Seventh grade sucked ass. Like, major ass.
The first sexual abuse happened just after the start of the school year, and consequently, my memory of most of the year’s events has been totally wiped clean. But I recall certain motifs, and a handful of incidents that were either minorly traumatic, hilarious in a pathetic way, or seemingly mundane. One of those events that fell into the first camp happened on a Monday at school, after a weekend spent with Michael N.
There’s no clear picture in my head for what happened while we were together, but I recall that on Sunday, after he’d left, I went ahead and completed my geometry homework for the next day. It surely wasn’t perfect, but it was done. Methodically organized in a Microsoft Word document I printed off with a small piece of dolphin clip art filling the blank space at the bottom of the righthand column (Mrs. Martinez, I’m so sorry I was like this).
Upon getting to school the next day, I walked into the classroom and began unpacking my stuff, and set my homework paper on top of our thin paperback workbooks. While I was preoccupied finding the exact pencil I wanted, one of my classmates walked over and lifted my paper from my desk, and took it to his and sat down and started copying the answers. It took a few moments for me to realize what happened, and just when I walked over to retrieve my paper, our teacher walked in, and assumed I’d handed my paper over to be copied.
She asked me to step into the hallway with her and explain why I would try and cheat like that, and I just… froze. I didn’t defend myself, I barely spoke at all. Under heavy breathing and clenched eyes leaking tears, I tried to explain that it was an accident, and that I didn’t want him to do that. I didn’t specify who or what.
My teacher that year, Mrs. Martinez, loved me, and was good friends with my mom, as most of my teachers were. As such, I think she showed me some pity, and told me to not do that again, and took me back into the classroom to start the lesson. In my immediate memory, this event wasn’t all that noteworthy, aside from being a minor frustration during a terrible year of junior high school in a class I didn’t care for all that much.
But as I grew up, and gathered a better idea of my life and experiences, I couldn’t help but linger on this moment as one that held more significant weight. It reminded me of another time a teacher took me into the hallway in tears, and showed me a grace that I didn’t understand I deserved. Unlike my experience in fourth grade, though, this didn’t have a clean ending. Its subtext was far more insidious.
One of the scariest things about recalling abuse and going back to times like this is the propensity to be sucked into that world, and to criticize your former self for not having said anything or done anything more to protect yourself. This one moment in particular feels like it would’ve just taken a pinprick at the fabric of spacetime to completely alter the trajectory of my life; what if I had confided in Mrs. Martinez I was being hurt constantly? That I was being taken advantage of by my friends and peers? That I wanted to die every day and didn’t know what to do about it because that’s what everyone does, isn’t it?
I came so close to escape. And yet, I didn’t get there.
My only escape from hot classrooms, cruel whispers, and overwrought stress was going home to what felt like a pot on a stove whose fuel was running unfettered to the burner. That’s to say that I had to make my own escapes in whatever I could. I’d play Roller Coaster Tycoon obsessively, I’d binge read Wikipedia articles on anything and everything - the more tables and graphics, the better - I’d sit on the couch and scroll through all 500 channels on the fancy new cable box for at least an hour, I’d make and spill cup noodles on myself and ruin my t-shirts, anything that felt like it was under my control.
Because nothing else was under my control. Not my body, objectified in the truest sense and turned into a thing of amusement for tormentors. Not my schoolwork, dictated to me by teachers and overwhelming in apparent scope. Not my own mind, boggled by all of the feelings I had that were spilling out of a woefully-small cup. Not my family, friends, bullies, enemies, neighbors, or anything. It was a terribly small sphere of influence I held.
And so, I filled it as best I could. I made it numb, cold to the touch, plain, and passable. It silently carried me through the life I was experiencing from somewhere else. And I’d done a good job at making it passable, because, like Mrs. Martinez, no one questioned the odd things I would do or say.
Over the course of junior high school, the pattern of “the new kid comes to school and leaves immediately” loved playing out with people to whom I’d grown close, only now, they were leaving me behind. In sixth grade, a kind quiet boy named Daniel and I grew close over lunch and free periods in the Humanities classroom playing the pre-installed computer games. Just before I had worked up the courage to ask if he wanted to hang out together outside of school, he told me his family was moving out to the exurbs of El Paso.
In seventh grade, the one singing the siren song was a lanky weirdo named Gideon. He was completely different than most of the people I knew, and I found him fascinating. So much of his own exuberance was similar to my own, the one that I kept inside my sphere. It was fun, getting to know him, and he enjoyed his time with me. For my 12th birthday, he was the only person who came that I invited. Not even Michael N. came to my party, or stayed for as long.
He moved to Arizona at the end of the year.
Somehow, the familiar pang of unavoidable and uncontrollable change came creeping back. And I’d be left to endure comments made about how ugly and fat my ass was in corduroy pants alone. Yeah, that memory is just one of the minorly traumatic ones, especially now that I know that it was probably hilarious to those kids in the hallway, but probably a plaything for others.
But one thing that both Daniel and Gideon left with me was a sense that my sphere worked. It kept me sealed away in the ether and let the body Nicholas exist and do “normal” things. People liked him, he was good in school, and he never caused trouble. That was, until the sphere could become permeable at home, and the Nicholas in excruciating pain without a voice came out. As long as I stayed inside the sphere for as long as possible, I would be okay.