One of them used to tell me that they didn’t pick on me because I was different or in love with girls, it was just because I was me. I could never understand what the difference was. She could never understand why persecution is violating, and not a legitimate hobby.

The alien hands grab my ribcage, the shield for my heart, and leave more bruises. A place no one sees, but you can’t ignore the ones of others eyes.

Every day in the locker room they watched me. Watched me undress an put on my gym clothes. I was quick out of vulnerability, but so quick that they would know I was scared.

It was another student from my sophomore class who I barely knew, he narrowed his eyes at me and sunlight glanced off his mousy brown grown out buzz cut and said “Who are you talking to?”
“What do you mean? I’m talking to Alex -” I turned back to Alex and stretched my hand toward him. Alex looked surprised as well and Maggie looked bored.
“What are you talking about – there’s no one there!” He was shouting.

I froze. I didn’t know what to do or what to think. My first instinct was that he was wrong, it was another cruel joke. But there was a small group behind him, about 8 students, and I could tell from their faces that they agreed with him. The boys looked at me like I was stupid or crazy and the girls looked scared. My mouth was open, my eyes huge and I could feel my face drain to white. They kept staring at me as though they expected an explanation but I couldn’t give them one. I knew they were right and I couldn’t handle it.

Not turning to Alex and Maggie, not meeting the eyes of the group, I bolted in the opposite direction. Past the Aud/Vis department, over the smoker’s bridge and into downtown I ran full tilt. I stopped on the wooden bridge that hides a 60 year old Coke ad. I stared into the water wishing it would tell me what was happening, what was real, what I had become. I dug my fingernails into my temples as though I could stimulate reality. I wept and sobbed and didn’t care how many people scrambled from me or looked at me like I was mad. I was mad, obviously, I had been delusional for years. My best friends were not real. They didn’t exist. No one else knew them and I had spent years walking around playing and talking with them, while everyone watched me. Alone and talking to myself. I was crazy. Completely crazy. I couldn’t cope with it. I couldn’t go back to that school where everyone despised me and knew I was insane. I couldn’t do it. I sat on a bench on the bridge and cried for three more hours until school was almost out. I walked back and hid in a quiet corridor until I saw my grandfather pull up. I walked out to him and got in in the station wagon.

“How doin’ little britches?” His jovial voice boomed off the brown nagahide interior. He smelled of concrete mix before you add water. His cowlick was growing wild. His hair was a medium gray, it never became white.

“It was a bad day Papa.” I did my best to not cry, it was very hard, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Papa. I already felt hopelessly weak and I thought if I cried he would agree with me. He wouldn’t have but it certainly would’ve ruined his mood. The seat was hot to my hands and warm through my jeans.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was gentle but firm, like always. Then he tried his old mainstay for distracting me when I was sad “I got a new book this morning…”

I can’t remember what the book was, or how he felt the author was handling the motivation of the main characters, or what homework y siblings had when they came home from school.

What I do remember of the next two weeks is sitting in classes like a zombie; white, silent and entirely unresponsive. Teachers would insult me to my face, like usual, “Are you really too stupid to do your homework, are those brains just a sham?” but no matter what they said I didn’t retaliate. Didn’t even make eye contact. There was no disdainful scathing belligerence in me. I felt dead and ruined and I didn’t care what anyone did to me anymore. Chris had raped me, and I realized afterward that I really hadn’t deserved it. I had been working up the resolve to tell the police about it, had been trying to form my words properly so that I could get them out without breaking down entirely, and then this realization.

That Alex and Maggie weren’t real. If they weren’t real how did I know anyone or anything else was? The two people I had so many memories with, and now I knew that all of those memories were really only mine. How could I prove that Chris had raped me? I knew that he had, the way that I knew my grandmother’s smile was real; it was something that effected my heart. Hallucinations had never effected my heart. But if I told about Chris, and they discovered – as they would of course – that I was crazy – why would they ever believe me? Why wouldn’t they believe him? He was a coward, he would never admit to it. What were my chances?

The school counselor wouldn’t believe that the basketball players groped me – I was making it up because that was the attention that I wanted, that the girls insulted me with homophobic slurs – I was outright lying. And the intern counselor even created a bizarre fiction that I was fantasizing about killing the football team with AK-47s. That was hilarious because I liked the football team and had only a vague notion that an AK-47 was some kind of gun. They could believe all that, why would they ever believe that I was raped? I must have made it up, dreamed it, or simply had a delusion.

After about two weeks of this merry-go-round of insanity that my head was playing I told papa I didn’t need a ride home from school that Thursday. I wandered around town for hours, sobbing so hard I couldn’t talk and could barely see where I was. It was a gray day and as the sky got darker large drops began to fall. By 7 pm it was a torrential downpour and I was a miserable, soaked, remnant of humanity. I cried aloud as though I was being beaten as I walked back to school, back to hell.

I made a collect call home and my dad answered, he said he would come get me. He arrived quickly, less than ten minutes later, and I got in his soft brown sedan. I was still moaning and coughing and crying and couldn’t stop. I remember babbling about how I had to kill myself, it was the only thing I could do, and I repeated that over and over. For whatever reason, my dad was relatively calm about it. He continued to watch the shiny streets flicker in the dark and asked “Why do you have to kill yourself?” further maddened I cried aloud “I can’t do this anymore!” That didn’t mean much to him, but he circumvented it. “What would have to change for you to not kill yourself?” I laughed and cackled madly, like a cartoon witch who’s had too much XXX moonshine. “Take me out of that school!” We were parked in the garage at that point. It felt strange to hear the rain hitting the house, but not the car, felt strange to be physically detached but somehow still feel as though I was being bruised.

My dad told me to go to my room, but said it in an astonishingly tender way, and I didn’t feel attacked, only mollified. He realized that my room was where I always hid when I was scared, but didn’t know that I had been violated there. I took off my wet clothes and put them in the hall laundry basket. Pulled on flannel pajamas, and their gentleness felt abrasive, because I didn’t deserve kindness, even from fabric. I paced and scratched the skin off my scalp until it was entirely a bloody sore with dark hair matted over it. I dug my fingernails into the part of my hair and ripped down, epidermus and blood building under my fingernails until my fingers were covered in blood. The rainwater had aggravated the skin, and the stress I was feeling made me want to tear myself up. I wasn’t becalmed after the tearing, but oddly felt as though I had accomplished something, had fought off some difficulty.

After studying ‘really old stuff’ I’d live far away from anyone, in a tower – so I could see people coming – with a cat and a refrigerator. And I would sit in the tower and write books until someday, I died. That was my plan.

But of course, none of it happened that way.