‘Don’t cry,’ I tell myself. ‘Don’t cry, don’t give them that.’
So, I try not to cry. I always try not to cry, but sometimes there’s nothing can stop it.
There’s nothing else I can do, because they have this control over me. They always have that, their power. All I have is the one last piece of myself they can never reach.
‘Don’t . . . Don’t do it,’ I say inside.
I go deeper, to the place they can’t follow. Though sometimes they try, and I lose my way. I should be able to shut them out, to push them back, but I’m weaker now, weaker than I was.
‘Don’t let them, Abbie, don’t.’
They’ve taken everything else, everything I had, and everything I was. I have nothing left except the one place I can go to hide from them: my heart.
Mum’s there, and my little brother. Sometimes it’s Papa’s place, with the paddling pool and the playhouse out back on a hot summer’s day. Tyler’s soaking me with the hose and laughing, smiling. Little Maxie’s barking, jumping away from the spray, and there’s ice lollies and blue skies and smiles and . . . and I know I’ve let them in.
A tear.
Small.
Rolling from my eye onto my cheek. As insignificant as an ant, it seems, but carrying the world I hold inside me.
‘No,’ I say.
They see the tear now. Him, the one that’s on me now, is angry.
I feel him going deeper, pressing harder. He wants to hurt me; they all want to hurt me because they know I’m not broken.
A hand presses my face and a thumb pushes my eyelid open. It’s him; he wants me to watch what they’re all doing to me, to see their staring eyes. They want me to understand just what it is they are, and why they have to hurt me.
‘No.’ I turn away.
‘Yes!’ He comes closer, his face touching mine. He’s sweating, his heart pounding faster on top of me. ‘You belong to us now.’
I say nothing. The tears stop because he has me in their grip now. They are my focus again, and I can’t find my way back inside myself.
I can’t escape any more.
He grits his teeth. Dirty teeth, decayed and grey, cracked at the edges. His skin is waxy and lined, old. He wheezes and is angry because he’s done this a thousand times before, to a thousand other girls like me, and he knows I’m not broken.
But, soon I will be.
I’ll be broken.
I know I will be.
Or I’ll be dead.