Page 89 of The Way I Used to Be
“She didn’t even report it for a couple of days,” he adds, as if this is some important piece of information, as if it means anything. “If it really happened, then why didn’t she report it right away?”
Compared to how long I’ve waited, two days seems nearly instantaneous, two damn days is nothing.
“And besides,” he continues, “I was there. I mean, I was right there in the next room. I would have known if something was happening. If she was seriously in trouble, she could’ve screamed, or called for me—I mean, we were friends too. And I didn’t hear anything!”
Oh, my heart. Stops. If he only knew the things he was capable of not hearing from the next room.
“Nothing at all,” he repeats. “And that’s exactly what I told the campus police when they questioned me last week. But then out of nowhere, they came last night—the real police, this time—and took him. That’s why I’m here—I didn’t know what else to do. I just can’t believe they can get away with this. They can’t just arrest someone for no reason, right? I cannot figure out why she would lie like this. She seemed so... normal.”
“Maybe she’s not lying,” I finally blurt out, unable to hold it in any longer.
“How can you even say that? Of course she’s lying!” Caelin looks like he’s about to climb over the table at me.
“Well, they don’t just arrest someone for no reason, and you just said yourself you didn’t think she would lie,” I remind him.
“No, I said I don’t know why shewouldlie, not that I didn’t think she was. And I don’t know, Eden, maybe she just decided to invent some fucked-up story because she felt bad—breaking up with a guy and then sleeping with him anyway—for being a slut.”
“Caelin, we don’t talk like that at the table,” Vanessa scolds gently.
But he ignores her. Instead he looks at me and mumbles under his breath, “You can understand that, can’t you?”
My mouth opens. Out of shock or to speak, I don’t know which. I can’t even think in words—can’t breathe, can’t feel—but somehow my voice finds them anyway, and they explode off my tongue, those perfect words: “Fuck. You.”
“Fuck you too!” Caelin matches me, in flawless reflex.
Conner slams his fist down on the table, rattling the spoons in their bowls. Rattling my heart. “All right, all right! What the hell is going on with you two? Both of you shut your goddamn mouths right now!” He points his finger in both our faces, alternately.
Caelin pushes his chair away from the table and storms into the kitchen.
I follow suit and stomp off to my room, slamming my door hard behind me.
I sit down on the floor, leaning my back against the side of my bed. I let my head fall against the edge of the mattress. I close my eyes. I can’t keep it out any longer. Can’t hold it back. I feel something break like a levee inside my head.
WHAT HAPPENED: I WOKEup to him climbing on top of me, jabbing his knees into my arms. I thought it was a joke—unfunny to be sure, but still, a joke. I opened my mouth. I tried to speak, but only got out “wwwh,” the beginning of what. What, what, what is happening, what are you doing?
But he put his hand over my mouth right away, so my mom and dad wouldn’t hear. They wouldn’t hear, because my alarm clock was blinking 2:48 at me from the nightstand next to my bed. We both knew they were fast asleep on the other side of the house.
No joke.
Because now his mouth is on your mouth and his hand around your throat and he’s whispering, “Shutupshutupshutup.” You do. You shut up. You are stupid, stupid.
It’s 2:49: He had my days-of-the-week underwear on the floor. And somehow you still don’t understand what’s happening. Then he yanked my nightgown up—my favorite nightgown with the stupid sleeping basset hounds on it—and I feel the seam rip where the thread was already coming loose. He pulls it up around my neck, exposing my whole body, my whole naked, awkward body. And he shoves a fistful of it into my mouth, choking me. I was gagging, but he just kept pushing it into my mouth, pushing, pushing, pushing, until it wouldn’t go in any farther. I didn’t understand why, not until I tried to scream. I was screaming, I knew I was, but no sound—just muffled underwater noise.
I managed to get my arms free, but they didn’t know what to do first. They flailed aimlessly, striking outward without direction. Stupid limbs. A quick smacksmack against a wall of boy body and I was down again. So much for that adrenaline rush of superhuman strength I’d always heard about—the kind that could allow grandmothers to lift cars off children yet wouldn’t allow me to just get out of his hands. Fucking useless urgency.
“Stop it,” he warned me as he held my arms down against the bed, his knees digging into my thighs, grinding his kneecaps in hard until all of his body was smothering all of my body, my bones turning to dust. I remember you thought that hurt. But that was nothing.
His body was shaking—his arms from holding me down so hard, his legs from trying to pry himself between my thighs, trying to position himself to do the thing that even then, in that moment, I still didn’t believe he was capable of doing. “Goddamn it,” he growled in my ear—her ear, her ear. “Hold still or I—fucking do it, or I—I swear to God,” he breathed.
I didn’t care about the ends of those sentences because this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening. This is not real. This is something else. This is not me. This is someone else. I tried to keep her legs squeezed together. I really tried—they were shaking from the strain of it—but by 2:51 he got them apart.
The bed frame creaks like a rusty swing swaying back and forth. Moans like a haunted house. And something like glass shatters. Shatters inside of you, and the tiny slivers of this horrible thing splinter off and travel through your veins, beelining it straight to your heart. Next stop: brain. I tried to think of anything, anything except it hurts it hurts it hurts so bad.
Quickly though, the pain became secondary to the fact that I thought I might actually die. I couldn’t breathe. No sound could get out of my mouth and no air could get in. And the weight of his body was crushing me to the point I thought my ribs would snap right in half and puncture a lung.
He used one hand—just one—to hold both my arms over my head, grinding my wrist bones together. He kept the other hand around my throat, constricting every time I made any sound at all. The sounds were involuntarily: gurgling and sputtering—dying noises—noises the body just makes when it’s dying. Did he know he was killing me? I wanted to tell him I was about to die.
At some point I guess I just stopped struggling. The thing, it was happening. It didn’t matter anymore. Just play dead. He kept his face buried in the pillow and every time he moved, so sharp, his hollow, muted grunts and groans reverberating through the cotton and polyester stuffing, winding a meandering path that led directly to my ears, melting with the noises of my insides breaking, the voices in my head screaming, screaming, screaming.
