1995
A survey had been done—by a church or a women’s center or some other do-gooder organization. The outreach workers had asked one hundred women living on LA’s skid row if they had ever experienced sexual violence. They all said yes. Every single one of them. Orchid and her friends had laughed at the waste of resources when the results were so utterly predictable. They also saw the irony in their circumstance, whether they used that term or not. It was sexual violence that had put so many of them there in the first place. In Orchid’s case, it had been the catalyst for a series of decisions that had catapulted her from the shelter of her mother’s home to this single piece of cardboard on the baking sidewalk, surrounded by the most damaged people alive.
Orchid was just fourteen when her mom’s boyfriend first touched her. At first, it had seemed accidental, his hand grazing her bare thigh as she moved toward the toaster, still wearing the oversized T-shirt and boxer shorts she slept in. His expression had remained blank, innocuous, as he drank his cup of coffee, eyes scanning the sports section of the paper. Trevor was hard to read, like a dog that wags its tail while it bares its teeth. And her mother was right there, having a smoke at the kitchen table. Would he be so brazen?
The second time, there was no mistaking his intent. Orchid should have screamed or hit him, but she’d frozen, her conscious mind drifting away, her body numb to the hand fumbling inside her panties. Her fight-or-flight response was broken, she determined. Much later, she’d learn about survival mode, her psyche turning off the negative stimuli to ensure her endurance, but at the time she’d felt weak. She’d felt like a coward.
When Trevor touched her the third time, pushing her up against the wall, kissing her with his disgusting mouth, his hand forcing its way inside her, she knew it was imminent. Soon he would come to her room, while her mother was asleep or at work or passed out on the sofa after too many whiskey-and-Cokes, and he would rape her.
So she told her mom. Lorna Chambers was a brittle woman, hollow like a cave in the sea. Disappointment, disillusionment, and betrayal had carved a hole in her center where her compassion had once lived. She sucked on her cigarette, watery eyes roaming over Orchid’s young body. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
It was late July. They lived in the valley without air-conditioning. Their apartment was above a chicken shop that added at least ten degrees to the internal temperature. Her mom took in Orchid’s thin tank top, the shorts she’d worn since she was twelve that were undeniably too small now, and her shriveled mouth twisted with hate. It was not a question: It was an accusation.
No one spoke. The smoke curled up between them, like the ghost of something that should have been, that never would be. And then her mom tapped her cigarette on the edge of the full ashtray, touched a piece of tobacco off her tongue, and Orchid walked away.
That night, Orchid took the butcher knife from the kitchen and slept with it under her pillow. And when Trevor came, as she knew he would, she plunged it into his belly.