Girl, Interrupted
"My commitment is to cross over that river, the river of victimhood."
~ Tori Amos


I recently rewrote this story in an attempt to heal what I have been left with. My eventual goal is to chronicle all of my truma, but that is quite a mighty undertaking. All in good time.



I have put this intensely personal story on this page in hopes that someone will see it, and feel not so alone, not so naked in the light. I absolutely DO NOT want sympathy, or pity. What I do want is recognition, for me, for Tori, for any woman who has ever been abused. Any woman who said no. I didn't ask for what I got. None of us did.


She was twelve, four days shy of thirteen, had only just gotten her period a few months earlier. She watched cartoons on Saturday morning, took the crust off her sandwiches,and kept a nightlight. She was still a little girl, still saw the world with innocent eyes, walked alone yet unafraid through the late-night hours of her safe, suburban neighborhood. She still believed that there were no truly bad people, had not yet learned what true evil was.

She had been hanging out with her friends, doing what twelve year old girls do: gossip and laugh and complain about the lack of maturity in boys their own age. She was spending the night at a friend’s, taking advantage of the fact that her mother would not be able to grill her when she returned home so late. After all, it was shortly past midnight, and she had not yet completely mastered the fine art of rebellion. Swathed in flowing black material and velvet she wandered down the main road of her neighborhood with marijuana floating through her nearly hazy brain.

She heard footsteps behind her and looked back, only to find the shadows of early morning following her. She kept walking, heard the footsteps again, and again turned around, but there was no one. She turned to get away from the thickness of the dark, and in front of her stood a man blocking the path, a smile on his face that sent chills up and down her spine and made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. She stumbled in fear and surprise, leaping away from him. She moved to run in the other direction, and found that a second man was behind her. She twisted to the left, a third man, twisted to the right and there stood a fourth man completing the ambush, surrounding the innocent confusion on her face. Her legs collapsed beneath her and she sank to the ground, weeping the tears of a child that she morbidly understood would finally cease to exist.

They were wearing black from head to toe and knit ski masks, like a bad movie cliche. They sounded like they could have been in their mid-late twenties, no older than thirty, had that surfer sound, speaking with the occasional "dude" and "right on". One of them grabbed her by the arm and pulled her through the dense trees on the side of the road into a meadow. She screamed and kicked cried and begged for them to let her go.

They made her stand in front of them. The first man took out a knife, and the moonlight glistened beautifully off the clean blade, only a twinkle when he moved it menacingly towards her. He commanded her to take off her clothes, and she sobbed, shaking her head and begging for them to release her. He came at her, pushed the blade harshly to her neck and told her he would slit her throat if she didn’t “shut the fuck up”. She raised her hand in a motion for him to stop, and did as he said. She removed her shirt, skin stiffening from the cool shock of the air. She had on a brand new bra, the one she had been so excited to get, her first pretty bra. It was butter-colored satin with tiny pink rose buds randomly scattered and a bow where the material met in between her still growing breasts. He told her to take it off. She dropped it to the ground, time moving in slow motion, and watched it land on the wet earth, saw the creamy satin splash with the mud from the light rain earlier th at day. That was when she knew, when the little girl who slept with a nightlight fled, ran screaming and howling from that meadow.

He backed her up against a tree, reached under her skirt and cut off her white cotton underwear. Dirty, lascivious fingers, and she could feel the filth. He made her tell him she liked it. She continued begging him to let her go home, over and over and over again. “Please. Please. Please… Please?”

He unzipped his pants, black denim and a tiny hole in the knee. There it was, ugly and repulsive. She fought the nausea when he made her touch him, could feel the bile gathering in the back of her throat. Before she even knew what had happened, he was inside of her, pain like she had never experienced before. Her feet left the ground, and she felt herself leave her body, watched the entire scene from afar. She watched a man thrust into a little girl, watched with fright and bewilderment. She saw the look on the girl’s face, saw her stare into the night with blank eyes so unlike her own. She wanted to run to her, take the girl in her arms, stroke her hair and kiss her eyelids. She wanted to beat the will to fight back into her, and yet the girl only stared vacantly into the night.

He came inside of her and she thought it was over, thought they would let her go. Instead he threw her to the ground and motioned for the second man to approach. There were no tears and she didn’t fight, merely lay there. He assaulted her orally, his tongue inside like a snake listening to her body. He entered just as the first man had, and she was numb from the pain, would later consider the conundrum of being in agony and being numb all at once. There was a rock digging into her right shoulder. It was only a little rock, no more than a pebble. But it dug straight into her soul, lodged itself in her heart, growing in size with each passing moment like a rock in your shoe that you would swear was getting larger.

They all took their turns with her and four hours later they stood up. Her skirt was around her waist, her eviscerated underwear resting next to the soiled bra, shirt in the branches of that awful tree. Her skin was dirty, her breasts cut and bruised. The first man leaned over her, his face millimeters away from hers. He smiled that sick, revolting smile, pushed his mouth to hers and kissed her. It was a soft, closed mouth kiss, almost tender, almost loving. They got in their car, Guns N Roses taking the place of her piercing screams and helpless cries, and they were gone, leaving her in the mud, dirty and bleeding.

There was no moon. She stayed there searching for the moon, and moaned at the solitude in her bones without lunar light to hold her close. She sat up, cringed from the pain between her legs and rocked, back and forth and back and forth through the pain. Rocked and sobbed, cried tears for the little girl that had run when her bra hit the ground. She could only seem to rock, an occasional whimper falling poignantly from smashed lips.

Eventually she stood up and her skirt fell back down around her ankles. She put her ripped shirt on and left the bra and underwear in the mud where they had landed. She couldn't bear the sight of her beautiful bra, soiled and destroyed. She went home and got in the shower. She turned the water as hot as it would go, couldn't seem get it hot enough. The dirt washed away, and her limbs turned pink. The cuts on her chest swelled, the skin around them becoming spongy and soft, but she still felt dirty, couldn't escape the feeling that they were coming for her, that they had followed her home. She sat on the floor of the shower, clutched her knees to her chest, shook uncontrollably for what felt like an eternity, and at last crawled into bed just as the sun was peeking it's head over the hills.