Your path is always lined with men like this
I’m not even sure how old I was. Young: nine, maybe ten? My brother was—is—six years older; funny, outgoing, alpha-male. I grew up in his shadow and he grew up, I’m sure, filled with resentment that his only child status had been so rudely revoked. We lived in a neighborhood full of kids his age and we spent the days roaming; my dad’s whistle from our front porch would bring us home for dinner. You could hear him for blocks. Our friends would say: I heard your dad. You’d better go now.
Admittance to this older group of friends was, for me, always conditional, always tenuous. My job was to tag along and be the cute younger sister, without drawing attention to myself or annoying anyone. Staying at the edges and as invisible as possible allowed me to hang around longer. Many of the kids were older girls, and I watched them so carefully for cues of how to be, what to care about. Once one of them got a really short haircut which she hated and we could hear her shrieking from two houses away. Her parents put bars on her windows.
The new kid showed up into our already-established group rather abruptly. He was foreign to us in every way: he moved to our small Southern town from a city in exotic New Jersey; he talked in a funny, cocky way we were unaccustomed to; his house was further away in the neighborhood in a section we never visited. His difference afforded him something of an exalted status in the group—because he came around less often, and had experiences we were sure we’d never have, all the kids looked up to him instead of marking him an outcast.
Unfortunately, to him I wasn’t invisible. I don’t remember how he first approached me. I’m sure at first I was flattered by the attention I had to beg for from the other kids, but it didn’t take me long to know that the attention he was offering was a kind I’d rather go without: it was excessive, inappropriate, and even as a young girl I knew what that felt like. When he took me to the side of my house, the side hidden from the street by giant blooming azaleas, up against the whitewashed brick, I felt sick. I didn’t want to disappoint a big kid. I didn’t want to be excluded. I thought maybe this was how they played, though I had certainly never seen anything like this before. It seems impossible, but I can still remember how disgusting it was when he stuck his fleshy warm tongue in my mouth and how truly confused I was when he took my arm, stiff and unwilling, to force my hand down his pants and rub it on those strange, lumpy parts I had never seen and had no name for.
Eventually I got away, awkwardly, burning with fear and embarrassment. Days later my mom had a rare appointment after school, which meant I would be returning to an empty house. That day, as I was walking the mile or so home with my elementary-school girlfriend, a man my father’s age stopped beside us in a big truck. “Do you know where Flowing Wells Road is?” he asked. My friend and I giggled at being asked such an adult question and finally managed to point him in the right direction. “Well, would you like to see my dick?” I froze in terror and incomprehension at his nasty self-satisfied smile, at this word that was not a part of my young vocabulary—did he say deck? Like he was going to try to kidnap us and take us to his house? Thankfully, he drove away instead, because neither of us had the presence of mind to take even one step away from him, we were so paralyzed with confusion and disbelief. Looking back, I realize that life as a girl and a woman feels like that sometimes: like your path is always lined with men like this. Waiting to make you feel dirty, to remind you that you are vulnerable.
After my friend turned to go toward her house, I saw him through the trees: that same big kid who had taken me aside and made me feel so gross. My mom wasn’t home. And there he was, riding in circles on his bike right at the end of my driveway, waiting for me to come home. Like a vulture. Like the goddamn predator he was. It feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it? Like they are always there, circling. Trying to catch you. Trying to stop you from finding your way home.
Nervously I cut through the back yards across the street, equally terrified that he would see me and be disappointed in me and that he would catch me and try to make me do those things again. Our closest friends were the neighbors who lived right across the street from us —I hid behind their familiar house and knocked at the back door, terrified that they wouldn’t be home; terrified that he, now just a driveway away, would hear. The mother of the family was home, though, and saved me that day from only God knows what by simply opening the door and letting me stay until my mother returned.
What he did to me was constantly in my mind. I feared for every time my brother might bring him home. I feared how well he knew the ways to isolate me from safety and from help. One day a police car pulled up in our driveway: they were looking for him. I never saw him again.
After he was gone, still with the gnawing guilt in my gut that I had somehow done something wrong, I made one of the bravest decisions I’ve probably ever made. I told my older brother what had happened to me—what his friend had done. It would become the first time I understood what it meant to be betrayed. From the boy who molested me, I had expected nothing; from my own brother, I expected sympathy, protection, ideally outrage. Instead, my brother clearly didn’t believe me—though how could I, who knew nothing of such things, ever fabricate something so strange, so utterly wrong? My brother decided—unfortunately, I would soon realize; better to have just called me a liar and let it go at that—to submit me to a trial, of sorts, with the older neighborhood girls. The ones I had grown up around, who had known me my whole life—I was born in that house, and my parents still live in it. The same girls I watched to learn how big girls treated each other. I remember my reluctance and embarrassment as they waited for me to tell my story and then asked me clearly skeptical questions. We sat right in the middle of the street, for some reason, in a circle, as this strange ritual of neighborhood justice played out.
They left to discuss their verdict. They delivered it through my brother: they didn’t believe me.
But I know better. I believe you, sacred sister. And I know it’s not your fault.
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