"I stayed after class and helped Mr Martin sort through his papers. Wouldn’t he see the things my face had to say? Then maybe he’d bring me to his house where I would babysit his son and help out his wife. She might comb my hair and make me a sandwich and let me sleep on their couch where it would feel so much safer. They would hear my telling and keep my secrets. And I’d go back home in August when my mother returned.
I hinted. I talked about the recent case of a teacher in another school who had been raped in the parking lot by a man she carpooled with.
'That kind of happened to me,' I said. 'Last night.'
I held my breath like a diver.
Mr Martin didn’t look up from his papers. He reached for his briefcase and put his notebooks inside.
'Men can’t understand rape,' he said.
When I got home from school, I put the Thursday clothes in a paper bag and took them to the trash can in the parking lot behind the apartment building. They’d have to wait there until the trash was picked up on Monday. But when I got back upstairs, I could still hear them crying. After an hour, I brought the clothes inside.
I washed them by hand and then hid them under a box at the back of my closet. It was the best I could do. They quieted down or else they just died.
At night, my ears were two bloodhounds without a leash following every sound. There was a faint clicking that took me a week to locate. I’d looked everywhere for its source. I even timed the intervals between the clicks – 20 seconds, six seconds, 12 seconds. The pattern repeated, but I couldn’t break the code. Then one morning as I waited on the corner for the light to change, a clunking sound hung above me and I looked up: 20 seconds of green, six seconds of yellow and 12 seconds of red.
I brought the Random House dictionary into my room. I wondered if other people picked words at random from dictionaries and books to help them find answers they couldn’t find elsewhere.
I let the pages of the large dictionary flip-flop back and forth between my palms. I wanted a word just for me in that moment.
The pages fell open in the As. I closed my eyes and let my finger land on a word.
ag·gra·vat·ed
adjective
an offence made worse, as in the use of a deadly weapon [kid-napping, rape]
I couldn’t let that word stay in my room overnight. Some words that show up are not talismans at all. Instead, they push their way forward like a bad dream with a fever.
I was sitting in algebra class when the blood came. Mr Martin was in the middle of reading a quote about algebra being metaphysical. The VW zero we’d drawn was still in the middle of the east-west highway behind him. I asked Mr Martin for a pass to the girl’s restroom.
Dear Our Lady of the Blessed Menstruation, thank God I’m not pregnant.
Mr Martin had no idea what a horror the girls’ restroom was – how not a single toilet worked, ever. How the toilets were chronically stopped up with bloody Kotex and shit. How, during the regular school year, the girls’ bathroom was just a place to buy dope, write graffiti, smoke, fight or fuck. I felt like I might vomit.
During summer school the bathroom was mostly empty. I jammed my washcloth into my underpants and headed home. For each block on the long sweaty walk, I counted how many humid breaths I inhaled and exhaled. Counting this way kept me from fainting.
The cramps were furious – as though my uterus was slicing its own lining to shreds first before spitting it out. As though the lining were the underpants I left in the truck on Thursday 5 July. As though my pelvis was finally able to scream and kick and punch the closest thing it could find.
It never occurred to me that it should have occurred to my mother to do more to protect me. What you get is what you get.
My mother wasn’t the kind of person to need other people. That’s what she told me once when I was alone in Ireland at 18 years old. I was ready to come back after three months on an independent study project for college. I didn’t use the word lonely, but my mother could sniff out my soft sides like a German shepherd sniffs out a bomb. I only ever told her I missed her one time after I’d moved out. She howled in complaint. 'How can you miss me? You keep coming back.'”
~ Stephanie Clare Smith
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