alexandra s.

cw: discussion of sexual assault

The most embarrassing thing I’ve done is not gather the courage to run.

They told me how brave I was anyway, in an office with a wicker basket of stress balls and a plasticky assortment of spring flowers that smelled of rubbing alcohol, like they were reciting Hallmark affirmations from a mentally prepared list. I found myself being unable to blame them, however terrible their execution might have been. Nobody really knows what to say in moments like these.

A circular table laid bare except for a patterned tissue box. Adults in pressed pinsuits drummed their fingers on the wood, cutting like nails through screaming silence. They spoke in swaddled words, tedious and with a counterfeit gentleness. 

They were struggling and choking on their sympathy, something that was certainly warranted, but I did not at all want. I tried to tell myself not to be mad at anyone except those who really deserve it. 

They tell me I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, that I was unlucky, that this could have happened to anyone. They have no clue how he made moves in a game of chess that I had no clue I was playing into. If this were up to fate, I would feel a lot better about myself for not kicking him in the balls and running away. Killing two birds with one stone. Fighting and fleeing.

As part of a pathetically miniscule punishment, they made him sit down with a paper and pen at a table, as he sulked like a toddler, and write me an apology letter that I told them I never wanted to read. 

Unwillingly and unfortunately, I had gotten to know everything but the dust in the corners of this boy’s brain, and I knew exactly what was going to be in that letter. Honesty would have been as hard for him as it was for me. He knew the truth and so he avoided it like the plague. He knew I wouldn’t read it either. My ignorance was the cowardly way to go, and I let him know me as one. 

He would have started out with a bogus soliloquy coated with sugar and naiveté. Whatever happened, he would have said, hurt was not at all my intention. I didn’t know any better. I’m learning. 

Bullshit, I would have replied, if they let me. You’re too smart to be that stupid and too stupid to be that smart.

I wanted to write a reply, I told them, because if he had to write something to me, I sure as hell had something to say back. They sucked air through their teeth and tilted their heads to the side. Their frigid denial was blamed on damage control, and keeping “this unfortunate situation” as under wraps as possible. We want to protect both of you, they told me. There are consequences to one's actions, I replied, especially when you decide to grope multiple girls. 

I wanted to tell them instead how he was getting off easy enough for ruining peoples’ lives. And how this situation existing speaks volumes on the lack of needed protection in the first place. How men are held to a boy’s standard and girls are expected to pick up their glass-sharded messes, over and over again until their fingers bleed. 

Because this whole situation is just goddamn embarrassing. I do not ever want to be limited to a tragedy who couldn’t muster up the guts to cause a scene in public, and therefore was crushed by a mountain of deep shit. 

They tell girls to laugh it off when boys pull their pigtails on the playset and push them off the slides, and to cross their legs in public, and to speak quietly and not laugh like a madman. They tell us to be nothing but kind, but it’s our fault if our kindness is perceived as anything more by boys who were hugged an insignificant amount as children. If I were an asshole sometimes, I think to myself sometimes, I could have avoided so many situations that cling to me like static. I wouldn’t have needed to ask for the help that I am receiving so little of, no matter how hard understanding is preached. 

I kept a composed face, my lips pressed together like stone, because good girls smile and nod and hold in their tears or are pretty when they cry. And everyone knows how they believe good girls who are hopeful and wide-eyed and patient beyond belief. If I sit tight, I told myself, and cross my legs and sit up straight and keep calm and don’t get mad or cry, they had no choice but to believe me. 

I had sat through interviews with lawyers and police officers, choking on my answers like slabs of stone with every excruciatingly detailed question. 

Where exactly was his hand, they asked. Are you sure he didn’t ask first? What were you two talking about that led to this? Did you ever tell him to stop?

I spilled out my guts onto the wooden table. They patted my hand and told me how strong I’ve been as they scribbled down words onto a frayed sheet of loose-leaf paper. I brought up story after story, jab after jab, touch after touch. I prayed after each one that it would be the final nail in the coffin, that my collection of bruises eventually sounded tragic enough. I hoped to God that this hellhole would come to an end. 

They ask me if I’m telling the full truth, and my throat comes close to closing up. 

Nothing I had said in that room had been a lie. According to the other side of the story, none of it had been true, either. I can’t seem to remember who’s right. 

My mother cried when they came to their decision, but thanked them for their time in a somewhat clipped tone. My father, on the other hand, had bones made of fire, and he burned.

He no longer had the voice of an attorney; it slipped and slid and screamed, bouncing off the tiny walls of the deans’ office, a hint of a Japanese accent rolling back in. The pin-striped suits are quiet and controlled. They expected this, I’m sure, so they tried to fill his anger with empty words that weighed nothing. He fought, lawyer on lawyer, fire on fire, warning them that their very foundation could not handle the final crack of one more lawsuit, and how there better not be a next time. His words could have singed a million sheets of paper with one breath. 

The car ride home was quiet, the type that holds your hands in speechlessness. 

His brow was twisted and turned and his teeth were pressed together. Discounting the specks of gray in his hair, he looked almost like me in that particular moment, young and confused, labyrinths toppling around in his mind like a tease. 

“I was at a party in college once” he stated, cutting the silence with a blunt knife. I turn over to face him, but his eyes are glued to the steely gray of the sky in front of him. “I got so drunk that I fell off a beer-pong table and cracked my head open.” 

I snort a little bit. He continues. 

“Everyone was paying attention to that,” he said “but there was a girl in a corner as wasted as I was.” He paused. “She was with a man that I don’t think she belonged with. I went and got seven stitches in the ER, but I don’t know what happened to her, and that’s the only thing I remember thinking about all night. Never saw her again. She could’ve been in the ER the same time as me, and I wouldn’t have a clue.”

He turned towards me, his eyes swirling. “That won’t happen again,” he promised, either to me or himself. “Not to you.”