It didn’t feel like much.
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I clenched my eyelids so tight that I saw phantom sparks flickering in the dark, like the fireworks we’d watched with his family that evening, because it was the Fourth of July, the last normal evening of my life.
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I tried to stop him — I swear I did — I even said no. I said no so many times — maybe not then, not that exact moment, but in a series of moments just before. No, I said when he kissed me, then when he moved my hand to his erect penis, then again when he asked for oral sex. No, thank you. Please, he begged. I won’t tell anyone, he said. But I said no and he rolled over and told me not to tell anyone either. Fine by me, I said with both venom and relief that I still held the power here.
​
So when he started kissing me again, after all the nos, I didn’t kiss back. I lay motionless, mouth closed. I figured he’d lose interest fast enough and it would all be over and I could go back to sleep again. But as I held myself still he moved from my dead lips to my bare neck. I remember how wet his kisses felt, how chapped his lips were. He’ll get bored, I thought, though the wetness made me squeamish. Then I felt something else, something lower, something where it shouldn’t be — was it a hand? A finger? A figment of my imagination? — then it was pulling off the underwear from underneath the dress I’d worn that night.
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Suddenly, it wasn’t a hand — these things happen so fast, nobody tells you how fast it’s all going to be, nobody prepares you for the way the world can shatter in an instant — rather it was a body on top of mine. I tried to sit up, tried to prop myself up on my elbows, but my body was weak against his torso. I strained, but I was dizzy from the drinking and smoking joints and then hookah out of the back of someone’s truck at the party he’d brought me to earlier that night, and I fell back onto the bed. I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed my resistance. I wanted to speak — to say, stop! — but I don’t know if I said anything. All I know is that he did not stop.
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As I lay there, a voice came to mind. It belonged to a comedian whose set I’d watched online after I read an essay about rape jokes; their work was cited as an example of a “good” rape joke. “Every woman in their entire life has that just, like, one moment when you think, ‘Oh, here’s my rape! Yep, this is it,’” they said as they checked their imaginary watch. “11:47! How old am I — 25? Alright!” I replayed that bit over and over in my head as I lay beneath him, hoping that what I thought I was feeling was not — here I was, sometime after midnight, eighteen years old — is this it?
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When he rolled off me, he left me lying on the bed. We were in the basement of his parents’ house, where he’d been staying that summer. Earlier that night, he told me I could stay over because nobody was safe to drive. I’d been picturing a spare bedroom or maybe a sofa bed, but this basement only had one bed, some storage, and a beat-up-looking couch. I’ll sleep there? I said and gestured to the couch. I wouldn’t, he told me. Someone pissed on that couch at a party last night. I could sleep in his bed, he told me, it would be fine.
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Now, in the aftermath, he’d migrated to the couch, the piss-couch that I was beginning to suspect was piss-less, and he called out into the darkness without even a head-turn in my direction, merely projecting his words into the air above us. Are you on birth control? Why? I asked, holding on to the magical belief that we might still be able to undo this. My mind was still shielding me from the truth of what happened. A beat passed before he spoke. Are you joking?
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No, I said. I’m not. Joking, I meant, but I wasn’t on birth control either. I didn’t bother to clarify.
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Shit, he said. A moment passed. I can give you some money in the morning.
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It wasn’t the first time I’d needed to take emergency contraceptives, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time it felt like this, so transactional — worse than a transaction even, more like a penance.
Thanks for the fuck — is that what we’d call it? — here’s 60 dollars for your trouble. Or, here’s 60 dollars, now thank you and fuck off.
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In the mildewed darkness, the walls closed in on me. I felt like the smallest person in the world. I started to cry, and before long, I was sobbing. I made no attempt to mask the noise. My body heaved as I shuddered and gasped from his bed.
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I can hear you, he said at one point. I ignored him.
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His words hung in the air between us, suddenly so pregnant.
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Katie, he said, a bit more insistent this time. I can hear you crying.
I didn’t reply.
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Do you want me to come over there? He said, almost like he meant it, like he thought I’d find that comforting, to have his body near mine once again.
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I don’t remember if I said no that time. That time, at least, he didn’t come.
***
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I wake up in the morning and am unable to find my underwear, but I find I can recall the prior evening’s events with clarity. I don’t want to speak about them out of fear that it would make them real.
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Instead, I hug him. I thank him for letting me stay. Thank you, I say to my rapist. It was nice to see you, I say to my rapist as I feel his arms around me once again, this time tender, or some performance of tenderness at least.
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I walk out to my car, with no underwear and no money for Plan B, and I open the door and sit inside. I pull down the sun visor and open the little mirror to look at my reflection: smudged mascara and a pink sunburn on the bridge of my nose. I take a deep breath before I shut the flap, then I put the car in drive. I navigate up Route 6 towards Provincetown in silence.
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Thirty minutes, my GPS tells me. Keep driving, I tell myself. Don’t look back. In the silent interior of the vehicle, I eye the speedometer, making sure to follow the speed limit — as if my good behavior could redeem me. It would be suspicious to come home so early anyway, I tell myself. Might as well go slow. I drive on, the road cloaked in foggy ocean air. I drive past neat rows of cottages with weathered shingles trimmed in pale pinks and yellows and beige, the flowerbeds below in full bloom, lilac and hydrangea bushes on the front lawn.
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My stomach burns hot and corrosive, but my face is cold and clammy despite the sunburn and the warm, stale air coming from the vents in front of me. I feel like crying, but no tears come, so I turn on the radio. I feel the words fill the emptiness. I sing along through tears, which finally come, enticed by the music. ‘Til the landslide brought me down, I sing in my unsteady, pitchy voice as I remember how my dad used to play this song in his car, back when we only had a fixed rotation of CDs to entertain us.
​
I need to pee, badly, so I pull into a gas station and step out of the car, suddenly conscious of the fact of my missing undergarment. I pull down my little black dress in the back as much as I can, smooth out the front. I pull my hair into a loose, bedraggled bun. I rub my fingertips across my bottom lash-line one last time to dispel any lingering flecks of makeup.
The automatic ding of the bell greets me when I open the door. There’s a long line in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts inside the station—elderly women in pastel sweaters and wrinkled capris, suburban mothers with large sunglasses and nautical jewelry made of silver and sea glass, a couple of middle-aged men in slacks who reminded me of my father. They turn to face me as I walk past them towards the bathroom. I feel their eyes following me down the hallway.
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I heave the door open and flop onto the toilet. I feel the wetness of the dirty seat as I pee. I don’t care. I stare at all the grimy sand and dirt and muck caking the floor. The stall itself is covered in stray scribbles and missives and abandoned pieces of gum. I feel like I’m going to throw up, but I’ve barely eaten in the last twelve hours, so I choke down the bile and flush.
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At the sink, I get a better look at myself. My hair has kinks in it from his pillow. My dress, which felt appropriate the night before, now looks ridiculous and obscene in the harsh light of the fluorescents. Another wave of nausea seizes me, and I retch into the sink. I’m sweating. I swipe away the spit and sweat and vomit from my top lip with the back of my hand and smear it by the hem of my dress.
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I step back out into the store and walk past the jury in line for their iced lattes and breakfast sandwiches. Mercifully they’ve forgotten me by now. I hasten my pace through the convenience store aisles until I reach the exit. The door rings behind me as I leave.
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When I arrive at our cottage, nobody is awake. I make my way to the outdoor shower and crank the hot water. My skin scalds under its spray, and I turn a shocking pink from the heat. I cross my arms over my chest and turn away from the showerhead. I stand there listening to the ocean waves just beyond the latched wooden door. I let the searing heat pour over my back. I want to be cleansed by fire.
​
***
​
I think about him often. Sometimes, I look at the photo of us that was taken that evening when I handed his friend my phone and asked him to snap a picture of us. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I wanted to commemorate the moment. We are both smiling, thoroughly sunburned, as otherwise-pale people tend to be in the summer on the Cape, all white teeth and sun-bleached blonde hair. He looks like he could be a brother.
I pull up his Facebook page — I’ve been looking at it long enough to see his relationships dissolve and new ones form. He and the girlfriend who didn’t believe me broke up. He joined a fraternity. He graduated. He moved to a city I wouldn’t have expected of him. He’s smiling. His sibling writes that he is missed back home. He seems to be thriving, from what I can tell.
​
I wonder if he ever thinks about me. I wonder if he ever looks at my Facebook profile, if he ever scrolls my Instagram at night. I try not to wonder if he feels guilty. I do wonder if he regrets it — he probably does, but I don’t know if that has anything to do with guilt. It caused him so much trouble, stirred up so much drama. Why does she have to make it into such a big deal? And why does she think she’s so precious anyway?
It’s a fair question, maybe. I’d had sex with men before, and I’ve had sex with them since; women too. Why is this so different, really? Why should sex be precious?
​
And, besides, it only lasted a couple of minutes. What’s a couple of minutes, really, in the great span of a lifetime? Sometimes, I fear they were the most consequential moments of my life.
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Sometimes, I wonder if he knows what he took from me. Sometimes, I wonder — do I?
​
***
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Years later, I am sitting in my college dorm room, and I see an article on Twitter.
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Really, I see the photos first. Women photographed in black and white, sitting on stools, rows and rows of them. New York reads the cover in bright red font. Who are these women, I wonder, as I click the accompanying link.
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Bill Cosby’s victims, it turns out. I read through the article in a fugue state as my heart begins to flutter, an arrhythmia I developed after my eating disorder that surfaces when I am under stress, and my breath becomes shallow and quick.
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This was before Harvey Weinstein’s notoriety escaped from the Hollywood whisper networks, before #MeToo went mainstream, before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s credible testimony that he sexually assaulted her when they were younger.
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And I think of him, when we were younger.
​
***
Years later, I am watching those hearings, the Blasey Ford hearings, from a classroom on campus, where I am in the first semester of my first year of law school, the very law school at which Kavanaugh was slated to teach a class the following spring, the same law school that failed to disinvite him from his teaching post until after he was confirmed and declined it himself due to his newly busy schedule, even as the hearings were airing on national television, even as activists, alumni, and female students alike petitioned the administration to do so.
​
A couple dozen of us — mostly female and gender non-conforming students, though there are some men — are gathered in a classroom in a satellite building to view the hearings live on a projector. I sit on the floor with my arms wrapped around my legs, pulled in close to my chest, which feels constricted and heavy. My heartbeat flutters.
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I want to cry, and I don’t know if I can even stop myself from doing so. I picture him, this boy who by now had become a man, his reddish complexion and towhead blond hair, if he were confirmed to the Supreme Court, too; I picture him as I knew him then, when we were eighteen.
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Always, I think back to what he did.
​
***
I’ve since read that “fight or flight” does not encompass the full spectrum of adaptive survival behaviors — sometimes people “freeze.” This is no quirk but a bona fide survival mechanism, like an animal playing dead to avoid a roving predator.
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I wish I’d known that then, although I don’t know what I would have — or could have — done differently. Maybe it would have been nice just to know. Maybe it would have been nice to understand in the moment. Maybe it would’ve been nice to forgive myself in the days and weeks and even months after when I questioned myself over and over and over — why didn’t I say more? Why didn’t I push him off? Why didn’t I do something, anything?
​
I never felt that I had a right to take it as hard as I did— so many other people are raped, and in more violent and traumatizing ways — I felt ridiculous when I was diagnosed with PTSD, when I had to take pills to sleep at night. And yet, the pain lingered for years, still lingers now. I no longer mourn our friendship, nor the other friendships lost along the way, but I do mourn. I mourn something, something ineffable, something I will never get back.
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I wonder who I might have been if this trauma hadn’t interfered at such an impressionable time. I wonder what she might have accomplished. I wonder whom and how she might have loved. Would she be more whole? Would it be any different at all, or is suffering written somehow into my DNA? I ask myself sometimes, am I who I was supposed to be?
​
***
​
I’ve told this story dozens, if not hundreds, of times now, recounted it to friends and lovers, therapists and strangers — not to mention my diaries and journals, my personal essays and thinly fictionalized accounts — but it never feels quite right. Somehow, I can never fully capture the essence of that night, the truth of what happened. Because what happened?
​
I spent years contemplating that question. All I know is the blur of my own subjectivity — movement and sensations: pressure, heaviness, breath. I know we came back to his house. I know we went down to that basement. I know I trusted him enough to lie down in his bed.
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I can delineate the sequence of events — I can spell out each action from start to finish. Yet I can’t make sense of it. I know what happened in a literal sense — which bodies were where, what body was doing what, and to whom — I remember the feeling of observing from outside my body. But how much can that really tell me?
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The problem is that telling the story reduces it to just that: a story. Am I lying? Am I exaggerating? The story itself — the words on the page as I compose it — are, in a sense, true. They are, in another sense, not true. How can I find words that won’t fail me?
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Here are some words: Cape Cod Fourth of July block party happiness comfort home fireworks flirting no not flirting Mike’s Hard Lemonade weed Bud Light hookah drive basement disposable cups whipped cream-flavored vodka couch dirty clean bed lay down clothes off no please shirt on sleep let’s sleep no wait hands touching no sleep? sleep sudden movement on top top heavy heavy breath grunting cold sweat heaviness warmth light darkness gone gone where what what happened joking? no. no joke here.
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Here are some more: wake up naked forced smile forced hug driveway drive away drive home gas station bathroom urine semen sigh dry heave vomit no tears leave music heat on so cold cold body hot shower red flesh father’s voice our daughter so proud hot water cold air naked body salt air salt tears silence, silence.
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Or what about these: It was a mistake. Or this: Don’t tell.
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How about: Did you use a condom? Or: Don’t worry, I got Plan B.
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Maybe this: I was drunk. Don’t forget: It’s your fault, too.
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Words, words, words.
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I write essays, so many essays. Some of them I share with people; some of them I don’t. In one fragment, long since abandoned, I react to the allegations against Woody Allen that were resurfacing at the time.
“Do people not understand what’s at stake when someone’s sexually abused,” I ask my reader. “Or do they just not care?” How do we make them care, when all we have is words?
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People say that everything happens for a reason, but I refuse to believe that God’s plan for me was to get date raped in a filthy basement while drunk off cheap flavored vodka and cross-faded from shitty joints and hookah smoked out of the bed of someone’s truck.
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As a feminist, you want to believe that rape is no one’s fault except the perpetrator’s, but as a victim, to accept that it’s not your fault is to accept your sheer powerlessness in this world, and your powerlessness to prevent it from happening again. That’s a big, bitter pill to swallow.
Which truth is worse: that it was my fault, or that it was just another moment in the cruel, relentless churn of life?
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Besides, as writers, don’t we — on some level — want it to mean something, anything at all? Where is my pearl of wisdom? Where’s the value in my suffering?
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I write because I want something to hold onto. I write to search for something to grasp. How many words, I wonder, do I have to pen before it means something? Anything at all.