Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
DAKOTA
The glow of my cracked phone screen illuminated my face through the darkness, my fingers circled tight around the device. Silent tears slipped down to my temples as I stared at the message for the millionth time.
Mom
Dinner will be at 6:00. Please be early
Tomorrow was Thanksgiving, and I was nowhere near ready to go back to that fucking trailer. Thoughts of Anthony had been tormenting me ten times more than usual this week, giving me a constant pit in my stomach, a constant lump in my throat.
It felt like everyone could see it on my face. Like that terrible word was written on my forehead.
Incest.
But nobody knew. Nobody could tell.
I had to remind myself of that constantly. Nobody knows. It’s okay. Hands clenched into fists, eyes darting side to side, terrible thoughts swarming my brain as I sat in all my classes.
I almost wished there wasn’t a word for what he’d done to me, for what I’d let him do.
I didn’t like reducing the complexity of all my formative years into a word as disgusting as that.
Into a porn category. Into something people got arrested for.
Everyone knew that word, but nobody knew what it meant to me.
They didn’t understand how twisted it really was in my brain. How many knots it’d tied in my ability to process anything. How disfigured I’d become after growing around this misshapen core. Nothing was neat or tidy or easy to explain to anyone.
They didn’t understand just how much shame came with it.
I twisted under my covers, shoving my phone away so I couldn’t see it anymore.
I was breathing hard into the pillow, my tears making the cotton wet, and my face was hot. That unrelenting shame poured over me along with each and every awful memory.
I didn’t stop him.
Why didn’t I stop him?
Anxiety gripped my chest. This panic attack had been brewing all week, building up bigger in my skull every time I tried to push it off. But I was running out of time.
I couldn’t stop thinking and thinking and thinking about all of it.
Every time he’d made me orgasm. All the sounds I’d made—not always bad ones. Good ones. And I hadn’t really wanted it at the time, but I needed him to stay, and I could get through anything except that. I needed someone to protect me.
Well, he didn’t.
Crawling out of bed and towards the bathroom, my stomach turned with nausea, the carpet burning my knees until I got to the linoleum, my phone forgotten in the hallway.
Tightness engulfed my entire body and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t survive knowing this.
I squeezed my eyes shut as my throat closed, pulling my hair with shaky fingers.
The memories shoved me further and further into the darkest corner of my skull.
All I could do was wish that none of it had ever happened.
I wished it with every single beat of my heart, and it was unbearable to know that wishing wouldn’t erase the feeling of my brother’s hands on my body. Nor the feeling of my hands on his.
Would it have been easier if he’d been violent?
Would I hate myself less?
I doubled over, palms pressing to the cold laminate.
Answers to those questions didn’t exist. Did I even want them to?
Was this why I wanted men to hurt me during sex? To fucking force me? Because he hadn’t?
My shame drowned me, suffocated me, killed me.
Anthony hadn’t ever been rough with me. He just wanted his younger sister sexually, and maybe in his head, that was exciting enough all by itself.
Hot tears poured down my cheeks as I choked on my sobs. The world was spinning out of control, my vision narrowing, my chest crushing itself. And there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t change this.
It happened.
I didn’t stop him.
And I didn’t tell anyone.
Those were the inarguable truths.
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
Fawn, fawn, fawn, fawn, fawn.
Let him do it. Over and over and over. Be nice to him or else something even worse will happen. Be agreeable or he’ll leave.
I wish I was different. I wish his mom never went to prison. I wish he never came to live with us. I wish he never made me love him. I wish I never trusted him. I wish I didn’t let him do what he did. I wish none of it ever happened.
My thoughts spiraled and spiraled and spiraled as I crumpled down onto the floor, unable to breathe or think about anything other than my regret and shame. The voice in my head just repeated the same fucking thing over and over.
I wish it didn’t happen.
It was all I could think. I was stuck in the same loop I’d been caught in for years. The one I had no clue how to break free of.
The wishing consumed me, and I couldn’t stop it.
How was I supposed to fight against that thought?
I wish it didn’t happen.
I fucking wish that more than anything on Earth.
I was devolving into some lesser thing, falling to my base instincts.
I couldn’t come to terms with this trauma, because I couldn’t even think about it without feeling like this.
Every time I thought about my brother, I thought about all the bad things he did to me, and then I thought about how I never told him to stop.
I thought about the girl in the grainy Photo Booth videos, grateful to have a new older brother who protected her from their father as best as he could.
I thought about the girl posting on her Instagram after her high school classes, longing for a different life, wishing she never had to go home.
I thought about the girl with a pit in her stomach on her eighteenth birthday because she knew it was going to end soon. He’d graduate college and move away and be done. How fucking sick was that?
And I knew it wasn’t consensual. I knew that.
I know that.
But my brain wouldn’t keep reminding me how many times I let him fuck me, and I never uttered a word against it. Didn’t say no. Didn’t say stop. Just let it happen.
Over and over and over.
Turning my childhood bedroom into a place stained by nightmares.
Darkness infiltrated every crack in the thin walls, every dusty corner, every hiding place, getting thicker and heavier until there was nowhere to go to escape it, until no more parts of me were left untouched.
Even now, when I saw someone driving the same car he used to have, it made my stomach drop. How many times had he ruined me in that car? Every driving lesson that ended with a coerced blowjob, every trip to the beach that ended with me getting fucked in the backseat.
The one person I loved most in the world taking my love and using it against me.
Punishing me with my love.
I hated the truth of that statement. Hated that I’d loved him that much. More than both of my parents, more than my friends. It felt like he was the only one who actually saw me, the only one who cared about protecting me. And I couldn’t stop loving him, even when he hurt me.
It was all a lie.
Tears rolled down my temples as I stared at the ceiling, making my hair wet. I was lying on my back, my spine pressed to the linoleum.
But my chest was completely motionless, my ribs frozen.
The world was closing in on me, and it was like my brain had forgotten how to send the breathe signal to my lungs.
Pressure built in my skull, dark spots dancing in my vision, my fingers tingling and my face stiff.
All my blood had left my extremities as my body tried to save itself from a trauma that was no longer happening.
Somehow, I managed to gasp in a single breath.
But then the same sensation enveloped me again. It terrified me. Was it possible for my brain to actually stop functioning like that? Forget how to tell my lungs to breathe?
More pressure was building in my brain and my face, a rope encircling my skull and pulling tighter.
Tomorrow, I would have to look at him again.
Tomorrow, I would have to be in the same shitty trailer he’d fucked me in.
The skin on my face felt tight, a needle-like sensation crawling over my cheeks and my lips.
My hands were stuck with my fingers bent into claws, and my lungs were broken.
They wouldn’t take in any air. I stared, wide-eyed, at the ceiling.
Seconds were ticking past and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even try.
Terror was encroaching on all my thoughts. I can’t do this.
A tiny sip of air entered my lungs.
I wished Micah was here. I just wanted him to hold me, to fix me.
But I couldn’t reach for my phone, couldn’t text him, couldn’t do anything except lay here like a corpse, like my panic was so huge that my entire body had completely shut down, all unconscious processes no longer functioning.
It’d swallowed me whole, and it was going to kill me now.
I would suffocate to death, but not underwater like I thought, not at Mason’s hands.
At Anthony’s hands.
His hands were all over me, even now, even here in this trailer he’d never been in.
It didn’t matter where I went, because he was always here inside of me. Didn’t matter how far or how fast or how hard I ran, because I would never make it deep enough into the forest to be safe from him. He could always find me.
Always.
He was in my blood.
I would be tied to him forever. I couldn’t change my DNA.
I choked on an inhale, then tried to launch myself upward. My vision was going dark as I forced myself into the hallway where I’d dropped my phone. With my stiff fingers, I fumbled to try and call Micah. The dull drone of my phone ringing was muffled in my ears.
“Dakota?”
The sound of his voice broke something inside of me, forcing me out of this suffocation, right back into hyperventilation. My head hurt like someone had dropped a weight on my skull, the pain pulsing in my forehead.
“Help me,” I squeaked out, tears dripping all over my phone screen, forming little rainbows around their edges.
“Hold tight. I’m coming.” I could hear the sounds of him rushing out of his house and I slumped down onto the carpet, right next to the spot where I’d vomited weeks ago. Micah had to save me then, too. I’m so fucking pathetic.