Journal Entry 9: 22.03.2019
I read a book in Spanish class last year – I know, weird, right? In a class where we’re meant to be practising our foreign language skills and we’re asked to go home and read a book in English?
Anyway, I weirdly really liked it.
It was a book that had short stories inside it, rather than one big long novel that I’d just add to the list of things that I never get around to finishing. But anyway, this book – I finished it. All of it. And no, I didn’t just watch the movie like I did for Little Women when asked to do a book study on Louisa M Alcott for English. No, there was no movie for this – OK, I checked that first, I admit it, but I read it. Start to finish. And like I said, I really liked it.
It was supposed to give us insight into Spanish immigrants in America during the…I don’t know… Seventies or something. And I became transfixed by a character called Esperanza. What a name.
ESPERANZA
It has a nice ring to it. Better than Katrina. I was terrified people at school would call me Kat like Mum did sometimes, so I gave myself a nickname before anyone else could. Trina. It was no Esperanza but at Birchwood High School, it would get me by.
Anyway, so back to Esperanza. She comes from a big Latin family, another thing to be envious of – for me, it’s just Mum and I. She was an only child, and I’m an only child, and now that the man who I occasionally call ‘Dad’ has gone, well it doesn’t really leave us with many relatives. But Esperanza lives with her parents – both parents – her sisters, her brothers, her grandparents, all in this small house in Chicago. And she has these big dreams for herself. She doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as just another Latin immigrant, someone whose background, whose house, whose family will define her. No, she wants something bigger than that life. And in this book she does just that. She surprises everyone by becoming something. And that’s what stood out for me. This girl from a nothing family, from a nothing neighbourhood, becoming someone.
Here, I have the book somewhere on my shelf.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
That’s it. I might read it again one day.
Anyway, I was thinking about that book a lot today, and last year in general. When things were much easier, much simpler than they are now. When all I had to think about was reading a book about an eleven-year-old girl for a Spanish class. When all I had to decide was whether to have Nutella on my toast or Lurpak salted butter before school. When school was a place to hang out in, to meet friends, to catch up on the gossip. Now, it’s a place to avoid, to remind me that I no longer have friends, and school is a place where I am the gossip.
I still can’t get Lucy’s words out of my head, even though it’s been a few weeks since she was here. I’ve thought about our conversation almost every night since. I replay it over and over in my head, and wonder what I could have said, how I could have responded differently. But at the end of the day, I don’t know what I could have done differently. Because I know now it’s nothing that I did, so that means there’s nothing I could have done to stop it.
Lucy called me a coward. She told me I was scared. And for days, weeks, I believed her. Maybe I was a coward. Maybe I was too scared to do anything about it. But then that book came to my mind (probably because it’s actually the only book I’ve ever read and finished from cover to cover all by myself, so maybe that’s why it sticks out in my head during this time). This book – that girl, Esperanza, was she scared? I’m sure she was. She was eleven and living in a different country where people thought she was weird and spoke in a funny language. But was she a coward? No.
Am I?
Not today.
Today I am not a coward.
Today I said his name out loud in front of the mirror, and I didn’t cry. Today I write his name.
CRAIG
Today I went to the police station.
I waited until the final bell, got dressed after PE – which I actually participated in today thank you, broke a sweat too – and walked there.
It was bigger inside than I thought it would be. The walls were a stark sterile white like the hospital where I sat with Lucy. The chairs in the waiting room were the same too actually. No framed pictures on the wall. Same water cooler in the corner. Same fake potted plant in the middle of a white plastic folding table meant to serve as the ‘coffee table’.
Police Station = Hospital
Both places for help, I guess, if you think about it. So maybe they should look the same.
I only had to sit in that waiting room for ten minutes before a female officer came and asked me to follow her back behind the counter, into the main hall. Desks, littered with stacks of files and papers white as the walls, mugs of cold coffee freckled with cooled milk deposits, ballpoint pens, paper clips. Much like my teachers’ desks.
School = Police Station = Hospital
She told me I needed my mum there but I lied and told her I was already eighteen. And then she asked me why I was there. Of course, I knew she’d ask me that. It’s a simple question – why was I there? She wouldn’t exactly be a great police officer if she didn’t ask me why I’d just walked into the police station asking to report a crime. It was then that I thought about getting up and leaving. Telling her that I’d changed my mind, or forgot what I was going to say, or that I had nothing to say at all and that I was just here wasting her time on a dare. But then I thought about a girl similar to me in a way. Maybe in many ways. A brave girl.
No, not Esperanza.
I thought about Lucy. And what she’s going through. What I could have been going through had a condom not been used by him. I could have been Lucy. It could have been me at the Family Planning Clinic that day. It could have been me on that hill, bleeding, needing an ambulance, begging for help. Begging someone – not just anyone, but my worst enemy – not to leave me alone.
So I recalled that entire night, that party, upstairs in the bedroom. I told her everything. I even told her what I wore that night, and that I was drunk. But she didn’t seem to care about that, and I thought she would. She just said, ‘If you said no, then you didn’t give your consent. And it doesn’t matter what you were wearing, or that you had been drinking. What happened to you wasn’t consensual. It was against your will.’
And it was. I didn’t give my consent. I said no. She wrote it all down on a piece of paper, asked me to sign and date it, and told me to go home and tell my mum. She said she would take care of it. That HE would never be allowed to do this to anyone else again.
When I left the police station, I started to worry a little. What if he denies it? What if he says I’m the one who’s making it all up for attention? What if everyone says that I ‘asked for it’? That I caused it, let it happen?
Again, I thought about Lucy. And how I’d blamed her for everything. She didn’t cause this. She didn’t let this happen. And neither did I. It wasn’t what I wore, what I said, what I drank, that I even drank at all. It wasn’t my make-up, or my hair, or that I flirted and maybe led him on. It wasn’t any of that. It doesn’t matter what I wore, what I did. All that matters is that I said NO. This is my body. And I didn’t consent to what happened to me at that party. And by not doing anything at all, I could let what happened to me, happen to someone else. I know now that it’s OK to be scared. But it’s not OK to be a coward. Life is too short to not be brave. Life is too short.
I still think about Sophia sometimes.
I think we all do.
I wonder what her last thoughts were that night, whose face she saw in her mind if anyone, if she texted her parents right before, what she felt – what she must have felt to do that.
I hope I never feel that alone.
I wish I’d confided in her. Then maybe, she would have done the same and we could have been there for each other.
I wish so many things had been different.
I’m sorry, Sophia. I’m so sorry.