Nowhere but Up (5 page)

The next year, my rebellious streak grew stronger. There’s no way around it. I was a troublemaker. As I became more delinquent, my conscience grew weaker. The first time I had stolen something, a chocolate bar, I’d been saddled with guilt, the adrenaline pounding in my veins. But after stealing a few more chocolate bars and then other bigger and more expensive things, I’d become quite adept at ignoring the guilt, so much so that it eventually faded to an inaudible lull. I kept telling myself that what I was doing wasn’t wrong, and I slowly began to desensitize my conscience.

Though I kept pushing boundaries with authority figures, picking fights with teachers and spending most of my after school hours in detention, I moved on to bigger and badder things. I started vandalizing school property; one time I even got suspended for starting a fire in a bathroom.

Then came the drugs and alcohol.

I started drinking alcohol and smoking pot when I was fourteen. There were more parties than I knew what to do with, and every one of them featured some type of mind-numbing substance. I can’t remember the first time I drank or smoked pot. It must not have been that interesting of an experience. Since all of my friends were drinking and drugging, it was easy to get sucked in with the crowd, and no one needed to twist my arm to try anything at least once. Besides, Stratford was such a small city. It’s easy to get bored when there’s not much to do. Drugs and alcohol were like an extracurricular activity. It seemed harmless at first—just feeling loopy and doing stupid things. Getting high made life more interesting.

Around the same time I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol, an old ghost came back into town. It had been about four years since anyone had touched me inappropriately. Four years that I had successfully kept most of the remnants of the abuse swept under the proverbial rug. But now the phantom was back for more.

I was fourteen years old, it was summer, and I was hanging out with my best friend, one of the infamous Chipettes. We had become fast friends in kindergarten and lived across the street from one another. We were inseparable. When we got old enough to have phones in our rooms, we’d call each other right when we woke up, even before meeting in front of my house to walk together to school.

“How are you?”

“What are you doing?”

“What’s new?”

And as our heads hit the pillow at night, we’d dial each other and end the evening with more meaningless BFF conversation.

“How are you?”

“What are you doing?”

“Anything new?”

We were like sisters, and I often spent time with her family. That summer we spent a week in the great outdoors on a camping adventure with her grandfather and sister. I had seen him around a lot and always felt comfortable with him. He was the kind of grandfather everyone loved—super cuddly and soft, like a big teddy bear you just wanted to wrap your arms around.

Because I didn’t get as much affection as I needed at home (my love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation), I craved physical attention. It was how I felt loved. Adored. Accepted.

So I loved hanging out with my friend’s grandfather. He was warm and caring, and he loved to give hugs. Because I was so tiny—only four foot six and maybe seventy pounds at the time—there were even times I’d curl up in his lap. It was easy for me to sit on this man’s lap without it feeling physically awkward.

My friend and I spent the first few days of our vacation enjoying nature. We rode bikes, took long hikes, and swam in the campground pool. At night we sat around an inviting fire roasting marshmallows and listening to music.

One afternoon I saw my friend’s grandfather sitting on a huge lawn chair, staring into the sky and enjoying the warm breeze. He looked so peaceful. Content. Just breathing in the summer without a care in the world. I wanted to be a part of that beautiful picture, part of the equation of peaceful nothingness.

I climbed onto his lap and rested my head in the crook of his leathery neck. He smiled, eyes still closed, and patted my head reassuringly. It wasn’t long before I started drifting off to sleep.

And then I felt it—the heat from his warm hand. The movement startled me, and my reverie came to a grinding halt.

It was happening again.

I was unable to fully process it all as his hand slowly and deliberately groped its way inside my shorts, resting where it didn’t belong and touching me in a way he shouldn’t have.
Oh no. Not this. Please, God
. As deep as my feeling of disgust was, I was also scared. Scared of rejecting him. Scared of saying no and risking him hating me. I thought,
How am I going to get out of this situation without offending this sweet old man?
Do you see how warped the thought process of a sexual abuse victim can be? It’s a battle I could never win.

I let out a fake yawn and inconspicuously stretched, as if I had just woken up from a catnap. I shifted my body away from his lap so I ended up sitting more on the chair than on his legs. Then I yawned again, got up, and stumbled away, pretending I was still drowsy. I hoped my act was enough to diffuse the unsettling situation.

I walked back to the camper, the sun blinding me and blasting me with its heat. I felt as if I were trudging through a barren desert, miles away from civilization. The truth was, I was miles away from myself. Once again, I detached from the colorful scene in front of me. I could barely make out the families grilling food, the little kids tossing Frisbees, the worn hikers returning from their long walk. I walked in a fog, stunned by what had just happened.

The old familiar feelings came back as if they had never left. Rather, they’d been hiding under the surface, waiting for the perfect time to reappear. Patterns in my brain immediately reconnected with my past abuse, transporting me back in time, and the floodgates of all the old memories unleashed with fury. The event was so upsetting, I tried to convince myself the incident was a fluke. Maybe I had imagined it all.

But I didn’t dream it up. It happened. And I finally found enough courage in that moment to tell someone.

When I got back to the camper, I pulled aside my friend and told her and her sister what had happened. My friend chewed her gum loudly, looking at me with a half-cocked eyebrow. I had the feeling she was suspicious. No, it was worse. As soon as I noticed the first sign of her head shaking, I knew she didn’t believe me.

Popping a huge bubble right in front of my face, the sticky gum only inches away from exploding on my suntanned cheek, she looked at me with contempt and accused me of lying. Her sister was just as vocal about me being a liar.

I didn’t expect that kind of a response. Their reaction devastated me. The PSA I’d seen all those years ago hadn’t prepared me for the possibility that I could tell someone but they wouldn’t believe me. What then? How do you handle being called a liar when you are the victim?

My mistrust of others grew in that moment. The conversation also taught me a valuable lesson. Though I was pretty confident I would never again talk about stuff like that, I knew that if I did, I’d choose my confidante wisely. It wouldn’t be someone close to the offender. I would need someone who wouldn’t automatically come to their defense.

I wanted to leave the campground immediately after opening up to my friend, but for some reason I stayed. I tried my best to brush off the incident and was determined to pull myself together and act as if everything was fine. I was used to spending time around my abusers, pretending nothing had ever happened, so it was easy to do.
What dirty old man?

The four of us played cards later that night. As I was waiting for my turn in our second round of Crazy Eights, I felt a hand slither up my leg and stop below the end of my zipper. It was the grandpa.
Okay. That’s it. Enough is enough
. Still not wanting to make a scene, I got up and said I wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed. I didn’t want—or rather I didn’t know how—to handle the situation any other way. I would just take myself out of the picture, and no one would be the wiser. What was I going to say, anyway? “Your grandfather’s trying to cop a feel again. See? I told you I wasn’t lying.” No one would have believed me, and there was no way I was getting involved in a he-said, she-said argument.

So I did what was most comfortable—I retreated.

I think that happens a lot with abuse victims. Instead of using our voice to speak out, we keep quiet. We hide. We ignore. We pretend. There are so many different reasons we don’t tell others. We don’t want to rock the boat. We don’t want to make anyone mad. What if they think we asked for it? What if we look stupid? What if they think we’re lying? It’s such a difficult and delicate thing with which to wrestle.

Though it feels like talking carries too much of a risk, in the process of keeping silent, we dig a deeper grave for ourselves day by day. By shouldering the burden alone, we are forced to find other outlets, usually unhealthy ones, to help us deal with it. Most times they lead us further down a dark road, making it harder to find our way up.

As a teen, I envied people who could be unguarded, unafraid. I even wrote about that in my journal: “I think [I’m getting] more open with my feelings. I wish someone could understand what I’m going through. In drama class, everyone is so open. Girls told the class how they got abused sexually and a couple raped. It was so sad. Everyone was crying.”

Yet in the next sentence, I made a sharp U-turn from writing about being vulnerable and wrote, “I hate how people are popular because they are pretty.” It was a stark about-face. There was no transition. I was so removed from the pain in my past, not even my diary was privy to the deep waters.

Not long after the camping incident, I was drinking and doing drugs every day. I was getting into even more trouble at school and going to parties almost every night. I rarely ate dinner at home, and I never made curfew. Some nights I even stayed out until the early hours of the morning.

Getting drunk and high for fun turned into a means of self-medicating. I couldn’t get through a class at school or a holiday function with my family without being stoned or drunk. By the time I was sixteen, I couldn’t function at all without numbing myself in some way.

I stuck mostly with pot, my tried-and-true friend, though at times I had a feeling the joints I smoked were laced with angel dust or cocaine. I also did LSD. My trips were racked with paranoia and fear. I would feel unrelenting anxiety during the twelve-hour high. If I took a hit before school, I was a goner the entire day. I’d sit in class and try to follow what the teacher was saying, but I’d forget everything two seconds after she said it. Same thing with reading. I’d run my finger along a sentence, and by the time I got to the end of the line, I had no clue what I’d just read. If I was walking down the hall at school and saw the principal, I was convinced he was walking past me straight to my locker. He’d open the metal closet, find my stash of drugs, and have me arrested. The police would then drag me kicking and screaming out of the school and throw me in prison, where I’d spend the rest of my life. A little extreme? Sure. Welcome to the world of LSD.

My mom wasn’t stupid. She noticed my strange behavior. Though she would get upset if I came home drunk or high, she didn’t press the issue. She would occasionally question me about using drugs or alcohol, and I’d always lie and say I wasn’t doing that stuff. She’d let it go.

Though my mom and I didn’t see each other much because I was either out partying or holed up in my room, when we did, World War III tended to break out. All the pent-up emotions that had been building in me since I was a little girl spewed mini volcanoes during these arguments. My rage came out in bits and pieces, and unfortunately my mom took the brunt of my temper. Once it even got physical.

I can’t remember what we were arguing about. It kept escalating at a pace neither one of us could stop. Heated words were exchanged like a ball in a Ping-Pong match. At one point I got in my mom’s face, my small features contorting with rage. It was too close for comfort. She took a step back and slapped me. The blow made me even more livid, and I threatened to call the cops. I even grabbed the telephone and with a menacing look on my face yelled, “That’s it, I’m dialing!”