UnSilenced

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink.

I’m going to tell you my story.

I’m telling it for her, and her, and them.  I’m telling it for all of the women who choose to remain silent.

I’m telling it for me.

I don’t know exactly why he chose me, but I can tell you with certainty that he planned my rape and executed it with the cold hearted precision of a spider catching flies in its web.

I was 12, and he was 18.

His sister was a friend of mine, and for weeks beforehand he made comments to her about me.  I will admit, I was flattered at first.  But fairly quickly his attention became uncomfortable and I distanced myself from that particular friend.

Over winter break, another friend invited me over to her apartment to hang out.  She lived with her grandparents, who had installed a special kind of deadbolt on their front door – one that required a key for both entry and exit.  Every day when they left for work, they locked her in.  What they expected her to do if there had been a fire, I don’t know.  I thought they were crazy, to put it mildly.

My friend didn’t ever leave, in case her grandparents called during the day to check on her, but she had figured out that people could come and go fairly easily through the kitchen window, which overlooked the landing in front of their apartment.

When I arrived and knocked on the window, my friend passed the kitchen step stool – the kind that folds up with a tall handle – through to me.  I climbed up, grabbed the step stool from the window ledge, and stepped through to the kitchen counter and down into the apartment, hauling the stool back in with me.

At first we just hung out, did each others make up, and tried on clothes like typical junior high students.  Soon, there was a knock at the window, and a moment later our mutual friend, the one I had distanced myself from, was making her way through the kitchen window.

She brought with her a bag full of all kinds of booze, I couldn’t tell you what, exactly.  I had had only one experience with alcohol at that point and wasn’t exactly sure I wanted a second.  Peer pressure being what it is, though, I played some sort of truth or dare drinking game with them and wouldn’t you know, an 80 pound 12 year old gets drunk pretty quickly.

Before I even knew what was happening, he was there.  Whether he came in through the window while I wasn’t paying attention, or if he had been waiting quietly out of sight while they got me drunk, I will never know.

My “friends” said they needed to make a phone call and went into the bedroom.  He and I were alone in the living room and he asked me to come over and sit by him.

I said I had to go and walked, drunkenly I’m sure, toward the kitchen.  As I tried to climb onto the counter, he grabbed me around the waist from behind, and told me I didn’t have to go, yet.  The more I struggled to get away, the tighter he squeezed. 

I was no match for his 200 pound frame.

He turned me around and pressed himself against me, the kitchen counter cutting into my back.  When he tried to kiss me I turned my face away.  “Please don’t,” I whispered, my eyes closed.

“You know you want to,” he whispered back, too close, his breath in my ear making my skin crawl.

I told him no, I had to go home, my parents were waiting and would come looking for me if I wasn’t back soon.  He laughed and said he knew better.  My “friends” had already told him that my parents worked all day.

What happened next is a bit of a blur.  I don’t recall how we got from the kitchen to the bedroom, whether he pulled me there or carried me.  But I remember being glad he took me in there, so that my “friends” could reason with him, help me, protect me.

All the help they offered was to give my rapist a condom.

They stayed on the top bunk, giggling to each other as they talked to someone on the phone, while I was raped on the bottom bunk beneath them, begging, pleading for him to let me go.  For a long time I obsessed over who might have been on the other side of that phone line.  Who it was that listened to me being raped.

He started out on top of me, my wrists pinned to the pillow above my head with his left forearm.  I was so much smaller than him, though, that he was worried about hurting me.

So he flipped over and put me on top of him, his massive hands wrapped around my skinny upper arms so tightly, it took three weeks for the bruises to heal completely.  My struggling against him seemed to excite him, making him get rough with me.  Eventually I went silent, focusing on the pain in my arms to get through what he was doing to me.

Afterward, he congratulated me for riding him like a bucking bronco, and I had to swallow back the vomit rising in my throat.  It was as if he couldn’t see my tears, didn’t hear my pleas for him to stop, was blind to my blood spattered on the sheets.  Somehow he seemed to believe that I had wanted him to rape me, and I shook with the realization that he thought I had enjoyed it.

My “friends” laughed and said that they hoped they hadn’t accidentally given him the condom they’d poked a hole in.  I cried and tried to cover myself with my clothes as I gathered them, some torn and some intact.  I locked myself in the bathoom and cleaned myself up the best I could.

I had never felt so alone, and I didn’t know what to do.  I tried to sneak quietly to the kitchen, to leave without anyone noticing me.

As I crawled through the window to freedom, his sister appeared behind me.

Arms crossed and a smile on her face, she told me that if I got her brother in any trouble, she’d tell everyone what a fucking slut I was, how I had begged her to set me up with him and had pushed myself on him.

I didn’t say a word, just slipped through the window to safety.

Twenty years have passed.

Twenty.  Years.

I have been silent for long enough.