Liosh squeezed her hand, not speaking but letting her know without words he was listening.
“So, Amanda and her friends teased me so much I started starving myself. By the time my Junior year rolled around, I was actually a lot thinner.” She sighed. “Which seemed to attract the attention of some of the boys, you know.”
Liosh squeezed her hand again.
“So one of the boys was Jason Sykes.” For a moment the name seemed to stick in her throat but somehow Melli made herself go on. “He was…what you call the ‘big man on campus.’ The quarterback of the football team, you know? Everybody thought he walked on water. And then Amanda came to me and said that he wanted to take me—little nobody Melli—to the Junior Prom.”
“I take it he was not all he seemed,” Liosh said, with a growl in his deep voice.
“No.” Melli shook her head. “But I didn’t know that then. I thought he was amazing. He was so big and tall and handsome and popular and suddenly he was paying me all this attention. He walked me back and forth to classes, held my hand in the hallway, told all his friends I was his girlfriend…” She shook her head, remembering how completely her younger self had been taken in by Jason’s load of bullshit.
“He got you to trust him,” Liosh said in a low voice.
She nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. And…” She cleared her throat. “And he got me to agree to give him my virginity on the night of the Junior Prom. That was important to him—that he got my consent,” she added. “So I couldn’t say afterwards that he’d taken advantage of me. He swore he would make it so good for me—swore that my first time would be special—unforgettable.” She shook her head. “He was right—I can’t forget it, no matter how hard I try.”
Liosh looked down for a moment at their clasped hands as though he was dreading what must be coming next.
“I am guessing he was not…not gentle with you,” he said at last.
“No,” Melli whispered. “No, he…he wasn’t.”
She took a deep breath, trying to continue. She had never told anyone all the details of what had happened to her that night. Not even her therapist—not even Jodi, though she had told her sister more than anyone else—and now she wished she hadn’t.
She had an idea that her own experience had somehow messed up her older sister too, in a way. It wasn’t long after the rape that Jodi had started dating that awful, stiff, buttoned-down James who seemed so completely wrong for her. It was like she was repressing a part of herself in response to what had happened to Melli, if that made any sense.
Jason Sykes had ruined more than one life on the night of her Junior Prom, she thought distractedly. She wondered if he’d be proud, if he knew.
“He took me to a hotel room after the dance,” she said, surprising herself by abruptly continuing her story. “He kept talking about how I would never forget what he was going to do to me. I was getting really nervous and wishing I could back out but he kept reminding me that I’d already told him yes. ‘You promised, babe,’—that’s what he said. ‘You promised and you can’t back down on a promise.’”
“Of course, you can!” Liosh sounded angry. “A female has a right to change her mind at any time about giving herself to a male.”
“I know that now,” Melli said calmly. “After years of therapy to process what happened. But back then I was so young—I didn’t know anything. Hadn’t been with anyone.” She shook her head. “I didn’t feel like I could say ‘no.’ So I let him take me to the hotel and that was where…” She had to swallow hard. “In the hotel room things got…rough.”
“He hit you?” Liosh’s voice was flat, as though he was trying to state the facts without giving way to fury.
“Among other things.” Melli looked down at their hands again. “He tied me up—tied my hands behind my back and when I started to cry, he gagged me. He laughed at me too—called me a ‘stupid little slut’. ‘You really thought I liked you, you stupid little slut?—that was what he said. He told me the only part of me worth a damn was what was between my legs.” She shook her head. “He acted like he’d earned the right to that…that part of me by treating me so nice around all the popular kids the past couple of weeks. Like being my ‘boyfriend’ earned him the right to do anything he wanted.”
She spoke in a cool, unemotional voice now—just a robot telling a story that had happened to someone else. She knew she was disassociating from the facts, but that was all right—sometimes you needed to disassociate—sometimes you needed to take yourself away.