by Rachel Gold
I remember it in broken pieces like a box of photos thrown down a flight of stairs. My body holds the memory of screaming. Trying to stop the people who were hurting me. Needing to run and not being able to move. A person looming over me, touching me like I wasn’t real. Hurting my dick and not stopping even when I screamed and cried. Not telling me what was happening or even looking at me like I mattered.
I told Dad I never wanted to go back there. He said I had to be brave, to be a man. He said they were going to fix me. He made me go back. Mom had been over in Thailand with Yai. I knew at four that I shouldn’t be going to doctors without Mom. She was the one who kept me safe.
I’d felt like those animals in the tar pits, sucked down into sticky death, inescapable. Not being able to breathe, panic, dying.
Before the pain, I had an earlier memory of Dad telling me there was something wrong with how I peed and that the doctor had to fix it. I remember him talking to a doctor about me like I was a broken machine. It had never been a big deal that I sat down to pee. Mom said it was nothing to worry about, some boys were like that, and told my brother to correct the other boys if they teased me.
But dad and this doctor said standing to pee was an important part of being a man. They joked about peeing in snow. I didn’t understand why it was funny. The doctor said it was easy to fix, routine surgery, he did this all the time.
I must have told Dad no, to wait for Mom, but he didn’t. He’d planned this for when she was gone. Nothing was functionally wrong with how I peed, I just couldn’t do it standing up like the “normal” boy he wanted me to be.
I was knocked out for the surgery but afterward the pain was unbelievable. They’d cut into my dick, made stitches there. They gave me drugs and I slipped in and out of a fractured nightmare world. Strangers came into my room and examined my genitals, touching me. They talked about me and I didn’t understand what they were saying. But I knew it meant I was wrong inside.
Dad stayed with me the whole time. He kept saying not to cry, be a man, that I’d be happier now.
I don’t remember if we stayed in the hospital for more than a day, but I know we had to go back for the doctor to check on my progress and every time it hurt my body and my self.
I didn’t have words as a spindly four year old to say how disgusting I felt inside from those dismissive touches. The doctor made me into nothing. He was allowed to touch me any way he wanted, anywhere he wanted, even after I’d said no. And Dad told me I was wrong to say no.
I was overwhelmed by a burning, shivering fear. Because to be a non-person was to never be safe.
Mom had told me that I wasn’t like other boys but that it was okay to be different. But now I saw she must’ve been wrong; I was wrong. I stopped playing with the neighborhood kids. I’d learned how precarious my world was. In my kid logic, I thought the doctor had told them I was a bad person. That it would be obvious to everyone.
When Mom came home from Thailand, I wanted to be around her all the time. She was the lighthouse of safety. I clung to her.
Until the day she put on a blue shirt. Then I ran away. Blue was the color of the people who’d hurt me and I was terrified that she’d become one of them.
She found me in the back corner of my bedroom.
“Nehal, what’s wrong?”
I was shaking and pointing at her shirt. It took a few questions and pantomimes for her to figure out what I meant. She changed shirts and came back to me.
“Did something scare you?” she asked.
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“Who told you not to say?”
“Dad.”
“It’s okay to tell me,” she said.
She sat down next to me and I climbed into her lap. She put her arms around me and rocked me.
“You can tell me anything and I won’t be angry at you,” she said.
“Dad took me to a doctor who hurt me in my bad parts and then they made me fall asleep and it hurt more. I didn’t want to go back but he made me. He said I was made wrong and they had to fix me.”
She was quiet for a long time and then said, “Nehal, my beautiful child, you don’t have any bad parts. You’re wonderful the way you are and I love you very much.”
I held onto her until I fell asleep in her lap. She carried me up to my bed.
When she could bring herself to leave me sleeping there, Mom’s first call was to Grandpa Bolden. Then she called the doctor to find out what had been done to me.
Grandpa Bolden arrived the next morning. I hugged his legs and he gave me a toy ship he’d brought. While I was upstairs playing with it, a locksmith came and changed all the locks on the house. Mom told Dad to get a hotel room. She told him that he wasn’t welcome in the house anymore. At least that was the cleaned up version she told me.
Grandpa Bolden sat out on the front porch that evening and wouldn’t let me stay out there with him. He was a tall, lean man, fit as an athlete, who kept a buzz cut long after his military service ended. He didn’t need to do more than sit out there with a book in his lap to send a very clear message that my dad had no chance at getting in the house.
There was a divorce and a bunch of adult stuff I didn’t understand. What I knew was that Mom made the world safe again.
She took to me a different doctor who talked to me in ways I could understand, let me know what he had to check to make sure the surgery went okay. I ended up needing another surgery to fix problems the first one had created. But I was lucky; some kids needed surgeries for the rest of their lives. They got a few surgeries trying to “fix” their genitals and then needed more and more to fix the fixes as problems mounted and scar tissue built up. Some people had twenty or more after their first hypospadias surgery and still had to sit down to pee because the doctors could make pee come out of the tip of the penis, but couldn’t make it not spray everywhere.
In addition to the new doctor, I saw a trauma specialist who had me do cool stuff with art, play, movement, and breathing. That’s when I got into dance. I learned that being in my body protected me from the fear taking over. I learned how to be a person again, how to feel safe.
Mom got a position at OSU and we moved cross-country without Dad. I missed him. I still did sometimes, irrationally and deeply. He was my dad.
For a while, I think he was ashamed of what he’d done—or at least the way he tried to do it. When he came to visit, he brought a ton of presents and we did fun stuff. I almost forgot what he’d done, though my body always remembered.
We had some great dad/son times before I was eleven. Then I decided to be girl for a while and he started being weird. Living nonbinary was the final straw.
The last time we’d talked, he seemed to be lightening up about things, sounded like he’d drop the lawsuit. It made me sort of want to see him again. But not so much that I wanted him living in the same town as me.
I did not want my dad in the same town as Mom and the family and all my queer, trans, genderfluid friends—and for sure not my friends with intersex traits. I didn’t trust him with that part of my life.
Chapter Seven
Tucker
My sister Bailey woke me before noon as she was getting ready to go to work at the beauty salon. Of my two sisters, I was closer to Bailey. She kept a spare pillow and blanket in the ottoman so I could crash on her couch when I wanted.
I went to the salon with her and let her play with my hair. She put a crazy braid into my Mohawk and neatened up the shaved sides, all the while chatting about some guy she’d met at a concert. Bailey had a thing for music guys.
I wanted to say, “Hey, I think I messed something up and I don’t know what to do.” But then I’d have to explain too much to her, not only about Nico but about me.
I hadn’t told her about Lindy. Not everything. Only that the breakup was hard. I didn’t say, “She raped me.” I never wanted to say that and I hadn’t told any of the family. It would seem too strange to them. It would get all caught up with the fact of me go
ing to college. And anyway I was used to being the tough one; I didn’t want to give that up.
When Bailey got bored with my hair, I gave her a hug and walked up the street to Shipley’s Hardware. I’d worked there on and off since I was thirteen. My job wasn’t official back then, but by sixteen Ship paid me on the books and started teaching me. I could paint anything and fix simple around-the-house damage. This last year, he’d begun showing me how to cut and lay tile, even the fancy patterns in shower surrounds. If I couldn’t get a cool job, like being a professor, I could always do home remodeling.
I waved at the guy behind the counter and kept going. Ship was in the back contemplating a lawn mower motor. He’d squatted down on the concrete floor, lean body bent over the guts of the machine.
He tipped his weathered face up. “Tucker, you home all weekend?” To Ship “home” meant here in Bluffton where I’d grown up, population four thousand, not at the university.
“Came in last night with Bailey,” I told him. “Probably won’t stay. You find a mower that stumped you?”
“Nah, trying to figure out how it got this nasty. You here to chat or keep busy?”
“Busy,” I said.
“Go clean the windows aisle and see what’s sitting in storage. Let me know what we’re going to need for the spring rush.”
“Sure thing, Boss.”
It was a busywork job that no one in the store liked, but it fit my mood. Ship had good intuition. I went from the windows aisle to the back storeroom about a hundred times, cross-checked lists that no one had looked at since last spring, and scoured the ordering books for new items. Plus I fixed a few screens that had come in for repair and had been sitting in the back for months. Customers hadn’t complained because it was too cold to use them anyway.
While I worked, I played over last night in my mind. What had set me off? Was it a memory of Lindy? Those still freaked me out. Was it the way Nico’s body felt in my hands? The combined soft curves and hard angles?
That wasn’t fair to Nico. We’d been talking since Thanksgiving, more and more, mostly online, text and chat. Nico sent hilarious videos. Yo was the most playful, funny person I knew. Every time I got a note or a pic or a video, it made me happy. Wasn’t that how you were supposed to fall for someone?
Hell if I knew. My first “girlfriend,” we’d gone to school together and she was the one who’d started things, but she always dated guys too and she never wanted to be seen with me. I wouldn’t say that I loved her, but when she called it off for good, it sure hurt.
In the middle of my senior year of high school, I started hanging out at Freytag University to be around other queer people. I met Lindy right off. The first few times, she didn’t pay much attention to me and then suddenly she was inviting me to all sorts of events. We made out afterward in the front seat of her car, like I thought regular dating should be.
I fucking loved her. How stupid was that?
It was hard for me to remember being in bed with her. I mean sex. I didn’t even want to say that to myself. Sex. Fucking. Fuck sex.
I stopped in the back of the hardware store, in the storage section where it was cold, beyond where Ship worked on the lawn mower. I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. Fresh tears started in the wake of the rough fabric. For a while I stood over the rack of broken window frames and let the tears slip down my face. One fell onto a raw wooden edge and soaked into the grain like a drop of rain.
I’d loved Lindy. As much as I hated her for what she’d done, I also hated myself for having loved her like that.
She’d raped me. It was immensely hard to say, even in my head. It was hard to believe. But now I couldn’t stand to remember any of the times we’d had sex or even the times we cuddled and were close. I never wanted to remember her touching me or kissing me.
That didn’t stop me from seeing the edges of those moments, over and over, and making myself turn away from them. Screw Lindy. If her girlfriend before me, who I’d learned had been beaten up by Lindy, could pull it together enough to have a cheerful relationship, then I could handle dating too.
I rubbed my sleeve across my face until the tears were gone and then pulled out another frame that needed to be re-screened. The work calmed me, except when I messed up cutting the edges of the new screen and had to start over.
I thought about the time Nico came up to visit Ella and we all drove out to Shipley’s so yo could sort through the boxes of old junk for cosplay props. I’d never heard of cosplay before—dressing up like fictional characters for conventions and other events—but apparently Nico did a lot of it.
I could use some costuming about now. Be nice to be anyone but me.
Nico had been searching for props for a science fiction show, Torchwood. We’d watched a few episodes together but I didn’t get the appeal other than the British accents. The guy Nico liked to cosplay had a cool wrist device, mostly leather encasing metal with a few buttons, lights, and a speaker. I’d been meaning to see if I could make one for Nico.
There were bins of busted electronics in the back. Ship said he never knew when he’d find a button or dial or bit of wiring that he could use. I searched for a picture of the device on my phone and went back and forth between that and the bins, pulling out anything I thought could go into a “vortex manipulator.”
Nico had one yo’d bought online, but it was junk. I wanted to make one with lights and sound. I grabbed a small box from receiving and filled it with bulbs, buttons, bits of metal, a few tiny speakers. I’d have to pick up leather pieces and borrow a rivet gun. Was there a craft club on campus? Someone had to have one. Holding the box, having a project to work on, I felt better.
At six, when Ship told me to get lost and have some dinner, I was sweaty and tired from the walking and carrying, but less knotted up inside. I tucked the box of parts under my arm and walked the few blocks back to Bailey’s salon.
* * *
Eating dinner with Bailey, reheated too-bland burritos from her fridge, I kept thinking about how fast the fear came over me at Cal’s. I liked Nico so much and in a heartbeat that was all gone, replaced with terror. If my reaction to Nico was panic from Lindy, I needed to figure that out and let Nico know. No idea how to do that.
After Lindy raped me—still so hard to think that word—I went to the campus health center for a medical exam. I was trying to say what had happened and the nurse gave me this vacant, alarmed expression like: um…what?
She did the exam but she kept peering at me like I was a puzzle missing a bunch of pieces. Like, how does that even happen? How does one woman rape another? How does the person you’ve loved, the person who said “I love you” a hundred times, how do they wipe you out like that? Blot you out of existence like you’re nothing?
Yeah okay, maybe I was more messed up from it than I thought. But I couldn’t face the “um…what?” again. I couldn’t have answered that nurse any better now than I could have months ago.
It felt gross and stupid and lame to have to talk to someone. I didn’t want to talk. If I never talked about it again, fine by me.
But I had to. If this kept screwing with my life, I’d have to ask someone what to do. So start somewhere, right? If I couldn’t tell my sister what had happened, how could I tell a stranger?
I waited until after dinner when I was on the couch, holding the TV remote but not turning it on. I leaned forward, arms between my knees, trying to take a deep breath and failing. “Bay, a bad thing happened. Not now, a while ago.”
Bailey dropped into the armchair by the side of the couch. She set her mug on the scarred wooden table with a dull thunk.
“With my…” I stopped because I didn’t want to say “girlfriend” and I didn’t want to say Lindy’s name out loud. “That relationship I was in last fall. When it ended.”
“You said, bad breakup, it messed you up.”
“I didn’t tell you all of it. When we were breaking up, she said she wanted to talk at her place. I didn’t want to, but she…the s
ex…I didn’t consent. She made me…”
“She raped you?” Bailey’s voice rose as she leapt up from the chair. She stalked across the room and back. “She fucking raped you? Is that it? Say it. Say it!”
I shook my head. Not to negate what she was saying, but because I couldn’t talk with her yelling at me. I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. I was trying to agree but I couldn’t stand to hear myself say it. I turned the headshake into a kind of nod.
“I’ll fucking kill her,” Bailey said. “Where is she?”
“Bay, no. She’s gone. Left school. Expelled.”
“I will fucking kill her.” Each word spat out separate, falling like acid to the floor.
“Um, thanks?” I pressed back against the couch cushions, trying to stop shaking.
Bailey paced and paused, paced again, saying, “I will hire a goddamned hit man and end her. How are you doing? Are you okay?”
“No,” I said. I felt the pressure of tears behind my face, but I couldn’t cry in front of Bailey.
I saw the flash of fear in her eyes, that feeling of: Um…what? And of: oh shit, what do I do?
She sat close to me on the couch and threw her arms around me, pulling me against her. Her hand patted the back of my shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”
I hugged back, not too tight because she was already smothering me and I wanted to get away.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?”
She nodded.
I disentangled myself and took my glass into her kitchen. When I got back into the living room, she was in the same spot on the couch. I sat halfway between her and the end of the couch.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It feels gross to talk about. I wanted you to know so if I seem different or whatever you know.”
