The Girls I've Been(48)

“My best friend.” And then, digging for that truth: “Kind of my only friend.”

She takes me in. “You’ve talked to me about other friends, too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

“Wes knows. I mean, no. He doesn’t know. He just . . .” I swallow. It’s like the first few times in here with her all of a sudden, and I hate it so much, it heats my face up. “He knows I got hurt. He . . . got hurt, too.” I’m betraying him, telling her. I’m betraying something else, by putting the abuse in the past instead of the present.

She can’t tell anyone, I remind myself. She wouldn’t.

“I’m impressed that you were able to share that with him,” Margaret says. “That shows a lot of progress.”

“He figured it out,” I tell her, unable to take credit that isn’t earned. “There are scars,” I continue. “He saw them when we were swimming.”

“And you didn’t spin a story for him?”

“He would’ve seen through it.”

She waits, in that maddening way of hers. She’s got a whole thing about drawing me out. It didn’t work for a long time, and then it did, and now we’re here: surrounded by that tricky trust thing. We built it, she and I. Bit by bit, over ninety painful sessions. She helped me lay brick on the tilting ground, weighing it down so I could walk steady.

But I don’t feel so steady anymore.

“I didn’t want to lie to him,” I finally say. “He’s got scars, too. To lie about it . . .” I just shake my head. It had felt so wrong. Like stepping away from something sacred and into something sticky-hot and putrid.

“So he knows more about you than most people,” Margaret says.

I nod.

“Do you want to kiss him?”

I can’t look at her or move. The answer’s not just yes or just no. It’s just . . .

“It’s okay to have a crush.”

“It’s not that simple,” I mutter before I can stop myself, because of that tricky trust thing. I’m used to speaking about stuff in here, but I don’t talk about some things out of choice rather than protection. And I’ve never talked about it because of that swirl of shame and the sour taste of bile that rises in my throat every time I think about it. Yet I find myself on the edge suddenly, like I’d planned to tell her today, even though I hadn’t. “I’m not good with that stuff,” I say, paddling desperately away from it like a kid who never learned how to swim but jumped into the deep end anyway.

“What stuff?”

“Kissing. Flirting. All that stuff.”

“Well, considering you’re just getting started with all that stuff, wouldn’t you say that’s acceptable?”

It lies there like a dead animal: assumption roadkill. And I don’t know how to ask her what I want to ask. The blood is pulsing in my face, and I am lost in the wanting to know and not knowing how to ask.

How to admit it.

“I don’t want to hurt him.”

She’s spent enough time with me—ninety sessions’ worth—to see the buried truths beneath those words.

“Why do you think you’d hurt him?”

“Because I want to kiss him, too.”

Her eyebrows twitch—the closest thing I’ll get to a frown her placid-like-a-pond face can muster up. “You’re not talking about emotional hurt, are you, Nora?”

I can’t look at her, so I stare down at my hands. I rub my pointer and middle finger against the pad of my thumb, back and forth, back and forth.

The silence stretches, and she lets it. She waits in this little pocket of trust we created for me to find the words, because I’ll never find the strength.

“Before my stepdad, there was a mark. Joseph. He owned a bunch of car dealerships. My mom had him moving us in two months after they met.

“He was always looking at me. And then he didn’t just look, he . . .” I twist my fingers in the air, this helpless, shameful little gesture, a shrug that says what I can’t. It’ll take until session 117 before I can say the words he molested me, but I don’t know that at the moment. All I know is that I can’t say it, even though I need help with it, because I’m scared what it makes me. Because I am terrified of how I might react if Wes gets too close before I’m ready or prepared. “At first, I just froze. It was like it was happening to me, but not to me. I could see it, I could feel it, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I was . . . not there. And then, outside, someone’s car alarm went off. It was like I’d been playing dead and that sound woke me up.”

Margaret waits. I still can’t look at her. If I tell her, what will she think?

She’s not normal. That’s what the last woman exposed to the results of my fight-or-flight instincts said.

“I tried to pull away. He was too strong. My mom’s knitting basket was sitting next to the couch. It was the only thing close enough to grab. I had to get him to stop.”

Margaret can’t keep her pond-placid mask from slipping as the realization fully grasps her. “You defended yourself with knitting needles?”

“It made him stop because he had to try to pull them out of his leg,” I say, and it’s a very simple, very neat way to talk about it when there had been nothing simple or neat about it. It’d been bloody, and the needles were thin because they were from Mom’s delicate work, but they were still knitting needles, so they were dull and I wasn’t very strong. I’d dragged them up his thigh as far as I could and hit something that had made it gush. He’d howled in pain, and I’d been so sick and scared at once, an overload of adrenaline as the shaky run, hide, fight got reversed to fight then hide then run.