The Way I Am Now (The Way I Used to Be)

Mom drives me and Caelin to the courthouse in the morning for the walk-through. Lane meets us on the other side of the security checkpoint and escorts us to the courtroom we’ll be in. There’s less wood than I expected from all the TV courtrooms, less everything— the space is utilitarian, with no warmth or character or ornamentation of any kind. I can hear all three of us breathing, no one wanting to talk, so the room swallows our breath.

DA Silverman struts in a few minutes later, in her high heels and impeccable suit, which is decidedly not business casual. Behind her are Amanda and her mom, and Gen, looking younger today, somehow, than she had at the café. There’s an older man with her who I assume must be her father.

The parents greet one another like they’re at a funeral, small syllables, all hushed and subtle. Gen steps close to me, and for a second I get scared that she’s going to hug me or something and possibly give away the fact that we’d met the other day. But that’s not what she does; she pulls my brother in for a brief hug.

And he sounds like someone else as he says, “Hey, Gen, Mandy, Mrs. A.” But as Amanda and her mom nod and smile politely back at Caelin, I realize it’s that he actually sounds like himself—his old self, the one I haven’t seen in months. It’s strange to see him here, not just my brother but someone who is something to all these people too.

The three of us—me, Amanda, and Gen—exchange our awkward hellos and look at one another like maybe we’re looking into some kind of distorted fun house mirror at ourselves. We take turns smiling at each other, then frowning and looking away.

“So,” DA Silverman says, her voice cutting through all this emotion taking up all the air. “We just want to walk everyone through what’s going to happen this week, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, and if anyone has any questions, then we can address them now. We all know testimonies start tomorrow. And as you know, we all must remain separate. We have a private room down the hall where we’ll have you wait until it’s your turn.”

Gennifer’s father, whose name I already forgot, says, “So, there’s no jury at this point, correct?”

“That’s right,” Lane responds, her voice way too chipper. “A hearing is really not all that different from a trial. Think of this as a pre-trial, without a jury. That part comes later.”

“But he’ll be here, in the courtroom, while the girls are on the stand?” he asks.

I see Mrs. Armstrong’s jaw clench. I wonder if Gennifer’s dad realizes that she’s Kevin’s mom too. I wonder what she thinks now, every time she hears her son’s name. It can’t be good.

“Yes,” DA Silverman says, and leads us up to the witness box, tells us to look out. “So, Kevin will be sitting there with his attorney.” She points at one of the tables in front of us. “I’ll be over here on this side.”

“And I’ll be sitting out here,” Lane says, pointing to an area of seating. “On your side, with the detectives who worked your cases and whoever else you’ll have here for you. So, if you need somewhere to look at any time, just look at me.”

I can’t stop staring at the table where Kevin will be sitting.

“You all right?” my mom says quietly.

“That’s really close” is all I say. What happened to all those big fancy sprawling TV courtrooms? This is tiny. Claustrofucking-phobic. Stuck in the 1980s. I want to raise my hand. I have a question: Why is that table so fucking close to the witness stand? I want to scream. Who fucking designed this place?

“So, we’ll start the process tomorrow,” DA Silverman says with a self-assured nod. “Just remember to remain calm and be honest. If you don’t know something you’re asked, it’s okay to say you don’t know. Keep your phones close. If there are any changes to the schedule or order, I’ll let you know via text.”

Mom takes me and Caelin for breakfast at IHOP afterward, the same one, off the highway, where Josh brought me that day last December, when he came for me. This was where I told him about Kevin, about me, about all of it.

We pick at our food in mostly silence.

I’m distracted by the fall decorations everywhere—pumpkins and ghosts and cornucopias—thinking about the way time passes. It felt like it took so long to get to this point, but now it’s here and I barely feel ready at all. Wasn’t it just summer? Just spring? Just winter before that, when I was here last, in that booth right over there by the window, trusting Josh with my heart, soul, mind, everything.

In the car, Mom looks at both of us and says, “You know that your father has never been good at talking about his feelings, but he doesn’t blame any of what’s happening on either of you. You need to know that, both of you. He’s just so angry still,” she tries to explain.

“Yeah, at who?” Caelin asks. “That’s the real question.”

“Not you,” Mom says. And then she twists around to look at me in the back seat. “And not you, either.”

I nod, sort of understanding—that kind of anger, that kind of silence—too well.

I call Mara once we get back home. I was planning on joking with her about business casual. Like, what even is that? I could hear myself saying. Asking her if she has a blazer I could borrow, but when I hear her voice on the line, something changes.

“Hey,” I say. “You busy in a few hours?”

Instead, I ask her to meet me at our playground. The one where we used to play when we were kids and then where we used to hang out drinking and smoking and getting high with randos, all post-Josh and pre-Cameron.

Our giant wooden castle—our private magical realm—still standing after all this time.

When I pull into the parking lot, she’s there waiting for me, sitting on a tire swing that’s shaped like a horse, swaying back and forth, sidesaddle. My headlights shine a spotlight on her. When I get out of the car, she runs and slams into me, full-body hug.

“Oh my God, I’ve missed you,” she whines. “I’m so happy to see you, Edy.”

“I missed you too,” I tell her, and I mean it, but things feel different somehow. It’s only been a month since I’ve seen her, but so much has changed for me.

We climb up to the highest tower and sit down, crossed-legged, opposite each other. She keeps making this awkward nervous half laugh I don’t know what to make of. “So, Josh being good to you?” she asks. “Treating you like a queen, I hope.”

“He’s being very good to me,” I tell her, but I can’t seem to force a smile right now the way she is. “He really wanted to come with me. Be here for the hearing. But I said no.”

She finally nods, straight faced, and says, “Why not?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

Mara looks down at her hands. “Edy, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

I open my mouth to answer but change my mind. “You know, I almost just said ‘I don’t know’ again? Because for so long I really didn’t know. I guess saying ‘I don’t know’ is easier to say than to try to list all the reasons.”

“I want to know all the reasons,” she says. “Because I would’ve believed you.”

“That’s probably the biggest one. You would have believed me, and if you knew, then I couldn’t pretend anymore and I would’ve had to do something about it. And I couldn’t. Or at least, I didn’t think I could.”

She nods but chews on the inside of her cheek like she’s trying to not say something.

“And you were all I had. I didn’t want anything to change.”

“It wouldn’t have,” she argues.

“It has, though. You feel it, don’t you? Things are just different now.”

She looks down again. “You never gave me the chance to be a good friend to you. As much as I love you, I’m mad too, and I know that makes me a total bitch. I’m mad because I would’ve been there for you if I’d known.”

“I know.”

“But I understand, too,” she adds. “Who’s to say I wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

I shrug, nod, say, “I guess.”

We sit there for a moment, looking out on this small patch that once held so many things from our childhood, our high school indiscretions. Somewhere in the distance a car horn honks, a muffled reprieve from the bittersweet reverie of this place.

“Can I ask you for a huge favor, Mara?”

“Anything.”

“Will you come to the hearing?”

“Of course,” she says, no hesitation.

“Really?”

“Yes. What do I have to do?”

“Just sit there,” I tell her. “Let me look at you while I’m testifying. Can you do that?”

She nods.

“I’ll have to go over everything that happened. The details. Like, probably everything that ever happened between me and—” I cough, clear my throat. “Me and him. Me and Kevin,” I finally say. “But especially what happened that night, I guess. It’s just that, he’s going to be there, and I don’t want to accidentally look at him and then freeze or break down or fly into a rage or something.”

“Would it help if you told me now?” she asks. “Like as practice?”

“Maybe.”

I tell her about the Monopoly game earlier that night, how he flirted with me, even though I didn’t really understand that was what he was doing at the time. I tell her about how I woke up to him in my bedroom at 2:48 in the morning—I looked at my clock because it didn’t make sense, why he’d be in my room. How I thought at first, he must be playing some kind of joke. How he climbed on top of me and covered my mouth, pinned my arms down. How he was crushing me, hurting me, how he told me to shut up. He put his hand around my throat. He wasn’t laughing. He was serious. It wasn’t a joke.© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

Mara’s squeezing my hands so hard.

“Then what happened?”

Mara stares at me and nods, her eyes wide, unblinking, from across the room now.

“He pulled my underwear down my legs and yanked my nightgown up so hard it ripped,” I say. “And then he shoved it into my mouth.”

“Why did he do that?” DA Silverman asks.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see his lawyer’s white-haired head pop up, his hand rising in the air, but I keep my eyes on Mara. “Speculation,” he says.

“What happened then, with the nightgown in your mouth?” she asks instead.

“I was trying to scream, but I couldn’t.”

“And what do you remember next?”

“He was kicking at my legs, trying to separate them. I got one of my arms free and I hit him, but he just held me down harder, tightened his hand around my throat. He kept telling me to stop, to hold still. I didn’t, though, and he was getting more and more angry.” I clear my throat.

“Was he yelling?”

“He was whispering, but directly in my ear. His face was right next to mine, and he said, ‘fucking do it,’ and I remember that because I didn’t know what he wanted me to do.”

“Can you tell us again how old you were then, on December twenty-ninth?”

“I had just turned fourteen in November.”

“And Kevin was a few weeks away from turning twenty years old?”

I look her in the eye. Was that true? Was he that old then? I don’t know. But I don’t have a chance to answer because his lawyer does that hand-raise thing again, this time laughing. “Your Honor, relevance?”

“Had you ever had sex before?” she asks instead.

“No. I had never even kissed anyone.”

“Again.” Hand. “Relevance?”

She spins on her heel and looks directly at White Hair, practically spits the words “I’m trying to establish why, when the twenty-year-old man told the thirteen-year-old girl to ‘fucking do it,’ she didn’t know what that meant.”

Now he stands. Takes off his tiny wire-framed glasses and shakes his head, even lets his mouth hang open for a moment as if he has no words to express how deeply he objects. “Your Honor . . .” is all he says.

“Withdrawn,” she says, and turns back to me. “After he said ‘fucking do it,’ what happened?”

I lock eyes with Mara. “He forced my legs apart. I—I was getting weaker. I couldn’t breathe.”

“Because of the nightgown in your mouth?”

“Yes, and because he was squeezing my throat tighter and tighter.”

“What do you remember happening next?”

“He . . . um . . .” I close my eyes. I picture the wooden play-ground. Just me and Mara. The softness of the night all around us. Mara’s hand holding mine.

“Do you need a break?”

I open my eyes. “No.”

“What happened next?” she repeats.

“He raped me,” I finally say, the word sounding too small and simple to convey its own meaning.

“Okay, and did he hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know he was hurting you?”

“Your Honor.” He raises his hand and stands up now. “Again, speculation.”

“I’ll rephrase. Could you indicate to him in some way that he was hurting you?”

“I was crying. I mean, I couldn’t speak or yell because he was still choking me, and I couldn’t move because he was holding me down, but I was crying, and I didn’t know until later, but I was bleeding. He knew he was hurting me—he wanted to hurt me.”

White Hair raises his hand again, almost bored now, not even bothering to look up from his folder. “Move to strike everything after the first sentence, ‘I was crying.’ She’d already answered the question.”

I see Mara’s face turning red.

I want to look at the man so badly, want to make him look at me as he deletes my words from the record. But I keep my eyes on Mara, let her be angry for us both. I know for sure I’ve made the right decision now. I couldn’t have had Josh here listening to this. And I couldn’t do it alone, either.

“Do you know how long he was raping you?”

“Five minutes.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked at the clock when I could move again. I remember thinking it felt like hours. I thought the clock had to be wrong.”

“And what happened next?” she asks. I think hard, trying to put the events in the right order, but my brain keeps skipping ahead to the end. “What’s the next thing you remember?” she rephrases, somehow reading my mind.

“He let go of my throat and he ripped the nightgown out of my mouth and I started coughing and he kept telling me to shut up. He was moving my hair out of my eyes—it was stuck to my face because my face was wet from crying. He wanted me to look at him.”

Hand raise.

“He said, ‘Look at me,’” I correct myself. I was catching on now—emotions are not allowed here, feelings aren’t facts. “He told me to listen, and he held my face so that I had to look into his eyes.”

“He told you to listen—what did he say?”

“He said, ‘No one will ever believe you.’”

“Then what? Did he leave?”

“No. He sat up but was still kneeling between my legs, staring at me—at my body. I tried to cover myself, but he moved my hands away. He made me promise that I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”

“And did you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He said that if I told anyone, he would kill me. He said, ‘I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you,’ and given what had just happened, I believed him.”

“So did he leave then?”

“No.” I hear my voice shaking, I feel my throat caving in, just like it had that night.

“What happened next?”

I can’t even look at Mara—I’d left this part out at the wooden playground. I cough, try to clear my throat. “He, um . . . he kissed me. And then he got up, put his underwear back on, and told me to go back to sleep.”

“And then he left?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Nothing further.”

I let myself exhale. I let myself think maybe I was doing okay. But then his lawyer stands up, buttons his jacket, and smiles at me, just like Kevin had smiled at me that night, in between shoving his tongue in my mouth and putting his boxers on—I had forgotten to say that. He kissed me, smiled at me, and then he got up. Too late.

“Good afternoon, Eden,” he begins, pretending to be a human being. “I’ll keep this brief; I just have a few questions.

“How long have you known Kevin?”

“Since I was like seven or eight. That was when my brother became friends with him.”

“And didn’t you have a crush on him?”

“What?”

“A crush.” He shrugs. “You know, a playful infatuation.”

“Maybe when I was younger, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Just yes or no.”

The thing about a crush is that you have them because, on some level, it’s unattainable, and if you’re being honest with yourself, you wouldn’t really want it anyway even if you could have it. But all there’s room to say here is “Yes.”

“And that night, you said you wanted to play a game with Kevin. Monopoly, right?”

I didn’t say I wanted to play a game with him—it was his idea. When had I said that? Did I say that today? I can’t remember. But wait, why is this even important?

“Eden, can you answer the question?”

“We played Monopoly.”

“The board game?”

Of course the fucking board game. I look at the DA, are these serious questions? I thought we’d be sticking to what I said in the police report.

“Eden?”

“Yes, the board game Monopoly.”

“And that night when you were playing, didn’t you tell Kevin that you wanted a boyfriend?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you did ask if Kevin had a girlfriend, right?”

I shake my head. Where is this coming from?

“I don’t—” I close my eyes, try to remember. “No. No, we were talking about my brother having a girlfriend. He was on the phone with her and that’s why it was just me and Kevin. He was the one who got the game out,” I add, remembering more clearly now. “Monopoly.”

“Right, and then you asked if Kevin had a girlfriend.”

“Maybe I—”

“Yes or no.”

“Y-yes.”

“You said earlier that you were fourteen at the time?”

“Yes.”

“And did you know how old Kevin was at the time?”

“He was almost twenty,” I say, repeating what the DA had said.

“So, he was nineteen, right?”

“Right.”

“But did you know at the time how old he was? At the time?”

Except now I’m doubting myself. Did I think he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty? “I mean, I really don’t know if I knew exactly.”

DA Silverman stands up and sighs. “Is this going anywhere?”

“Did he know how old you were at the time?”

She sits down and then shoots right back up. “Speculation, Your Honor.”

“Did you have a conversation about how old you were?”

“Well, he knew I was in ninth grade.”

“Yes or no—did you have a conversation about age?”

“No.”

And so it continues for what feels like hours. Pointless questions mixed in with important ones, always with right or didn’t you tacked on to the end. Dissecting all of my sentences into smaller and smaller fragments until they barely make sense anymore.

“One last question, Eden. Did you ever say no?”

“Say no?”

“Did you ever verbally say no at any point that night?”

“I couldn’t speak. He covered my mouth immediately, and then he—”

“Did you say no?”

“I fought him, I hit him, I kicked him, I—”

“But did you ever say the word no?”

I look at Mara, then Lane, then the DA.

“I—I already said I couldn’t speak.”

“Your Honor, please instruct the witness to answer the question.”

“Please answer the question,” the judge says.

“No, but—”

“Thank you,” he says, and smiles again, like I’d just handed him a fucking cappuccino or something. “I have nothing further.”

And as he turns around and walks back to the table, I make the mistake of watching him—this old, frail, white-haired fossilized monster—and as he sits down, my eyes drift too far until I realize I’m looking at him. Kevin. And he’s looking at me. He has me pinned like a dead insect mounted on a foam block, with only his eyes, like he had that night.

I hear this sound in my ears like the ocean. I close my eyes. I’m going. Leaving my body. Disappearing. Gone. The next thing I know I’m in the bathroom, Lane there, telling me how great I did. “Great” is the word she used. It echoes in my head. Great great great. And she’s smiling at me in the mirror.

I look at my hands—I’m washing them at the sink. I’ve torn my bandage up into ribbons, the tape peeling off, the two red welts on my palm, only just starting to scab, now picked over and bleeding in patches. I don’t remember doing that. I don’t remember leaving the courtroom.

“How does that fucking lawyer sleep at night?” Mara says.

“I want to go,” I say out loud to no one in particular.

Lane touches my shoulder, and I flinch. “Sorry, honey. You did really well, I mean it.”

“Whatever, I don’t care. It’s over. I just wanna go.”