The Quiet Girl
By: Melissa Speed
Tags: Rape, Relationships, Trauma, Fiction, Flash Fiction

The Quiet Girl

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

My name is Patton, Betty Patton, but back in high school everyone just called me by my last name. There were three Bettys in our year, you see, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and I’m still not sure which one I was.

Some say our school years are The Best Years of Our Lives, but not me. For me, they are a time in my life more present than the one I'm in now, a time from which I can never escape. All because I rode A Streetcar Named Desire straight into hell.

It Happened One Night in Nashville. Although there were undoubtedly some Goodfellas in school, like the one my friend Annie Hall hooked up with and eventually married, I picked one of the not-so-good ones. I guess you could say I picked one of the worst. His name was Ben, and Ben Hurt me.

Sometimes I tell myself I should have known what he would be like, but he gave no clues about his true nature. At school, he was like the perfect Citizen (Kane, our principal, even singled him out as the model student). His best friend was Amadeus, another straight-A student, and they had organised a party On the Waterfront near Sunset Blvd.

To say the night got off to a Rocky start would be a lie. He was the perfect gentleman, and we were having a great time together, so great I felt as if I were walking on air, the butterflies in my stomach fluttering with anticipation of our first kiss, causing me to become so giddy with excitement I felt like I had Vertigo. He was the sort of guy I thought would love me From Here to Eternity.

How quickly things can change.

Some of the guys and one of the other Bettys decided it was time to crank the party up a notch. They contacted a guy they called The Wizard of Oz, an appropriate name for someone who can send you on technicolour trips.

“And what will it be for My Fair Lady?” The Wizard asked me, as he opened the Jaws of his backpack and revealed what he called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an array of uppers for The Searchers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I knew, deep down, that I shouldn’t accept anything, but I was already carried away in the party atmosphere and wanted to impress Ben. Not that I actually chose anything myself. “I want her to feel like she Dances With Wolves,” Ben told The Wizard, who lifted a small plastic bag and removed a pill. Handing it to Ben, he said, “one of these and it will be High Noon for your girl, buddy. She’ll reach fucking Wuthering Heights and feel Yankee Doodle Dandy right through the night.”

A smile escaped the corners of Ben’s mouth, and he took the pill from The Wizard. His arm wrapped around my shoulders, he pulled me closer to him and put the pill in my mouth, then lifted his bottle to my lips. I looked into his blue eyes — he looked like Lawrence of Arabia — and took the pill.

The party must have looked like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to anyone watching, not that anyone had been. Maybe if someone had, they might have been able to stop it. No one did. It was 2001: A Space Odyssey taking place at a high school party way out on the edge of town, and I was in trouble.

He whispered Terms of Endearment into my ear, telling me exactly what he knew I wanted to be told, and I fell for them hook, line, and sinker. He walked me along The Green Mile to what everyone called The Deer Hunter spot, a secluded little place far enough away from the rest of the party to meet Ben’s needs.

As we sneaked away from the party I had felt like we were Bonnie and Clyde. Looking back, I realise how foolish it was to romanticise such awful people, but then they always did seem to have a strange appeal to the public, and back then I was a Rebel Without A Cause, looking for heroes in all the wrong places.

We reached the spot. I could see the City Lights in the distance across the water, and from behind us The Sound of Music coming from the party would soon prove sufficient to drown out any other sounds.

“Some Like It Hot, are you one of those girls? Are you gonna like it hot with me?” he asked, his tone more insistent than inquisitive, his right arm pressing me firmly against his body while his left fumbled with my belt.

“Hey, slow down,” I protested, causing the look in his eyes to change instantly, a ferocity emerging that was visible despite the darkness.

“What did you say?!” Ben demanded. Suddenly, he was like a Raging Bull. Those strong arms I had thought were so dreamy quickly became part of my nightmare. As he began forcing himself upon me, I screamed for help, but my Midnight Cowboy used that strong right arm of his to hit me so hard that, like The Silence of the Lambs, my cries were abruptly halted and it became All Quiet on the Western Front.

A storm started just as Ben was finishing, the rain washing away some of the blood and tears from my face. I could hear our friends at the party. They were so high they were Singin’ in the Rain. Ben zipped up his fly then reached out his hand as if to help me up, saying “Come on, get up, I wanna get out of this Rain, Man.” How strange that was. I was so shaken and confused and terrified. He rushed me back towards the party, the pain I was in not yet registering as my mind was still numb from the blow and the shock of it all.

As we neared the others he stopped, leaned close to me, and whispered into my ear, “You say anything and I swear to God I’ll kill you, you hear me?”

Unable to speak, I nodded, and he took my head in his hands and kissed my forehead. To any onlookers, it must have looked so affectionate, the perfect kiss from the perfect guy.

Ben called us a Taxi, I stood next to him, clinging to his arm, terrified to move or speak but at the same time terrified to give anything away, to show any signs of what had happened. Shane came over and noticed the injuries to my face, blood still coming from above my eye and from my lip. When he asked what had happened, I looked at Ben for the answer. From that moment when he had threatened me, right through until we finished high school, he was like The Great Dictator of my life.