They let you sleep in, not that that surprises you. Extra sleep is like the universal Girardi concession when something bad happens. Kevin gets paralyzed; let him sleep in. Luke is sick; let him sleep in. You go crazy, so more rest for you. Molestation apparently falls under the same umbrella.

Molestation. You hate that word, even more than you hated "hallucination" or "delusion." Those words represented what wasn't real; this one is represents what is. When you thought you were crazy, you imagined that He was like a ghost, something you could pass your hand through and something that antibiotics would evaporate and therapy would whisk away. What isn't real, you figured, can't hurt you.

Only he was, you think, feeling his hands on you, touching you, not stopping…

Suddenly, you sit up, and before you know it, you're running down the hall, fast and frantic. If only you could have done this yesterday, when the only "he" in your mind was Him.

………

The waters falls on you, burning, scalding, incredibly hot. It stings your skin with every drop, but you don't move away from the cascade. You imagine the heat burning away everything he touched, cleansing you of it.

You don't need Dr. Dan to tell you this isn't normal (But then again, is anything about your life normal?). It's the type of thing the self-mutilators and obsessive compulsives at camp might have done, the same twisted behavior that makes its way on to newsmagazines as "alarming new trends." If God and Lyme's didn't make you go crazy, this just might.

………….

When you get downstairs, Kevin and Luke are already sitting at the table. Luke is blathering on about some physics concept you're never going to understand while Kevin reads the newspaper, totally blocking out Luke. Everything is normal; they must not know yet.

Thank God.

You sit down in an empty chair not bothering to get anything to eat. The thought of putting food in your mouth is extremely off-putting somehow, so you just sit there in the silence, cherishing this moment of being invisible. Even the drama queen in you knows being no one is better than being who you'll become.

Just as you're reaching for the newspaper, Mom and Dad walk into the kitchen. Mom is holding a rolled up piece of newspaper in her hand, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why.

You can feel them staring at you, terrified but loving, unsure but authoritative, repulsed but sheltering. You are their only daughter, the child they swore to love and protect, but you are also the victim, someone broken and not yet healed, someone they don't quite understand. You are a paradox, just like He said.

………..

The hospital. Again. For some hideous reason, your family seems drawn to this place like the proverbial moth to the flame, except the moth has the good fortune of only being fried once. You, on the other hand, just keep getting beaten, drawn back, and beaten again. You'd like to argue that cruel twist of fate with Him sometime, but you don't expected to win in the least (The record is in His favor from all the times he creamed you at chess anyway).

Today, there is a woman waiting for you when you pass through the sliding automatic doors of the hospital. She is dressed in uniform and has her long auburn hair swept back in neat ponytail. The women, whose name you pay no mind to (You cringe at the thought of ever meeting her again, away.), notices you immediately. She and Dad greet each other by name, so you're guessing they see each other around (Could this get any more humiliating? Probably, but you don't want to know how.). Next, she introduces herself briefly to Mom and then beckons you follow her down the hall. This whole time, you don't stay a word.

The room she takes you to is more of a conference room than a hospital room. Two large stuffed chairs are positioned on either side of a small wooden table where a laptop rests. It is only then that it occurs to you that your words will be taken down and distributed among your father's friends and colleagues as needed. As hard as the deposition was, you think, this is going to be far worse.

It crosses your mind that this is type of thing that He would love to talk to you about, not just to prove one of His points about perspective, but also to comfort You in His strange yet effective way. As much as you know you should be mad at Him and as much as you want to, it is hard not admit how much you need Him right now. You searched for Him in the faces of the pedestrians as you drove through the streets and gazed at the faces in the hospital hallways in hopes of finding Him among them. Yet He wasn't there, at least not that you could see. You take a deep breath and sit down, keeping His face in your mind all the while like a rock in the storm.

The woman sits down opposite you and readies her laptop. Then she asks you the question you've been dreading: What happened?

………

It was an art party, the type of thing Adam would have loved with strange abstract paintings, senseless sculptures (not one-millionth as good as his, mind you), and other stuff you couldn't even begin to affix a label to. In truth, you never really liked stuff like that, but you went anyway because you thought that it might help connect you to Adam, even though he was busy working at the design studio that night.

You ordered a sweet coffee drink and absent mindedly milled around for a while. The art was good, you'd say, but no where near the level of Adam's (not that you're all that great of a judge, anyway). They seemed to lack that dynamic punch, the feeling that you were around something filled with life and motion, something moved you to the depths of your soul and changed forever how you saw the world. With these works, you just saw the paint or the metal. They were shells.

Actually, there is only one piece that you can truly remember from that whole ordeal. It was a painting of a lion and tiger in the mist of a fight. It was pretty good, you guess, but the guy standing by it kept distracting you. He was tall and lean but fairly strong and had shaggy light brown hair. He must have been the artist because he stayed over there a large part of the night, talking to random passer-bys. For some reason, he creped you out, though you don't know why (It's not as if you don't have enough encounters with random "strangers.").

But he didn't address you by name, didn't tell you to build a boat, didn't quote classic literature, didn't announce that he was casting a zombie-themed musical, so you just walked away and pushed the guy out of your head. It's not like you didn't have enough to worry about in your life.

It was later, maybe twenty minutes later, when you decided to go the bathroom. The bathrooms at the place were really poorly positioned (as though the architect hadn't actually considered the people that would be in the building until the project was almost due), and so they had been placed in a small wall niche on the north side of the building.

It was in that small, desolate, shitty corner of the building that another piece of sanity dropped out of your life.

The guy from the painting was waiting for you there as you opened the stall door. Just sitting there and twiddling his thumbs like the creep he is. Before you can say anything, he came into the stall, and it started. You don't remember what happened, exactly where his hands went first or the look in his eyes as he stared at you before he mercifully let you go and walked away.

All you can really remember is what you didn't do: you didn't bite or kick or scream like they always said, you just stood there transfixed in horror. You were weak, silent, the consummate victim. You became a person who, no matter what any therapist, cop, or PSA tells you, will always wonder in some dark place if it was somehow in some way her fault. It is then you realize that no amount of hot water can wash out evil. Hopefully, there's something that can. You'll have to ask God.