Incomparable

by Brie Bella

  Looking back on my senior year in high school, it’s hard not to be angry. I pushed myself so hard to funnel all of my energy into soccer, and my education, social life, and SATs all suffered a lot for it. Then I ended up with a shitty-ass surgeon and the minimum requirement of physical therapy. We didn’t have good insurance, which definitely didn’t help. But my parents and I didn’t advocate for me at all either. We didn’t push enough on my behalf, demand better care, or research my surgeon before letting him fuck up my leg. Being a professional athlete now, with resources, I realize how much more could have been done for me. How important it is to ask questions, research, explore all channels, and ask for help. I believe the outcome could have been so much better. Maybe that college scholarship could have been resurrected.

  I will say that my coach, Matt Potter, who had been with us since we started playing in fifth grade, did try to help. He knew how rough it was at home, and he treated us at times like we were his own kids. He would come and meet me outside of practice and get me training and moving again—kicking the ball, getting some mobility back. Throughout my life—and like Blanche DuBois—I’ve come to depend on the kindness of strangers.

  I was still young, with my whole life in front of me. But it’s a strange experience when your best laid plans, everything you’ve ever counted on, disintegrate. And it’s a stranger feeling when that future was contingent on your body, which you’ve always had complete control over. That period in my life was dark for many reasons, but it was really the first time that I felt like I personally hit a wall. I had lost the thing that most defined me. In retrospect, as angry as it made me, I wouldn’t have had my life turn out any differently. Italy would have been fun and all, but women’s wrestling, and standing behind this movement of female empowerment in the ring—the creation of real-life sheros—has inarguably been a much more incredible adventure to join and lead.

  And it feels like the fact that Brie and I were both rerouted on this path was anything but luck. After Bear died, Brie became very spiritual. Fortunately, a fair amount of that rubbed off on me. It came from watching her prevail over dark, dark grief, but also from her faith that there is something on the other side. That life has a much greater purpose than it might sometimes seem to have on the surface. I’m not saying that there was divine intervention in my leg break, but I do think that this bigger context—maybe we’re not just here to live and die—helped me turn that course correction into something positive. I’ve always found that I’m most successful when I mix a certain amount of everything-happens-for-a-reason fatalism with driving really hard for what I want. It helps me manage my expectations for the moments when I don’t get what I want, while also keeping me feeling like I am in the driver’s seat and capable of, and responsible for, directing my life.

  So I wish I could say that I immediately went and capitalized on and maximized this post-soccer freedom, but not so fast. First, I had to marry and then divorce my high school boyfriend, Ken. Before I get into what he meant to me, and why we eloped to a Las Vegas chapel, I need to back up to the darker undercurrent of high school. There were some experiences I wish I could forget, but I feel, more than ever at this point in the culture, like I need to revisit and share.

  My dad was controlling, abusive, and strict, and he had never really let me speak to boys. So when my parents finally divorced when I was fifteen, I lost my virginity—on the floor of a Hyatt hotel room on the 4th of July. “Lost my virginity” is very inaccurate, actually. My virginity was stolen from me, without my consent. I was raped, by a guy I thought was a friend, while I was passed out at a party. I’d had too many beers, and maybe some shots of hard alcohol, and I only woke up because my stomach hurt—I came to, and this guy was both on top of me and inside of me. I pushed him off and ran out of the room—he followed me down the hall and asked me if this meant we were now boyfriend/girlfriend.

  It is fucked up—shocking in retrospect—that it never occurred to me to call the police. I didn’t even tell my sister because by admitting that it had happened, it became true, it became fact. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t worry about getting in trouble. He thought that by taking advantage of me, he should now have official and full access to me. That this attack would actually make me his, in a celebrated social way. I get enraged even writing about this now. I know I was not the only girl in our high school who was violated like that and then expected to shrug it off the next day—this is what it was like. There was no education around it, no awareness, no five-point plan should it happen to you. And man do I pray things are different now, that girls realize that if something that horrendous and sickening happens to them, they can and should say and do something. I wish I had known that I could have taken away his future the way he had taken something so sacred away from me. Something I was waiting to share with someone I loved, at the time of my choice. While I didn’t know what to do about it, I had even less of a clue how to address the shame and revolting feelings of ickiness that permeated my whole being. I had never even seen a penis, yet I was no longer a virgin.

  I actually had a boyfriend at the time—an older guy who went to another high school in town. He had been totally respectful of me, and we had never done anything beyond kissing. I didn’t tell him that I had been raped, but I did tell him I was ready to have sex. I wanted so desperately to erase what had happened and replace it with a new first, positive experience that felt special. He was surprised—when you’re in high school, you typically follow the bases very slowly. I don’t remember if he’d had sex before, but when we started, and he said, “You’re not a virgin,” I protested, but I was crushed (side note: What a dick!). The sex we had felt dirty and horrible.

  A few months later, I went to a modeling competition with a friend in California.We met two guys who invited us back to their hotel room. My friend was really excited about the invitation and begged me to go, even though they gave me the creeps. I tried to convince her that it was a bad idea. We were sixteen, they were college age, if not in their mid-twenties, and it felt dangerous and wrong. But I finally relented. We sat on the edge of the bed while they tried to get us to drink from a jug of orange juice and vodka. I refused and refused again and again, until I finally relented. I thought that if I gave in on this, maybe they’d leave me alone. I hadn’t drunk very much before I felt really dizzy and stood up to go to the bathroom, thinking I might vomit. One of the guys followed me in and bashed my head against the bathroom sink—I came to when he accidentally switched on the blow-dryer with his elbow. I had clearly been roofied—I was groggy, and I couldn’t see straight, but I could see four condom wrappers littered across the bathroom floor and realized that I had been raped. I hit him in the face and ran from the bathroom—my friend was gone and the door was open. I took off into the night, sprinting across empty fields until I made it back to the hotel where we were staying with her mom.

  My friend was there. She had left me behind and run. But she had also been raped and was hysterical and in the shower. Her mom held me until I calmed down. Then, for some reason, the three of us decided not to call the police, not to tell anyone. We all decided to pretend like it had never happened. Even my mom is learning about this for the first time in this book. We certainly didn’t do the right thing by failing to call the cops. But in a fucked-up way, I think we all felt responsible. Her mom, for failing to protect us. The two of us, for willingly going to the guys’ rooms, for drinking alcohol illegally.

  The #MeToo movement both enthralls me with its potential and reminds me why rape and sexual assault are a double slap for women. There is the horrible offense in the moment, and then the shame and blame that follow and feel almost worse than the original pain. When something like this happens to you, you understand the blame-the-victim mentality, how easy it is to feel shame rather than anger, how easy it is to feel like you could have stopped it yourself. The “if onlys,” the “why didn’t I’s …”

  I count myself lucky because I was unconscious for both rapes.
But the other details, like the faces of all three men, the condom wrappers, the sound of the blow-dryer—it’s all seared into my mind. If I had been aware of what was happening to me in the moment, I would never have been able to escape it, or get over it. I can imagine how the consciousness—and the feelings of helplessness to stop the assaults—could have really ruined my life.

  After these two incidents, I fell into a deep depression. When my mom was at work, I would go into her closet and shut the door and cry. I would just sit there, among a sea of her very work-appropriate Nine West heels. I gained visible weight, probably the first time that I became the “bigger” sister of the two of us. It was a physical manifestation of holding on to all these secrets as a sixteen-year-old. I was eating my feelings in an attempt to push the depression down, to somehow digest it. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. I didn’t even tell Brie until many years later. I had no tools for processing the trauma except to try to bury it deep within and pretend like neither episode had ever happened. I was just not equipped.

  Later that summer, I met the guy who would become my high school love. He held this promise of safety, of starting over. Ken and I first talked at a party. I was hanging out in a hot tub, waiting for this hot senior I had a crush on to come back. Ken climbed in to keep me company, and then we really connected. I remember thinking that the water made his blue eyes sparkle. He was so handsome, and he had a lot of muscles for a high school kid; he seemed safe and protective. I totally forgot about the hot senior. Nothing happened that night with Ken, which made him seem even safer. He was not a guy who would rape a passed-out girl in a hotel room. After that night we started talking on the phone, and on AOL Messenger. My screen name was PNKDMND, which I picked because I thought “pink diamond” evoked Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t know that it was a euphemism for a vagina. And it kind of fits me, don’t you think?

  A few weeks later, Ken and I hooked up for the first time, at a high school party. I was wearing platform Vans with a four-inch lift, and I never took them off even though I pretty much ditched the rest of my clothing. I was like a dude who wears his socks in bed (I must have been really into those Vans). We were hooking up in an empty bedroom, and then everyone at the party rushed in to bust us. From that point on we were inseparable. We would hang out at school, after school, at night—he pretty much lived with us by our senior year. He also came from a broken home, and we remade our families in each other. I wanted to be his everything, and he wanted to be my everything, too. We were bunny rabbits—rabid bunnies, actually—looking for anywhere and everywhere to have sex. The middle school baseball diamond, the football field, his Camaro.

  Ken was a hothead and was extremely protective. (He even tried to fight a lecherous teacher, who he thought looked at me inappropriately.) I thrived on his desire to stick up for me at every opportunity. I so desperately wanted a guy to make me feel safe, to undo all the bad things that had happened to me. Ken made it feel like love means violent protection—like the world is unsafe without a knight charging with a drawn sword. It squared with my childhood. It squared with what happened to me in my teens. He looked for fights. One time he got jumped by a group of kids. They came into the locker room after a game, when he was alone, and hit him across the back of the head with a bat before punching in his skull with brass knuckles. To this day, I don’t know why they had him in their sights. But they had even created a website in advance to commemorate the day that Ken would die—then they set out to fulfill their mission. They were all expelled.

  That wasn’t his only rodeo in the hospital either. Another time—I think it was for a blood clot—he had to spend a few nights there. When his parents would leave, we’d have sex in his hospital bed—just two kids thinking they were adults. We loved to see how sex would make his heart rate go up, because he was attached to all the machines. I want to die now thinking about it. Obviously the nurses probably had to watch this entire, hilarious spectacle from their station down the hall, while rolling their eyes. Although we’d both had sex before, our relationship was the first time that either of us had really experienced someone’s body. I know I’ve always been a sexual person—I have the middle school journals to prove that—but I think I was partly so attached to Ken because I felt like I could find good touch with him. Enough good touch to take all those bad touches away.

  We were kind of lost and were each other’s first love—defining what that meant as we went along. We fell hard. It was that first high-school-sweetheart love that’s a dumpster fire of lust. In many ways we were completely out of control. The sex, yes, but also the addiction to high drama. We thought that’s what it was supposed to feel like. We often had terrible, even violent fights. We both knew that it wasn’t healthy or sustainable. But we also couldn’t quit the drama or each other. We were like addicts.

  Brie

  Ken was a good guy, but the two of them together was not a good combination. He was jealous and controlling, and that was hard for me to see. They would fight all the time, including physically.

  I remember one time, Bear and I were hanging out at our house and Nicole and Ken were there. I don’t know how it escalated, but they started arguing in front of us. Then suddenly they started wrestling, just throwing each other around my mom’s living room. Bear intervened and tried to stop it—he was trying to push them apart when Nicole reached over and just ripped Ken’s shirt off his body. Then Ken took off in his green Camaro. I remember thinking, “Can’t we all just be normal for one single day?”

  Nicole

  A week after graduation, Brie and I moved to California. We were so desperate to get away, to leave all of our bad memories in Arizona behind. The place was tainted, dark. It was a place from which we needed to escape. Ken decided to move to San Diego, too. That’s the point when our relationship really fell off a cliff. It was a messed-up situation, because I wanted freedom and complete liberation from the past. Ken reminded me of everything that had happened that was bad. But he had also been my lifeboat for most of it. He would continue to be the person I clung to when things got bad, and I kind of resented him for it. Rinse and repeat.

  The fact that I didn’t want to look back and didn’t want to be tethered to the memories won out in the end. I just wanted to forget. So I treated Ken really poorly. We began a cycle of two weeks on, two weeks off that pretty much went like this: I would clamor for my freedom, and then something would happen that would make me feel bad, or unsafe, or in need of protection, and I would call him. When I felt safe once more, I would dump him again. We had gone through so much shit together, we could never fully let each other go. It makes me feel terrible to recount this, because he didn’t deserve any of it.

  Ultimately, he went to boot camp because he also wanted to change his life. And I wanted to move to Los Angeles. I missed him a lot while he was away, and I made that very known to him. Then someone planted it in our heads that if we were married he wouldn’t be sent abroad to serve, and so we drove to Vegas and got hitched. Internet research at the time was not my friend. I was in a sweatshirt, Uggs, my hair up in a messy bun—it was very Britney Spears. As I walked down the aisle, I thought, “What the hell am I doing and how do I get out of this?”

  We never lived together. I never took his last name. He ended up being shipped off to war despite our marriage certificate. That happened when we weren’t actually together as a couple anymore and were dating other people, which I think I used as justification for asking him for a divorce when he was away. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have waited until he came home to ask him to let me go. I definitely owed him that, even though I ultimately knew that our attachment wasn’t healthy and our relationship wasn’t good for either of us anymore.

  By the end I hated the person I was with him. He made me crazy, evil almost, in a way that felt like I was possessed, like I wasn’t myself. When you’re young, I don’t think you realize that there are other ways to end a relationship besides killing it. Instead, we went down a di
fferent path, a destructive, let’s-destroy-ourselves-as-we-destroy-this-romance journey that ultimately created so much more pain. It was on-again, off-again throughout, and I was typically the person driving the status. Every time I felt needy, I got him back; then I would break up with him again. It was not kind. I was in complete sabotage mode, I think probably because, deep down, I thought it would be easier to drive him away than to choose to really leave and fully shut the door. I didn’t know if I could hold that responsibility of ending the relationship, and I knew we would keep coming back together, even though it was clearly not the right thing, unless we did so much damage that we burned the house completely down. It’s not until you’re older that you realize that there are much kinder ways to let things resolve. But as I said, drama was our primary means of communication—and it always felt high-stakes, high-emotion.

  I saw him years later, at the funeral of a mutual friend. It was a devastating loss—one of those people who was beloved by many—the life of the party, the class clown, the person you can’t imagine not being there anymore. He and Ken were like brothers, truly, in that they knew each other’s secrets and had been there through tough times. But it was clear that Ken did not want to speak to me, and so I gave him space. There are very few people I have loved in my life, and Ken was one of them. I will always send him love. I always keep him in my prayers.