Angel’s Story: Her Tabs Were Blank

I have written an opening to this and erased it a million times by now. There is no correct way to tell this story, this shouldn’t have happened to me and it shouldn’t have happened to you either. That’s I guess why i’m writing this, because at the time I wish I had someone there to tell me that It wasn’t my fault, everything I was doing to cope was okay, that not remembering everything doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, that just because it didn’t go “all the way” doesn’t mean it wasn’t rape, that even people who are close to you can hurt you, that it’s normal to feel at fault, that you don’t need to say no; you need to say yes, and for god’s sake that the gender of your attacker doesn’t matter. Rape is Rape. I was 14 years old, suffering for bipolar disorder which was early onset, severe depression, and probably some ptsd from childhood trauma. Did I know this? No. I had a best friend and as much as I want to say her name and to have that power, I can not. We met on the school bus while I was in first grade she was in second. We lived only a street away from each other and spent all of our childhood days with each other whether it be roller skating in the local skate rink, sledding in the graveyard across the road, screaming on the trampoline in someone’s backyard, playing monopoly for the 100th time on her glass living room table, and playing hide and seek in my basement. We grew and we aged and roller skating turned into running for self acceptance, sledding became mourning, the trampoline became our bedroom floors at night with the lights off, monopoly became head games we would play with ourselves in any vulnerable situation, and my basement became the place I tried to kill myself the night before my 15th birthday. We were both troubled behind closed doors but in the open we were happy go lucky preteens awaiting the next good thing. We both suffered from mental health issues and we found comfort in each other’s sadness. We could compare heart aches, negative thoughts, and bad ideas. We were losing touch of one another, we both unspokenly became aware of how destructive we were to each other. To this day I don’t know what made this happen, I don’t know if anything did, and I don’t know if I will ever truly know either. She called me crying because her mom had picked her up from a boys house where she was not supposed to be, I walked down the street I so lovingly knew to her bedroom above the garage to comfort my friend. We talked about her despair and her self hatred, then we were back to normal. Laughing and joking until she asked me if I wanted to drop acid. Acid. Only had I ever smoked a little bit of weed here and there, but in my sickness I was trying to make her happy. She took one tab, I took three and a half. Because she told me to. Her tabs were white, Mine were blue. Because she said that’s just how it was. I remember it being okay at first, goofing around. Then I remember her being on top of me and I remember her kissing me for the first time. I pushed her off of me and asked “what does this mean?” “What if your parents find out?” “What if my parents find out?” “Why?” “What’s happening” “Why are you doing this?” “What are you doing?” “Is this okay?” “Why would you do this?” And a million other questions running through my head. She sat up and started crying, she said she was in love with me. “Don’t you love me?” I did, with everything I had, she was someone that had known more about me than I thought I ever would. I felt as if we were connected through this magical sort of bond that I swore the universe created. I told her that I loved her, but I wasn’t in love with her. The only thing I remember from after was that was that I was naked, vulnerable, in one of the only places I ever felt safe, but now the walls were torn off and there was 80mph wind brushing across my tired body. I also remember her taking a photo of our bras scattered on a mirror on the floor and it kills me to wonder if she still has that. I remember her getting mad at me and telling me that If I didn’t take a shower with her then she felt unloved. I don’t remember anything from the shower but begging in my head that her parents would wake up and walk across the hall. I left the shower, I left the bathroom, and I always blamed myself for not running down the street right at this point and screaming to my childhood what had happened. I didn’t. I sat down in her kitchen and watched the floor tiles float around me as If I was sitting still and they were judging me. I went back to her bedroom, found a hoodie on the floor and I think a pair of pants and crawled into the little playhouse her dad had never finished making. I fell asleep and never saw her come back in the room. I’m not sure if she ever did. The next morning I found her in the living room sitting on the couch. I sat down on the same leather I had fallen asleep on numerous times over the years. She said nothing. I said nothing. Her face was blank, her eyes blank, her words were sinister. She told me it was her ex’s birthday party that night, did I want to go? I said okay, I don’t know why. Before we left we sat in her kitchen and she asked me if I felt anything that night, referring to the acid. I told her yes and described the tiles in the kitchen from the night before. She said “I think my tabs were blank.” in the most disgusting way. I went to the party and watched her kiss him in front of his family, he wasn’t an ex, he was in love with her. I convinced myself that she should have loved me. She told me she loved me and made me do this to prove that I loved her and now what? I walked home from his house which was right above mine, walked past my grandma, got in the shower, turned on the hot water, and scratched at my skin all over my body until it was raw. I felt so dirty, a dirty that nothing could clean. The next night, I layed on my basement floor and took six bottles of painkillers. I wanted to believe that it was all the other troubles in my life that brought me to that point and that she had nothing to do with it, but she did. My dad found me passed out in his bed and took me to the hospital. I was admitted to a children’s psychiatric hospital for a week. We didn’t talk much after, when a month went by we never spoke again. I didn’t come to terms with what happened until probably a year later and that’s when my pure rage subsided. Sometimes when I think about it I still get that feeling in my core of anger. Today one of my closest friends told me how she was raped two weeks ago by a friend, he held her down, the police said he was just “rough.” I felt that anger again the same way I did when I was a fresh 15