Sticky situations.

I've been working through this story-telling sort of thing. This is about as far as I've gotten thus far. I wrote it about 3 years ago, probably some point in the summer of 2004, although I unfortunately didn't put the date on it.

TW for sexual assault

Feedback? (ok, so on an invisible blog I won't get any. But perchance?)

They always teach you at school how to be street-smart. What to do in a “sticky situation”. Everybody gets back their test papers at the end of the safety unit in health class; everybody’s passed, and even done really well. They’ve all filled in the blanks correctly: they know how to act, what to do, what to say. The teacher heaves  a sigh of relief. Another group of students headed off into the big scary world, and none of them would get into trouble, right? No, of course they won’t, the teacher assures herself; they all got an A on their test papers.

If only real life was about filling in the blanks.

Funny. I got an A in health class, and look where it’s landed me. No less lost than if I hadn’t taken the class at all. Maybe more lost. As I lie here and write this, I wonder how I’ll make it through the week; the weekend gave me just enough time alone to realize how scared I am. And everything I’m feeling right now goes against everything I’ve learned.

Let’s jump back to last September. I was your typical grade nine student; a little overwhelmed at the reality of being in high school, knowing that it was time to get a boyfriend, get into trouble, and that sort of thing. That was what everybody else did, right?

I met him at lunch, my third week at that school. All of my friend were off at a club that I hadn’t joined, and I was all alone. He came up to my table; he thought I was my twin sister, who he had met a couple of days earlier, and we started talking. He was a really sweet, great, funny guy, and pretty good-looking too. In fact, he was a model. He showed me some of his pictures. Without that spattering of acne he wore that day, this guy was gorgeous. Just for laughs, he showed me his driver’s license photo, which was very different from his modeling headshots. I knew, after seeing these photos, that I’d found a goldmine of a guy. Not only was he a model, but he was eighteen, and could drive!

From then on, he always joined me and my friends at our lunch table. One of my friends seemed just as infatuated with him as I was; she was always flirting with him. She had a better sense of humour than I did, and my sister was prettier. Still, even though he always joked around and flirted with them more, I was the one he always liked to talk to. Oddly, one of my other friends never spoke around him. Back then, I was really confused by this, but now I know that she knew something we never noticed; he wanted more than your average guy.

As the semester went on, we began to talk less and less about real stuff, and he started telling me more and more dirty jokes. We had used to talk about philosophy, and that sort of stuff, a lot; having just had a mental breakdown, I was really interested in the meaning of life. But philosophy was all over with him; that just wasn’t what he was interested in anymore.

By November, all he ever wanted to talk about was his sex fantasies, particularly one where he’d use strawberries and whipped cream as a sex toy with a helpless virgin. He seemed to like the whole ‘damsel in distress’ sort of idea. I found these fantasies to be rather disturbing, so I stopped hanging out with him. I started to spend my lunch hours in a corner of the library doing homework with my friends. I ate my lunch as quickly as I could in the bathroom, just before class started. I gave him the cold shoulder in the halls between classes. I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t like the way he talked; he’d think I was being a baby.

In February, I turned fifteen. I guess he thought that this made a real difference to how I would feel and act, because he started following me around again. I found this to be a little weird, but I really couldn’t care less. He was just another boy who liked me; creepier than some, sure, but after all, he did go to my school. I wouldn’t tell him where I lived or anything; I wasn’t that stupid. But he couldn’t do anything to me while we were at school, so I considered myself to be safe.

Safe from what, I don’t know. It never even bothered me that much that he persistently followed me, not even when, every so often, he would sneak up and grab me from behind. He’d just sort of pounce on me, then laugh. I never really expected it, and I’d generally shriek or squeal a little. He thought that this meant that I liked it, although I really really didn’t.

It was only when he started to try to grab my chest or reach down my pants that I realized that things were really wrong.