Just Pretend You’re Happy

“Let’s talk about your siblings then”, Dr. Meyers had a lemon yellow notepad sitting on his lap, one of those clicking pens bobbing against his knee.

I nodded, shaking my long blonde do around my head.

“What’s your sisters name?”

“Elizabeth Jane Blake”.

I’d recited this a thousand times, a million times by now, but I still needed the warm-up, I wasn’t used to talking to anyone about anything, so this was just practice.

I smiled as Dr. Meyers kept tapping the pen on his clipboard. It seemed funny to me that he should have to write down if I said anything worth repeating to the authorities, didn’t they think if I wanted to tell them, I would have?

“And your older brother?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat, “Cody Daniel Blake”.

Dr. Meyers sighed, “You’re going to have to tell me about it eventually, Violet”.

I closed my eyes, I didn’t have to say anything. As long as I was sitting there with my mouth shut, all he could do was moan and groan about how I was uncooperative, a complaint I heard all too often from him.

Dr. Meyers reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, a gentile, cold hand.

I jerked back, throwing myself up and into one of the walls near the door.

Dr. Meyers blinked, “You need to tell me about that”, he said.

I gritted my teeth, trying to make the images in my head go away that had immediately sprang into my mind.

“Fine”, I sat back down on the frigid leather couch.

I took in  a slow breath, and waited for the click of Dr. Meyers pen.

“Well, It all began when my mother and father seperated”…

I was eight years old when my dad moved into his own house with his girlfriend and an old high school roommate. I didn’t think much of it, my Dad was around just as much as he was before he moved out, which was almost never.

He left me alone with that roommate a lot when he and his  girlfriend were at work or partying at night. I knew it wasn’t fair, he was supposed to be spending time with me, that’s why I went over there every weekend, but theres nothing I could do about it, so I let it go.

I didn’t mind being there until one  day, one scalding August day when I decided I was going to play with the hose out in the back yard. It was dwindling into the late afternoon when I finally decided to go inside and do something else for the remainder of the day, so I went into my room and started to peel of my wet bathing suit.

That’s when I felt his eyes on me, scanning over my little body and looking at me like he was inside a candy store.

“Can I help you?” I asked, feeling awkward and exposed.

He didn’t speak, didn’t say one word, he just came into my room and started…touching me.

That’s how it started. After that he came into my room at night when no one but me was home. I dreaded going there, having to look at him all the time and watch him strip me down and have his way with me until i screeched and screeched for him to leave me alone.

I would pull the covers up over my head at night and pray he didn’t come into my room, but he always did.

It got worse. I tried to get him to stop, I even tried to kick him once, but he was too strong for me. He grabbed my by my arms and shook me senseless, slapping me across the face time and time again. He would strap me down to the bed by the posts with a rope and not let me up until the next morning when my wrists were torn and bloody and my whole body ached with the knowing that I had no ounce of strength left to fight back.

I couldn’t tell anyone though. He threatened to do the same thing to my little sister Eliza, who no more then two years old at the time. I couldn’t let him take from her what he had stripped from me. I was no longer the happy little girl that I had once been, always smiling, laughing, having a good time. He had taken that emotion from me and slandered it.

I was alone. I didn’t have anything anymore. He had taken it all from me; my freedom, my innocence, my trust in people, my love of life, my youth, my vey childhood. But I couldn’t let anyone else see that. I had to fake my smiles, fake my laughs, fake my happiness.

I had to whisper it to myself every single night before he came into my room, just to remind myself not to let him see me cry.

“Just Pretend You’re Happy.”