It Was Just a White T-Shirt

What to Wear for Your Sexual Assault

Remembering the Very First Time He Hurt Me

I woke up crying this morning around 4 am. The man who sexually abused me was doing it again for the first time. Over and over, I dreamed of how he forced me to do things that no fourteen year old should be doing. Least of all, learning what a blow job is.

After I left my mother at the Jersey shore to return to school, I moved in with my mother’s best friend, Joanne, and her husband and two children. I would be their live-in babysitter until my mother came back a few weeks later with my youngest sister. All was good for a few days until the first night they went out. I was sleeping on their couch in the living room and got up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. I was wearing one of my father’s old white t-shirts, Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, whatever. It was big, baggy, unremarkable. The man followed me in and as I was turning around to go back to sleep, there he was.

I was surprised and nervous because like my own father, he worked a lot, and I didn’t know him well — in fact, he worked with my father, but in a different department at the university. He had always been nice if distant. He was large and imposing and authoritative. He came up close and leant down. He kissed me, kneaded my tiny breasts which hurt — and he said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.” Shocked, I don’t think I said anything because not only had I not wanted to do that, but I did not want to be kissed by a man, especially a man who was supposed to protect me from men like him. I remember thinking, “I’m just wearing a t-shirt. How could this happen?”

Luckily, he let me go back to sleep and I spent the rest of the night nervously half-sleeping on the couch, not really asleep or not really awake. Mostly reeling. It was going to be his job to take me to school in the morning and I knew he’d come for me. And that’s exactly what he did.

Joanne and their daughters went to work and school themselves and that left me and the husband alone. He called my school and told them that he was my father and he’d taking me to school late so I would be excused from my first classes. Then, he told me he wanted to “fuck” me. Not having any real idea what that meant or would be like, I said no. He pushed me into their bedroom and onto the bed. He sad me down and said that if I didn’t want to fuck, then I could just “suck him off.” Still petrified and unable to think or act for myself, I felt I had to do as I was told. He undid his pants, pulled down his underwear, and pulled my head towards his penis. I still feel his head on the back of my head, firmly, moving me closer to him. The last time I saw a penis I was about five years old when I was at a sleepover at primary school when a little boy and I marveled at how we looked so strange to each other, and we laughed because we thought our respective private parts looked silly.

This was a very, very different experience: a grown man didn’t want to show me something he wanted me to do something. I was more than nervous now, I was frightened. I didn’t want to touch him, I didn’t want to look at him, I didn’t want to touch him. I didn’t want my mouth to touch him. But I decided that if I didn’t, he’d force me to have sex. I was alone and deeply aware that there was no one else in the house. I had to do what he wanted not only because I was raised to do what my elders said but because he was big and strong and excited — I wasn’t a girl, his ward, a child, a person. I allowed him to shove his penis into my mouth and he told me what to do. It was without a doubt the most disgusting feeling and experience I’d had, and it was the nearest I’d gotten to a male body. I was horrified and my throat was closing on me and I could not breathe. I was not breathing because I was afraid but also because I couldn’t figure out how to breathe through my nose as his penis was filling my mouth and going down my throat. I was sure I’d vomit.

I did what he wanted and when he was about to come in my mouth, I started to gag. I had no idea what he was doing and pulled away. He was making sounds that I’d never heard before: moaning and grunting. I was glad when he brusquely pushed me away, got up and said he’d finish himself. Leaving me alone, he went into the bathroom to do what I didn’t know.

When he was finished, he told me to brush my teeth, acted like nothing had happened that was out of the ordinary and took me to school. I had to go to class and behave like what had just happened to me was ok. A man who I’d looked up to and liked had just violated me, had entered my body, where I put sustenance and expressed myself with language, had stuffed himself into me and made me quiet. He stifled me, he suffocated me, and it was the first of many times and many things he did to me in many places.

I couldn’t speak. My mouth was full. No words could come out and they wouldn’t for months.