Right now, I am looking at a photo of us. From a lifetime ago. Stuck within the pages of an old book, the photo fell to the floor.
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“How do you, the jury, find the defendant?” asks the judge after two hours of deliberation.
The room was silent. The only sound was the jurors breathing a sigh of relief as they sat in their chairs. It was all going to be over soon. A tall man with white hair and kind eyes answered the judge.
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I was not raped by someone you know. Just a few days after my fifteenth birthday I was raped by a boy who was scared of ghosts and hung a tin cross on his wall. When I was raped it felt like drowning. I could not breathe. My body twisted in ways I was not in control of, and in the fleeting moments when I realized and re-realized what was happening to me I gasped for air. I cried.
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Girl nervously follows Boy into the dimly lit bar, traveling in his wake to the leather stools. Red velvet drapes project an eerie, dark hue throughout the room. Faint jazz music plays from across the seating area; if it was any louder, it would be too difficult to hear Boy discussing his love of poetry and tattoos—the ink he gets in honor of family members.
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I am an abuse victim. My grandfather abused me over the course of five summers when I was working for him and my grandmother at their cafe. Waitressing at their steak house was a summer job and a way for me to earn money for school clothes—a way for me to escape the crush of seven siblings—and a way for me to be singled out for sexual abuse.
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