KJ called me every day or came over to our house, or both. No one stopped him from being alone with me in my bedroom. No one cautioned me. No one inquired when he became more my friend than my brother’s. No one asked what we talked about or what we did together all day. I was always left to my own devices. Even as a small child, I never had a curfew. As I got older, my parents never asked where I was going or who I spent time with. They never peeked in on me and KJ or told me to leave the door open.
Then the new house was completed and we moved in. It was grand and painted canary yellow. My room had its own balcony overlooking the lake and beyond, which was where KJ lived with his parents. They were directly across from us, on the other side of the lake, and had been living there for many years. They had a small white paddleboat. Sometimes KJ took me out on the boat and we pedaled around the lake, where he inevitably steered us out of view and tried to kiss me.
At first I resisted. I wasn’t ready the way he was, and I was a little scared, but his persistence and insistence that I was ready (he said he could tell) wore me down until I kissed him back. It began a pattern.
Every day KJ professed his love in some way or another, and I came to trust him as a best friend, protector, and boyfriend, though I was still of the age when I thought of him more as a friend who was a boy than my first steady boyfriend. I was naive and still a kid, almost thirteen but not quite, and caught up and confused by the changes I was experiencing.
I loved to rollerblade. But always geared up with every kind of protective pad imaginable, to the point that I looked like a wild derby queen in pink and purple as I flew through the neighborhood. One day KJ was with me. I was wearing my favorite rollerblading outfit, a T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts that were frayed at the hem and fell sort of mid-thigh, not even close to the short shorts that some of the other girls wore.
I was self-conscious about my body. I was curvy for my age, and my brothers taunted me by calling me “big butt.” I developed hips and thighs early on, and I hated it. I felt like I could never wear the types of things that other girls were wearing, because they never fit me the way I wanted. I didn’t want the cellulite on my thighs to show. That was all I saw when I looked in the mirror, and I was sure that was all everyone else saw, too.
Except for KJ. As we caught our breath on a curb, he sat across from me and touched me. First his hand was on my knee. Then it moved up to my thighs. And as he slowly continued to move his hand up my leg, he said, “You’re so hairy.”
As with any body-conscious young woman, the smallest comment always had the biggest, longest-lasting effect on me, and later on I found myself locked in my bathroom, shaving the baby blonde hair from my legs and the more tender area farther up. KJ probably never again thought about the remark he made to me. Why would he? I was smooth from then on.
But it made a deep and lasting impression on me and left me feeling at this terribly vulnerable time in my life that I was somehow unacceptable and undesirable and needed to change myself, even this most intimate, personal area, in order to be better and more desirable, as if I even knew what that meant.
What I did know, though, was KJ gave me attention and I was willing to do anything I could to get it.
At home, the loudest voices at the dinner table were those that got heard, and I remember many times when my brothers and parents were talking and I wanted to add something to the conversation. But every time I tried to interject a comment, my voice felt too small and went unheard. Only after I gave up did someone finally ask, “What is it, Mena?”
By then, I was done and shook my head, defeated.
“Nothing,” I said.
But KJ was always interested in me. Even if he was mostly interested in my body, I told myself that was okay. That was still me and it was better than being ignored.
I don’t know where KJ’s parents were this one day when we were at his house making out on the living room couch, like we had done many times previously. As always, he played with me and took it as far as we had gone before and then a little bit further. By this point, he had gone down on me, more interested, I think, in satisfying his own curiosity than pleasing me. I had not reciprocated, which he’d seemed okay with up until now. This time he sat back on the ottoman and pulled out a condom.
“I don’t want to do that,” I said, fearfully but with unmistakable clarity.
I don’t want to do that.
I was fine to continue what we were doing, but not that, not all the way, not yet. I was about a month shy of my thirteenth birthday and didn’t feel ready for that. KJ put the condom away, with a dejected “Okay,” and I was relieved. I had been clear, and it seemed that he had understood and could be trusted to respect that limit. He had pledged his love to me for most of the year, so why would I think otherwise?
After making out a little longer, he persuaded me to follow him up to the guest room above their garage. He wanted to get out of the living room to someplace more private. The guest room was large enough for a bed and a bathroom, like a hotel room. I agreed, thinking we were going to continue what we had been doing in the house, with the same understanding. However, after a few minutes of kissing on the bed, he took out the condom again. Like before, I said no—and I said it with a tinge of fear, because I sensed something was different.
I was right, too. This time, sequestered in this small room away from the large house, with the door locked and no one likely to hear us, he didn’t say okay. Instead, he kept showing me the condom, talking to me about what he wanted, and pressuring me to acquiesce, kissing me, touching me, all the while pressing his weight on top of me, until I felt trapped, suffocated, unsure of what to do, and scared, very scared.
I didn’t understand why he wasn’t listening to me.
Was I going to have to fight him?
Should I run?
I saw him put on the condom and felt my heart sink into a dark abyss. And just like at the dining table back home, my voice disappeared. No matter how many times I said, “No, I don’t want to do that,” and implored him not to do it, he didn’t hear me.
I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, KJ was climbing off me and walking into the bathroom to take off the condom.
I turned over onto my side, facing away from him, and cried.
So deeply.
So full of shame and fear.
So broken.
So absolutely terrified that I could be pregnant, because I really didn’t know the first thing about sex except that I would never be the same. I wished it hadn’t happened. I hadn’t been ready. I was too young to even know what being ready was; I hadn’t wanted to do it. And now it was too late. My virginity was gone. Stolen. The most precious part of me was taken from me by this person against my will. He had satisfied his own desire. Countless times he had professed to love me, but would he have done that against my will if he truly meant it?
I went into instant survival mode. I told myself everything was okay, that he really did love me, and maybe I… No, I didn’t love him. And I was no longer sure he loved me. He didn’t even look at me. He didn’t notice my tears or hear me cry. He didn’t see me curled up on the bed. How could he have seen me, though? Yes, my body was present. But the rest of me was gone, fleeing through the dark, looking for a safe place to hide, to think, to cry, to recover, to eventually shut down the emotions and tell myself that this was normal and I would be all right.
I never was all right again, because in that moment I became what I believed I had allowed to happen to me.