I’m seventeen and everything is perfect. I’d like to say I have a good handle on my life. I have a 4.0 GPA and my entire life people have been telling me that I’m a smart girl. That might be true but there’s still a lot that I don’t know.

I don’t know why I let my friends pressure me into having a party on a school night. I don’t know why I drank so much the whole world began to swirl. I don’t know why I didn’t register that something was wrong when I felt something someone on top of me. Why I didn’t scream when I opened my eyes to his naked body between my legs. Why I didn’t fight back even when I still had a chance. Why I just lay there, unmoving, silent, crying, unable to breathe, telling myself to ignore everything. Ignore the way his fish hook fingernails and barbed wire hands sliced into my hips. Ignore guttural voice cutting through the silence as he moaned “fuck,” into my ear. Ignore the way his body engulfed me like a forest fire. Ignore everything. Ignore the whole world. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real.

Can’t cry. Can’t cry because nothing happened. Because it was just a nightmare, that’s all, just a bad, bad dream. 

I close my eyes. All I see are his hands reaching for me in the darkness. Open them. Still see him. Fuck. 

Scrunch my face up. Notrealnotrealnotreal. Say nothing happened and nothing happened. Repeat it, again and again, until the only thing you have to say about it is that it didn’t happen. Repeat it, like a mantra, like a wish. Repeat it again and again until it becomes true and wait for his face fades into obscurity. Shake his name out of your head like a bad etch sketch. Wait for his breath like condensation on your skin to turn back to gas and float away. Wait for the world to end. 

Oh man. There is something seriously wrong with me. I must be actually deranged if I’m thinking these horrible things. And about Dan of all people. He’s the guy in maths class that everyone likes cos he’s always kind and helpful. He’s the kind of guy who spends his time with his sick dad and helping old ladies cross the road. Last month he helped my best friend, Max, with a flat tire, just because he could. He’s a nice guy. A good guy. Not the kind of guy my twisted brain has come up with to torture myself with. There’s no way that any of that actually happened. He’s not that type of person. He would never, could never – absolutely not. Not a chance in hell. 

My alarm goes off. A screeching beeping noise making its way through the silence and this liquid concrete brain. The sun rises over the horizon “an invitation to a new day,” as my mother would call it. It feels more like a death sentence. The sunlight stings like salt in a cut and my eyes adjust to the brightness. Man, I’m really hungover. I can’t believe I drank so much last night. 

Just five more minutes, I pray. Please, just five more minutes. 

I try to get up but someone has tied great big weights to my feet. I press snooze and sink deeper into the mattress. 

Five more minutes and my alarm is beeping like crazy again. I close my eyes and use all my energy to push myself out of bed. My whole body aches. I guess that’s what you get for drinking so much. When I get up I realise I’m naked. Weird, I never sleep naked. Now to be fair I was REALLY drunk which is being proven by the pounding headache and side splitting nausea. I run to the bathroom to puke and am greeted by last nights dinner. Gross. 

I get off my knees and take a long look at the sorry state of myself in the mirror. The puke around my mouth, the crusty eyelashes stuck together with mascara, the bruises.

The bruises. 

Marks in the shape of kneecaps on my arms, on my legs, on my chest. Fingernail marks on my sides and on my wrists. 

I fell down the stairs. I think out loud. What a klutz. But the truth is already entering my system like poison.
I put my walls up. 

I did fall down the stairs. I was drunk enough to fall down the stairs. I drank a lot. A LOT a lot. It makes sense. Fell down the stairs. I definitely just fell down the stairs. Just fell down the stairs. Just fell down the stairs. Just fell down the stairs.