t isn't that she likes fucked-up guys. It's just that Monica can no longer bring herself to sleep with a man who doesn't have a molestation story to top hers.

Her story is humdrum. She was 10 years old. A stepfather, an afternoon, no penetration. No continuation of the behavior. Nothing more than lingering looks in her teen years as she sunbathed in the front yard with her girlfriends. Quick but wet lip-kisses when she went out at night. An over-eagerness to possess one of Monica's new school photos every year.

She's 21 now, the whole thing so far in the past it's hardly worth concerning oneself with. After all, Monica's mother has divorced the stepfather, remarried. Another preacher, this one Presbyterian rather than Baptist, with a drawn lower lip and no discernible attraction to prepubescent girls.

 

onica's best girlfriend, Mary June, counsels teen girls who've been abused. She tries to turn her feminist, self-empowerment bullshit on Monica.

But Monica is empowered. She's beyond empowered. She was first in her high school class, the best volleyball player in her freshman dorm, as Mary June well knows since they'd met as first-years.

Three years in, Monica is still getting straight A's at Washington & Lee even though she's from Tucson, Arizona, and doesn't have the genteel southern accent her male teachers crave. She plays the cello, and she plays it well. She is aware that it looks good straddled between her long, thin legs.

"Kiss my ass, Mary June," she says. "You're just jealous that vulnerable guys can open up to me."

"No, Nica," Mary June says, her Nashville-proper voice lilting like a little suburban lawn windmill on a light breeze, "I'm worried about your anger issues. The transparent implications of your hunger to be with someone more broken than yourself. The ease with which the wrong man could manipulate you."

Mary June is a Poli-Sci major and a women's studies minor. Pre-law. Always coming up with some cockeyed argument.

 

onica can't remember what, exactly, she's said to Mary June, or when she said it. A recent night of heavy drinking seems the most likely occasion. Telling her molestation story isn't a big deal, she's told it enough times, to a shrink, to her mom, to a handful of girlfriends and boys. But mentioning the guys was a mistake.

She calls up a vague memory of lingering on a porch swing outside her apartment, confiding in Mary June.

"Note to self," she says, looking up calmly from her toenails, which she is painting black and blue, "don't tell Mary June shit."

"Fine, be that way," Mary June says. She tosses her hair and leaves the room.

 

onica hadn't confided in her first love — no, make that first fuck, because it wasn't love, she knows that after Carlton — her high school boyfriend, Glenn. Glenn dressed like a skater and longed to be a surfer (in Arizona, no less). On their first date, he took Monica to Denny's for dinner and didn't seem to be aware of their prior discrimination policy.

But Monica felt something like love the night he told her how, when he was eight, a man had taken him around the side of a house, handed Glenn a dollar, pulled down Glenn's pants and then his own, and whacked off.

Naked in the front seat of his pick-up truck, she took Glenn inside her. It was weird the way she felt, connected to him and distant at the same time. She was a holy vessel. She was purity. It was her first time, and he tore her, but she pushed past the pain to a feeling that was like communion. Or it would have been like communion, anyway, if she'd ever felt anything any of the times she ate the bread cube and drank the grape juice her former stepfather distributed from the pulpit.

Glenn went off to Cornell in Monica's senior year and she tried dating Scott something-or-other. Tall, blonde hair, athletic, well-read, blah blah blah. They screwed a couple of times, but it felt infantile. There was no holiness, only two kids groping each other in a hotel room. She tired of it, of him, broke it off.

She tried to call Glenn. He had left Cornell. No phone number was available.

At Washington & Lee there was more casual sex, an endless stream of boys, of cocks. Monica felt nothing, not even heat and visceral pleasure.

She redoubled her attentions on the cello, on her studies. Occasionally she fucked, but she was always unfulfilled.

 

n her second year at W&L, Monica met Carlton, the older brother of one of Mary June's Nashville girlfriends. Blonde like Scott. Well-versed in feminist lingo. At first just another boy at a party who wanted to bang her.

But one night, after their third date, high on hash, he told her about the elementary teacher who'd violated him for two years, every day, in a broom closet. First with pencils and then, Carlton said, his voice wavering, "with his thing — his long, nasty thing."

Monica held him and told him her own story, making much more of it than she felt, and then she fucked him, in an explosion of feeling, of pleasure, of white light.

The white light went on for months. Monica saw herself in a wedding gown, treading on rose petals toward her groom. "We should get married," she told Carlton, as they lay naked in her bed.

A week later, over wine at the Blue Heron Cafe, Carlton, her source of the holy white light, said, "Look, you're great. You're just a little, um, intense." And he gave her back the silver ring she'd given him. And he asked her for some space.

She nodded, didn't speak.

After he left, she went into the parking lot and sat in the middle of the space his car had occupied. Cars honked at her but still she sat. Her eyes burned, not for herself, but for the boy who'd been violated with pencils, for the boy who hurt too much to love her.

 

n the two months since then, Monica has lost weight. She was pretty before, tall and thin with blonde hair and blue eyes and an uncanny resemblance to Bridget Fonda. Now she's positively gaunt, a youthful waif with an aura of melancholy that motivates boys to buy her endless rounds of drinks in bars, to try out sincere-sounding pick-up lines. Their efforts depress her. She drinks too much and, apparently, she says too much when she drinks. At least to Mary June.

Mary June proselytizes until Monica agrees to try the campus self-help group. Even the name is horrible: SAVED, for Sex Abuse Victims Express and Deal.

As Monica enters, late, she can tell it's going to be a total waste. Just a bunch of weepy girls and a gay male couple. Mary June sits at the front of the room, a look of deep concern on her face, as a girl tells her story. An uncle. A basement.

The door creaks and a guy shambles in. His head hangs low; his arms are covered with scars.

Mary June shakes her head at Monica, who pretends not to notice.

She is concerned with trying to catch the guy's eye. Failing that, she pats the empty seat next to her until he comes over and sits, his eyes still focused on the floor.

 

[END]

© Maud Newton 2002