Deflowering

When I was seventeen, I moved to Denmark as an au pair. I lived with Louise, who was a good friend of my parents. Louise lived in a village with her family—a sailor who was often at sea, a three-year-old daughter, and a big dog. I went to a high school in town to work on my Danish and to have something to do during the day while the little girl was in preschool. It took me a long time to make friends with the kids in my class, because I refused to speak English with them.

In the end, I made friends with Anne, an unpopular girl who was obsessed with her ex and loved Linkin Park. She was fucking boring, but I had to start somewhere. Anne said we should go out together some evening. I was up for it, since the main reason I came to Demark was to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Anne and I met at my place one evening and shotgunned a few cheap beers. There wasn’t really much of a bar scene in the village—one pub that we didn’t want to go to, and one bar where other teenagers went to party. There, we bumped into an Icelandic boy and some of his friends. They all looked like small-time criminals, with bleached hair and ripped jeans, dripping with sickly sweet aftershaves. This boy was the first Icelander I’d seen in two months. I chatted with him for a long time—I think his name was Steinn or Steinar. We didn’t have anything in common other than our language—no shared interests—but I was glad to be able to speak freely without feeling like I was stupid. His scummy companions kept buying us drinks, we did shots, and as the night wore on, Steinn Steinar asked if I wanted to do a line with him. I’d never tried anything like that, but I felt up for it in that moment, at that level of intoxication. We snorted something in the bathroom, he tried to kiss me, but I slipped out from under his arms and made a break for the dance floor. After that, there was only bass, noise, dance, touch, black, nothing.

The morning after, I woke up in my bed feeling like I’d been hit by a train. When I got up, the floor was covered in broken glass, but I rushed past it and made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up. I puked and puked, with short pauses to lie down on the living room sofa, where I sweated and shook under a blanket. When Louise got out of bed, she teased me, said I’d been pretty wasted when I came home. I’d slammed the front door so loud the house shook, and I’d knocked over a couple of plants on my way up to my room. She noticed that I was bruised. I had deep scratches on one of my thighs, like I’d fallen and skinned my whole right side on the pavement. My body was covered in small cuts and bruises. Louise kept asking me what happened at the bar, and finally I gave in and told her that I thought I’d been raped. I left out the part where I’d taken drugs, instead saying that Steinn Steinar must have slipped me something.

We went to the emergency clinic, where I was examined, and based on the injuries, there was no doubt I’d been raped. I’d never slept with anyone before, and now my vagina was covered in contusions, torn. It was a wound. I was grateful that I hardly remembered anything. It’s still a blur—my head was hit or hit against something hard, and I saw Steinn Steinar wild against me in the bathroom, which was covered in graffiti. The nurse encouraged me to report the rape, but I didn’t want to, I knew it was my own fault. I shouldn’t have taken drugs. All I had to do was say “No, thanks,” and it never would have happened, I wouldn’t have lost my senses. My parents would feel really bad if they found out that I’d broken their trust, right when they’d let me move to a foreign country. It was bad enough that I had to call them and tell them about the rape.

At school on Monday, Anne came over to me and announced proudly that she’d gone home with one of Steinn’s sleazy friends and he was her new boyfriend. Then she asked teasingly about what happened between Steinn Steinar and me. I’d completely disappeared! I told her that Steinn had slipped me something and raped me and I’d gone to the hospital the day after. When Anne heard that, she laughed sloppily and said, “That makes no sense. He couldn’t have raped you. You were hitting on him so hard.”