Did she wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, run her tongue over her teeth, fix her hair a bit? Did she pull up her underpants, straighten her pinafore, tug the white blouse back down—or did he? She watches him, chin bobbing like one of those little nodding dogs on the rear parcel shelf of a car. I’m a nice girl. I’m pretty. I like it. You’re my friend. You like big thighs. You’re good to me. I am a gourmand. I won’t say anything. It’s our secret, I promise. I won’t say a thing. Words he’s said to her that she doesn’t remember, any more than she remembers what he’s done to her.

She picks up the white paper bag of sweets and the tin of goldfish flakes she’d put down on the corner of a step.

Something has tilted; she’s not sure if it’s herself or the floor. She concentrates on climbing the stairs.

She turns around on the landing when he calls her, promising again, nodding her head.

 

She’s lying on her bed, trying to catch a tear on the tip of her tongue. The floorboards creak in the corridor. She picks up her book. Nobody’s Boy, by Hector Malot.

“Is your book making you cry?” asks her father—concerned, perhaps, because she slipped like a shadow from the apartment’s foyer to her room without the usual thunderous shout of Hello, dear family of mine, without slamming the front door, without coming to tell them about her day.

Her head moves. Left. Right. Right. Left.

“Did something happen?”

Her head moves. Up. Down. Down. Up.

 

She’s sitting between her parents on the wine-colored living room sofa. Her brother and sisters have disappeared. She stares at the wallpaper as if she doesn’t recognize it, like she doesn’t recognize her own parents. Everything has changed, suddenly, and she can’t understand why. They’re talking to her, but she can’t quite hear them or understand them. She’s floating.

 

She’s sitting next to her father in the back seat of a police car. The police officers are turning on the revolving lights to make her smile. She smiles. She’s a nice girl. She’s no longer there. She’s dead, only no one seems to realize it.

 

At the police station, a woman officer asks her questions. She has to answer “yes” or “no.” She nods or shakes her head, depending on the answer. She doesn’t feel anything. The woman police officer writes: He touched me down there, in the front and the back. He grabbed my left hand and put it on his penis.

They tell her she’s lodging a complaint for sexual touching and that the man from the stairwell is a pedophile. She nods.

 

She can’t feel the jellyfish twisting inside her on that day; she can’t feel the long, transparent tentacles penetrating her. She doesn’t know that their filaments are going to drag her, little by little, into a story that isn’t her own, that doesn’t concern her. She doesn’t know that they’re going to derail her completely, pull her down to solitary and unwelcoming depths, hobble her every step, make her doubt her own strength, shrink the world around her year by year until it’s nothing but a tiny air pocket with no way out. She doesn’t know that she is at war now, or that the enemy forces are inside her.

No one warns her. No one explains. The world has gone quiet.

 

The years will pass. They’ll forget about this sunny Sunday in May—or they won’t talk about it, at least. She won’t think about it anymore, either.