or dare” or “hide-and-go-get.” Their games often included alcohol, kissing, heavy petting, and sometimes they excluded clothing. While those games perplexed her and oftentimes troubled her, she was with her sister and her sister’s husband. She was with friends and a man she was falling in love with, as much as a fifteen-year-old could. She felt safe and she had her boundaries, but the lines around her were moving so subtly, she didn’t realize her boundaries were becoming invisible.
Games that included Pop, her sister, brother-in-law, and other friends soon became games she and Pop played alone. Sometimes, the games required a bed, but even those she believed she could handle. During heavy petting and kissing sessions, Pop had always stopped when she said, “No more.” She began to trust him, which meant to love him, and she thought nothing of going into the bedroom, lying in his arms, kissing and grinding in order to prove her affection.
Many days found them in the bedroom together, groping one another. At times, they tried to move to the next stage, but she was still a little girl, even if she acted like a woman. Her tears and pleas for him to stop reminded them both of that. Until the day he ran his hands between her legs and up and down her breasts. He wound his pelvis hard, like a merry-go-round, sustaining rhythm, holding her as if she were a ride he could flip off of. She held onto him too, gripping the sides of his arms, feeling his veins bulging under her grasp. She whispered, “Stop. No.”
He muffled her pleas with his lips, all softness. Warm air from his nose ricocheted against the side of her cheek. The next kisses were not soft, not warm. They were the pressing of lips, tongue into her. She pulled away, but the more she pulled the more he pressed. His hand, clenching, hurt the outside of her thigh. His pelvis rotated as he used one hand to restrain both her hands above her head. One kiss erupted into another before she caught her breath. Her mind screamed, That is enough, and then her mouth screamed, “That is enough,” and then her mouth couldn’t scream anymore and her hands couldn’t push anymore, and her legs were open with his thighs wedged between her thighs.
She attempted another “No,” but he, again, silenced her with his lips. She struggled to free her arms, but his hand remained locked around her wrists. Her body tensed, legs tightened, feet flexed, all preparing for impact. Then submission, when nothing more can be done. Only tears were there, pouring down the sides of her face, washing away the girl she was.
When he was done, when he let go, she ran into the bathroom, plunked on the toilet, and stared down. Blood. With so little knowledge about virginity and what happens when it is taken, she wondered from where the blood dripped.
After a knock on the door, there her sister stood, reaching out to comfort her. Momma cried, “Why didn’t you come for me when you heard me scream?”
“It’s all right,” her sister gently replied, “You’re okay,” with care. “This is the way it’s done.” She rubbed Momma’s back like a teacher, rubbing away tears attached to skinned knees and stubbed toes. She asked, “Do you need anything?”
Momma shook her head, “No,” even though she required much in that moment—an understanding, an apology, an admonition it was not her fault—but she asked for none of those things. She accepted, “This is the way it’s done,” even as she shook her head from side to side and cried.
“This is the way it’s done,” her sister had said, which meant it might have been done to her. Maybe it had been done to her other sisters too, maybe even her mother. “This is the way it’s done” played repeatedly in her mind. What happened, she knew, was wrong, but this is the way it’s done.
She repeated those words as she cleaned herself. She heard them as she returned to the living room where her brother-in-law, alone, stood. She searched the room for Pop, but he was gone. She searched for her sister, but she, too, could not be found. Her brother-in-law had been charged with taking her back to her mother’s on the handlebars of his bike.
As they rode, she clenched the handlebars, rocking from side to side, working to gain balance. She sat, ankles crossed against the stinging between her legs. Her brother-in-law whispered in her ear as the wind whipped across her face. He said many things, but all she heard was, “Don’t tell your daddy.” This is the way it’s done.
She did not tell the first time it happened, so she couldn’t tell each time that followed, each wrestling match in the bedroom, each ride on the handlebars of her brother-in-law’s bike.
The first time, she had not wanted it. This she knew for certain. But the second, the third, and each time that followed, she couldn’t be so sure. It didn’t take much for her to agree to that house, to that bedroom, to that bike. It was the way things were done.
Each time, she screamed. Each time, she cried, but those moments under Pop’s gaze seemed fair trade for tears that would later fall. With each encounter, Momma learned something all women eventually come to know. Loving a man means sacrifice, giving. The act of receiving, of taking, that is the gift he gives her. This is the way it is done.
After the first encounter with Pop, the home Momma had with her daddy no longer fit. Secrets, even the ones we keep from ourselves, have a way of making the familiar unfamiliar. After each rape, she tiptoed throughout her daddy’s house even when he wasn’t there. When he was home, she hid in her room, door ajar because no doors could be closed in Big Boone’s house.
Her period was a week late. Then two. Then three. After a month, she’d stopped counting. She feared something had broken inside her, like Pop’s mishandling had thrown her off track. At night, she lay on her back, surveying her body. Her breasts, always big and soft, had grown as hard as grapefruits. Her stomach, which used to be flat, had rounded into a hill under her sheet. Throughout the day, she suffered bouts of nausea, vomiting, then dry heaving when there was nothing left to expel. At night, there was the stabbing hunger, so severe she could not be still. Living in Deep Creek with so many brothers and sisters, hunger had rocked her to sleep many nights, but it had never gripped her as it did when her insides churned and groaned as if she’d forever be empty. She drank water, rubbed her stomach, tried to sleep. Nothing helped. The hunger, unwilling to be silenced, prompted her to smuggle slices of bologna into her room and nibble quietly as she listened for her daddy’s footsteps.
She soon decided the problem wasn’t her body, but her daddy’s home. Its rules had tightened around her like a shoe she’d outgrown. She was newly sixteen, but the time had come for her to travel that same road her brothers, sisters, and mother had traveled. She devised a plan. With only a week to set it in motion, she had little time to be afraid.
That morning, she stood at the living room threshold, her body bent, hovering over the line that separated her from her daddy. She knocked, though there was no door. He didn’t look at her when he belted, “What you want, Pretty?” The syllables collided as he leaned back in his chair, his legs propped on the coffee table, his eyes turned to the window. His belly, visible from behind the arm of the chair, looked like a sack of laundry. His plaid shirt was splattered with splotches of paint and weld burns that had singed through parts of the material. The legs of his pants were rolled, revealing shins and ankles that resembled swollen pork loins bulging through lines of butcher twine.
She walked to his chair and stood in front of him, careful not to obscure his view of the window. She held the paper in her hand, the one that announced she was one of a few students, a sophomore no less, chosen to attend the summer Upward Bound Program at Norfolk State University. She inched the paper toward him as he shooed her. His voice, booming, shook her and the paper she held. “What you want, girl?”
She
