All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(80)

Rape victims usually just say he, instead of the suspect’s name. He did this. Then he did this. She called him by a nickname, even though the prosecutor kept trying to get her to say his legal name. Finally she looked at me and said, “Can you put in that Kellen is Jesse Joe Barfoot, Jr.?”

She spoke in this small, soft voice, and she had a strange way of talking. Sometimes she used big words she didn’t know how to pronounce, and she inhaled and exhaled in odd places, not in between sentences, but in the middle of words.

She didn’t sound upset, but even in statutory cases, the girls want to avoid details. She was happy to give them. Leaning back in her chair, she crossed her legs, swung her foot, and told the court everything.

“First we kissed. Kellen tastes like wintergreen. He kissed my mouth for a long time and then he kissed my neck. It tingled all down me. He lifted up my shirt. Slow. He slipped his hand under it and touched my tits. Held them in his hands. Rubbed his thumbs over my nipples. Kellen has beautiful hands. Big and strong. Rough from working in the garage.”

It was unsettling to listen to a little girl saying things like that and she enjoyed describing it.

It didn’t get really bad until she started in with the graphic details. In police reports, often victims will be asked to describe their attacker’s genitals and things like that, but in depositions, there’s less of that, unless the defense or prosecution hinges on some identifying feature. Miss Quinn didn’t even wait for the attorneys to ask her for details.

“He still has his foreskin. He was born at home and his mother didn’t have him circumcised.” She stumbled on the word, inhaling in the middle of it, and looked at me. “Is that right? Circumcised?”

When I didn’t answer, she went on. “My hand won’t go all the way around his cock. Unless I squeeze hard. Kellen likes that.” She brought her hand up to demonstrate, fingers held in a semicircle. The girl’s guardian put her head in her hands and cried. Quietly at first and then louder. Almost in response, the girl let the hand she’d held up drift to her breast. Just for a moment, maybe not even aware she’d done it.

“My * was very wet. I was sitting on his desk, my legs open. He pushed against me, not hard. Rubbing against me. Then he slid his cock into me. It hurt a little, but he went back and forth in me. Every stroke, his cock was rubbing against my clitoris.” She struggled with the word, said it three times to get it right. Or she said it three times to shock people. “That made it not hurt. It felt good.”

Her guardian sobbed so loudly that the prosecutor said, “Miss Quinn, would you like to take a break?”

“No.” That time there was no mistaking that she was trying to provoke a reaction. She moved her hand off the arm of the chair and pressed it between her thighs. “I wrapped my legs around him. Held on tight to him. He moved faster, going in and out of me. His cock was so hard, swollen up in me. I felt how close he was getting. I remember saying his name. Kellen. Like this: ‘Harder, Kellen. Fuck me harder, Kellen.’” That came out in little breathy pants. “He did. Right as my * clenched up on him, he exploded.”

I looked up at her, but I was the only one who did. The lawyers all had their heads bent over their legal pads, but none of them were taking notes. Why bother, when they could get a transcript of it from Penthouse Letters?

The girl sat back in her chair, smiling like an angel.

“Miss Quinn, would you please—” The prosecutor cleared his throat.

“He never raped me. I love him. I want to marry him.”

I hesitated with my fingers over the keys.

“Type it. That’s part of my statement,” she said.

“Miss Quinn. Do you understand that this will be entered into the evidentiary record and legally, your signature indicates that you swear this account to be true?” the prosecutor said.

“I understand. Will Kellen see it?”

The prosecutor and the public defender swapped nervous looks.

“I want him to see it,” she said.

Definitely one of the more disturbing depositions I ever took, and I didn’t for a minute think her testimony would convict him. All the defense needed to do was put that girl in front of a jury and let her do her little reenactment.





9

AMY

Fall 1983

When Mom finally came home from Powell, she brought Wavy and Donal.

The whole first month, they slept together in the other twin bed in my room. They didn’t have anyone else, besides us, and I wasn’t sure how they felt about us.

For a while, we lived in a circus with Mom as the ringleader. In the middle of the night, I often heard her on the phone with one of her friends, or fighting with Dad. Once I woke up to Mom yelling, “Restitution is important! Wavy deserves something for what happened.”

All of Val and Liam’s property was tied up in the mess with the drug bust. Most of the property wasn’t even in their names, and the government confiscated it all. Mom wanted to sue Kellen, but he was indigent, dead broke with a public defender.

All along Mom had said, “If he actually cared about her, he’d plead guilty, so she wouldn’t have to testify.”

He pled guilty to one count of Criminal Sexual Penetration of a Minor under Sixteen and was sentenced to ten years. Mom still wasn’t satisfied.

“The S-O-B who stole her innocence gets to walk free after ten years,” she told her book club. It wasn’t much of a book club by then, more like Mom’s personal support group.