August 2014
It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. I don’t wanna do it no more. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Mama, help me. Mama. Mama. Mama can’t know. Mama can’t know. Help me. It hurts so much. Help me. Nobody can know what I’ve done. It hurts. It hurts.
HELP ME. HELP ME. HELP ME.
Hot, painful tears rolled down my cheeks and met at the curve of my nose. I sniffled as I read the entire page, scrawled with the same words over and over. Images of Crew, small and innocent, swarm in my mind. His ice-stricken eyes reflected those of a tornado wreaking fatal damage across open fields.
It was heartbreaking to turn the page, only to find all that remained was a continuation of those two words with some scribbles, smeared in a graphite cell, even a decade later.
The second notebook felt heavier, somehow. Weighted with horrific memories. The truth I had been searching for rested in my hands, and I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to read them.
I turned the crumbled front of the notebook, taking care not to let the loose papers fall from the spine.
June 2015
I didn’t tell her. I didn’t even ask about situations like what I went through last summer. Didn’t utter a single fucking word because I was too scared.
Now I’m going back to camp, and this time, Mom says she hopes it’ll fix my attitude. As if I can just turn it off. I’m angry and I’m fucking confused and I know exactly what’s gonna happen the moment I see Thompson again. Now he’ll have a reason to fuck with me. I’ve been an asshole for a while now.
Mom says she knows I’m going through puberty and that it’s hard on me. She doesn’t know the fucking half of it. It isn’t puberty I’m so angry about. It’s the fact that I screamed and begged and punched a hole in the goddamn wall just so she wouldn’t send me back to Tiger Claw, but apparently that only made her want to send me more.
Whatever. I looked it up a few months ago. What the kind of thing Thompson does to me means. My search history is shot to shit. All that came up was gay porn ads and questionnaires to figure out if I’m gay or not.
Well, I figured that part out. I just don’t know if Thompson plays a part in it or not.
Summer camp, here I fucking come.
June 2015
Thompson snuck me away from the campfire. I told myself I wasn’t gonna go no where with him but he gave me “that” look and I crumbled. I fucking froze again. Even though I felt like a damn iceberg, I followed him. He told me Mom told them all I had some anger issues and attitude problems. I told him to fuck off and not to touch me.
He said he was sorry about last summer. He was tryingto do good by me. He said a whole bunch of stuff and promised to do better this year. And then he pulled out a beer. I’d never drank before.
We drank together. My first beer, which made me a man now, I guess. It felt weird. Getting drunk ain’t like the movies say. My head got all foggy, but it felt nice. Beer tastes like shit.
It was fun, though. Maybe he won’t do it again.
June 2015
I was wrong. Thompson and I drank that nasty piss-tasting beer again. I got all drunk and wobbly. We played a video game on his TV with zombies and lots of shooting.
Since I was so fucked up, I didn’t even notice that he had gotten closer. Not until his mustache touched the side of my cheek. And then he kissed me.
He was gentler this time and I couldn’t fight back. It was weird. He’d never done that before. He said he was sorry for hurting me so much last summer. He said it could be different.
Thompson showed me how it could be different. And I fucking let him ’cus I wasn’t frozen no more. I was swimming in a pool of drunk and confused, and I still ain’t learned how to swim.
The entries continued, explaining how Thompson gained Crew’s trust back, only to shatter it once more. It wasn’t even a full month before Crew started writing about his “lessons” and the bruises on his skin.
He couldn’t wear a bathing suit anymore, just like the previous summer. At some point, he gave up trying to fight Thompson off. The wicked and confusing ideals Thompson spat off made zero sense half the time and kept changing, so much so that Crew mentioned it, claiming he’d given up understanding his reasoning. He wrote how hestopped trying to understand, succumbing to whatever Thompson wanted to do.
Why didn’t matter. Crew knew he wasn’t going to say anything, and so did Thompson. Crew stopped trying to be good, claiming it didn’t matter if he was or not.
Reading the thoughts of an abused, confused, and helpless fourteen-year-old put things into perspective that I never considered. How could a child understand these things? Nonetheless, find the courage to break free of it when it seemed like the whole world was against him.
The third and final notebook was the worst by far. There wasn’t a single entry in June, which signified the beginning of camp. It jumped straight to July, starting abruptly. By this time, Crew had resolved to believing everything Thompson said, no matter how incredulous it was. He was trying to survive the only way he knew how.
He had to convince himself everything was normal to function. He had to believe he deserved and liked it, so he wouldn’t go insane. At fifteen years old, Crew had mastered the art of brainwashing himself just so he could get through it all.
