews’s requests to “get your hand off of her mmm-hmmm.”

I had no boyfriend.

I had boys, a long line of them wanting to know who would be next.

***

As the year drew to a close, Mrs. Andrews started letting us leave a few minutes before the bell. We finally convinced her of the threat of long lines in the cafeteria and having to eat quickly. Ever mindful of our etiquette, she would not have “her girls” eating improperly, stuffing our mouths. To Mr. Tanner, the vice-principal, the problem was what we stuffed into our mouths. He would not let a lunch go by without telling us that the pizza and cheeseburgers, the chicken fried steak and fries would make us fat. Then none of the fine boys seated around us in the cafeteria would like us anymore.

And while being first in line at lunch had its advantages, we were focused on the walk to lunch. Some of the girls had boyfriends in B lunch, and most of us had at least one crush out there, so the extra time gave us a chance we were rarely allowed due to the random scheduling system that left best friends in different first periods or the same wise guy duo in the back of every English class. The walkway during lunch was also unsupervised, no teachers keeping guard the way they did in the hallway, no coaches on watch, no “hands off” reminders. Mrs. Andrews’s girls walked toward those boys, arms swinging. We pretended they meant nothing to us, that we hadn’t been writing their names in the notes we passed during third period or that we hadn’t written our first names next to their last names in our most sophisticated cursive just to see how it might look. Some girls stopped to talk to their boyfriends. Others, the lucky ones, heard their names being called from a huddle of boys. The rest of us carried on to lunch, hoping that tomorrow might be our day.

I was in a category of my own.

***

Since the lock-down of the gym’s back doors and a coach on guard between bells, the boys had been eyeing me in secret, aggressive ways. After all, I had been the x in their algebraic desire, and now it was as if all the answers they had once been able to easily flip to in the back of the book, those pages that had made it easy, had been ripped out. In Mrs. Richmond’s class, we had been learning about rational numbers (2, 3, 5) and irrational numbers (3.14159 . . . ). Rational numbers were created when I, one, plus one of them, one, added up to a clear sum, but when the constant was removed, the sum became an irrational one, like pi, their lust going on to infinity.

It could not go on forever.

The pre-lunch walk to the cafeteria had shifted to one of dread. I hurried past the boys, ushered through their line by leers and lewd remarks.

***

That day, Mrs. Andrews let us out even earlier than usual, and I felt the pressure of those extra minutes. By adding five minutes to the equation, the operator was no longer an addition of two constants (their aggression + my avoidance), but rather a multiplication of them. As I pushed through the double doors, I looked toward the gym to notice that the boys’ backs, even their shoulders were turned against us as if in collusion. Later, I would come to think of it the way Coach Farnsworth had explained the Alamo during Texas History—an ambush.

I sped up, my head down, my attention pressed toward the sidewalk. The boys stayed turned from me, hushed, and I thought for a moment that they had tired of me, that I could finally get by.

I didn’t get by.

Jeff T. was behind me, grabbing my arms and knocking my books and purse on the sidewalk before pulling me into the boys’ bathroom. No one ever used that bathroom; it was too dark, too dank, too dirty. I stumbled backwards into the stench of urine and fear, his open mouth on mine, his hands under my shirt. Other boys followed, at least ten of them, behind me, beside me, their bodies in my face as they grabbed, pulled, shoved tongues in my mouth and hands under my shirt, unlatching my bra, taking turns holding my arms behind my back while another’s sweaty palm splayed over my mouth to cover my screaming. I could not breathe, either from a hand over my mouth or a mouth over my mouth or the suffocation from the stale urine and released aggression.

A window above the door was cracked open, a sliver of light I kept my eyes on, perhaps to separate myself, exist on the other side of the door, exist in two places at once. I struggled against shadows and my own body’s inability to shut itself. Somehow, I broke free but only threw open the door before more hands and arms were pulling me back into the sweaty circle. My refusal, my near escape had angered their assault, incited an even more egregious attack. They were taking what they had been denied. After all, I had already given it to them.

This round, as one or two held my arms behind my back and others held my legs in a wide stance with their own black-tennis-shoed feet, hands went down my pants, my panties, and then fingers, one hand at a time, were inside me.

***

I do not remember getting free from those boys. Maybe that’s why when I think of it, I do not exist in two places at once—I’m nowhere but in that bathroom, struggling.

I do remember that the punishment for the boys in the bathroom was running extra miles at practice.

Some of them, I knew, loved to run.

***

Thirty years have passed, and I still dry my hands before flipping on the switch of the disposal.

***

Listen to Jill read her essay:

Related Posts:

• So Raped
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• The Cave
• The Sacred and the Profane
• “A Tragedy of Choice”