Before this terrible thing happened, I had already started to lose my body. I was too young, in a sad semblance of a relationship with a boy who knew too much, wanted too much. I wanted too much too, but he and I wanted very different things. Christopher wanted to use me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward, of being the girl always on the outside looking in. When I met him, we had just moved to the area.
I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill. I was willing to do most anything if that boy would ease my loneliness. I wanted to feel like he and I belonged to each other, but each time we were together and then after, I felt quite the opposite. And still, I was drawn to him.
At the time I was, and would continue to be for many years, obsessed with the Sweet Valley High books. I read them voraciously because I was nothing like Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield or even Enid Rollins. I would never date a boy like Todd Wilkins, the handsome captain of the basketball team, or Bruce Patman, the handsome, wealthy bad boy of Sweet Valley. When I read the books, though, I could pretend that a better life was possible for me, one where I fit in somewhere, anywhere, and I had friends and a handsome boyfriend and a loving family who knew everything about me. In a better life, I could pretend I was a good girl.
This boy Christopher, so handsome and so popular, was my piece of Sweet Valley High in my well-manicured, suburban neighborhood. Certainly, no one could know this because he never acknowledged me at school, but I knew and I told myself that was enough. For many, many years to come, I would keep telling myself that the barest minimum of acknowledgment from lovers was enough.
We would hang out in his bedroom and flip through worn copies of his older brother’s Playboy and Hustler magazines. I studied these naked women, mostly young white blond thin taut. Their bodies seemed alien, unreal. I knew it was wrong to look at these women displaying such wanton nakedness, but I couldn’t look away.
He clearly found these women exciting, sexually attractive, and I knew, even then, that I was nothing like them. I didn’t really want to be like those women but I wanted him to want me and I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at the magazines. He never did, and in his way, he punished me for what I wasn’t and couldn’t be. He punished me for being too young and too naïve, too adoring and too accommodating.
I was a thing to him, even before he and his friends raped me. He wanted to try things and I was extraordinarily pliable. I didn’t know how to say no. It never crossed my mind to say no. This was the price I had to pay, I told myself, to be loved by him or, if I was honest with myself, to be tolerated by him. A girl like me, pliable and sheltered and unworthy and desperately craving his attention, did not dare hope for anything more. I knew that.
I cannot bring myself to detail the things he did to me before I was broken. It’s too much, too humiliating. But with each new transgression we committed, I lost more of my body. I fell further from the possibility of the word “no.” I became less and less the good girl I had been. I stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror because I felt nothing but guilt and shame when I did.
And then there was that terrible day in the woods. And I finally did say no. And it did not matter. That’s what has scarred me the most. My no did not matter. I wish I could tell you I never spoke to Christopher again, but I did. That may be what shames me most, that after everything he did to me, I went back, and allowed him to continue using me until my family moved a few months later. I allowed him to continue using me because I didn’t know what else to do. Or I let him use me because after what happened in the woods, I felt so worthless. I believed I didn’t deserve any better.
I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got.