MY PALMS SWEAT, the perspiration gathering between them and the polished wood of his office desk. On the computer in front of me, the recording plays like a cult film I saw once; only the girl in this movie looks just like me. Same blonde hair. Same small figure. Same nervous tick as she twirls her near-white blonde hair around her finger.
The boys… they look like my brothers, one fat and smirking, one nervous and eager, one cunning and handsome.
No.
Why aren’t you smiling at the girl who looks like me, Benji? Why aren’t you smiling sweetly at her?
The boys take turns licking the girl between her legs while her head rolls with sporadic consciousness.
A pounding begins in my brain.
Why aren’t you asking them to leave, Benji? So you can be alone with her? Why?
The girl who looks like me passes out, and the fat, smirking one thrusts into her so hard her entire body pulses up the couch. So hard her eyes fly open with the force of it, and the first whimpering sound escapes her contorted, hopeless throat. I hate her… Hate how weak she is.
“LIKE MY COCK, our … dirty … little… slut?”
WHY DON’T YOU CARE, Benji?!
The pounding in my head becomes a physical boulder of sound and pain, slamming from one ear to the other. The word no on repeat. A chant. A cry. A plea. I want to save her. I want to climb inside that monitor and drag her the fuck out.
‘WHERE ARE YOU GOING?’
NOW THE GIRL is trying to get away, and she’s so weak. So utterly useless. Her body isn’t working at all, not for her at least, but it is working for them…
I shake my head slowly, whispering, ‘No,’ before begging the girl on the monitor, ‘Get up. Please. Please get up. Don’t let them hurt you.’
But it’s too late.
Because the cunning, handsome one that looks like Benji is pinning the girl’s chest to the couch and fucking her from behind.
No. No!
I burst into tears, the current flooding my face, making the vision of the girl who looks like me, who is being fucked by her three foster brothers, a blur of gyrating fierce movements.
Their grunts are clear and haunting. I’ll hear them forever. In my head. In my nightmares. I’ll hear the grunts like a battle drum, the last sound before a willing walk to death. I cover my ears as the drum beckons me to silence it forever, to do anything to stop it.
My heart twists.
But it’s not me.
I shake.
But it’s not me.
I feel hollow, painful helplessness.
It.
Is.
Not.
Me.
But the sound of their pleasure lingers inside the cells in my brain, a broken neuron on repeat. A sound that imbeds itself in deep.
“I’M BLEEDING.”
NO. No. No. Bile rising in my throat, I throw my head to the side, expelling the entire contents of my stomach: three meals, cake, and ice cream.
A stomach full of lies.
My eyes are dragged back to the screen again as the fat one pushes the handsome one onto the glass table before taking hold of the girl again. Slamming her face down on the couch, he starts to fuck her again while she watches the other boy slowly bleed out all over the carpet.
My lungs shrivel inside me. Oxygen impossibly thick. I feel dizzy. Hazy. Airless. She looks just like me…
No.
It’s not me on the screen.
It’s not me who was raped.
It’s not me.
‘Fawn!’
The grunts from the screen, in my head—in my cells—and the pounding between my ears are all interrupted by a weak, useless name being called. Someone is calling my name from outside his office. I look up to see the office handle shake and shake and shake, but it’s locked and I’m alone in here. With her. And them.
My body keels over, and I drop to my knees, press my palms to the carpet, and heave for oxygen.
It’s not me.
