These things disturbed me, yet I told myself you were just being a typical teenage boy.
You didn’t act like this during my first time. This time, I wanted you. You asked me several times if I was sure—you were concerned, loving. I had just turned seventeen.
When it was over, we got dressed and went outside. You pulled out your phone to record me. “I want to immortalize this moment,” you said as I spun in circles with my umbrella, laughing. The afternoon sun warmed my body, surrounding me like a protective mother. Meanwhile, the rain dripped heavily like tears from the sky.
* * *
///
That summer, just before Grade 12, was a clash of sunny, humid days and aggressive rainfall. You and I joked that Lucifer was fighting with his wife. We searched for other interpretations on the desktop computer in my basement: The devil is angry that God created a beautiful day, so he brutally beats his wife. The rain is her tears.
By now, my kilt was well above the school’s knee-length requirement, and I was wearing skin-tight trousers from the mall instead of the baggy ones from the uniform store. I ditched the glasses and invested in contacts, along with a full face of makeup. I no longer wore basic underwire bras from Walmart, opting for the padded sequined collection from La Senza. The edge of womanhood was thrilling, and at lunchtime Taz and I walked along the main roads smoking Superslims, our kilts swinging as male Toronto Catholic District School Board employees looked out the windows of their burgundy vans and honked.
From my baby fat, which I had struggled with for years, the curves of a woman’s body had emerged. I became more confident in my shapely legs and flat stomach, and the ways I could show them off like the girls in teen magazines. I wore short shorts, miniskirts, and sundresses. On the bus to the mall, you pinched my leg under my Daisy Dukes. “That’s your punishment for wearing those,” you said. “No guy wants his girl showing off her body for other men.”
But it wasn’t for men; it was for me. When the red chaos of womanhood made its home in my body at only nine, it launched eight years of bullying. To the other kids, I had changed. I now had an adult body—abnormal, unrelatable. No one wanted to be marked by the girl with the period, who was developing much faster than the others. As puberty moved rapidly through my body, I got taller and fuller.
I wanted to be friends with the other girls, but their disgust over my natural bodily functions had shifted into a desire to constantly humiliate me. They kicked and slapped and teased me. When I told my teachers, they accused me of lying—these girls and their small bodies were so fragile. How dare I make up lies?
My grandmother’s death had shaken up our household. I was fragile, and in my grief, I didn’t know how to defend myself. My mother, angered by the slow staff response, spent every morning before and every afternoon after work in the principal’s office, cussing him and his staff out, demanding that something be done, that they believe me. And when that didn’t work, she would wait with me in the parking lot until the morning bell rang, her eyes on my bullies as she played Beenie Man and Elephant Man so loud that the car would shake and concerned white parents would stare. She’d light her Du Maurier and inhale, then turn to me, her nose and labret studs shimmering in the sun, and say, “If anybody fucks with you, you fuck them up. And when you get sent to the principal’s office, you tell them that your mother told you to fucking do it, and if they have a problem, they can fucking call me. Don’t forget this.” And then she’d send me off with my big-ass backpack and the two neatly packed pepperoni Hot Pockets that she had over-microwaved.
The next time I got in trouble for defending myself, I told my teacher, as instructed, what my mother told me. Thinking I was bluffing, she called my mom. The teacher returned pale-faced and teary-eyed, and told me to go play.
That was so long ago. But now you were fucking with me—with my growth, my glow-up. Why did you want to suppress what was blossoming within me? I told you to mind your business, channelling the sass and ferocity I had seen my mother unleash on men who told her what do to. “The more you complain, the shorter my clothes will get,” I snapped.
A boy had never even taken an interest in me before you, and your aggressive jealousy was as flattering as it was concerning. The slightest male attention sent you into a rage. In public, guys passed by me, stealing a glance, and you’d yank me to your chest and kiss me hard on the mouth while looking them in the eye. You’d grab my ass so hard it stung. “What the fuck are you looking at?” you’d yell. “This is mine.”
Everything I knew about teenage boys was from high-school television dramas: Gossip Girl, The O.C., One Tree Hill. Boys were inherently sexually aggressive and jealous, and you dealt with it because you were lucky to be someone’s girlfriend. That’s where I also learned about love. There was no division between love and rage, between pain and passion—those were signs that you were loved deeply. I was lucky enough to be chosen by you, to be loved so fiercely by you, and I equated your control with love and devotion, despite my gut warning me that this was not what love should feel like. I continued to call it love, even when you demanded I stop hanging out with my girlfriends because you thought they were too feminist and headstrong. Even when you sulked when I spent the day with my mother and not you. Even when you wanted me to delete any male Facebook friend who liked my posts. Even when you told me I wasn’t as smart or likeable as you.
I felt bad for thinking about breaking up with you. You had lost your friends when you defended me against their racist comments—the same friends who rapped in the halls and wore urban wear and styled their hair in cornrows—friends who were fine with Black culture as long as it wasn’t on Black people. And your mother was barely talking to you now. How many times did you hurt me by telling me what your mother said: that I was ugly, that I wasn’t welcome at her house? That Black girls were dirty, that I would use my sexuality to corrupt you? Do you ever think about the irony of that statement? Like your friends, you appropriated Black culture, and like your mother your obsessive comments about my skin colour and our interracial relationship were ignorant. I broke up with you once, at the end of summer, five months into our relationship. Ignoring my instinct had become so overwhelming that I blurted it out while we were watching TV. It lasted seventy-two hours. Then I took you back, worried my decision was premature, afraid of seeing you in the hallways.
Like me, you never planned on going to university or college. We both had working mothers; we wanted to replicate their lives, not realizing they had broken their backs to provide for us—that they wanted more for us than what they’d had. I decided to go.
The countdown to early-acceptance letters sparked an urgent desperation in you. All you talked about were the things I didn’t want: marriage, children, living together. All I talked about was the new life I was looking forward to. You wanted me to stay. You reminded me every time you tampered with our protection or lied about not having condoms.
I wanted to end our relationship and enjoy the last few months with my friends and my family, but our lives felt so fused by our own imposed teenage standards. People knew us as a couple now; it had taken so long for the gossip to die down about the unlikely interracial pairing. When we weren’t together they asked where you were. We shared a locker and took the same classes. I wondered what you would tell people if we broke up—would you reveal my secrets? Tell them that I was easy and gave it up too soon? Would you call me that word you toyed with when my clothes were too short—slut?
You had no one, and I was your everything. That was something I made up for by always being there for you and your needs, despite never being there for my own.
That only made me resentful and combative. I was angry at you for your dependency. I was angry at myself for enabling it. After school, we fought on the phone about your control over me and my refusal to be controlled. The next morning you came to school, your knuckles crusted over with dried blood from punching holes in your bedroo
m wall.
The day before I moved to London, you and I sat on a grassy hill at a park near my house. I had already decided that I would end our relationship when I got to university. You gently took my hand in yours. “Will you marry me?” you asked.
I searched your face, hoping it would crack into the smile you made when you were pranking me. “Are you serious? You don’t even have a ring,” I told you, rolling my eyes.
“I know, but I just want to claim you, so you’re mine.” You spoke softly, which you did when you were asking for something you knew you shouldn’t.
“Joshua, we’ve talked about this so many times.” I wanted to choose my words carefully. “I just…I need to experience other things.”
“You mean you want to fuck other guys,” you spat angrily, your voice now a low growl.
In the charged silence, you lifted the same hand that had just held mine up to your face, clenching it into a fist. Remains of crusted blood had made a home in your pale flesh.
“Look at this,” you said, examining the scarred, bloody knuckles like precious stones. “One punch and I could kill you.”
* * *
///
The morning after moving into my dorm room in Medway-Sydenham, I woke up to a flurry of your messages. I can’t believe you’re gone. Come back, please. I hate you. Let’s have a baby. I want to be with you forever. I wanna kill people, especially myself. On the phone, you alternated between crying and screaming at me, for leaving you and ruining your life. I spent most of frosh week huddled in the corner of my room, listening to the muffled sound of bass and people partying in the hall—where I wanted to be—apologizing to you. I couldn’t end it like this when you needed me.
On the last day of frosh week, when you finally realized no amount of messages would make me come home, you conceded. “I’ve been a jerk. Go have fun tonight, you deserve it,” you said. It was the most rational you’d sounded in a long time. Taz and I cracked open the bottle of Smirnoff vodka we’d gotten an older first-year to buy for us. I didn’t know how to measure liquor, and I drank a whole red Solo cup full. The intoxication was warm and fuzzy.
Taz and I made our way to University College Hill, pushing through the blur of over a thousand people in glow-in-the-dark necklaces, purple shirts, bandanas, and sunglasses. Faces and bodies painted in purple and white were moving against one another, dancing, tripping, and falling everywhere as music pounded from the stage, booming like it was coming from the sky. For once, I wasn’t thinking about you.
I don’t know how I got into that giant bouncy castle that night, but I do remember worrying that the security guards would kick me out. Instead they laughed and helped me up. I don’t how I started talking to a guy there, but I know I pushed him away several times before letting him kiss me. I wanted to feel the weightlessness of not having responsibilities waiting for me in the form of threatening messages and voicemails. And I kissed him back—the easy way out of my shackles.
The sobering jolt of reality made me pull away. I ran all the way back to my dorm, sobbing, spitting out the taste of him. He was unfamiliar; I missed you now. I called you, crying. “What did you do?” You already knew. I begged you to forgive me, unable to stand being the villain. You were gone with a click.
The next morning, you called me back. “So, I’ve given it some thought, and I want us to work this out because I love you.” Your voice was flat and emotionless.
My relief was short-lived. I wanted you to take me back, scared that what I had done had marked me as an unlovable whore. But the moment you hung up, the gradient of dread became steeper. I gave up my out. Now that you had taken me back, I owed it to you to stay.
A week after the kiss, I took the Greyhound bus to the mall to see you. You were waiting at the bottom of the steep escalator, your face expressionless. As I got off the last step, I put out my arms to hug you, and gasped as a sharp sting spread across the back of my leg. I looked at you, but your eyes were dead. “That’s what you get for what you did,” you said before giving me a tight smile, flexing the hand you’d just slapped me with, and then you walked off without me.
It took me a long time to come to terms with why I didn’t leave you right then—or before that. The red flags piled up, one after the other, but I didn’t believe any of it was violence. Violence seemed like something complete, unfragmented. The pieces—sometimes subtle, other times more obvious—made it hard to form a complete picture. How could you be so controlling but make me feel so loved? How could you use your hand to trace my lips with your fingers, then use it so forcefully against my skin? It was these grey areas that confused me—the bad with the good, the discomfort with the comforting. In high school, as the president of the leadership group, I taught the younger girls about dating violence. I ran through the red flags with them, I taught them how to spot guys like you. I knew better than to stay with you.
But I wasn’t innocent either. I was flighty, cold, moody, and mean. I knew your limits and I ploughed through them to get a reaction. I held powerful grudges, much stronger than your gentle attempts to talk through our issues. I had my own problematic definitions of masculinity, chastising your emotion as weakness. I provoked you just to see how upset you could get.
You’d roughed me up play-fighting; I’d found it to be an immature assertion of masculinity. But this moment was deliberate. You played it off like a playful smack that accidentally went too far, but the deadness—the darkness—in your eyes was something I had never seen before. Yet I wasn’t surprised at all. You had so much rage inside you, so much insecurity, a hell of a lot to prove—it was inevitable that you would explode. By then I was sure I’d be long gone.
* * *
///
Written in red at the top of my essay was a scribbled note that I could do better. I knew I could, and I knew I couldn’t right now, so I shoved it in the bottom of my backpack, pretending not to see my favourite TA watching me, concerned.
My grades had slipped since you started leaving me messages again. There was a lull after that day at the mall—you got a job in construction and were making new friends, and I finally got to enjoy being a student. I went to all my classes and caught up with my friends in residence. It was nice to clutch a map of the campus instead of my phone. But that didn’t last long.
I was at the library and you called four times. “What are you doing?” you asked me.
“I’m studying for my test. Is something wrong?” I said.
“No.” You sounded annoyed. “I just want to know who you’re with.”
You did this every day at different times—as I went to class, as I worked on assignments, as I spent evenings unwinding with the rest of the floor in the common room. “Who are you with? Are you alone? Get on video chat to show me.” You’d demand a full scan of the room. You thought I wouldn’t notice that you were trying to catch me cheating. But you also forgot to mark my emails and Facebook messages back as unread when you hacked into my accounts to compile the information of everyone I knew. Before bed, you’d call on video chat again. “I need to make sure you’re alone.” This clouded my vision and made my heart race, and then I’d yell at you and we’d fight into the early morning. Taz became so used to it that she’d wear headphones to sleep when we spoke. I’d wake up the next afternoon to texts from a friend asking if I was coming to our morning class, along with a dozen erratic ramblings from you: you were sorry for being controlling; you knew I wanted to leave but you couldn’t let me go. You loved me and wanted me to be happy, even if it was without you. You couldn’t live without me. You didn’t want me to live without you. You wanted to do to me what Chris Brown did to Rihanna.
The night I tried to break up with you, I remember you saying you were walking down to the train station to jump. I don’t know if you actually went, but you were yelling and crying, “I will fucking kill myself if you leave me, and it will be your fault.” I cried so har
d in the girls’ washroom that I had a panic attack. “Tell me you won’t leave, ever, or I’ll do it right now,” you repeated, over and over.
“I promise,” I gasped, clutching my chest for air. “I promise, I promise. I promise.”
I wanted to get us both help, but I didn’t know where to go on campus. I had only been in this new environment for a few weeks, I couldn’t even remember the buildings that housed my classes. During appointments at the OB/GYN’S office, I laid on the exam table, staring at the foot stirrups covered by pieces of cloth that said “Abused? You can talk to me.” I almost considered saying something but the thought of being exposed from the waist down, legs spread wide, as I caught the poor doctor off guard with my confession—they probably didn’t even put those cloths there—made me laugh. I wouldn’t have minded talking to a professional, but they weren’t easy to find. I could barely figure out what services were available on campus and where to look. There were some posters about sexual assault, and support services for survivors; I hadn’t recognized that part of our relationship yet. I wanted to call your mom while you were at work, but I didn’t think she would believe me. And I didn’t want to worry my own mother. She always joked that I had redeemed her: I had done well in school. I was trustworthy. She never had to deal with me getting into trouble the way she had. I couldn’t tell her just how dark our relationship had become. I couldn’t bring myself to shatter the illusion she had about her only child. Instead, I asked Taz and another friend from residence for advice.
They both rolled their eyes and said you were just being stupid. “He’s Asian, he can’t do anything to you,” Taz said.
“Girl, just beat his ass,” the other friend said. “You’re Black.”
You were just being immature, nothing that I couldn’t handle, they suggested. My friends believed I could fend off abuse simply because I was a Black woman. I was supposed to be angry, defensive, indestructible, physically and emotionally unbreakable. By virtue of our respective races and the stereotypes that followed, it was impossible for them to believe that I was in as much danger as I claimed. The stereotype of the effeminate Asian man—submissive, passive, non-threatening—meant that, in their minds, you were incapable of such abuse. Your presumed passivity was no match for my presumed aggression. I resolved that maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought. Maybe all I needed was to defend myself better, to put you in your place and make you afraid of me.
They Said This Would Be Fun Page 9