arms pressed above my head. Then I’m back in the parking lot. I look down
at my white stomach, then up at my brother. His expression is unforgettable:
not anger or rage. There is no fury in it. Only pleasure, unperturbed. Then a
part of me understands, even as I begin to argue against it, that my
humiliation was the cause of that pleasure. It was not an accident or side
effect. It was the objective.
This half-knowledge works in me like a kind of possession, and for a few
minutes I’m taken over by it. I rise from my bed, retrieve my journal, and do
something I have never done before: I write what happened. I do not use
vague, shadowy language, as I have done in other entries; I do not hide
behind hints and suggestion. I write what I remember: There was one point
when he was forcing me from the car, that he had both hands pinned above
my head and my shirt rose up. I asked him to let me fix it but it was like he
couldn’t hear me. He just stared at it like a great big jerk. It’s a good thing
I’m as small as I am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him
apart.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to your wrist,” Dad told me the next
morning, “but you’re no good on the crew like that. You might as well head
back to Utah.”
The drive to BYU was hypnotic; by the time I arrived, my memories of the
previous day had blurred and faded.
They were brought into focus when I checked my email. There was a
message from Shawn. An apology. But he’d apologized already, in my room.
I had never known Shawn to apologize twice.
I retrieved my journal and I wrote another entry, opposite the first, in
which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If I’d asked
him to stop, he would have.
But however I chose to remember it, that event would change everything.
Reflecting on it now I’m amazed by it, not by what happened, but that I wrote
what happened. That from somewhere inside that brittle shell—in that girl
made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there was a spark left.
The words of the second entry would not obscure the words of the first.
Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his. There was a
boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page
or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness,
and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is