The Way I Used to Be

WHAT HAPPENED: I WOKE up to him climbing on top of me, jabbing his knees into my arms. I thought it was a joke—unfunny to be sure, but still, a joke. I opened my mouth. I tried to speak, but only got out “wwwh,” the beginning of what. What, what, what is happening, what are you doing?

But he put his hand over my mouth right away, so my mom and dad wouldn’t hear. They wouldn’t hear, because my alarm clock was blinking 2:48 at me from the nightstand next to my bed. We both knew they were fast asleep on the other side of the house.

No joke.

Because now his mouth is on your mouth and his hand around your throat and he’s whispering, “Shutupshutupshutup.” You do. You shut up. You are stupid, stupid.

It’s 2:49: He had my days-of-the-week underwear on the floor. And somehow you still don’t understand what’s happening. Then he yanked my nightgown up—my favorite nightgown with the stupid sleeping basset hounds on it—and I feel the seam rip where the thread was already coming loose. He pulls it up around my neck, exposing my whole body, my whole naked, awkward body. And he shoves a fistful of it into my mouth, choking me. I was gagging, but he just kept pushing it into my mouth, pushing, pushing, pushing, until it wouldn’t go in any farther. I didn’t understand why, not until I tried to scream. I was screaming, I knew I was, but no sound—just muffled underwater noise.

I managed to get my arms free, but they didn’t know what to do first. They flailed aimlessly, striking outward without direction. Stupid limbs. A quick smacksmack against a wall of boy body and I was down again. So much for that adrenaline rush of superhuman strength I’d always heard about—the kind that could allow grandmothers to lift cars off children yet wouldn’t allow me to just get out of his hands. Fucking useless urgency.

“Stop it,” he warned me as he held my arms down against the bed, his knees digging into my thighs, grinding his kneecaps in hard until all of his body was smothering all of my body, my bones turning to dust. I remember you thought that hurt. But that was nothing.

His body was shaking—his arms from holding me down so hard, his legs from trying to pry himself between my thighs, trying to position himself to do the thing that even then, in that moment, I still didn’t believe he was capable of doing. “Goddamn it,” he growled in my ear—her ear, her ear. “Hold still or I—fucking do it, or I—I swear to God,” he breathed.

I didn’t care about the ends of those sentences because this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening. This is not real. This is something else. This is not me. This is someone else. I tried to keep her legs squeezed together. I really tried—they were shaking from the strain of it—but by 2:51 he got them apart.

The bed frame creaks like a rusty swing swaying back and forth. Moans like a haunted house. And something like glass shatters. Shatters inside of you, and the tiny slivers of this horrible thing splinter off and travel through your veins, beelining it straight to your heart. Next stop: brain. I tried to think of anything, anything except it hurts it hurts it hurts so bad.

Quickly though, the pain became secondary to the fact that I thought I might actually die. I couldn’t breathe. No sound could get out of my mouth and no air could get in. And the weight of his body was crushing me to the point I thought my ribs would snap right in half and puncture a lung.

He used one hand—just one—to hold both my arms over my head, grinding my wrist bones together. He kept the other hand around my throat, constricting every time I made any sound at all. The sounds were involuntarily: gurgling and sputtering—dying noises—noises the body just makes when it’s dying. Did he know he was killing me? I wanted to tell him I was about to die.

At some point I guess I just stopped struggling. The thing, it was happening. It didn’t matter anymore. Just play dead. He kept his face buried in the pillow and every time he moved, so sharp, his hollow, muted grunts and groans reverberating through the cotton and polyester stuffing, winding a meandering path that led directly to my ears, melting with the noises of my insides breaking, the voices in my head screaming, screaming, screaming.

By 2:53 it was over. He let go of my arms. It was over, it was over, I told myself. When he ripped the nightgown out of my mouth, I started coughing and gasping. I had almost suffocated to death, but he couldn’t even let me have that—a simple bodily reaction. He clamped his hand over my mouth. He was out of breath, his mouth almost touching mine, his words wet: “Shut up. Shut up. Listen to me. Listen.” He held my face still, so that I had to look directly into his eyes. His eyes were the eyes he always had, but they burned me now, burned right into me. “Shhshhshh,” he whispered as he peeled away strands of tear-soaked hair from my face, tucking them behind my ears—like, gently—over and over again, his hands on me like it’s the most normal thing, like this was just supposed to be.

“Look at me,” he whispered. “No one will ever believe you. You know that. No one. Not ever.”

He pushed himself off me then, a burst of icy air rushing in between us as he sat up. He was leaving and it would finally be over. I didn’t care about what had just happened, or what would happen next, I only cared that it would be done, that he would be gone. I would be quiet, I would be still, if that’s what it took. I shut my eyes and waited. And waited. Except he wasn’t leaving, he was kneeling between my legs, looking down at me, at my body.

I had felt plenty ugly before, in general. But never ugly like this. Never as insignificant and repulsive and hated as he made me feel then, with his eyes on me. I tried to cover myself with my hands, but he tore them away and laid my arms flat against my sides, he put his hands on me instead. It wasn’t over, not yet. This was still part of it. I grab handfuls of sheets in my hands to make my body stay put, like he wanted.

He wasn’t even holding me down. Not physically. But he was holding me in some other way, a way that was somehow stronger than muscle and arms and legs. I couldn’t even feel my body anymore, not even the hurt, but I could feel his eyes on me, showing me all of the places I was ugly, all the things he hated most about me, all the ways I didn’t matter.

“You’re gonna keep your mouth shut,” he whispered into my mouth. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or an order. Either way, there’s only one right answer, I know. “I asked. A fucking. Question.” Drops of spit fly onto my face with each word.

I stare . . . am I allowed to speak? Wasn’t I supposed to be shutting up?

He grabs hold of my chin and a handful of hair and jerks my face up and down. “Yes?” he hisses, nodding slowly. I nod my head ferociously. “Say it.”

My voice doesn’t work right though; I can only get out the “s” sound.

“Say it,” he demands.

“’Es. Yes, yes,” I hear myself whimper.

“No one—do you understand? You tell no one,” he says with his mouth close to my face. “Or I swear to God. I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you.”

I hear my voice, no louder than my breath: “Please, please, please.” And I don’t even know what I’m begging for—him to just get it over with and kill me or for him to spare me.

He smears his lips against my mouth one last time, looks at me like I’m his, and smiles his smile. He gets up. Then he’s back in his boxers. He whispers, “Go back to sleep,” before shutting the door of my bedroom behind him.

I put both hands over my mouth, squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could, and tried to fix my brain to disbelieve everything it thought and felt and knew to be true.