Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed

  It is a year that I am still sometimes amazed I survived. At a new school in a new town, I fell under the seduction of a manipulative and emotionally abusive girl who essentially acted as a pimp for my junior high’s ninth-grade boys, trading access to my body in order to increase her own social standing. Some part of me felt strangely grateful for this—as objectifying as it was, it made me valuable. My body, the fact that it was wanted, gave me worth. So I did not question it when, only a few weeks into seventh grade, she delivered me, high on strong drugs I had never even heard of before that night, to the boy who wanted me the most, the highest bidder in terms of social currency. I did not question being in his bed. I did not question what we were doing. I would have done anything, but we were interrupted and I had a curfew. Another girl came after me that night and gave him what he wanted, and he no longer wanted me. I had failed. I had lost my worth.

  I learned that giving boys what they wanted made me valuable, so that’s what I did from then on. That friend soon turned on me for reasons I still don’t fully understand and bullied me so severely that my parents had to call the police and I had to change schools. I felt more worthless than ever, but being wanted by boys at the new school gave me worth. I never even considered saying no. I never even considered thinking about what I wanted. Shortly after starting the new school, I became the girlfriend of the ninth-grade boy who was most persistent. I did whatever he wanted. I closed my eyes and learned how to make myself numb. I discovered the switch inside me that would turn my feelings off. I got high. I fell into drug addiction easily, as if it were made for me. I did whatever I could to make it not hurt. I learned how to die.

  And again. And then again. And maybe some of the guys even had real feelings for me. Maybe it was possible for me to have had feelings for them. That boyfriend I had in seventh grade said he loved me and I said I loved him back, but I was lying. As soon as I gave him my body, he turned into something dead. I was dead. Any possibility of a real relationship was dead. He joined the great cemetery of all the dead guys.

  In retrospect, I do not think these boys knew how much they were hurting me. Maybe they would have stopped if I had said no. Maybe they wouldn’t have. I will never know. These are not useful questions, but I keep asking them. These questions are part of the abuse I heap onto myself: How much was my fault?

  Is it ever the fault of a thirteen-year-old when she has sex that wounds her to her core?

  That thirteen-year-old version of myself still lives inside me. She whispers on repeat: You should have said no. You should have said no. Her voice is cruel, hateful. She would never say this to anyone but me.

  * * *

  I remember going to the school nurse in high school, seeing a poster on the wall explaining the different degrees of statutory rape:

  Rape of a child in the third degree: Child is at least 14, but less than 16 years old. Perpetrator is at least 48 months older than victim.

  Rape of a child in the second degree: Child is at least 12, but less than 14 years old. Perpetrator is at least 36 months older than the victim.

  I thought of the boys that could have fallen into these categories. Did they qualify? Were their ages off by a few months? I tried to picture them in jail. It did not seem right. I hated them, but I did not think they were rapists. They were kids too. Older than me, yes. But still kids.

  But I remember feeling a glimmer of something inside, something like being seen, like maybe I did have some validation of my pain, that maybe my story was enough to earn the brokenness I felt, that maybe all those women marching against rape were marching for me, too. But that feeling did not last long. I convinced myself it was a stupid poster. Those were stupid rules made by stupid adults who had no idea what was really going on. How could they call something rape that was not rape? How could it be rape if I never said no, if the person who did it was a kid too?

  All I know is I was barely thirteen years old when I lost my virginity. I was a child. I was not ready to consent to anything.

  Laws will never be able to explain the feeling of a girl’s soul dying.

  * * *

  I spent the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college in South America, much of it in a little mountain village in Ecuador with my friend who had been living there for a year already. By then my drug addiction and alcoholism had firmly established itself, and my mental illness was not properly medicated. I spent those months in and out of various states of inebriation and emotional extremes.

  One night, a guy in our general social circle, a foot taller and at least ten years older than me, followed me home from the bar. I did not like him. He was annoying and talked all the time and never bathed. But he seemed harmless. He was the guy the other guys made fun of.

  By that point I had already fended off a couple of old truckers who knocked on my motel room door one night, bottles of liquor in their hands, asking if I wanted to party. I had a reputation around town. I was the American girl who never said no.

  But I did say no that night. I said it many times. I said it with my voice, in many different ways, in Spanish and in English, as he stood outside my door with his goofy grin trying to convince me to let him in. I said it with my body after he got tired of words, as he pushed on my door and I pushed back, as he lodged his foot in the doorway so it couldn’t close. And the whole time, both of us smiling, because he was the friendly hippie and I was so goddamned nice, and it was just a game, a silly little game between friends, and we were both in on the joke. Even though he sickened me, even though I was scared, even though I meant every single no I said. It was not a joke to me at all.

  After so many years of silence, I finally said no. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t believe me. After all, I had a reputation. I had slept with that married guy a few nights before. I was drunk. I’d dance with anyone at the club. All a girl like me needs is a little persuasion.

  So I stopped saying no. I got tired. I felt the weight of inevitability: he was not going to take no for an answer. I could fight or I could get it over with. I knew how to get it over with. I had been doing that for years.

  By the time I emerged from my room the next morning, hung over and wanting to die, the news had already spread around the village. My friend laughed and said, “I can’t believe you slept with him. You hate him.” Like it was a big joke, like I had chosen to do something funny. Yes, I hated him. But now I hated myself more.

  * * *

  These boys and men are ghosts. None of them have edges. They bleed into one another. They are the same. The only thing real is the thirteen-year-old girl underneath them, the girl who still lives inside me, the girl who shows herself whenever I am scared, who lends me her armor, her closed-off heart, even when I do not want her to. Sometimes it is this girl who still runs things.

  The boys are part of a machine. Maybe each of them, individually, are not bad people. But something in the cumulative effect of them, something about being the girl I was in the body I had—something was taken. My choice was stolen, not by one physical act of assault, but by a combination of powers outside my control—my young age, my lack of education around sexuality, my emotionally unavailable parents, the trauma of transition and living in what I perceived to be an unsafe environment, my emotionally abusive friend, a culture of masculinity that does not teach boys to question silence and does not train them to know what it looks like when a girl’s lights go out. Even the guy in Ecuador probably had no idea what was going on inside me. He was probably taught, like so many guys, that sometimes girls play hard to get, that sometimes they just need a little persuasion, that sometimes no really means yes. He probably had no idea that coercion is part of sexual assault. He probably thought I consented. He has no idea that he raped me.

  I used to be angry at them, but now my anger is more nebulous. These boys are a symptom of a much bigger problem, of a society that does not teach its boys to truly understand what consent is. The boys of my youth did not know they were doing anything wrong.
They were young and horny and grateful that they had what they thought was a willing participant. They did not know the extent of the damage they were causing.

  I forgive those boys now, so many years later. But I do not forgive the society that created them. I do not forgive the society that created Brock Turner and Donald Trump, that lets men like them get away with hurting women, hurting an entire nation. I do not forgive a culture where masculinity is defined by conquest. I do not forgive the culture that forces girls to have to defend themselves, that shames us when we can’t. I do not forgive the misogyny that turns women against one another, that makes us judge other women for not being woman enough, that makes us judge and hate ourselves.

  Rape culture is the culture of silence. It’s the culture of girls thinking a boy’s desires trumps their own. It’s the culture of girls thinking they’re choiceless, of girls thinking their bodies are the most valuable parts of themselves and their worth is determined by how much they are wanted. It’s slut shaming and victim blaming. It’s parents not talking openly with their children about consent. It’s parents not talking to girls about their entitlement to pleasure. It’s parents not talking to their children about sex at all.

  * * *

  I have been publishing young adult fiction for ten years now. I have been writing different versions of that girl who lives inside me—the lost girl, the scared girl, the girl tearing herself apart. But some things happened in the last few years that started to change my writing. That started to change me. That started to change my feminism.

  More than anything, it was the birth of my daughter that turned me radical. There is something about being a mother that has awakened my desire to save the world. I no longer have the privilege of not caring what happens to it. Because my heart is now outside my body. My heart is in the wild. She walks around in the world, vulnerable. My instinct is to defend her fiercely, to do everything I can to make the world safe for her, to make it safe for all the little girls like her.

  I am blessed to work among the most passionate and compassionate people I have ever known—young adult authors. Our community is fierce in our love for our readers, and we feel a deep responsibility to them, especially teen girls. Our readers are our hearts in the wild. They are the girls still inside us, desperate to be seen and heard and loved. Our books are acts of love.

  Two recent novels in particular moved me to my core—All the Rage by Courtney Summers, and The Way I Used to Be by Amber Smith. Courtney’s book is about a girl who is raped and tells, but who is met with hostility and rejection by her entire community. Amber’s book is about a girl who is raped but doesn’t tell, who lets the secret destroy her from the inside. In both stories, the girl was alone. She had to survive what happened alone.

  I was alone.

  I wrote my novel The Nowhere Girls partly in response to these brilliant books. The characters haunted me. I felt a mix of anger and love, a mother’s desire to protect them and lash out at those who hurt them. Not just them, but that thirteen-year-old girl still inside me. Not just her, but all the girls. Myself. My readers. My daughter.

  I wanted to write a book about what could happen if those girls didn’t have to be alone. What if they had been supported? What if they had been believed? What would happen if girls organized to take care of one another? What if girls unified to resist the culture that makes rape possible? What if we were all in this together? What would our power look like? What could we accomplish?

  It’s only now, writing this essay, that I realize I was writing The Nowhere Girls for myself. For that girl inside me who, at age thirteen, felt irreparably broken; who, at age sixteen, so desperately wanted a women’s march against rape to include her, too; who, at age nineteen, needed a friend’s compassion, not ridicule.

  I wrote a community for the girl alone inside me. I wrote best friends who believed her. I wrote her a whole army of girls to defend and protect her. I wrote her a path to healing.

  Maybe sometimes I don’t know how to fight for myself. But I will always fight for my readers, I will always fight for my daughter, and, in that fight, in those bold acts of unconditional love, maybe I will keep learning how to turn some of it back on the girl inside me who, these days, is feeling a little less lonely. Maybe it will get easier. Maybe we will keep working together to show one another how to love just a little bit better.

  This is my feminism.

  UNEXPECTED PURSUITS: EMBRACING MY INDIGENEITY & CREATIVITY

  Christine Day

  This essay was selected from the editor’s call for submissions from unpublished writers.

  When I think about my high school years, I often think about boxes.

  I remember the squat, boxy buildings that comprised the campus. I remember the worn, institutional feel of the faded red bricks. I remember the rectangular classrooms, the perforated ceiling tiles, the bland white walls. I remember laminated library books, the gleaming expanse of the gymnasium, the sleek metal lockers that lined the halls.

  I remember standardized tests, the information they requested, the boxes I checked: female; American Indian/Alaska Native (sometimes mixed-race/multiracial/other, if they had it); English, first language; US Citizen.

  I remember career aptitude advisements, college planning sheets, interest assessments.

  I look back at all those plans and am relieved to share: I didn’t follow any of it.

  * * *

  In retrospect, it’s difficult to describe how I felt as a high school student. As someone who spent her adolescence in that rigid space, growing and changing and breathing but doing so almost invisibly. I was always a little apprehensive of my surroundings. Something about the school made me feel claustrophobic. The classes I took often left me uneasy. Looking back now, I realize these feelings probably stemmed from my Indigenous identity, my personal history.

  I should begin by saying that I wasn’t raised on a reservation. I grew up in a suburb just outside of Seattle, Washington, and attended a school with an approximate 0.5 percent Native American population. Our campus was built in occupied Duwamish lands, but I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning this.

  I attended history classes in which Indigenous perspectives were almost entirely erased. Their civilizations, their treaties, their resilience, their agency: all absent from the textbooks, gone without a trace. I attended science classes, which were entrenched in biology, ecology, and environmental activism, without integrating Indigenous values or knowledge systems. I wrote countless essays in my English classes, and yet I don’t remember any Indigenous-centered prompts or research options. I memorized SAT vocabulary words despite how useless they were in everyday communication. (Meanwhile, letters from the Nooksack Tribe—where my mother is enrolled—arrived at our house, advertising programs for language revitalization.)

  We were the thunderbirds. I remember our crest: a lightning bolt pierced the school’s green initials, sealed inside a royal blue shield. A banner with our full name unfurled beneath it, and two nondescript evergreen trees stood alongside it. Our mascot was perched at the top, gray wings spread wide, motionless.

  In traditional stories and oral histories, Thunderbird holds significance and power. In my high school, this iconic figure became a frozen caricature. A stenciled silhouette, deprived of movement and color.

  * * *

  I took a career aptitude test in my sophomore year. It was a class assignment, something I did to get full credit. When the results came back, I penciled in my post–high school plan:

  The test claimed I would be a good nurse. I wrote the job title down, imagined how my life would turn out, and decided I liked it. I could live with it. Nurses were important; the world could always use more of them. Plus, I could finish my education after spending two years at a community college.

  That was good; I found it reassuring.

  I submitted the assignment, and tried to forget about it.

  * * *

  Throughout high school, my grades remained average at best.
Teachers wrote lukewarm comments in my progress reports: Is a pleasure to have in class, but could put forth more effort. Is well-mannered and cooperative, but has several missing assignments. Demonstrates a need for consistent motivation. Expresses ideas clearly in writing.

  They thought I was bright, but they also thought I was a problem. I could feel it when they returned my assignments, papers delicately folded to hide their red ink scribbles. I could hear it in their sighs, each time I “forgot my homework at my house.”

  There were some exceptions. I remember my US Government & History teacher, my junior year. She took an interest in me and regularly checked in to see how I was doing. She also veered from the typical curriculum, delving into topics other teachers avoided for the sake of “neutrality” and “political correctness.” She taught us to look for biases across different news outlets. She showed us graphic images from wars and protests. She directed our attention away from the textbooks, where history was presented in a sterile, linear version of events. And she introduced us to other renditions that were grittier, darker, more volatile.

  She still had rules to follow. Limitations to work around. But her class was one of the first that really mattered to me. I realized there were real stakes in the decisions I made. I realized that history unfolds based on the work that happens in the present.

  I also created my first documentary film in her class.

  The assignment adhered to the National History Day prompt, “Innovation in History: Impact and Change.” My ten-minute film was about Lewis Hine, the photographer who helped reform child labor laws in America. I submitted it to the National History Day competition, where it was selected as a regional finalist. My teacher gave me an A and asked for a DVD copy of the documentary. She wanted to use it in her curriculum for future classes.