The Time I Wasn’t Raped
The time I wasn’t raped, we sat together on the old mattress. You struggled to release your muscled shoulders from the low-hanging mosquito net — an enormous brown fly caught in a wispy synthetic web. You passed me the joint and I gratefully inhaled. We watched the thick smoke unravel in the humid air.
I was there on a fellowship to help. I was supposed to teach literacy. Never mind that I didn’t really speak Spanish. Never mind that I wasn’t a teacher. The slum where you grew up was littered with people like me: student groups, missionaries, NGO volunteers. We were tiptoeing in the footsteps of earlier colonizers. We were there to help.
You taught me to wash my fruit with bottled water. My diarrhea finally stopped after that, but I was still 6 pounds lighter than when I arrived. From then on, I came to you for explanations about everything: who to visit for the best mid-afternoon snacks, when to expect access to electricity, which parents knew how to read. I taught you how to use a touch screen, about legalized gay marriage, and about meditation. I taught your little sister the alphabet.
I watched you exercise under the 4:00 sun- lifting weights made of rusty discarded pieces of iron. It looked effortless but later beads of sweat angrily glinted on your chest. You offered to teach me. I couldn’t lift even the smallest iron fragment. I defended my weakness with explanations about our relative sizes. The stretched star of my fingers easily fit inside the confines of your palm. I wasn’t sure about our relationship. I thought you saw me as a little sister. But sometimes your jokes turned sexual when you were with your friends. I knew you didn’t see me as a little sister.
I asked you to help me teach a class. I arranged for you to receive a stipend. It was more money than you could make working the fields. But I didn’t like the way you held the back of the seven-year-olds necks when they gave you attitude. You must use the disciplinary system, I instructed you, and pointed to the poster I had made taped to the peeling paint- stars and x’s drawn next to each child’s name. You had grown up with these children, and I had arrived three months ago. I was your boss. There was no contest. The next time a child talked back, you drew a small x on the poster.
One day, the volunteer I lived with opened our door to a gunpoint. She relinquished her laptop and other electronics. After, I no longer felt safe. We had too many belongings. We were surrounded by people who couldn’t afford enough rice. I insisted on moving. I wanted to be protected. I moved into your mother’s house. She also didn’t have enough rice. But I paid rent. I insisted on overpaying. My currency was strong, fortified by too many years of exploiting your land’s resources and labor. I could afford to pay for your whole family’s rice, at least.
A year after I returned home, I would get a Facebook message from you. You would ask me to send you $300. You would tell me how your mother had just given birth to a new baby, but there were complications and she was going to die if she didn’t get a blood transfusion. You would tell me how you couldn’t afford the blood and you needed my help. I would send you the money, and then I would get a message from your father returning the money and telling me you had lied. I would add this fabricated blood to a list I had never meant to create: a list of all the reasons I couldn’t trust men. This list would get so long. It would include my boss neglecting to mention that he knew you had spent years in jail for raping a 15-year-old girl. It would include the cowardice of boy after boy who couldn’t bear to tell me the truth, who would clumsily break my heart. It would include little things, like boys showing up empty handed to my dinner parties. Each little thing would add up until I reached a point where I would have trouble trusting half the population.
After we got high, I slowly closed my eyes. When I blinked my eyelids open, your pants were off. No, no, I said. You smeared my shoulders roughly into the pillow behind me, pinning me under your weight. Your body surrounded me. Your knee forced my clenched thighs apart and I stayed silent as you stuffed your fingers inside me. My shoulder ached, my skin still pinched in your grip. I felt the moistness of your breath on the side of my neck. There was no contest. I thrashed to the side, tugging at the mosquito net. The mesh tore from the ceiling, floating down over your smooth back. We made eye contact. I said your name, forcing laughter to erase the gravity of the moment, easing us away from the present and back into our uncertain friendship. You rolled off me and put on your pants. We sat side by side, still entwined in the criss-cross of the net, both powerful and both powerless.
