“I just don’t see why you let her play with Vanessa,” said the male friend.
“I don’t know,” her dad said. “We try to do what’s right and not judge, but yeah, she’s white trash.”
“The poor thing’s never gonna amount to nothing,” Vanessa’s mother said. “Not with that mama. Vanessa’s room will smell like cigarettes tomorrow. Watch.”
“She smokes?” asked the female friend.
“Naw, it’s that mom,” said Vanessa’s mother.
“She will soon enough,” said Vanessa’s dad, “and probably try to get Vanessa into it.”
They moved on to the weather, having decimated me. My face was burning hot, and I walked into the bathroom and quietly closed the door before I started sobbing. I looked in the mirror and for the first time I saw what they saw. The dirty clothes, the hair my mother never touched. I pulled up my T-shirt, first to wipe my eyes, then to try to huff in the smell of smoke that maybe I had grown used to. All this time, these people thought I was trash. My mother’s neglect, being sexually abused next door, just twenty feet away from where they were sitting discussing me—it was all to be expected for someone who wouldn’t amount to anything.
And then I got angry. I washed my face, slapping cold water on it to stop my crying. I leaned in toward the mirror, and I said two little words that have made all the difference.
“Fuck them,” I whispered. I was going to prove them wrong. It was the start of a coping mechanism that has gotten me through every traumatic event in my life: I keep moving. I’m not the kind of person to stay in one place. If I’m not going forward, I know I will go backward. So I just keep going.
It’s part of why I never sought help from an adult to stop the abuse. I thought that would just affirm what people thought about me. I suppose that’s what a serial abuser counts on—the notion that kids blame themselves. If you didn’t tell the first time, it’s harder to tell the second time. Vanessa’s parents would probably think I liked it. Besides, in my world, adults were not people who helped you. I was on my own protecting Vanessa, and taking her place was the only way I knew how. And when adults did get involved, they let us down. I am sure there were other girls he raped, because when I was eleven years old, near the end of the summer of 1990, he got into trouble when he made some kind of move on the visiting family member of another neighbor girl. She told her parents, who called the cops.
The police showed up at my house, two men at the door. My mom happened to be home, and she opened the door just a crack to talk to them. I stood in the living room as they talked quietly. I heard my name, and she told them, “Hold on,” and closed the door.
She said the man’s name. “They wanna know if he’s ever done anything inappropriate,” she said. “If there’s something you need to tell me, you tell me privately. Because if I let them in they’ll take you away and I’ll never see you again.”
My mom looked around the room quickly—there was a glimmer of shame I’d never seen from her about the state of the house. The bugs and the rats, the filth surrounding us. She was right—anyone in their right mind would take a child out of that house.
“No,” I said. I am a terrible liar, and my mother knew it. She just didn’t want to let the police see how we were living. She opened the door again, still just an inch.
“She said he’s never done anything to her,” my mom said flatly. “Okay? Bye.” My mom closed the door on them and any discussion about what had really been happening to me. She lit a cigarette and never brought it up again.
As far as I know, he never did any jail time, but Vanessa stopped going over there. I don’t know if he was spooked or her parents told her to stop going. Vanessa and I drifted apart as friends when I started seventh grade at Istrouma Middle Magnet School around that time. When I saw her, she acted like I was just someone she knew vaguely. I accepted that, because I was already doing my own work of burying the abuse and moving on as if it had never happened. I started “dating” a boy at school, meaning we held hands and wrote each other notes. Michael lived down the block from me and had brown hair and the cutest nose. We dated for a few months and he was so great—until he dumped me on Valentine’s Day. He did it just as all the other girls were getting their valentines, and I have always suspected that he broke up with me to avoid the embarrassment of telling me he didn’t get me a card.
Not long after, we were getting off the bus from the school, him behind me, and he grabbed my ass. He had done things like that before, but now we weren’t dating. I reacted with an insane fury, with all my pent-up anger focused on him. I pushed him, and when he pushed me back, I lunged at him, jumping him and throwing him to the ground. While other kids watched, we rolled around someone’s front yard, with me punctuating my slaps and blows with “That. Is. Not. Okay.”
He got away from me, and we called it a draw. “You do not get to do that,” I yelled.
“Okay,” he said, dusting himself off. “Okay.”
Someone told on us, and since we were just coming off the bus we got suspended for a day. They called our parents in and my mom actually showed up. His mom, Terry, a bus driver, came in, and seemed relieved that Michael and I had already made up. But my mom made a scene, making the most of the attention on her. As Michael and I sat in little plastic chairs outside Principal Patim’s, we could hear my mother rant inside. When Mr. Patim refused to lift the suspension, my mother stood on his desk and yelled, “You just taught my daughter that it’s okay to be sexually assaulted.”
Michael and I exchanged a wide-eyed look. For him, it was insane to see and hear a parent acting that crazy, saying those words. But as I waited for my mom’s performance to end, I played the words over in my head, “sexually assaulted.” That is what had happened to me for two years, and she knew. If anyone had tried to teach me that I needed to be “okay” with being raped, it was her. As an accomplice in silencing me, maybe this was the alibi she was telling herself: her daughter’s first brush with assault was a boy grabbing her butt, not the continual rape she chose to believe never happened because it would have exposed her negligence.
The following year, Vanessa started at my middle school and was having crippling anxiety. There was an incident, I don’t know what, but it was enough of one that she had to see a guidance counselor. She told him what she had been through. I guess she said my name, because he called me in.
“Is what Vanessa is saying happened to her true?” he said, looking across the desk at me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Were you there?”
“Yes,” I said, and finally I was able to say it. “He did it to me, too.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“Saying what?” I asked. “He—”
“Vanessa has real problems,” he said. “He didn’t touch you.”
“He did, I swear.”
“Then why are you fine?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Was I?
“Because you’re making it up,” he said. “I don’t know why you would lie about this. Are you jealous of the attention she’s getting? Is that it?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why would you lie?”
I didn’t answer. I looked at my hands until he told me to leave. I’d finally outright asked for help from an adult, and I was called a liar. Vanessa stopped talking to me altogether, pretending I didn’t exist if we walked by each other in the hall. She seemed to hold her breath until I was gone, like kids do when they pass a cemetery. I respected that and didn’t push her. Maybe I reminded her of the room, or maybe she felt responsible for what that man had done to me.