24. SUBJECT: AN EXPLANATION

Content Warning: This chapter has content that could be triggering for some readers. While intentionally non-graphic, this chapter includes mention of child abuse, trauma and rape. I don't tackle this subject lightly, but recognize that my experience and portrayal of such matters will not be shared by all readers. If you have any questions, concerns, or want to have a conversation about the content, please don't hesitate to message me.

to: weston.maguire@baderu.com

from: cassandra.belford@queesu.com

subject: An explanation

sent: April 8, 2017 at 8:53pm

Wes,

Okay. You got me. Your persistence is almost impressive. I mean, seriously, don't you have school? And friends? A college senior should not be able to devote this much time to chasing a person down. A part of me wishes you'd just given up. Did it not occur to you that I was trying to save us both? I'm worried about how this is going to impact you, too.

But, at the same time, I can't fault you for wanting answers. Our friendship was real, and I miss you as much as you say you miss me. I got used to your voice.

We had a nice arrangement; share what you're willing to share and write the person you want to be. There was something so untouchable and precious about those emails.

But I guess we were both hoping for something more tangible. You wanted me. Not just my thoughts or my words, but me in the flesh. And I don't think I can meet those expectations.

It might not seem like it, I know, but you're asking too much of me. I'm unable to give you what you want or deserve. The best I can do is explain myself, and I hope you understand. Hopefully, you'll see where I'm coming from and why things happened the way that they did.

You're a good and compassionate person, Wes. I need you to understand that there's some sad and fucked up shit in my history that makes me less... accessible. It's especially sad when you compare my story to yours, with your functional family and sweet disposition. It isn't going to help you to look at our lives, side by side.

Try not to pity me, please. I'm better than my story, and people are more than the bad things that happen. So, don't cast me as a sad person. I actually care about your perception of me; I hate admitting that, but it's true. Even if we won't be in each other's lives, I'd like for you to think well of me in my entirety.

I'm all over the place, right? I know. It's all pretty complicated.

When it comes to me and men, it's always been complicated.

I was quite young when I realized the world treated me a little differently. People have always given me attention, warranted or not. Whether it was due to my appearance or my obvious desperation for affection, the eyes of others followed me wherever I went. In some ways, it was a blessing. I always had an audience, someone there to stop me from wandering into the road. My mother made sure I was clean and fed but had very little interest in me as a person. She didn't like leaving me home alone, though. While I was scared of the boogie-man, she was scared of child services.

I stayed with our neighbours when I was very young. They had two kids; a girl named May, who was a little younger than me, and a boy, Leon, who was older, though I'm not sure by how much. Eleven? Maybe twelve or thirteen years old? I don't remember a lot about that family, only that their house smelled terrible. They had too many cats.

One afternoon, I was trying to untangle the hair of May's off-brand Barbie doll. Leon sat on the floor beside me, playing a handheld video game. I asked him for his help untangling the little plastic brush stuck in the doll's hair.

He took it from me begrudgingly. "She looks like you," he said, staring at the toy. This was a lie; I looked nothing like the doll. But she was pretty, so I didn't care.

I was young, maybe six, and stupid. I don't remember everything that was said, or how we got to the point that we did, but Leon wanted to play a game. He called the game 'X.'

It involved me taking off my dress, and Leon touching and kissing me. He told me to do the same to him. It didn't make sense to me; I'd only ever seen people kiss on the mouth, but I didn't argue because I didn't know. Honestly, I don't think Leon knew entirely either. He was old enough to know better but too young to fully understand. That's what I choose to believe, anyway.

It wasn't like the movie Marnie, or anything, but I used to get stomach aches when I thought about Leon. Their family moved away a year later because the dad got a better job.

I'd told my mother what happened a few days after they left. She told me to forget about it, and that kids are curious and dumb. I don't know, maybe that's all it was.

My mother didn't stay home with me when Leon's family moved, heavens no, she just brought me with her. She worked as a waitress in a few shitty bars, got drunk and partied with her friends. She was in her early twenties after all.

One of the bars where she worked was owned by a guy named Dominic. He was large and old, and he didn't approve of my mother's parenting. He had no problem telling me how fucked up she was, which I can appreciate in hindsight. If he hadn't said anything, I might have believed her when she said she "was doing the best she could." Dom made sure I understood that that wasn't true.

He wasn't a substitute parent or anything, but he was a friend. Dom let me sit in his office and do my homework, read, or watch TV when my mom was working, and the bar was busy. I liked Full House.

"That's what you need, kid," he'd tell me. "You need a dad like Bob Saget." Side note: Bob Saget was really not very child-friendly outside of that San Francisco house.

I was nine years old and still going through the same routine until one evening when Dom had to fill in for a bartender who'd been in a motorcycle accident. He unlocked his office door for me, handed me a shirley temple made with ginger ale (my favourite) and told me to stay there and do my long division.

I finished my homework and turned on the TV.

One of the busboys came in and told me that Dominic wanted him to look for something. He left and came back a few times.

I didn't care. It was really late by then, and I was falling asleep. I remember thinking that the busboy was going to get a screaming if he didn't find whatever it was he was looking for before I fell asleep.

And he found me. Asleep. Alone.

One of the waiters had been sent to the office to check on the busboy, and found him, digital camera in hand, trying to undress me.

The shouting was loud, but not as loud as the fight that broke out. I think Dominic was the one who called the police.

He explained what had happened to me the next day, after he'd calmed down. I still didn't understand, but Dom made it clear that attention wasn't always a good thing.

My mother quit a week later. She told me I was lucky that nothing really happened. She said plenty of girls end up a lot worse.

Dom and I had lunch a couple of times after she stopped working for him, but he retired and moved to Arizona shortly after. He's probably dead now.

Both Leon and that busboy were wrong to do what they did. I felt gross about it, but only because I knew what had happened wasn't okay. Even then, I knew that none of it should have happened. But kids are resilient in a way that I can't explain, and I got over it. Maybe because I knew my mother was partially right; it could have been worse.

It still sucked, don't get me wrong. But I was mostly fine. I dated a little, worked hard in school, stayed out of trouble, and got my ass out of there. Nobody gave me any problems.

Then, there was the night you and I met. Not earlier this semester, but a few years ago.

The party I wrote to you about in that first email has been burned into me---I wear that night like a tattoo. The couch, the kegs, the stupid fucking bouncy castle. Your baseball hat.

You and I spoke briefly, that night on the couch. You cracked some jokes, and I kept checking the time. You apologized for your teammate. I was acting like a bitch. You got up and left. Maybe you went to get another drink or decided to go home... but my memory of that night didn't end with our conversation.

Going to the party had been my attempt at 'opening up' and trying to meet new people. I didn't know anybody at Bader, and I'd decided that I should try to make some friends. A couple of girls I recognized from my floor came to join me, taking your vacated seat on the couch, plenty of drinks among them. I took one, not realizing how high the alcohol content was. Then a few more. Some jello shots. I might have had a beer, too. I'd never been to a party like that before or had a real drink, but I was determined to keep up with the others.

I ended up getting sick.

The bathroom near the kitchen was locked, and I could hear someone vomiting on the other side. Another party-goer took pity and told me that there were two bathrooms upstairs, so that's where I went.

Staggering like a baby deer, I opened the door to one of the other bathrooms. There was someone already in there. He hadn't bothered to lock the door. The guy from the couch, whose name I learned from you: Doug.

I apologized and tried to leave, but too many bodies had crowded the hall, and pushed against the doorframe of the bathroom, making it impossible to walk out the way I'd come. Especially when my alcohol intake was factored into the equation.

His pants were undone, I assume because he'd just taken a piss. "Oh, it's you," he said, recognizing me from before. "Hold on a second and let me wash my hands. It's all yours."

I nodded and laughed, because at the time it was funny. My head was still spinning. I didn't notice him close the door.

"You're Cassie, right?" he asked. He turned the sink on.

I told him that I was.

"A bunch of guys asked me about you, you know? You're the prettiest girl here."

I was completely out of it. Maybe I laughed or smiled. I don't know. I was past the point of having fun and was barreling towards being sick.

I can't remember what else he said, but eventually, he turned off the tap. My stomach was starting to settle down a bit---I liked watching the water run in the porcelain sink.

"So, did you see it?" he asked me.

I didn't know what he meant. I'd stopped listening to him.

"When you came in, did you get a good look?" He gestured toward his crotch.

I don't think I responded. But maybe I did.

He talked more, and I wondered when he would leave. I didn't have to vomit anymore, but I really wanted to lie down on the cold tiled floor for a second.

He wanted me to take my top off, so we'd be even. I shook my head. No.

I moved to open the door, but he chuckled and blocked my way. "Not until it's fair."

I just stood there. He said he'd compromise, and suggested I lift my skirt instead. I figured that was the better option. I guess it felt less like 'girls gone wild', or something.

I did it, fast, then pushed it back to where it had been before. I moved to open the door, again. He pulled my skirt back up and inspected my ass.

He told me it was cute.

I didn't say thank you.

He said that his dick had been out when I'd seen him (if it had been, I hadn't noticed), so I needed to pull down my underwear. "Only fair," he said.

I said nothing.

"What about you give me a kiss then?"

I didn't understand why he was so adamant. As if he could read my mind, he told me, "I like you. I want to kiss you."

I closed my eyes; my head had started spinning again. He took that as a cue to put his lips on mine before I knew what was happening.

Honestly, the progression of it all is fuzzy. There was a lot of coaxing, and then my skirt was bunched around my stomach. More talking, and his hands were in my underwear. Then my underwear was gone.

I didn't say no. I didn't say anything.

I think I might have asked him to wait at some point, when my brain was struggling to catch up to the situation. But he didn't hear me. Or if he did, he didn't care.

He bent me over the bathroom counter and fucked me against the sink. My eyes didn't look like mine in the reflection of the mirror as they watched what was happening behind us.

I still can't remember how I got back to the dorms that night. I could have written it off as a bad dream, but the next morning I was sore, and there were four little half-moon cuts in both of my palms, the same shape as my fingernails.

It's like it wasn't me. But it was. It was, and it sucked.

The next morning, I got a Plan B pill and did a screening through Student Health. The nurse took one look at me, gave me my results, and five condoms. I put them in my backpack and went to class.

At the time, I chalked it up to a series of bad decisions and a very stupid mistake. That's all. My mistake.

It took a while, almost two months, for me to tell Simon about the party. I think he knew that I was an anxious person when he met me, but he couldn't have guessed the rest of it.

I broke down and told him after our first football game. We'd gone, faces painted and everything, with Sarah and some of their friends in the afternoon, and then spent the evening on the floor of his room, talking about the day.

"Devon was asking about you," he told me. Devon was Simon's friend from class.

"Asking about what?"

Simon shrugged. "He has a thing for you. All my friends do, you know, they all think you're the prettiest girl here."

I burst into tears.

It took a lot of prodding, but I told Simon. It took multiple tries for me to explain everything, but he waited patiently.

He took it hard, really hard. And he didn't react well at all; he was more fixated on me getting 'help' as he defined it than what I wanted.

I wasn't ready to believe that it was something that warranted help. I think I would have gotten there, in my own time. But when I first told him, I thought Simon was being overly intense, even dramatic. Everyone hates their first time, I told him.

"Cassie," he shook his head. "That's not what that was. You get that, right?" He wouldn't stop. He kept saying things I didn't want to hear, words that made me sick.

He dragged me, kicking and screaming to Athena's Circle, a support group for sexual assault survivors that meets downtown.

There were a lot of people there. Not all were women, and nobody there looked like me. It turns out that it isn't always the prettiest girls who get the bad kind of attention, contrary to my mother's belief. I sat in the circle and listened to the others talk, getting angrier at Simon with each story.

I told him, in very simple terms, that I didn't want to talk to him anymore. I was furious with him. We didn't speak for nearly a week.

Sarah eventually approached me. She didn't know any specifics, and she didn't press. But she didn't push me the way Simon had, and I didn't tense up when she hugged me.

It took a long time, but I came to terms with the words that Simon and the people at Athena used: Coercion. Sexual assault. Rape.

Sarah got me in touch with a social worker on campus who explained my options. There weren't very many. A lot of time had passed since the party. Still, Simon begged me to go to court. His mother is a judge, and he wanted to believe that I had a case.

I refused, a decision with which I'm still comfortable. But I know it bothers Simon, even years later.

It was hard for him to lack control in the situation. I'm certain that's why he's such a nag about counselling. I realize that it's a hard pill to swallow. I'm sure you're going to take this hard too, Wes---that's why I tried to save you from it.

What happened during our date wasn't your fault, and I don't want you to think that you did something wrong. You were wonderful. I'm just not going to be where you are for a really long time, if ever. I wanted to be ready to be with someone romantically because I like you. I was trying to will myself to be okay with things that still feel wrong to me. I'm trying to be okay with the fact that nothing, and nobody, is going to make this move faster. Even you.

It isn't your fault, but you understand, right? Maybe you could be happy being my friend, or maybe there will be a day where I'm ready for the things you want. But not right now.

And honestly, I think I need a break. At least for a while. I'm trying very hard not to carry shame about this, but it's going to be hard to look into your eyes, or read your words, and see the realities of my circumstances and your subsequent reaction.

I'm so glad that you saw my flyer. Thank you for your time.

Love,

Cassie

If you found the material triggering, upsetting, or if something I wrote simply contradicts your own experience, please don't hesitate to contact me. I'm happy to answer questions or respond to your thoughts, and I'm always willing to have these important conversations with anybody who wants to talk. Cassie's story is very different from my own. But my experiences with sexual trauma as both a child and in my early years of adulthood is a large part of the reason I wanted to write this story, and a driving factor in my MSW.

I want to make it really really clear that this story is in no way an attempt to romanticize trauma. Rather, it's a story that aims to emphasize that people are more than the trauma that they experience. I'm here if you want to talk.

US National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline: 800.656.HOPE (4673)