None of the adults in my life catch on that X is raping and molesting me. Not my parents, not my grandparents, not my aunts or uncles, not my teachers or Sunday School teachers. I ask for help more than once. Not directly, because I don't know how to do that, and I can't tell on X. I try to reach out to my parents with the limited language and communication skills of my pre-adolescent brain.
On a Saturday morning a few months after X first rapes me, for example, my parents tell me X is coming over to babysit me for a few hours. My brother and sister are with friends. That means X and I will be alone. I throw myself to the kitchen floor and scream, "Noooo! No, no, no, no, no!" I kick and slap at the linoleum. I spin myself in circles.
"Get up off that floor now," my mother says between clenched teeth.
"No! I won't! I won't I won't I won't I won't I won't I won't I won't!" Tears stream from my eyes and into my ears.
Mother mutters and I hear her stomping up the stairs. I stare into the space between the floor and the bottom of the oven. There are twist ties, dessicated crumbs, and dust. I hear two pairs of feet stomping down the stairs. Mother has brought Dad.
"Kelly Ann!" my father says. I lie on my side and look up at him. I sniffle. Dad's teeth are clenched, too. His eyes bulge and his face is set in the expression of a stray dog about to bite. Mother stands beside him, her arms folded across her chest and a smug look on her face that says, "You're not getting away with this now, are you, kid?"
"Get up!" My dad says. "Now!"
"Please, Daddy," I cry. "Please not X. Please?"
"What is wrong with you?" Father growls. "Stop acting like a brat. X is coming and you are going to get along. You give him any trouble and you will be punished. So help me. Do you understand me?"
When X arrives, I am told to open the door and let him in. His eyes already have that light inside, the light that means danger. The light that means run. Hide. But there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Not even in my own house.
My parents have just bought their first VCR, a VHS rather than a Betamax. X's family just got one a few weeks ago. They're the only ones we know who also own a VCR. Watching movies at home is a novel concept, so my parents excitedly explain to X that there is a stack of movies downstairs and we are free to watch whatever we want. They give me stern looks before walking out the door and locking it behind them.
Downstairs, X sifts through the movies. He asks what I want to watch. I pick the most innocuous movie of the bunch, the black-and-white Disney movie, The Shaggy Dog.
X sits on the couch and pats the cushion beside him. I sit in my dad's ugly brown La-Z-y Boy rocker instead. I stare straight at the TV. But out of the corner of my eye, I see X still beckoning me to sit beside him. Soon he is standing in front of me, telling me to move over. I ignore him. He plops down in the chair anyway so he's half on my lap, half off. I'm wearing my favorite outfit: a white blouse with a tie neck and red buttons under a pair of tan corduroy overalls. X turns my face and kisses me with his metallic, dirty tasting tongue. Of course. He always kisses with his tongue.
I gulp and look away again. I feel my pulse beating in my ears, hear my heart bang at a frenzied tempo. He unties my blouse. Unfastens a button. He tries to slip his hand inside my shirt, but the overalls prevent it. So he unfastens one strap of my overalls.
That's when I run. I don't think about where I'm running to. I just run. Up and down the stairs, through every room in the house. My tri-level house never felt so small. I've just run into my room when X grabs me and knocks me down on the bed. I kick and yell and thrash as hard as I can, but his grip is firm. I hear a ripping sound. I look down to find a long tear in the seam of my pants. If my mother sees the tear, she will demand to know how it happened. But she will never believe me. She will accuse me of lying, and father will decide my punishment.
I quit resisting X to avoid anymore damage to my clothes. Before my parents return, I change my clothes, shoving the tan cords to the bottom of my dresser drawer. Later, I will bury them in the trash.
When they come home, my parents don't notice I'm wearing different clothes. They never notice that I never wear my favorite pants again.
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