Finding Me (15 page)

Not a day went by that I didn’t dream about Joey and wonder what he was doing.
Did he go to the store today? Did he have a nightmare that I wasn’t there for? Did he play at the park? Does he have a dog now? Was his name changed? Are things happening in the world that would affect him?
So when the dude showed up with a TV, I kinda went nuts on the inside, but on the outside I tried to act like I didn’t care.

Although he told me not to turn to the news or watch black people, sometimes I did anyway. One huge news item happened in the middle of March, when Elizabeth Smart was found. I was so glad she was alive and got to go back home. It gave me hope that maybe I’d be discovered and set free too.

I also caught up on a lot of other stuff: Michael Jackson had held his baby over a balcony the year before (
Oh my God
). The Anaheim Angels had beat the San Francisco Giants to win the World Series (for some reason, I loved baseball … I always wished I was tall enough to play). I found out that Kelly Clarkson had won the first season of
American Idol
, but I couldn’t catch every episode of the second season because there were so many black contestants and I knew the dude might walk in and see them. I later heard that Reuben Stoddard won. I could have told you
that
would happen … that guy could
sing!

My favorite show was
Everybody Loves Raymond
. It made me laugh so hard that I almost had to pee on myself, but it also sometimes made me sad. In some of the episodes Raymond took his family out for fun. They would go to the movies or to the park. One time he even had a romantic dinner with his wife. Things like that made me cry because I didn’t have that—and I knew I might
never
have that. It was like the whole world was just moving on and living their lives while I was stuck in a hellhole.

Even when the dude came up to my room at night, he let me keep the TV on, for whatever reason. When I heard his boots hitting the stairs, I’d hurry up and change the station to make sure there was no black person on the screen. Sometimes while he did his thing to me, I would turn my head to the side and try to catch the latest episode of
Everybody Loves Raymond
. Every time something funny happened I could hear the audience cracking up. It was kind of weird to hear all that laughing while a man was on top of me—because on the inside I was crying so hard.

N
OT
LONG
AFTER
I received the TV I got another surprise—a shower.

“You stink,” the dude said to me one morning.
No shit, Sherlock
. After almost eight months with no shower, I was pretty gross. My white skin looked brown. I had smudges of dried blood, dirt, and pee all over me. My legs were so hairy that they looked like a man’s. And I never got used to the way I smelled. It was so bad that it sometimes made me gag.

“I’m going to take you down to the bathroom so you can wash up,” he said.
Is this some kind of mean trick? Or another test? Or is he really going to let me clean myself up?
I had no idea. He unchained me and I followed him out. Going down the stairs made me a little dizzy after so long stuck in the blue room, so I took each step slowly.

The bathroom was on the main floor. I had never been inside it. He opened the door and said, “I’ll wait for you out here.” He handed me a tiny sliver of soap. “Make it quick,” he said as I walked through the door.

The bathroom was a total wreck. The toilet was covered with flaking brown dirt. Spider webs were in every corner. All kinds of trash covered the floor. There was mildew on the walls. I put down the toilet seat and sat on it. For once, I wanted to use a bathroom like a normal person instead of like a wild animal. As my pee hit the water, I could feel the whole toilet bowl rocking back and forth; it wasn’t totally bolted down to the ground. There wasn’t any toilet paper. I had just one thought:
How the hell does anyone live like this?

I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink. I looked hideous; I couldn’t believe it was me. My brown hair was now shoulder-length and was standing up in every direction. It was so full of semen that it was hard as a rock. My eyes were bloodshot from the months of constant tears. My face was pale because I hardly ever saw sunlight. There were deep purple-and-yellow bruises on both sides of my face from all the times he’d socked me in the head. I started to cry.
Is this really happening? Will I spend the rest of my life here?
I wondered. Even though I had been in the house for about eight months, I still felt like I was trapped in some kind of horror movie. But seeing my bruised face told me just how real this all was. Looking at my hair, I decided at least I could try to do something about that.

The dude pounded his fist on the door and shouted, “Hurry up in there!” I stepped inside the tub. It was filthy and had a ring of black dirt all the way around it. I turned on the hot water. Even after it ran for a minute, only cold water came out. So I gritted my teeth and stepped right under it.
Oh God
—it was ice cold. I scrubbed myself all over with the little sliver of soap. The water coming off of me was black.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” the dude yelled.

I got out of the shower real quick and poked my head out the door. “Can I have some scissors?” I asked.

He gave me a weird look that made me think he wasn’t going to give me any. But then he stepped away and came back with a small pair. He handed them to me, and for whatever reason, he didn’t ask me why I needed them. “You’ve got five minutes to get your ass outta there,” he said.

I hurried back into the shower and held the scissors up to my head. Of course they were dull, so they wouldn’t have worked as a weapon. I had to squeeze them really hard to make them cut through my matted hair.
Snip. Snip. Snip
. My hair was so stiff that to wash it, I had to cut it real short, all the way up to my ears. My hair ran into the drain. The tub was so nasty that I could barely tell which part was my hair and which part was the ring of dirt. I tried to cut some of the itchy hair off my legs, too, but the scissors weren’t sharp enough.

I didn’t have any way to dry myself, so I just did my best to shake off some water and wipe the rest with my hands. I opened the bathroom door to find the dude still standing there. He snatched the scissors out of my hand.

“You cut your hair off.” He seemed surprised. I didn’t answer him. “Let’s go,” he said. He then shoved me into his tiny room that was on the main floor. “Get up there,” he said. He pointed to the top of the bed, where he had put in chains and locks like the ones he had upstairs. He locked me in, and I laid there while he watched some wacky show on cable TV about people who have strange fetishes. Then he watched a porn video. Then another one. Then another one. That’s when he pulled me over to his side of the bed and started playing with my breasts. Then while he was raping me, he forced me to say certain things to him.

“Tell me you’re enjoying it!” he shouted. I wouldn’t say it, so he slapped me in the head. My hair was still wet from the shower. “Tell me my dick is good! Call me Big Daddy!”

For a long time I would not cooperate—and he kept right on hitting me. I started to see that the whole thing was going to last a lot longer if I ignored him, so I ended up saying what he told me to say. But every time one of those sick words came out of my mouth, I hated myself for giving in.

Photos

Kindergarten

First grade

Fifth grade

Junior high

Freshman year in high school