“Jesus. Busy,” she said, looking concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Kendra’s a bitch.”
“Well, yeah. Kendra’s an idiot. But are you okay? What happened??”
“Nothing. We’re just in a fight.”
She looked at me. She knew something was really wrong. She knew it. But she wasn’t going to press it. Or she didn’t know how to press it. We got home and I went directly into my bathroom. I peeled off my dress and looked at my back. The skin down my spine had been ripped off and was bleeding. I ran the shower. I peed, and so much blood and cum came out, I was momentarily fascinated. I actually didn’t even know what the cum was. It took me a year to figure it out; I know that seems crazy, but it was just so disgusting and foreign to me. I rinsed my underwear in the sink and threw them in my hamper. I took a super-hot shower but was careful to avoid my vagina, which was swollen and throbbing still, so I got a washcloth and ran it under cold water and gently cleaned myself. Then I cried and got out of the shower and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I decided that what had happened was what I had wanted. I called Kendra and apologized for being such a bitch and leaving the football game. She was right to be so mad at me.
“What happened with you and Trey?” she asked, relenting.
“Oh,” I said quickly, “we just hung out at a park and hooked up. It was fine.”
I was very careful not to let my mom see my back, but a week or so later she came into my bathroom while I was changing and saw the scab running down my spine.
“Elizabeth! What happened to your back????”
I threw a shirt on.
“Nothing! It’s fine. I was messing around at Kendra’s apartment and she was dragging me around and I got a rug burn.”
The lie was so immediate and came so easily it almost shocked me.
“What?! Honey, how is that possible??? Didn’t you know that she was hurting you?? What’s going on over there?”
“MOM. IT’S FINE! IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL.”
I convinced myself not only that it wasn’t a big deal, but also that it was normal and that’s what sex was and Trey must be super into me. Like, he must want to be my boyfriend! How insane! Clearly he loves me! And I guess I love him, too? That must be what it means when you have sex with someone like that.
Obviously, I know now how ridiculous it was to think that, but I was fourteen, insecure, and painfully inexperienced. Also, I couldn’t change what had happened. Or how it had happened. All I could control was how I decided I felt about it and him. My still-developing fourteen-year-old brain couldn’t handle the trauma of what I had gone through, so I invented a new reality. And for the next few months, I became completely obsessed with him. I would call his number all the time and hang up—and by the way, this wasn’t before caller ID, so he knew how much I was calling. A few times we had what I thought were meaningful conversations. I brought up the sex and said we should probably do it again because it was really uncomfortable and painful for me, and his response was, “Well, what do you think it was like for me? It was like trying to fuck a brick wall.”
I fluctuated between my manic obsession and a deep empty hollowness, lying on the floor of my room and listening to the same songs over and over on repeat and sobbing. Or sometimes I would take a safety pin and scratch at my legs or arms.
“Cut that shit out, Elizabeth!”
That was what my mom said when she saw my arms. Then she made me go to group therapy for teen girls. It was awful. Mostly, I lied in the group and tried to be supportive of the other girls, all while hating them because their problems sucked. I didn’t talk about Trey or any of what had happened. I would just talk about my mom and dad. My sister. How hard school was for me.
Eventually, I told Kendra that I’d had sex with Trey and we were dating. She tried not to be judgmental, but told me that she thought he was a jerk. She was still friends with Jacob, and he said Trey had showed off the scratches on his back to illustrate how hard he’d fucked me and how into it I was, and that I was such a little slut. I laughed it off, then swallowed hard, pushing my rage and sadness down to my stomach. It didn’t exist! I was fine!
One Saturday, Trey came over and picked me up in his SUV; then he drove around to the back of a strip mall where the dumpsters were and I gave him a blow job. My dad, who had recently started a consulting job in Salt Lake City and was only home on the weekends, happened to pull into the lot as we were pulling out, and the look on his face was so horrified I still to this day remember it. It wasn’t that he’d seen anything—at least I’m almost positive he didn’t—but he knew this loser kid was up to nothing good with his fourteen-year-old daughter. And he wasn’t wrong. But neither of my parents talked to me about it.
One night, my sister was home from college on break and had gotten tickets for us to see Nirvana. I was so excited. After school, my phone rang. It was Trey. He told me that he had night school that evening but could maybe come by and see me afterward. I immediately marched into my sister’s bedroom and told her I wasn’t going with her to see Nirvana.
She stared at me. “What? Busy! Come on! You’re so excited!”
“No. It’s fine. Take someone else. I have a lot of homework and school tomorrow and I don’t want to go—”
“WHAT?! WHY?! Come—”
“NO! JESUS, LEIGH ANN, LEAVE ME ALONE!”
I slammed her bedroom door. I don’t think I need to tell you that Trey didn’t show up that night, and I guess adding insult to injury is the fact that I never did get to see Nirvana, since Kurt Cobain killed himself like four months later.
• • •
For Christmas that year, my dad gave me Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes. He’d heard the songs on NPR and said, “It just seemed like something you would like, Elizabeth.”
It’s weird. I wasn’t close with my father at all, but that Tori Amos CD basically saved my life. I remember listening to it over and over and just finding everything I needed in there. Like she had written it for me. I understand how dramatic that sounds, but it was. It was. It all was. It was truly a gift to fourteen-year-old ripped-apart me.
Around New Year’s, I decided that I was done calling or seeing Trey. I was done trying to be his girlfriend or thinking that I was. I actually wrote in my diary something to the effect of “I’m sick of this little game that Trey and I are playing and I’m done with it!” Oh, sweet baby Busy. There was no game, honey. But here is where I found my true talent. Because what I was able to do was cut it off, all of it, everything that had happened. I shoved it down so far inside myself, it barely even existed anymore. It brought me no pain. I didn’t feel it. It was like it never happened. Any of it.
After winter break, I stopped hanging around with Kendra as much. Emily invited me to come sit under the olive tree in the quad and eat lunch with the kids she was friends with. Kids who were the opposite of the skater boys. The AP weirdo kids. Not nerds, just kids who were super smart and interesting and all ended up going to Wesleyan and Brown and NYU and Reed. Right before Valentine’s Day, one of them—a junior named Chris—asked me out. He was so nice and smart and had plans to go to Cornell University. I said yes.
I remember not being sure what was expected of me sexually, but he was so sweet, and I didn’t feel like I had to do anything. Mostly we just made out at his mom’s house. Like how it should be, I guess. But after a month or so, I got bored and broke up with him over the phone. I wanted something more . . . what? Exciting? Challenging? Dangerous?
Eventually, I started hanging out with Kendra again, mostly to avoid the awkwardness of seeing Chris under the olive tree, since I felt like he always gave me weird puppy-dog eyes. Even though I had been trying to reinvent myself as the girl who hung with the smart kids and dated nice guys who aced their SATs and weren’t trying to pummel me in the back of a car, I missed Kendra and the freedom of roaming around Scottsdale at night, smoking cigarettes in the washes and hanging out doing nothing with skater boys.
/> One day, I went with my friend Nelson—who I knew from theater—to the mall so he could buy a new bathing suit. Nelson’s claim to fame was that he was the original Hobie on Baywatch but had been replaced by Jeremy Jackson. Which was a pretty great claim to fame since no one could prove him wrong. We were riding the escalator up when I instinctually turned around and looked below. I knew it was Trey before I saw his face—I knew it from the back of his brain-damaged head. I started to panic. I got shaky and sweaty and short of breath. I didn’t know what to do.
I grabbed Nelson’s wrist. “That’s Trey.”
“Where?”
“Down there. What do I do??”
“Nothing, why? He’s just your ex-boyfriend, right?”
Yeah. That was the story I had going. That he was just a regular ex-boyfriend.
But then, before I knew what I was doing, I screamed out, “HEY, TREY, FUCK YOU!”
I grabbed Nelson’s hand and ran to the mall exit. I looked for Trey’s car in the garage, thinking I’d key it, but I don’t remember if I did. Still, it was pretty satisfying. It felt good to scream at him, at least once.
I saw him only one more time after that, when I was a senior in high school and my dirtbag on-again/off-again boyfriend and I went to some random house in Phoenix to buy drugs for a rave we were going to. There was Trey, sitting fucked up on some dirty beanbag chair on the ground. Again, the immediate shaking and panic and shortness of breath.
“We have to leave now,” I said. My boyfriend was annoyed, but he’d already scored the drugs and could tell I was freaking out anyway, so we left.
For a few years, I pushed it down and my narrative mostly was, “Oh yeah, when I was fourteen I lost my virginity to some random seventeen-year-old I was dating in his car.” But then, at my senior prom, I was in a deep red wine–fueled conversation about losing virginities with a friend’s date when he abruptly stopped me and said, “Dude. That guy raped you.”
It was hard for me to wrap my head around that word. I mean. No. Not really. Rape is what happens to girls in alleys screaming no. I unbuckled his belt. And I followed him to his car. And I got in. And I didn’t say no. And I didn’t say stop. And I blew him after the fact. And I called him all the time. And I was obsessed with him. And I said we were dating. And I told him we should do it again. And I was a slut. And I was a slut. And I was a slut.
And I unbuckled his belt.
I wish I had some definitive thing to say about what happened. What it was. What I call it. Or what it meant then and what it has meant to me the last twenty-four years of my life. How it has fucked me in the head again and again, almost always in new ways. Showing up when I least expect it. In college! Night terrors in the months before my wedding! As I’m pushing my baby out of my vagina with no pain drugs! And how it has fucked with all of my relationships, both sexually and emotionally. But it has never been one thing to me. And it certainly has never stayed one thing for long. Even to this day. Even as I’m writing these words. How I feel about it changes yearly and monthly and weekly, sometimes hourly. My only hope is that my girls grow up in a culture that truly understands consent and that they’re never left to question if violence means someone cares for them.
• • •
Last year, my therapist asked me if I knew where Trey was or if I ever looked him up. My answer was immediate. No. I’ve never trolled Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for him. Which, if you know me, is a little weird, since I initially only got on social media in order to look up people from my past. So that night, while Marc put Birdie to bed, I did. And there I found him, smiling with his wife and their two little boys. I clicked to her page. He’s the love of her life. “Dreams do come true!” she wrote under their wedding photo. “I finally got my happy ending!”
TEAR IN YOUR HAND
(Tori Amos)
I was raised Catholic and I loved church when I was a kid. I loved taking the body and blood of Christ. I loved listening to the priest give his sermon, trying to always make it relatable and modern. I loved putting dollars in the little wicker donation basket and passing it down the aisle. I loved lighting a tea-light candle at the little altar and saying a silent prayer for someone who needed it. My mom was a lector at our church, and my sister and I would sit together as kids, pressing our legs into each other’s to keep from laughing as my mom over-enunciated the scripture in front of the parishioners: “THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE!”
When I was little, I wanted to be an altar boy, and I remember my mom arguing with Father Brian about why they should let me, even though the church hadn’t technically allowed girls to do that yet. But I had pretty much stopped going to church by the time I was in high school. It was hard to find the value in sitting there. I thought God had abandoned me in the back seat of an SUV.
Ben Miller was also raised Catholic but had ditched it in his teen years, for reasons different than mine, obviously. He wore pants that were bigger than his head, and they hung super low, suspended like magic under his flat ass. His head was shaved and he was prone to acne, especially around his nose. But he had a smile and eyes that melted my soul when we would talk in the halls or when I would “happen” to walk past the breezeway between third and fourth periods because I knew he would be there smoking with his friend Grant.
He had a girlfriend—a really scary girl named Samantha, who seemed like she would kick your ass for looking at her the wrong way. (In fact, I later based Kim Kelly on her.) But I knew they would eventually break up and he would be mine. I was sure of it.
I had to do one session of summer school that year. Considering the emotional toll of the year, I’m surprised I didn’t have to do more. Ben started showing up at noon to skate in the parking lot of our school until Dennis, the security guard, would run him off. Sometimes I would walk with him over to Chop and Wok and we’d eat egg rolls in the 105-degree heat. He started calling me at night when he’d get off work, and I’d stay on the phone with him for hours. He told me he wanted to kiss me every time he saw me.
“But you can’t,” I said. “You have a girlfriend.” (And I really didn’t want to get my ass kicked.)
“I know,” he said with that irresistible smile of his. “I gotta take care of it.”
A few days later, Kendra called me with the news. She knew before me, because Ben told his friend Grant—who she was now dating—that he’d broken up with Samantha. That night, we all walked from Kendra’s apartment to Denny’s, and on the way back, Ben grabbed me and kissed me.
I was in heaven.
Afterward, I went home and called him, and we talked until we were both falling asleep on the phone.
“So, listen,” he said. “I want you to be my girlfriend. You know, like officially.”
My heart was beating out of my chest.
“Yeah. I mean. Yes. I would like that so much.”
It was June 9. We spent every moment we could together. I would stay on the phone with him until two in the morning and then wake up at six for summer school. I was running myself ragged but I didn’t care. I was so in love with this boy. I have no idea the things we even talked about. Jim Croce? The Grateful Dead? His asshole dad? What his relationship with Samantha was like? How my ex-boyfriend was a real jerk who wasn’t very nice to me?
My mom liked Ben all right. His parents were also Catholic, even though they went to a church where my mom “didn’t like the music.” But Ben certainly knew how to be polite around them, calling them Mr. and Mrs. Philipps and looking them right in the eyes.
“He seems like a very nice boy, Biz. I just do not understand those pants! But you know, your grandmother never understood the way my girlfriends and I liked wearing our glasses down on our noses in high school. We thought we looked so great!”
“Cool, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.
As the month wore on, I was getting ready to leave again for the fancy performing arts camp in upstate New York. This time Emily wasn’t coming, but I’d gotten my friend Ami to go with me, since we bo
th did theater. We were super excited, but the idea of leaving Ben for three weeks was really painful to me. I promised I would call him as much as I could and write him every single day, and he promised to do the same. He even gave me a letter to open on the plane.
The Saturday before I was leaving for camp, my favorite band of all time, the Stone Temple Pilots, were playing at Desert Sky Pavilion, and Kendra scored us third-row seats for my birthday. I was feeling super run-down, but I thought it was just summer school and the heat and staying up late every night on the phone with my new boyfriend. Kendra’s dad dropped us off and we made our way down to the front. I had scribbled a message on a shirt that I wanted to throw onstage. The hope being, obviously, that Scott Weiland would get the shirt, read the message on it and then what? Call me and Kendra maybe? I think we put our phone numbers on it. Anyway, I don’t remember much of the concert. I do remember passing out against a huge sweaty dude, really the first and only time I’ve ever passed out. He yelled at Kendra, “Get your drunk friend off of me!!!”
The thing is, we weren’t drunk.
“Kendra. I think I have to go. I feel really weird. . . .”
“No! You just need some water! It’s like a million degrees out! Plus, they haven’t played ‘Creep’ yet! We can’t leave before that!”
She had a point. We went and bought some water and I started to feel a little better. We heard them play “Creep” and hugged each other and cried and I lamely threw the T-shirt onto the stage and then watched as it just sat there sadly for the rest of the show.
When I got home I went into my mom’s room and started crying hysterically. This is actually a trait that I still have. If I have a fever, sometimes the only way I’ll know is because I’ll start hysterically crying out of nowhere.
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