I could see how he thought that assumption was reasonable, in retrospect. For a time, even I bought into the idea that only a certain kind of woman got sexually assaulted or raped. I was not that kind of woman.
***
I don't know where I got this idea, but from a very early age, I believed that to be girly was to be weak. And I was not weak. I was not timid. I was not frail. I was tough. I was bold. As my step-grandfather later recalled, after calling 5-year-old me a nice little girl, I replied: "I'm not nice; that's my sister. I'm Heidi. I'm mean!"
I rejected girliness with the full force of my being. As soon as I was old enough to pick my own clothes, my wardrobe reflected as much. I did not wear dresses or skirts; it was all jeans and t-shirts. What feminine clothes I did inherit from my sister went largely unworn. The dressy clothes my parents did buy were worn only on select occasions, when my parents made me wear them. I climbed trees and played in the mud. I loved catching snakes and frogs in the yard. I asked for G.I. Joe and Legos for Christmas, but never got them. It confounded me to see my brother getting Legos, though he'd long since stopped asking for them. He even complained that he didn't want them. I got a Barbie the one time I asked for it (which my parents were surely relieved to see on the list when it appeared), but I was disappointed by it anyway, and gave it to my sister. I never stopped asking for boy things, til I stopped believing.
When I was in school, I fit in pretty well, up to a certain point. If my intelligence ever would have isolated me, I always had the peers in my gifted classes. I did make an effort to take an interest in the things the other girls liked, though most of their talk bored me. I tried to dance with them along with the Spice Girls music, but I was not as practiced as they were. I was quietly left out, passively discouraged from participating. Which was fine by me. I was tired of being the catcher on my softball team anyway, just because the other girls were too cowardly to do it. My hero was Ash Ketchum, not Brittany Spears. I decided I didn't really like other girls anyway; they were shallow and sly, not deep and honest, like me.
In fifth grade I joined the baseball team (my parents looked at each other, shrugged: "Okay honey.") There were try-outs, and I could tell I wasn't as good as some of the boys I was playing with. But I still wanted to play. I loved the game. But they loved winning more. So I warmed the bench. A lot. I knew what was happening. I knew I was being left out again. And I cried about it, shamelessly.
But I wasn't a boy, so no one told me not to.
I went to practice, I worked hard, because I loved to play, but I didn't get good enough. When we got our trophies at the end of the year, they went out of their way to get one for me with a girl on it. But when the coach talked about our progress over the course of the season, I realized they didn't want to go too far out of their way for me. Other boys were getting training between seasons. No one offered any to me. I wanted to become the first professional female baseball player, but after that season, I gave that up.
My breasts developed sooner than the other girls. I went with my mother, red-faced, to the store for my first bra. I skipped the training bra and jumped straight to a B cup. I wore all my shirts baggy after that. I didn't care when people told me it made me look fat. It took a lot of goading by other girls before I was finally shaving my legs and armpits. I could only get told I looked like a gorilla so many times before I started wearing my 4-H jacket every single day, even though I lived in Florida. And it wasn't enough that I shaved my gorilla legs; now they were pasty. So I wore only pants. They didn't have much to say after that; most of my body was hidden. At least I felt sure that the few friends I had liked me for who I was.
I hated my name. "Oh, like Shirley Temple?" "Oh, like the super model?" Sweet little girls. Hot, sexy super models. It was not the impression I wanted. In middle school I got people to start calling me H.R., my initials.
Though I worked so hard to keep my body to myself, it didn't stop me from going a little crazy for boys once in a while. I fell hard once at the end of middle school, and two month later had my heart torn to shreds. By high school, I fell again, this time a relationship that had such high highs and low lows I felt insane, and we eventually parted ways. Both were good boys, who loved me for my confidence and intelligence. I never felt violated, because they never took more than I was ready to give.
My closest friends in high school were almost exclusively boys. We were outcasts, mostly, even the other girls. But I still hated girls. The girls in our clique said the same thing. We did not paint each other's nails. We did not have slumber parties. We did not go to the bathroom together. We ate pizza, drank Mountain Dew, and played video games with the boys. We were as content in each others company as discontented teenagers could be.
I joined the swim team, and realized it was a great excuse to shave my gorilla arms. By that time I had been wearing that jacket constantly for about five years. I was happy to retire it. I found I could enjoy sports again, because if I didn't win races, I could still compete against myself. Compared to what I normally wore, my swimsuit was liberating. From then on I never even tried to wear a bikini; the one-piece competition swimsuit was fine by me. Bikinis didn't hold me in very well, anyway.
I also joined the wrestling team. I had always been pretty rough-and-tumble, and I found I really enjoyed this sport, too, though I didn't expect to win. I practiced with the daughter of a wrestling coach and some of the smaller boys. In competition I was matched with boys, though 128 pounds for a boy means something different for a girl. They were tall, lanky, and had long reaches. I was short and stubby, with significantly more body fat than them. When I bested an opponent, I knew it was my practiced skill, not raw strength, that won the match. I loved to play all the same, but this was when I learned how fantastic it felt to win.
Sports left me confident in my physicality. I knew I was no super model, and I was fine with that. I never tried to be. But I was never afraid. Then again, I didn't know what I was supposed to be afraid of.
I grew up on dirt roads. Walking home from the bus stop, I got in folks cars when they were going my way, and waved when they honked if they passed the other way. I knew everyone in my neighborhood, and applied a naive trust to them all. And why wouldn't I? They all came out to help each other when someone's car got stuck in the mud, they came together to petition the county to fix the roads. My mom put banana bread in their mailboxes for Christmas and we played barefoot in everyone's yards. It was a borrow-a-cup-of-sugar sort of place.
So I didn't understand what the big deal was when I told my mom I'd just walk to our family friend's house after school. What's the big deal? I asked. We've driven there enough times, I'm not going to get lost or anything. Grudgingly, my mom allowed it. But of course I got lost. And as I backtracked and tried different routes through the ghetto, I felt like a small child lost in a grocery store, until I finally borrowed a phone at a greasy-looking tire place. The men stopped their work and were happy to oblige. I was picked up just before the sun went down. It felt stupid for getting so turned around (I wasn't far, I'd just missed a turn), so I nodded passively when my mom told me to walk with someone next time.
She was our family friend's daughter, who I affectionately called my cousin. We didn't get along all the time, but it was easy enough to consider her family. The first day walking with her, a passing driver honked at us, and I instinctively waved.
"What are you doing?!" my cousin yelped, aghast.
"They honked at us. I figured they probably know us or something."
She shook her head, looking at me like I was crazy. "That's not why they're honking."
"Oh."
Oh.
It wasn't the last time we were honked at or whistled at. I followed my cousin's lead, kept my head down, avoided any eye contact, and ignored it, even though it enraged me. Why would you honk at us? You don't know us. My friendly rural default settings were slowly being adjusted.
Though the catcalls were annoying, I was still fearless. I did not shy away from walking down the street or even taking shortcuts. One day, after wrestling practice, I got impatient waiting for my ride outside the gym, so I walked down the side alley by the school to the main road to wait there. Even before I headed out, there was a warning voice inside my head: "It's very late and there's hardly anyone on campus right now. Maybe you don't want to walk down such an isolated path." I scoffed at myself. I was sweaty and gross from wrestling practice, in a damp, over-sized t-shirt and high school gym shorts. Who's dumb enough to attack a wrestler?
I had made my way halfway down the alley when a strange man came alongside me. The sirens went off in my head. I began sizing him up. He might have been in my weight class, but barely. And he was kind of scrawny. I could take him, I thought to myself.
But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was a homeless guy who wanted to ask for money. Maybe he legitimately just wanted to talk. I continued walking. Even still, I was replaying in my head the moves I had just been practicing.
"Hey, how you doin'?" he asked, innocuously enough.
"Fine, just getting out of wrestling practice," I replied, hoping my tone came off warning enough. Even then, I was thinking of how I would pin him and scream if he tried anything at all. My pulse was quickening.
"Cool, cool," he said. After a brief pause, he continued, "So you wanna guess how big this is?"
I glanced over, and he was gesturing at his groin. I rolled my eyes and turned on my heel after a quick calculation: the main road is closer than the gym, but I don't know if anyone is there. But I know my teammates are still waiting for their ride by the gym, so it's a longer walk but they'll see me or hear me. I could hardly believe this was happening to me. It was difficult to run with a bulky backpack, but I walked as fast as I could manage.
He followed me back up the alley. I cut across past the dumpsters to get to where my teammates would be able to see me sooner, and the man made one last attempt. "Oh, c'mon baby," he said, and grasped my shoulder. The sirens in my head shrieked, and so did I. "GET AWAY FROM ME!" I slapped his arm away, dropped my bag and bolted toward the back road.
I could see my teammates in the distance, looking in my direction, still sitting where I'd left them. That's when I stopped, and looked behind me. The man was slinking back through the opening in the fence, walking fast but trying not to move too fast as to look suspicious. And then, he disappeared into the foliage.
I went back to grab my bag, and headed back toward the safety of numbers. I had barely gotten halfway back there when my mom finally drove up, and I hopped in the car.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
I was trembling, trying my hardest not to cry. "Nothing. Let's go home."
***
My friend stared at me as I told the story. When I finished, he just said, "Oh."
Oh.
***
In the aftermath of the event, I struggled with what to do about the incident. I knew it was important for me to report it, and I told myself I needed to report to the school deputy's office first thing in the morning to let them know.
But the guy is long gone, they'll never catch him.
Still, I needed to report it. The school personnel needed to know that area was dangerous, and that there was a predator prowling the area.
You don't remember what his face looked like.
It didn't matter. If I didn't give them a chance to do something about it, some other girl would get hurt.
But I shouldn't have been walking there in the first place.
In the morning, I didn't report it. My conscience berated me again and again to go in and say something. I felt ashamed that I wasn't doing what was right, but I felt even more ashamed for being assaulted in the first place. You can tell them tomorrow, I told myself. Then the next day. Then the next. Finally, I felt like the time had passed, I would just be shamed for not going in sooner, if I wasn't shamed outright for going there in the first place.
I was now part of an under-reported statistic.
That moment haunted me for years before I took a women's studies class in college. Only then was I able to process it and work through my shame. But even now I still feel guilty.
A few weeks after the incident, they announced over the intercom at the start of the day that the afternoon before, one of the cafeteria staff was assaulted and robbed on her way to her car, in the exact same spot I had made my escape.
I could have helped, I should have, but I didn't.
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