The days after that? Those she remembers.
Jessica can remember screaming, raging around the rooms she was in, her mind trying to wrap itself around what had happened. She remembers tugging at her hair, fingers running through it until it was in knots. She remembers bruises up and down her legs, on her knuckles and the heels of her hands. She remembers screaming so loudly, for so long that little red dots appeared on her Kleenex – blood vessels torn in her throat.
She remembers finally taking a deep breath, saying enough was enough. She was Jessica Moore. When Raymond had pushed her down the hill in first grade she had punched him in the eye before running to get the teacher to help because ‘Raymond fell and hurt himself’. When Andrew spread around rumors about her being a slut in 10th grade, she’d stared down anyone who tried to tease her about it until things turned around and he became the laughing stock. At Stanford, when Amanda had talked about wanting to get with Sam, Jessica had informed her, in a soft and sweet voice, exactly what would happen if she tried.
Jessica Moore didn’t get knocked over by life, or if she did, she always got right back up.
A few months after she gets back, Jess spends three days standing in front of her mirror saying the words ‘I died’ over and over until her voice stops cracking, the tears stop welling. She watches the shape of her mouth as she speaks, her pallor as the words sink in. She listens to the intonation and weight of the syllables. I died. I died. I died. She says it until there isn’t a moment’s hesitation between those words and the next. She says them until they stop being something horrific, and become one more thing she overcame.
She goes to a salon and gets several inches cut off, watches the way the natural curls change. She feels lighter, freer. There’s no doubt this is psycho-somatic, but the haircut helps.
There’s a heavy feeling in her chest, something dark and bitter that feels like it could swallow her whole some days. It’s the place where she’s a victim, a corpse on a ceiling, the target of vicious laughter. It scares her, and Jessica is done being scared, so she finds a solution.
She starts kick-boxing. Starts learning to defend herself. She buys books on the occult, learns just enough to be safe, not enough to be a target. She puts a chin-up bar in her kitchen doorway, leaves it there until every time she enters the room she does a pull-up.
She stops baking. Stays away from things that make her throat close, her hands clench, her temperature drop. She watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and buys a baseball bat and buys salt at six different grocery stores so that the clerks don’t look at her funny. She signs up for classes at the local University, and never misses a shift at work.
She looks in the mirror every night and every morning and says ‘I’m not dead. I’m alive. I’m ok.’
Most of the time she believes it.
