Rise Page 7

  The beast of my past laughs when I entertain these thoughts and continues to wrestle with me, victorious as it eats away more of me, day and night, shrinking the essence of me down to a speck. I stifle all of it—the crippling emotions and even the news of the text message. I won’t ruin Reno for my parents by sharing it with them, and I won’t ruin myself for Alan by letting him in. This pain belongs to me, it’s a tattoo on my existence.

  I wish I could talk to my parents, to bring them into the truth. But I just can’t. My mom is already struggling with the move, and I’m terrified of what Dad will think or do when he realizes that his daughter is nothing but a sulking, worthless Slutton. Instead, I start to drink even more alcohol—vodka, whiskey sours, tequila—which helps incrementally to keep the demon at bay. I don’t even drink to get drunk, I drink to fall asleep, and if it were up to me, I would happily just stay asleep. Alan thinks “I’m going through something,” but he doesn’t push. Then even more hate texts start to appear.

  hey loser

  you should just kill yourself already

  I should ignore the messages, change my phone number, block the number, anything to stop this heinous and unpredictable onslaught. Why am I allowing this to happen? Why don’t I just tell someone already? But the words of that last message stay with me, like little prickles all over my skin. These words—“kill yourself already”—at once terrify and seduce me. I try to keep up with normal life, like cross-country, school events, and time with Alan, and do everything I can to avoid staying alone. I act like everything is normal, smile when he talks to me, and say nothing of my private hell. I hold on to the sweet moments with him as if just the act of being with him somehow undoes all the bullshit from my past. I use my hours with him as a shield—he keeps me safe from everything, including myself.

  But wherever I go, panic breathes down my neck. When Mom drops me off at a football game one day, she drives off and I stand on the sidewalk trying to move forward, to simply walk into the venue on my own. But my legs go soft beneath me, and I start to hyperventilate. I’m dizzy and nauseated, and I start having chest pains. I feel terrified, agonized. I might just drop dead right here. I am physically unable to move from that spot. All I can manage to do is pull out my asthma inhaler and quickly call Mom. She drives back, shocked to see that I have not moved even a centimeter from the spot where she left me.

  “Why don’t you go in?” she asks, rolling the window down. By the look on her face, I must not look too good.

  “I can’t,” I whisper.

  “What do you mean, ‘You can’t’? Get in there. You’re a grown-ass girl.”

  “I physically cannot. I can’t move. Please help me.”

  With a gasp, Mom quickly gets me in the car. I know she can feel what I feel—I’m like a ticking bomb.

  I try to hold on tight to Alan, to force more smiles. I try to act as if I’m OK, to pretend I am the cheerful girlfriend. But the beast hovers, dangling the memories like eerie marionettes right in front of my face. Sometimes it feels like I have one foot rooted in progress and healing, and the other one shackled firmly to the past, like a patch of quicksand slowly swallowing me, while tiny moments of hope try but fail to rescue me. Alan starts to see that it’s something more than just a phase, that something is deeply wrong, but I don’t yet have the heart to fully let him in. I try to kiss him back when he brings his face close to mine, to wrap my arms around his neck when he holds my waist. I allow him to spoon me when we lay around after school, but I want to scream when I feel his hot breath on my shoulder. The physical closeness feels oppressive, a heaviness that forces me to pull away. I wince. I resist. I tense up at the beast cackling just around the corner. The closer Alan gets to me physically, the closer I get to the story of my body.

  It gets worse when October rolls around, and I start seeing Halloween decorations throughout the neighborhood, all those crooked pumpkin smiles and blank scarecrow stares. Candy corn served in cheap plastic pumpkin buckets at the front of every bank and store. Witch faces and skulls on the fronts of doors. The memories start to flood my consciousness, and the scenes from my living nightmare become all I can think about. It’s like I am possessed, and no matter how hard I try to distract myself from the remembrance, to tell myself it’s stupid, like oil in water, the truth always ascends to the top. The pain, which at first slowly nibbled at my mind with its sharp little teeth, now rips massive chunks from my sanity. Now it’s not just my mind that feels overtaken—it’s my whole being. Every fiber of my body, every single one of my cells, becomes consumed with a dull, gray toxicity, which keeps darkening with every second to the point where everything I see, feel, say, hear, and touch turns ugly. No matter what life offers, I will always be anchored to the truth of what happened to me. Nothing I ever do, nothing I ever feel, can sever me from my own history. I will always be that girl. There is no point to my life. There is only suffering. The backdrop to all my thoughts is a graveyard.

  I can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on pretending that I am normal, that things are OK, that I even want to be alive. All I have is hell every single moment of every day. I need relief. I need to free myself from the constancy of this pain. No one should have to suffer this way. No one should have to fake her way through life.

  I sneak into my parents’ bathroom one night when they’re out; I don’t have a plan in place, but I am like a fire now, snapping wildly and out to burn without rationale. My actions are coming from a place beyond logic, from the dark place in me that is ready to stand in the jaws of destruction.

  I am driven by sheer desperation, by something beyond myself. My sense of right and wrong is no more. There is no morality. There is only survival, which, ironically, can come only by dying. I open the mirrored medicine cabinet and eyeball every single bottle of medication I see lining the shelves. I don’t know what anything really is. I land on a giant Costco-size bottle of Advil and take it in both hands. I shake it to gauge how many pills are inside—it feels mostly full. The words “pain reliever” stand out to me, they are lit up like the neon signs, and without thinking I take off the lid and stand there facing myself. I look at the reflection and I see two of me: the me who used to drink up the days, roll around in the sun, dance with her whole heart, the serious, no-nonsense athlete, the scrappy, smiley girl who loved to kick around in the mud. But the other me is more prominent, the me with dark circles beneath her eyes and the hole in her soul, the one who stopped caring about herself, much less anything else in her life, the one who feels irrelevant, invisible, and damaged from inside. Maybe this me is who I have become. Maybe that’s just how some people evolve. That is the me who went into the bathroom and opened this cabinet. If I don’t act fast, I’ll lose my nerve, so without another moment of haste I dump all the pills onto the palm of my hand. I stare down the pile of liquid-gel capsules, their greenish-blue translucence somehow fluorescent to me now. It occurs to me that this might be the very last color I ever see. I close my eyes, unconsciously doing a thirty-second inventory of my life. I feel for my mom and dad; I can’t imagine what this will do to them, but the pain tramples the concern. It wipes it clean. I’m not good to anyone if I don’t care about life, I say to myself, a final testimony. I open the faucet and start swallowing huge batches of pills, following each batch with a giant chug of water, surprising myself with how fast they go down. I do four or five rounds of this until I have swallowed every single pill in the bottle. Chester is asleep in my parents’ room. The house is completely quiet and still, except for an air conditioner quietly humming.

  I wake up in the shower, covered in chunks of brown, pill-laden vomit. Chester is barking maniacally. I try to unravel things but I can’t remember anything. My brain suspended somewhere between fury and relief. It feels like I have been asleep for two weeks. My body feels heavy and achy, and it’s hard to keep a single thought straight. Thank God my parents are still at work, so I find my legs beneath me again, scrub myself clean, wipe up the puke, get rid of the empty Advi
l bottle, and go back to pretending that I have the power to prevail.

  But the truth of my misery always makes itself known, like one of those trick birthday candles that you think has been blown out. The pain sneaks up out of nowhere, forcing my hand. So I continue to seduce death in my own private way, to tempt the darkness, to walk this dangerous line, especially when the house is empty. Dad keeps a gun at home for security; he always has. Sometimes I find my way to it, as if I am visiting a naughty friend that I’m supposed to stay away from. I pick it up and allow myself the grim satisfaction of holding it in my hands, the cold steel refreshing against the heat of my palm. I like the weight of it, which feels somehow indicative of its potency. This is not a plastic bottle of headache medicine. I could just blow my brains out with this thing. The thought both delights and disturbs me. I don’t want to die—but I don’t want to live.

  Mom knows. She may not know the extent of it, but she knows it’s not good. Not because I address any of this directly with her, but because she finds things. Like the words “FUCK LIFE—I just want to die” scribbled in thick black magic marker on my bedpost. And notes all over my room with lists of people whom I want to kill, and musings about the meaninglessness of life and the lure of death. She starts to hide all the pills. I know this because I keep seeking them out.

  She forces me to see a counselor at the University of Reno. “If you don’t see a therapist, I have no choice but to get your father involved,” Mom threatens, knowing exactly which buttons to push with me. I want my dad as far from all this as possible. He’s not one for sob stories. I’ll have to see this doctor just to calm Mom down.

  Dr. Marks has kind eyes and a warm, even voice. She sits quietly and listens, but I say nothing during the first session. I literally just sit there staring at the ornaments lined neatly on her desk. I should tell her. I should turn this nightmare inside out, but instead I sit in that frigid air-conditioned room and fidget with my hands, defiant. The second time Mom tries to take me, I run away from the house. I run as fast and as far as I can manage, running from my mom, from the therapist, but really from myself. I disappear for a good five hours, because the idea of counseling feels like pouring lemon juice and saltwater into a raw, open wound. I just can’t do it. After several hours of this manic getaway, I reach an empty park. I’m exhausted to the point of physical pain. I sit by a maple tree for a moment and stare at the leaves, contemplating the life span of each one, wondering why some get to turn gold and others just rot into an ugly lifeless brown crumble. By the time Mom finds me, I am asleep on the ground like a homeless person.

  I can’t keep my feelings under wraps for much longer, and Alan sees it. I respond to questions with monosyllabic answers. I stare off into space. I pull away. I don’t comb my hair. I live in sweatpants. I stop smiling completely. I don’t even fake them anymore. He tries all his usual sweet stuff with me, but I increase the distance. I no longer have anything to give him, and deep down I don’t want to give him anything. Our conversations are reduced to him trying to pry words out of me.

  I lie. I tell him that I am fine. That he should not worry, that nothing is wrong. But he isn’t stupid. “Sweetie, you gotta talk to me,” he pleads often. “I’m here for you,” he says, sincere as can be. I should open up to him, at least him. But I don’t even know where to start, how much to tell, if it’s even safe to confide in him. Where does my sadness even truly begin? How do I tell a boy I care about what happened to me when I was fourteen? How do I even think about articulating that story? What words do I choose?

  When I try to answer any of those questions, the shame bubbles up like a venomous froth, suffocating me. The rawness of the reality burns in my memory. The pain presses on me, the way those boys pressed on me on that ill night I was violated by four different men, the night my life turned into ash. But Alan’s sweet eyes don’t let up.

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?” he asks one night when I’m particularly closed off and quiet.

  “I know,” I say, lying, because I can’t talk to him about the awful thing that happened to me. Even if I did have the strength to tell him, how do I know it won’t scare him off, or that he won’t judge me? Or worse, tell someone else? But there’s Alan: stroking my hair, rubbing my back, making me tea—even when I don’t ask for any of it. He doesn’t give up on me, he keeps trying. Gently urging me to open up, to trust him, to find a way to see a light at the end of whatever is going on.

  His love is genuine, so much that it starts to crack me. Very slowly, one kiss and caress at a time, I allow the closeness to comfort me. And soon, his love feels powerful enough to start countering the hate from my past. It starts to feel like a healing agent. I wrap myself up in it and try to let its warmth comfort me. I try to reach back to that sunny place in myself, the self that was happy, alive, energized, and I allow that part of me to let Alan in. I let his love serve as a rope. And I grab on to the end of this rope, and slowly start to pull myself up, allowing myself to open, to tell him, to tell the truth about what happened to me on Halloween. It’s the first time I ever speak those words aloud.

  “I was raped.”

  Each utterance a hideous reliving, each word like a nail in my own coffin. Alan takes it all in, like he’s drinking a foul-flavored syrup, and I can see the breadth of his compassion expanding more and more, and it envelops me like a sacred wingspan—he’s my angel in this moment. He asks no questions and makes no comments. His eyes don’t leave mine as I tell the story. He holds me as I speak, and this gesture grounds me into the now, and for the first time since that awful thing happened, I feel untethered to death.

  Driving back to Oregon feels like a death wish itself. The farmland pastures, which at one point in my life gave me a sense of calm and openness, now make my skin crawl with their incessantness. The lush, damp greenery used to be my playground, my happy place—but now it’s the backdrop to the desolation that broke me. As we get closer to Newberg, I can feel my jaw go tight and the pressure build at the sides of my head. What have I done?

  “You good?” Alan asks, one hand on the wheel and the other firmly gripping my hand.

  “I don’t know,” I answer, knowing full well that I am nothing close to good. I want to tell him to turn the car around, to forget this whole thing. I want to tell him that I made the whole thing up just to get attention, that it’s a giant lie. But the tears falling into my lap tell a different story, so he knows already, and there is no turning back.

  The parking lot at the Newberg-Dundee Police Department is an endless row of cop cars. I don’t even have the courage to unbuckle my seat belt, so Alan does it for me, and he takes my bag.

  “Come on. The sooner we do this, the sooner it’s done,” he says, rational, poised, supportive. But there is nothing rational about telling a roomful of officers that I was raped by a group of jocks. There’s nothing rational about reporting a crime that took place over a year ago. And there’s certainly nothing rational about willfully slicing open the place where I carefully store my misery, essentially inviting the pus of that festering infection in the depths of my heart to now come oozing out.

  “I can’t do it,” I say, clutching the armrest in the car. We’re here because Alan has convinced me that I absolutely must make an official statement about what happened to me, if only to stay within the statute of limitations, so that I can press charges one day, if and when I am ever ready. I trust him, his mind and his maturity, so I agree, knowing, of course, that it will feel like open-heart surgery.

  “You’re stronger than you think,” Alan says, and for a second I believe him; and in that split second, I manage to get myself out of the car.

  From the moment I walk into the precinct, my senses feel heightened. The sound of my soles against the floor feel loud and unnecessarily percussive, and even the shuffling of paperwork sounds like a loud serpentine hiss in my ear. The cops all have poker face stares, each one busy and seemingly unconcerned with us. Walking down a long corridor to
the room where I’m meant to report my case, I start to wonder if experiences like mine are often reported here, if these types of stories are old hat for these stern-faced, uniformed cops, who seem impervious to everything. I haven’t even thought of what I will say, how I will start, which words I will use. Will they blame me for sneaking out, for hanging out alone with a bunch of drunk and stoned guys? Will they think I had it coming?

  Alan holds my hand the entire time; this has become his signature, a constancy that shows me he has my back, that’s he’s not one of those boys, that the possibility of something good is out there.

  I’m seated in an empty room. One of the officers brings in the sweetest golden retriever I have ever seen, an emotional-support dog, for me to cuddle while I talk. The overgrown puppy stays right by me and looks straight at me, her own giant brown eyeballs practically saying I love you the entire time. And in that room, with one hand in Alan’s and the other caressing the top of that sweet puppy’s velveteen head, I tell my story, one agony at a time, everything from the early bullying, to the daily violations at school, to the piercing solitude, to the daily crying in the bathroom, to the night of the rape. I use the word “rape,” shocking myself with every flash of memory, vividly reliving the hell one hideous snapshot at a time. A part of me is detached from what’s happening, as if watching from above, unable to come to grips with this insane narrative that’s spilling out of me, as if it wasn’t me who experienced it. But I begin to sob so much, so intensely, the words thundering out of me so emphatically, my body shaking so hard, that I know it’s me, and the cops tell me to take a break, give me a glass of water, and let me wear my sunglasses for the rest of the session. I am asked to give a list of names and identify the boys in photographs, and each time I say one of their names out loud or see one of their villainous mugs, it feels like someone has taken a machete to my heart, until I utter the last name, Ivan’s, and weep with a fierceness, with every one of my organs, my whole body crying out for what he did, for what they did, for how they changed me, abused me, took me from myself.