I knew what happened to my sister. I wasn't stupid. I heard. So now that she was gone and I was here at Degrassi I eyed all the boys with suspicion. The same thing could happen to me. I viewed them from the corner of my eyes and wondered what violence they were capable of.
I wanted school to be just school. Just books and papers and robot projects and grades, but I knew it was more than this. I wore my catholic school uniform in the hopes of keeping everyone at bay.
It wasn't healthy, I knew that. My narrowed eyed look, my hugging my books to my chest, head down, scurrying through the halls. But I saw Darcy in the hospital after she slit her wrists in school, the pallor of her cheeks, the dark circles under her eyes. I saw the bandages over the thick double row of stitches holding her arteries closed. I knew what that boy had done to her.
When I was little I used to read these trashy novels by V.C. Andrews. I thought it was ghost written. There were so many of these books with their worn covers and weird illustrations. My mother had bought them at a yard sale for a quarter and she didn't know their content. These trashy novels all involved trauma and betrayal and confusion and loyalty. When I was three and four I ate these things up, getting clues on the human psyche that seemed to allude me. One of those books reminds me of this. Of me and Darcy and this…this.
I shouldn't let it get to me. I should talk to boys and people and wear the trendy slut clothes and not think, 'I'll be asking for it,' That is only chauvinistic propaganda. No one asks for it. Darcy didn't.
The book that reminds me of this whole thing is called, "My Sweet Audrina" and in this book there is a girl named Audrina. She wears fancy dresses, white and iridescent flowing dresses in her creepy house filled with stairs and torrents and hidden rooms. She looks at prisms and the rainbows they make all day long. Her memory is full of holes but she knows that she isn't the first Audrina. She had an older sister named Audrina who died before she was born. She knows this because her handsome father brings her to the grave and they put flowers on it and she looks at the little pyramid prism in her hand.
Darcy hangs over me just as if she had died. She didn't die. She just went away. And she got better over the whole rape thing. She healed. I seem to have gotten worse in some ways, having nothing to heal from. I've pulled into myself, into a little iridescent shell of my own.
I remember the ending of that book, "My Sweet Audrina," Her mother died, or maybe she was dead from the start. Her father met a legless woman who used to be a dancer in a cottage in the forest and he married her but somehow she died, falling down the spiral stairs. And it was revealed that there was only one Audrina, the whole girl who was first and the broken, strange one who was left after the boys raped her that day on her way home from school. Her father made up the older sister with the same name and the tragic death to protect her from her memories, to save her. I was acquiring Darcy's memories, and her rape is becoming my own, and there's no one to save me.