---

I had to turn it off… The TV.  It made me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. 

 

I remember when I was in her place, that girl who couldn’t remember the night she was raped.  That girl who was so drunk that she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think at all.  She was already a victim.

 

That witness chair is hard and cold.  It marks a beginning and an end, a victory and a shallow defeat.  I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.  Those boys, those Ohio star football players, deserve every single bit of their punishment.  Stupid Steubenville.  Shame on them for rallying behind the perpetrators of such violent repression.  Shame on them.

 

I get up and walk around my tiny dorm room, stretch my legs and loosen the knotted darkness in my belly.  As much as I want to, as hard as I try, I can’t rid myself of it.  It has become as much a part of me as my own skin.

 

My roommate is out for the night.  Her boyfriend is Phi Kappa Psi.  It’s a Wednesday night, and everybody knows that Wednesday is the new Friday.  Whatever.  I’m not falling into that trap again.  I worry about Valerie.  I worry about every girl who drinks until they don’t make any sense, until their world spins and their mind blanks out.  I worry because they are my sisters, and they don’t know what could happen.  They know, but they think it won’t happen to them.

 

I thumb through the pages of my journal, hand-scrawled words in shades of black and blue that remind me every day of the things I might otherwise forget.  I go to the beginning, because that’s where it starts.  The words are small and tight.  I lean into the page, my head a shadow in a pool of warm yellow light. 

 

She was afraid… the girl that wrote those words.  She was only sixteen, just like this other girl, this girl from West Virginia who suddenly has no name, who has become she-who-must-not-be-named.  It’s like the rape erased her identity.  I know it erased a part of her she can never get back.  I look at those tight black words on the page of my journal.  I remember writing them.  It was the only way I could get through it.  It was only after I wrote it, and wrote it, and wrote it that I could finally tell it.

 

“I hate myself.  I am ugly garbage.  No-one loves me and I don’t deserve any love.  I am a filthy whore.  Jacob knew it even when I denied it.”

 

I read this first line and my eyes well up with tears.  The pain courses through my veins again.  I take a drink of my tea and pull my plaid comforter up around my body.  I think for a minute about Valerie, and whisper a quiet prayer that she returns safely.

 

The journal reaches out and pulls me back into the story of myself. 

 

“I was so drunk.  Why did I drink so much?  Oh yeah, because I hate my stupid life.  My parents think I’m an idiot.  I’d rather they just leave me the hell alone…  I can take care of myself.  I’m going to drop out of school.  I’m sixteen.  And if I’m pregnant now–“

 

My breath catches in my throat.  I thank god that I didn’t get pregnant.  I was just a baby, and Jacob was a criminal.  As soon as he forced himself inside of me, he became a criminal.  Before that, he was just a horrible excuse for a human being.  He took something away from me that I’m not sure I can ever get back: trust.

 

I flip forward a hand full of pages, to one that’s written in loopy blue cursive.  I know it’s after the trial, because I didn’t write much cursive before that.  I’m not sure why.  I just didn’t.

 

“I had to shut down my FB account today.  I thought I won.  I thought I could get my life back.  How could other girls be so cruel?  How could other girls take Jacob’s side.  I’m NOT a liar!”

 

When I deleted myself from Facebook, I remember feeling incredibly empty.  I felt like the haters won a huge victory.  I couldn’t believe that people were threatening me, blaming me for ruining his life.  I see this going on with this Ohio case, and I want to reach through the airwaves and smack the crap out of those girls.  How dare they! 

 

Was she drunk?  It sure looks like it.

 

Was I drunk?  Yep.

 

But no one really knows my life but me.  No one knows what kind of pain I was drinking away that night, and just because I was drunk didn’t give anyone a right to violate me!  To smear my name online, to make a laughingstock of my vulnerability!

 

My hands shake with rage.

 

I couldn’t see it then, but now I know that everyone was just afraid.  Fear breeds hate.  I am trying so hard to let it go, to move on, to live my life.  But every time I walk across the quad in twilight, I quicken my step between the circles of light cast by the lamps onto the concrete.  I know I shouldn’t be afraid, but I am.  Four years later, I can still feel it in my core.

 

I’m startled by a knock on the door.  I stick my journal under the covers and get out of bed.  I peer through the peephole.  It’s Valerie.  I open the door to let her in.

 

Mark is standing behind her with his arm wrapped around her waist.  His brow is furrowed and he looks as if he is supporting her weight.

 

“Hey,” I say.  “C’mon.”

 

“Hey, Kris,” he says, as he walks Val to her bed and lays her down. 

 

I immediately stiffen.  I know what this is.  This is Valerie so drunk that she can’t function, and Mark bringing her home.  She smells like stale beer and cigarette smoke.  God, why did I choose to live with a girl that constantly reminds me of my darkest hour?

 

I watch as Mark gingerly lays Val’s head on her pink and orange flowered pillow.  He removes her shoes and sets them on the floor at the end of the bed.  He pulls a blanket up over her as she rolls onto her side.  She mutters something, and then goes quiet.  He kisses her on the cheek.

 

I breathe.

 

Mark gestures for me to come out into the hallway.  I follow him and leave the door cracked behind me.

 

“Hey, Kris…”

 

“What happened to her?”

 

“I don’t know.  I was at work so I didn’t get to the house until she was already toast.  Seriously, Kris.  I’m worried about her.   I’m not sure why, but she is suddenly, y’know, drunk all the time.  Like, completely trashed.  I’m not sure if it’s stress or what, but…”

 

He shrugs his shoulders and shoves his hands deep in his pockets.

 

Mark knows my history.  I’m not a closed book.  He has been with Val for two years, so I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known her.  I just didn’t know him well… until this moment. 

 

I shift my eyes to my feet, covered in fuzzy socks with pandas on them.  I wiggle my toes just to do something, just to fill an awkward silence.  Then I look back up at him.

 

“Mark.”

 

He looks to me.  I can see the pain in his eyes, the dark place that has grown from a seed of worry.

 

“She needs some help,” I finally say through barely parted lips.

 

“I’m know.”

 

“Mark?”

 

I need to say his name, because saying it somehow validates my thoughts.  Saying his name somehow makes the concept of him more real.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“You’re a good guy.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

He turns and walks back down the hall to the stairwell.  I watch him open the door, and I watch the door swing shut behind him. 

 

Back inside my room, Val is sleeping hard.  Her breathing is heavy and burbled.  I’m sure she will wake with a massive headache.  I sit on my own bed across from hers.  I just look at her, wrapped tenderly in blankets, her hair pulled back in a rubber band.  Suddenly my chest swells with something I haven’t felt in a long time.  Hope.  It fills me so completely that I shudder, like the kind of shudder that cleanses you after a long, hard cry.

 

Mark is a good guy.

 

A good guy.

 

I reach under my comforter and pull out my journal.  I run my fingertips across its worn leather cover.  It’s frayed at the corners, like me.  It’s full of the stories of me, but I realize something as I catch a glimpse of Val’s silver high heels lined up neatly at the foot of her bed:  I don’t have to let those stories define me.  I am not a rape victim.  I was raped.

 

Now, I can be strong if I want to be strong.  I have to be strong, for my sisters. I have to be strong for that girl who was taken advantage of by those football players.  I have to be strong for every woman who is repressed and violated and harassed and used.   I have to be strong, for me.  I can’t let the Jacobs of the world win.  It’s my time.

 

A vibration runs through my body, and I have to stand.  Holding my journal in my right hand, I stretch up toward the ceiling, reaching as high as possible and stretching every muscle in my back.  The vibration runs from my toes, up my legs, and races through my spine.  I can feel it, almost like an electric current, as it bursts through the top of my head.  My scalp tingles, and I am suddenly light, like a freedom that pulls the weight out of my body and allows me to move myself with ease.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – A poet and fiction writer since she was a child, Melinda K. Bryce has always felt the power of the written word.  After studying English Literature and creative writing at Western Michigan and Oakland Universities, she is now a freelance writer living outside of Detroit.  She is published in various online magazines and is working on her first novel.