“The night I was an ass—”
“Which night, specifically?” I teased. I tried to hold on to the levity because I sensed what was coming.
“Yeah. Ha-ha. I was an ass, but I seemed to hit a particular nerve in you. Was that just putting me in my place about my choice of words—totally justified by the way—or was it…more?”
I thought about just brushing it off. But Billy had, in a way, bared himself to me by letting me readDown in Flames, and by listening to my ideas. I wanted to do the same for him.
“I was raped when I was thirteen,” I softly said. It was easier to say it facing away from him. He didn’t say anything, just continued to stroke my hip, but the motion now seemed more comforting rather than seductive.
The sun had gone down completely now and the room was cast in mostly darkness, just the glimmer of the streetlights on campus coming through the shades. I enveloped myself in the shadows, and went on. “By my stepfather.”
“Jesus,” he hissed, but said nothing more. Which proved that Billy Montrose knew how to manage me as well—if not better—as I did him.
“He wasn’t really my stepfather,” I went on, growing braver now, and just wanting it out on the table. I didn’t want any secrets between us. “Still isn’t. He and my mother never got married, but he’s lived with us since I was eight.”
“Christ,” he said behind me.
I shook my head, loving the strength of his arm under me, as if he was holding me up. “It didn’t start then. Thank God. It happened when I was thirteen and my mother was pregnant for my little brother Duncan.”
Nothing from Billy, and I forged on.
“It happened once. I told my mother of course. She said…she said that Steven had probably been drunk. That she’d talk to him and it wouldn’t happen again. But that I absolutely couldn’t tell anyone, or they would remove Steven from our house and then how would we survive with a new baby. She…” the words caught in my throat, still not wanting to believe her huge betrayal of me. Though, at the time, I wasn’t able to process that—that she had let me down. My thirteen-year-old brain projected all of those feelings back onto myself. ThatIwas the one at fault. ThatIwould be responsible for the new baby starving if I said anything. ThatImust have done something to make Steven act that way in the first place.
“She didn’t even seemmadabout it. She’d pointed to her big pregnant belly and shrugged, with kind of a ‘well, what do you expect, the guy’s got to get it somewhere’ look.”
“Fuck,” Billy whispered behind me, then brushed my hair over my shoulder and placed the softest of kisses on my bare nape.
“Yeah, fuck,” I said. “The one thing that she did do was somehow get him to never touch me again. I don’t know what she said to him, or what she threatened him with, but he stayed away from me. Still as mean as a snake to me, but at least—”
“He’s still in the house? Still with your mom?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, lifting a hand, waving it, and then dropping it, like it was a very breezy decision for my mom to keep her daughter’s rapist in the house all through my high school years. “When she was pregnant with Liam a couple of years later I made myself scarce through the last few months of her pregnancy, and when Ididsleep at home, I made Duncan sleep with me.”
“And when you didn’t sleep at home?”
Fork in the road time. Tell him everything and taint his vision of me? Or fudge over the truth and let him think of me as just another Bribury Basic who easily overcame a tough break in her early teens?
“Well, for the first year after the rape, I really acted out. Grades went down in school. I became sexually promiscuous. A self-destructive streak really took over.”
“I would image that’s common behavior after something like that. Especially if you weren’t able to talk about it,” he said.
“Textbook, actually. Which I learned later.”
“I am so sorry that happened to you, Syd. I know I can’t take away any of that pain, but, I…”
He didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t blame him. I just continued to tell my story. “A year into that kind of shit, when I was fourteen, I was held back because I’d failed all my classes. They had me work with a counselor, Ms. Francis, and she…” How to explain how much Ms. Francis had done for me? And mainly by giving me one book to read. “She pulled me out of it. Really worked with me that year to make me see that it wasn’t my fault. She tried to help legally too, but my mother called me a liar. They would have removed me from the house, but by that time I was so in love with little Duncan that I couldn’t bear the thought of being away from him. I was doing a lot of his care by that point.”
“Thank God for Ms. Francis,” he said, giving me another kiss, this time on the shoulder. It felt good, warm and comforting.
“Yeah, she was great. I don’t know where I’d be without her. My grades went back up. Skyrocketed, actually.”
“Your true genius being unlocked by Ms. Francis.”
“Well, she was wonderful, but the thing that really turned me around was a book she gave me. I really think reading that book was the turning point for me. I was so in tune with it, it spoke to me so much. It pulled me out of myself, out of my situation and allowed me to see life as it could be, not as it was. It, literally,” I jabbed him at the use of that word, and he chuckled, “saved my life.”
“Wow. The power of a good book, right?”
“Yes. It changed everything for me. I read it over and over, still do. And besides the book itself, it instilled in me my love of all books, which of course is a gift in and of itself.”
