by Mignon Mykel
He stood then, stuffing his penis back in his pants and zipping them back up. He bent to the floor and returned to me, pressing an ice cold cloth to my vagina. He didn’t say another word, just completed his tasks with a joyful hum in his chest. My ankle restraints were undone and I quickly turned to my side, bringing my knees to my chest, which only caused him to chuckle.
On my side, he had access to my wrist bindings. Once released, I brought my arms in front of me, my clenched fists pressed into my lips. They were sore from being pulled behind my back for who knew how long.
God, how long had he been in here?
Even though my prayers had failed me before, I prayed that it hadn’t been much longer than his assault.
He placed my folded pajamas at the end of the bed but I was too numb, in too much shock, to reach for them. He lifted the comforter up from the base of the bed, bringing it up over my shoulders.
My eyes were squeezed shut and I muffled my cries behind my fists. I just needed him to leave.
Just go.
“Good night, Genna.”
I heard as he shuffled to the other side of the room, listening as the door clicked open.
He locked the door when he came in.
Before he could pull the door shut behind him again, I heard the bedroom door across the hall open.
Ryan.
“Hello, Ryan,” he said, my door clicking shut but if I strained, I could still hear.
“What were you doing in Genevieve’s room?”
“Just brought her some water. She called out. I’ll see you in the morning, Ry.”
The hall grew quiet but after a moment, the door to this bedroom opened. My heart immediately began racing. I didn’t bother opening my eyes, hoping that he would just leave.
Just fucking leave.
“You alright, Gen?”
Ryan.
“I’m fine,” I whispered into the dark.
I kept my eyes shut but I could feel him staring at me.
Please don’t be like your father. Please, God, don’t be like your father. I can’t…
After an antagonizing, long moment, Ryan finally said, “Alright. Good night, Genna.”
This time, the click was deafening.
I woke up to blood on my inner thighs.
Freaking out, I put my hand down there, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for. I needed to see someone, but how?
Thank God I was on birth control. It was one of the things that was urged to female foster kids to be taken, and was therefore something I didn’t need permission from the foster family to get.
I quickly showered and dressed, trying to avoid my reflection in the mirror but it was of no use. Eventually the fog lifted from the mirror and, staring back at me, was a shell of who I recognized.
My eyes, which had the ability to be a unique swirl of colors, were a dull, lifeless green. My skin was pale, my lips drawn in a thin line. I had bags and shadows under my eyes because I didn’t sleep anymore.
Being placed in this home was my own personal hell and it was wreaking havoc on my body and mind. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could last another week here, let alone three.
I needed the emancipation to go through.
And while it hadn’t been on my radar in the least bit two days ago, I wanted to join the Marine Corps. It would, at the very least, get me out of Tennessee.
I finger combed my wet hair back from my face and pulled it into a low messy bun and, before leaving the bathroom, placed a well-worn baseball cap on top of my head. I couldn’t wear it in school, no, but it would at least help keep my hair from frizzing on the walk there.
I placed my cell phone in my back jeans pocket and left the bathroom, going back to the bedroom I used. Near the door sat my backpack. I shouldered it and turned back, moving toward the stairs. I ran down them and quickly moved out the front door. Thankfully no one had been around to stop me today.
A block out, I pulled my phone out to text Marie.
Can you take me to a clinic?
I couldn’t very well tell her he assaulted me last night but I could come up with a story.
Marie’s text pinged back nearly instantaneously. Absolutely. Are you ill?
I bit my lip as I walked, unsure how to weave this story.
Condom broke last night I finally typed out, tears threatening. Hell, she and everyone else thought I was some promiscuous teenage hussy, so it worked.
Never mind the fact that last night was the first time a penis had ever entered me. I’d been no stranger to playing and taking things a little too far, but never had I gone all the way.
A sob caught in my chest and I shook my head. I was done fucking crying.
I took a deep, calming breath, looking up from my phone as I walked. When my phone binged with an incoming text, I chose to ignore it for a few minutes. I needed to clear my mind.
Finally, I looked to see her reply. Ok. Do you need to go right away or after school?
Ideally… Can you meet me before school?
Alright. I’ll meet you there in fifteen.
When she arrived, she came in with me to the office to inform them I would be arriving to my classes later, and drove me to the nearest clinic. I didn’t have a primary doctor but I was still able to be seen quickly at a walk-in.
Marie sat in the waiting room while I was seen. After, on the way back to school, she said into the otherwise quiet car, “Let’s go to an early lunch.”
I frowned and looked over at her. “What about school?” She was always pushing me to apply myself, and now she was essentially allowing me to play hooky.
“I’d like to talk with you about a few things on your file.”
I shifted under my seatbelt. “Ok.”
Marie didn’t start talking until we were both nearly through with our lunches.
“Your emancipation is going to be granted.”
I couldn’t stop the smile from filling my face. It could have easily been the first smile I had in months. “That’s awesome.”
“Not every kid does,” she said, staring across the table at me, “but will you be looking to do a name change?”
It wasn’t something I had ever considered but…
In light of what was going on with him, I thought I’d be better off severing all ties to my former self once I stepped away from the system.
“I think so.”
Marie nodded and opened up her notebook, jotting something down. “You’ll have a hearing in a few weeks. We can work it so it aligns with the military.” She flipped her pen over to click the tip in and put the pen back down. “Is there anything—anything—else you’d like to discuss, Genna?”
I bit my lip and shook my head. “No.”
“Nothing at all?”
Again I shook my head.
“You understand that if I hear reports on things going on with you, it’s my responsibility to have them investigated, correct?”
I nodded.
“The clinic wants to further investiga—”
“It’s fine,” I interrupted her. “I’m fine.” I shook my head. “We were just rough.”
Marie considered me and tightened her lips. I didn’t think she believed me.
Finally though, she conceded. “Ok.”
Two weeks.
Two weeks of being used as his fuck doll.
Two weeks of rushing out of the house, not getting to school fast enough.
Two weeks of worrying about the health tests that had been done—both through the clinic, but also with the Marine Corps.
When the doctor at the clinic had asked what happened, because apparently I was bruised and torn, I simply told her my boyfriend and I had gone at it rough, and that the condom breaking was the only reason I came in to see her. She had insisted on a rape kit—just as I insisted I wasn’t raped and refused it.
Knowing—without actually knowing—that she had brought it up to Marie
, I knew the doctor didn’t believe my story, but other than the brief mention of it at lunch, Marie hadn’t brought it up again.
The tests from the clinic came back clean, thank God. Never had I thought I would be one of those girls who caught some STD or another after being assaulted. And God, if I got pregnant…
At least one thing was holding up for me, and that was my birth control. For now, anyhow.
…because my body continued to betray me every night.
It was embarrassing.
It was disgusting.
And I hated myself for it.
By day though, I tried hard to forget.
Thankfully, earlier in the week he left for another trip and hadn’t been back.
In addition to going to the clinic and working on being prepared for my upcoming finals, I completed a number of enlistment activities with the Marine Corps, including blood and urine tests—which didn’t bring up a surprise pregnancy—and a written test that told me what career choices I had.
I’m not sure what Marie told the courts, but everything was seemingly fast tracked there now, too. My emancipation was going through, making enlisting at seventeen possible. I chose an MOS—a military occupation specialty—and was given a ship date for late June, when I was originally told it could be two to twelve months before I left for boot camp.
I was going to be stuck in the current house for a couple weeks longer than I wanted but there was an end in sight.
I was studying at Starbucks one afternoon after school when Marie surprised me with a visit. We weren’t due for one for another week or so, before my emancipation hearing.
She pulled out the chair across from me, the same one she sat in a couple weeks prior, and watched as I finished a note in my finals study guide. When I looked over at her, she continued to stare at me.
“What?” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“Are you doing ok, Genevieve?”
I nodded quickly. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
Again, she stared.
“As we previously discussed, I’ve had some things brought to my attention that concern me. From multiple sources,” she added.
I shook my head. “I’m fine, Marie,” I said, giving her a smile. I hoped it didn’t come off as forced as it felt. “I promise. Just a few more weeks.”
“If you’re having issues, we can get you out, move up your hearing,” she pressed.
Without giving her the words she wanted, I said, “It’d be stupid to move out now, wouldn’t it? Where am I going to go?”
“Are you being hurt?”
“Where am I going to go?” I repeated, my brows up and my lips tight.
She and I had a mini-stare down before I added, “Even if everything were moved up, where would I go? So I get emancipated quicker than planned. Where am I going to go?” My voice was starting to raise, panic most definitely tinging the words. I forced myself to calm down and lower it again. “It’s not like they can change my ship date.”
“You’ll have resources, Genna. We can set you up in a hotel, or even find a family willing to take you on—”
“The whole point of emancipation is to no longer be someone else’s burden, Marie.”
“For emergency purposes, we can move up your hearing. I can’t help you if you don’t open up to me. After the clinic, I had no choice but to start an investigation.”
An investi—
Suddenly, his business trip made sense.
It wasn’t business.
He was removed from his own house during an investigation against me. Against him.
My breath hitched in my chest as I recalled the sad look Tracy gave me the other morning. She even tried hugging me before school this morning.
And then there was Ryan, and the fact that he, who didn’t speak to me much anyway, seemed to go out of his way to avoid me.
They knew.
Or, they knew that a case was pending against their loved one.
Did they resent me? Did they want me out of the house? I was breaking up their family…
“With only the clinic and some interviews with people you know, but without your cooperation, there’s not much that can be done,” she continued. “Genevieve. Do you need to be removed from the Johnson household?”
She was asking if I was being abused in the house, but not necessarily telling me I had to confess to it.
I could.
I could lay the truth out.
Or…
Or I could leave quietly.
But if I did that, if I didn’t open up, what would happen? He would go back home to his pretty wife and perfect son. They’d foster another kid. And what if that next foster kid was another girl? I hadn’t been the first kid in their house; surely I wouldn’t be the last.
If I kept quiet, what would it feel like to know some other girl could potentially go through what I did? Could I live with that guilt?
But your body likes what he does to it.
A shudder wracked through me at the thought.
Rape was rape.
I felt my body heat at that. I was raped.
I was raped.
It was easy to ignore. Easy to place the blame on myself and my betraying body.
I was raped, and if I don’t say anything, someone else could be raped too.
“Genevieve.”
My eyes, which had been focused on the table in front of Marie, lifted to hers. From staring, my eyes were rough and dry, but seeing the kindness in Marie’s own eyes brought on a sting of tears. I wouldn’t let them fall though.
“Yes,” I finally whispered. “I need to leave the Johnson house.” I fought against the need to vomit as panic started to settle in.
“Please.”
Three days after that conversation with Marie, my meager belongings in the black garbage suitcase that every foster kid knew, I was the proud owner of emancipation paperwork and a name change.
Gone was Genevieve Asher Spencer.
I was now Asher Spence.
With the help of Marie, I figured out a place to stay so I could finish out the last of my high school career. I had a cell phone in my own name, because I had to give back the other one to the Johnsons, and I found sleep to be a beautiful thing once I could do it without being worried someone was coming into the room I slept in.
Sure, I locked both locks on the hotel’s card entry door—essentially giving me three layers of locks with the keycard entry system, but I felt safer in this run-of-the-mill hotel than I did in the two-story beautiful house in a nice neighborhood.
I took the last of my exams and didn’t look behind me. I wasn’t going to the graduation ceremony, but my diploma would be mailed to Marie who would get it to me. She was the only person who knew where I was—and where I was going.
I spent a lot of time in that hotel room over my last weeks in Tennessee, watching television shows and movies, but I also went to a number of pool functions with the other Marine poolees—those enlisted to go to boot camp. There was only one other girl in the group, but she was pretty cool. She wasn’t shipping out until November though.
Pool functions were where all of us got together with our recruiters and did something fun. Sure, there was the running and the sit-ups, the whole getting ready for boot camp thing, but we also did activities like bowling, rock-wall climbing, and rappelling.
That had to have been my favorite.
I learned pretty quickly at these functions that I had a competitive nature to me.
For once, I was surrounded by people I wasn’t afraid to talk to. These people weren’t there to judge me. We all were together, knowing we were going off to do a bigger “thing.”
My last weeks in Tennessee flew by. When Marie showed up to the hotel with my diploma, I wasn’t entirely sure where to put it.
I was going to boot camp with the clothes on my back, and tossing everything else. I had no plans of coming back to Tennessee. And even if I di
d, what was I going to do? Rent out a storage locker for an eight by eleven piece of paper in a folded piece of cardboard?
It was just a piece of paper. It said nothing about who I was.
Hell, it was even made out to Genevieve Spencer.
I was no longer her.
I no longer had to be her. I still hadn’t confessed to what, exactly, he had done to me. A trial was to begin in the coming weeks, but I would be gone. When it came time for me to be interviewed, I stayed pretty tight-lipped.
It wasn’t rape if you liked it, and my body certainly liked it.
So I kept it pretty simple.
He sometimes came into my room at night and it left me uncomfortable.
I knew that the detectives weren’t thrilled with my answer. I could see on Marie’s face, that she didn’t believe my answer.
But that was the one I gave, and it was the one I was sticking with.
I rolled to my side in the hotel bed, reaching out to turn off the television, dousing the room in pitch black. My eyes still open, I took a deep breath as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark.
Tomorrow was a new day.
Tomorrow was the beginning.
Tomorrow, I was leaving.
I knew that boot wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.
Sure, they plied us with pizza at a hotel the night before throwing us on a plane, then packing us like sardines onto a yellow school bus. But I was prepared. Sgt. Kitters and the other recruiters weren’t shy in telling the poolees that the yelling was going to start the moment the bus stopped at Parris Island late in the night.
And oh did it ever.
On a full bus of girls my age, some looked timid and others looked bored, but the moment a female Marine came on board and started yelling, the timid ones looked ready to call it quits.
We were hoarded off the bus and toward yellow footprints, and from there to the true entrance.
“Passing through these hatches symbolizes your transformation from a civilian to a United States Marine!” she yelled at us and I felt a surge of pride course through my body.