Stop is a four-letter word

He’s on top of you and he wants to know why you won’t look at him.“What’s so fascinating in that corner over there?” He bites your earlobe. Pulls your face toward his. Laughs. You go limp.

When it's over, you smile sweetly and kiss him goodbye, because it's the safest way out. It's the only way out.

On the drive home, you take a sip from your water bottle and decide, since your mouth touched it, you’ll have to throw it away.

You fumble your way to the bathroom and scrub your mouth until your gums bleed. You climb into the shower, and here’s where things get dicey. Remember how you used to play Don’t Touch the Ground? It’s like that, except you can’t touch what he touched, and he touched

everything.

Good luck.

When your hand grazes your thigh, you scrub it raw. Your thigh, then your hand, then your thigh again, each one contaminating the other until you’re sure you’ve uncovered something subcutaneous or maybe even disappeared like an eraser rubbed down to the nub.

Your hands are shaking. You hold your trembling fingers out in front of you and say, “Stop,” but they don’t stop. So you say it again—stop, stop, stop—and you feel your voice getting hysterical and your throat heaving and you wonder if you’ve made any sound at all.

Maybe “stop” isn’t even a word. Maybe it’s just a collection of sounds you made up in your head.

You go to urgent care, and they tell you they can’t see you here. You have to go to the emergency room for this sort of thing.“This sort of thing” is what they call it.

The ER nurse gives you a morning-after pill. She tells you you might feel nauseous. She doesn’t tell you that you’ll bleed for 17 days, that you’ll wonder if it’s a side effect or a miscarriage and if it even matters, because the point is you’re bleeding and you can’t un-bleed, so whatever, right?

You wake up the next morning in your bed, but you think you’re in his. You run to the sink, stomach slamming into porcelain, and vomit.

You see your reflection in the mirror and you hate yourself, you hate yourself, so you scrub the glass with your fist and you yell that non-word again, “Stop, stop it” but your reflection doesn’t go away, it just stays there stubborn as a wine stain. Stubborn as a blood stain.

You can't tell your family, the family that voted for the guy who

spied on naked children in a pageant dressing room told a 10-year-old girl he'd be dating her in 10 years was held liable for sexual assault was credibly accused of raping a child threatened to kill the family of an eyewitness was photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and young girls for more than a decade appears in the Epstein files more times than anyone but Jeffrey Epstein himself said his infant daughter had his wife's legs and might one day have her breasts called women animals dogs fat pigs said he could grab women the way your rapist grabbed you and then dared to ask why the women he abused weren't smiling while he did it

"We don't believe it," they say.

What would it take? What would it take to believe the girls, believe the women, who have nothing to gain and everything to lose, whose bodies and souls have already been violated in every conceivable way?

"I will never believe it."

This is why you don't report. This is why you don't report your rapist, the boys in the high school stairwell, the married coworker twice your age

because photographs emails flight logs diaries therapy notes eyewitnesses corroborated timelines DNA don't count, so your word sure as hell doesn't, and

62 million men visited a website in February to trade tips on how to drug and rape their wives, and you have to go to work and pretend it didn't happen and that it doesn't really matter and that

stop is just a four-letter word.