Us Against You

When people talk about rape, they always do so in the past tense. She “was.” She “suffered.” She “went through.”
But she didn’t go through it, she’s still going through it. She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped.

Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

That’s the sound of this town, everywhere. Perhaps you understand that only if you live here.

Bangbangbang.

On the hilltop stand two girls, watching the car disappear. They’ll soon be sixteen. One of them is holding a guitar, the other a rifle.

After four hours of silence in the car, when they’re so far from Beartown that they can’t see any forest, Kevin whispers to his mother, “Do you think it’s possible to become a different person?”

She shakes her head, biting her bottom lip, and blinks so hard she can’t see the road in front of her. “No. But it’s possible to become a better person.” Then he holds out a trembling hand. She holds it as if he were three years old, as if he were dangling over the edge of a cliff. She whispers, “I can’t forgive you, Kevin. But I’ll never abandon you.”

“Do you still want kids?” Ana asks.

Maya’s mouth barely opens when she replies. “Don’t know. Do you?”

Ana shrugs her shoulders slightly, halfway between anger and sorrow. “Maybe when I’m old.”

“How old?”

“Dunno. Thirty, maybe.”

Maya is silent for a long time, then asks, “Do you want boys or girls?”

Ana replies as if she’s spent her whole life thinking about this, “Boys.”

“Why?”

“Because the world is kind of shitty toward them sometimes. But it treats us like that nearly all the time.”

What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.

This time of year used to be a time of endless adventure for them; they would spend all day out in nature and come home late in the evening with torn clothes and dirty faces, childhood in their eyes. That’s all gone. They’re adults now. For some girls that isn’t something you choose, it’s something that gets forced upon you.

Some girls will make us proud; some boys will make us great. Young men dressed in different colors will fight to the death in a dark forest. A car will drive too fast through the night. We will say that it was a traffic accident, but accidents happen by chance, and we will know that we could have prevented this one. This one will be someone’s fault.

People we love will die. We will bury our children beneath our most beautiful trees.

boy, the star of the hockey team, raped a girl. And we lost our way. A community is the sum of its choices, and when two of our children said different things, we believed him. Because that was easier, because if the girl was lying our lives could carry on as usual. When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us. It’s easy to say that we should have done everything differently, but perhaps you wouldn’t have acted differently, either. If you’d been afraid, if you’d been forced to pick a side, if you’d known what you had to sacrifice. Perhaps you wouldn’t be as brave as you think. Perhaps you’re not as different from us as you hope.

A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.” He was a bit drunk at the time, of course, that damn priest.

Children notice when their parents lose each other in the very smallest ways, in something as insignificant as a single word, such as “your.”