And then there was Matt. Matt was a friend of David (the rapist I was dating, remember?)’s brother. They were in this group of three or four guys, and they were just kind of always around. We played video games together when I was around their house, we went to movies together, and did various normal teenage/young adult things aside from drinking or doing drugs. Matt was tall, the tallest of the group, with dark hair and a narrowing stare. The rest of them sort of followed his lead.
Matt would go out of his way to sit next to me in the car or get paired up with me playing games. He flirted, sometimes in full sight of David. But David never said anything. David didn’t really care all that much for me, sexually, or really any other way. He was much more interested in his all-night raids in whatever video game he was playing. I mentioned to him that Matt was clingy around me, mostly out of fear that I’d be seen as “asking for it” (she said TO HER RAPIST) if something happened. David brushed it off, telling me I should take it as a compliment.
A week later we were outside in the middle of the night in some fields, playing a laser tag game or some nonsense. I had ducked behind the tree line by the road, and Matt found his way to where I was. He immediately threw himself to the ground next to me and grabbed my hand. He didn’t say anything, he just looked out into the dark, his eyes darting for either targets or witnesses. I froze and stared straight ahead, waiting for him to do something. He rubbed and squeezed my hand for a minute and then ran off towards a couple blinking red lights.
I was praised for my looks as a child. Not by my dad, of course, but by other adults around me and no one more than my mother. I was perfect. The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being she had ever known in her life. But pointedly, I was beautiful. I was beautiful and this was considered “wasteful” because I didn’t have the feminine dial cranked to 11.
I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair. My mom let me wear “boys” clothes, but cutting my hair was off limits. She cut her hair shorter and shorter every year, with it being as short as a pixie cut by the time I was 10. I was told that she “had” to keep her hair short because she didn’t have time for it due to working and parenting, and so I had to keep my hair. This of course made absolutely no sense to me, nor should it have. It was crap. I convinced my mom of shorter and shorter haircuts until eventually I got my dad to take me to get my hair cut before my mom got home one day when I was 15, finally living out my tomboy fantasy.
And even though I my mom didn’t push back very hard on my discomfort with dresses and skirts, I could sense her disappointment. She thought I looked like the protagonist of a Francis Hodgson Burnett novel and wished I’d dress like one. But also, I think she wished that she could have had long hair and pretty dresses, and blamed me and her job when really my dad was super into short hair on women. I suspect she cut her hair due to the positive reactions she got from him.
The year my room was moved from downstairs to the finished half of the second floor of the house (the only other room on the second floor was the unfinished attic), I came home from school one day to find my mother had installed mauve pink carpeting. She knew that I was expressly not into pink. She knew my favorite color was green. Her argument was that she wanted it to match the wallpaper which had these tiny flowers on it, and I made a very strong counter point which was that there were clearly other colors in the wallpaper, including green. But it was already installed, so I had to play with my ninja turtles and micro machines on a mauve pink carpet.
I would have my justice just a couple years later, when my allergies and asthma were so bad that the doctor recommended ripping out the carpeting in my room to cut down on dust. Mom loved me and she thought I was amazing, but I think she also kind of wanted a doll and kind of wanted a friend because she was lonely. We did have a lot of tea parties, the two of us.
My mom wanted a little girl, but never prepared me for anything beyond that. And I don’t just mean her naivete in thinking I wasn’t making out with boys in 5th grade. I also never did a load of laundry or cleaned my room more than a few times before she died. Along with attempting to compensate for living with my father by buying me presents, she did every single chore in the house partly because I was sick most of the time and too much dust could make me sick for days, and partly because she cared for people by doing things for them. Too many things, sometimes.
Mom was so worried about how shit everything was for me that she didn’t prepare me for most any of the shit I would experience once she was gone.
I was working at the mall one afternoon when Matt, David’s brother, and one more of them showed up at my store. They were “bored” and wanted me to come with them. I explained that I was working for another couple hours but Matt insisted they would wait for me. I told them not to, explained I was busy. I was not in the mood to put on a performance of being fun and cool, and David wasn’t around that night to be alpha of their idiotic pack.
“Nah, we’ll wait.” Matt turned and left. David’s brother gave me a shrug and followed along with his other friend to a table in the food court where they could see the entrance to my store. I was confused and mostly just annoyed. I called David to see if I could reach him at work to complain about them but he wasn’t answering.
I tried to act busy and hoped they would get bored and go home. Some of them may have gotten bored, but they would not leave. Ryan wasn’t my manager that day and it wasn’t super busy so I managed to get permission to leave 30 minutes early without any questions about why. I was hoping that since Matt and the group knew what time I said I was getting out, maybe if I slipped out at just the right time they wouldn’t notice.
There was no back door I could use, so of course they spotted me trying to power-walk towards the exit.
“Giiiinny, hey!” Matt called and bounded up behind me.
I kept walking but let my body language relax a bit. “Oh hey. Sorry, I forgot you guys were waiting. I had an emergency come up, I have to run.”
“Aww, come on, you can just tell us you don’t like us.”
I glanced back at the other two who were just trodding along behind, clearly not brave enough to interject.
“Seriously, I got a call from my dad. I have to go.” I reached to push open the glass double doors that opened to the parking and got my keys out.
“Come on, wait a minute.” Matt reached out but I was jogging by then and jumped into the Rav4.
I locked my doors, started the car and looked over to see them running over to another car in the parking lot two rows over. I started to pull out and I saw them closing their doors. They were following me.
Self-esteem isn’t something I like to talk about much, as it’s kind of like a rich person giving financial advice.
Growing up, I saw myself represented in most every cartoon and line of toys you could name. I never wished I looked like someone else, not even famous actresses. No one ever mocked me for what I looked like. I was given a pass from ever feeling ugly.
Yes, there’s the normal insecurities. Sure, you worry that boys might not like you or that you won’t get invited to the cool parties. But not having to work through years of learned self-hate once you figure out what’s going on in the world is an immense privilege.
And I wasn’t just a thin, white girl. I was naturally blonde with blue eyes. This was treated as winning some sort of genetic lottery. Praise often had specific mentions of my hair and eye color. Wanting to dye my hair, just like wanting to cut it, was a “waste.” My physical attributes were often referred to like some sort of talent I had or capital I had acquired.
The white supremacy, master race mythology that brought us such horrors as Operation Lebensborn flows from and permeates the culture of the United States like we’re the hellmouth of racism, and it is fucking terrifying when you really see it. Kids that look like me are fetishized on top of all the other white privileges that come along with it, and it’s not even subtle.
All of that gets wrapped up in gender and sexuality. If you have a natural “talent” for something, it’s a “waste” if you don’t do something with it. So, if you are good at being fetishized and desired because of your looks, that’s where your value is. To not be something that men wanted was another squandering of usefulness.
My first thought was that I didn’t want to drive to my apartment. I would be there alone, and that didn’t sound safe. If they were going to follow me, I decided going to my dad’s was the best option since they didn’t know where I would be going. So I sped down the back way home, the same way I’d raced home less than a year before from the same mall parking lot.
Why were his friends all going along with this? Was this their idea of a prank? I was almost angrier at the other men/boys in the car, most of all the one driving, than I was at Matt’s creepy ass. I just wanted to be left alone.
I sped as fast as I could down the winding lanes, trying to lose them on the turns. I bolted through the last stop sign, bouncing down the hills. I hoped if I could just pull into my driveway fast enough, maybe they wouldn’t see me. I could drive this road much faster than they could because I knew where I was going. They weren’t from the woods.
I couldn’t see them in my rear-view before I made the turn into the driveway. There was no way for me to park without them seeing the car, so I could only hope they’d speed by too fast to see it if they were behind me. Dad’s truck was parked next to the garage and I just pulled up as close to the house as I could, leapt out of the car, slammed and locked the car door, and bolted into the house.
I ran to the bathroom to look out to the front of the house to see if I could see them drive by. I didn’t at first, and for a second I had hope that they lost me before getting this far. But after 15 seconds or so, their car came down the street, stopped a few car lengths past the driveway, and slowly backed up.
I was panicked. I couldn’t understand what was happening. This wasn’t normal. Was this normal? Was I overreacting? I came back out to the living room and my dad came out from whatever hole he had been sitting in, his dull eyes opened comically wide with tiny pupils.
“What’s going on?”
“Some guy is being a jerk and following me, just ignore them and they’ll go away.”
“What ‘some guy?’”
“No, just stay out of it and let me figure this out.”
I went over to the phone and had just finished dialing David as the doorbell rang.
This time, David picked up.
“Your brother and his idiot friends chased me home from work.”
“What?”
“Dad, don’t answer the door! Just leave it!”
“I’m just gonna go talk to him.” My dad stepped outside.
“I’m at my house. My dad’s. They followed me here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know! And now Matt is on my porch! Call your brother and tell him to fuck off!”
“Okay.”
David hung up to, I assume to tell his brother to fuck off.
Dad had stepped out into the driveway to talk to David.
I took my asthma inhaler out from my bag and took a drag as dad came back inside.
“Well, I think he just really likes you, Ginny,” Dad said, grinning.
“Well, good for him.”
“Why don’t you just go talk to him?”
“No. He’s an asshole and fuck that.”
“Well he doesn’t have any way to get home so he has to come in and use the phone.”
“What? No, he fucking doesn’t. His asshole friends can come get him.”
“Apparently they dropped him off.”
At this point I just screamed for a few seconds.
“Now, Ginny…” Dad was being peak dad. He delighted in being the calmest person in the room. “This is my house and I can let the boy in to use the phone. Don’t be rude.” The condescension dripped from his mouth.
I had just been chased to my dead mother’s home down the route I had taken on the night she died by a creepy dude nearly twice my size and two other men, and my dad was gonna let the creepy dude in MY house? There was a fuse and it had already been lit.
“Fuck you, this isn’t your fucking house!” I screamed while feeling that aching urge to start kicking shit.
“Watch your fucking mouth and get out of my house then!”
“THIS WAS NEVER YOURS. NONE OF THIS WAS EVER YOURS.” I was gesturing around wildly, still clutching my inhaler. “YOU STOLE IT FROM HER AND YOU STOLE IT FROM ME AND FUCK YOU.”
I stormed out the front door and made a rush for my car Matt was waiting outside; he ran around the back of the car and came up on my right side as I rage-fumbled with the car keys.
“Ginny, wait.”
“Seriously, leave me alone.” I had my keys out.
Matt grabbed my shoulder pushed me up against the car, trapping me between his body and the driver side door.
“Just give me a second, listen.” He pressed up against me and started to reach a hand toward me and wiped a tear from my face like he thought we were in some skeevy rom-com. “You’re just really special and I want to spend time with you.”
I shoved him, hard, and he backed off enough that I could open my car door. He probably thought my dad would care if he pushed it further, which was a wrong but lucky assumption for me. I sped away through the woods as fast as I dared, back to my apartment in a different set of woods.
By the time I got home, the sun had set. I made my way inside the dark, musty apartment, still hot and blurry-eyed from 20 different emotions, and was greeted by a blinking red light on the answering machine. I put down my things and hit play.
“Don’t bother coming back here because you don’t have teachers here anymore because this isn’t your house. You don’t live here anymore, so stay out.”
After I had left, Dad gave Matt a ride home. Then he called one of my tutors and told them I didn’t live there anymore. This was reported back to the school and my entire education plan was irreversibly thrown out because my dad told them I had moved outside the school district.
