14

Disclaimer: Any names I am using are real, but were also the names of multiple people. If you think it could have been you but don't remember it being you, you're probably safe.

Okay, when I was fourteen some boys teased me at lunch, and then it continued with a minor sexual assault later that day.

It's weird how angry and irritated I feel trying to write some of this. I think it's because I have written about all of these things before, and how am I not done with them yet? But maybe I am more mad that they happened at all.

In the past I had a hard time allowing myself anger. It gets a bad rap as an unproductive emotion, and not righteous and good, so it would have felt weird to indulge it. My confidence in me always being the problem exacerbated that. To admit that something was unjust and unfair to me, therefore that I did not deserve it, was a little more affirmation than I was ready for. 

If you have to go through and grieve all your unprocessed grief, maybe I also have to go back and feel all my un-felt rage. 

That doesn't sound fun at all.

I was eating lunch with friends in the Five Oaks cafeteria. Our regular group consisted of six girls and four boys, even if it wasn't always all of us at the same time. This time none of the boys were there. In retrospect I believe that mattered. 

If they had been there, they would have been expected to do something, fair or not, but their presence may have also been enough to keep anything from starting. 

I don't want to need protection. I do not want protection to come from being someone else's property or territory.

Jason asked me to go with him. By "go" I mean going steady, not going somewhere with him. Neither would have appealed to me.

It was clearly not serious, so I am not even sure that I said "no". I am also not sure that I would have felt right saying "no". I mean, I was not interested in any of the three, but there was a lot of pressure to get a boyfriend, and so refusing would not only be counterintuitive but also would seem rude. Girls are supposed to be the nice ones.

Besides, they always tell you to ignore teasing.

But I might have said "no", or maybe ignoring was enough reason for Matt to sub in and then just keep going. All the way through the lunch period and clearing our table and walking to classes, "Will you go with me? Will you go with me?"

He had stamina; I'll give him that.

Finally I turned and said "Yes!" as I entered my class, because I was afraid he was going to follow me in and that I would get in trouble. 

I think this is why I felt the need to share the math teacher story; I was so sure that adults were not trustworthy.

For the record, we did have cafeteria monitors, because I remember I time when we were laughing too loud and they came to shut that down. Apparently this didn't disturb enough people.

I know I didn't think saying "No" would work. I wish I had tried "Shut up!" or something scathing.

I remember that I was relieved when he left. Technically he won, because he did get a reaction from me, but I also remember feeling unsettled for the rest of the day, like it wasn't over.

It wasn't. 

I almost did make it. I was on my way to the bus. It was the activity bus. It left an hour or so after the end of school buses and had a route with fewer stops, but it was helpful to have the option to stay a little later, and I used it a lot.

The three of them were there, between the school exit and the bus. As I passed them Steve reached out and started opening my shirt. 

See, I think of it as ripping open, but it was snaps. It was probably the most fashionable shirt I owned at the time, though I may not have ever worn it again after that.

Years later I talked to Jason about it; he didn't remember, but he felt bad, kind of.

I have never and probably will never talk to Steve again, but I learned later that the following summer he hit on one of my friends who was also at lunch.

The very next day, though, I talked to Matt. I asked him if we were going together. He said - and he did seem to have enough decency to be ashamed, but he did not apologize -- "What do you think?"

Well, my thoughts were very complex and for a long time I couldn't face many of them openly.  

Regardless, my essential takeaways were...

• No boy can ever love you.
• If he acts like he does, it's a joke.
• You are a big piece of garbage, as evidenced by the way people treat you.
  

This was easy to believe. I had never gotten a lot of male attention, and in first grade I lost the boy that I liked because he found out that I liked him, so that all tracked. 

It also tracked because of me always feeling like there was something wrong with me, going back to my father's constant dissatisfaction with his life, but that I had determined was because I was fat.

Therefore, the reason I was an impossible to love joke was because I was fat.

Arguments against it could be the people who liked me and enjoyed spending time with me, but again, it was not boys asking me to go steady. To be non-objectionable, I would have to take dating off the table.

Unfortunately, dating was what I wanted most of all. 

I thought I wanted it for love and to get a chance to create a happy, nice family. (Naive. I know that now.)

Subconsciously, it probably was a desire to heal the wound that came from my father's dissatisfaction, strongly reinforced by societal messages that feminine worth is tied up in her attractiveness to masculine types. 

And while I did hold on to an oft-dashed hope that someday I would be able to lose weight and that would fix everything, it felt more like what I wanted most was impossible, and would never happen.

That's why I couldn't help but implode.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/12/my-sexual-assault.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2020/10/navigating-hierarchies-in-microcosm.html