“Why do you think you’d hurt him?”
“Because I want to kiss him, too.”
Her eyebrows twitch—the closest thing I’ll get to a frown her placid-like-a-pond face can muster up. “You’re not talking about emotional hurt, are you, Nora?”
I can’t look at her, so I stare down at my hands. I rub my pointer and middle finger against the pad of my thumb, back and forth, back and forth.
The silence stretches, and she lets it. She waits in this little pocket of trust we created for me to find the words, because I’ll never find the strength.
“Before my stepdad, there was a mark. Joseph. He owned a bunch of car dealerships. My mom had him moving us in two months after they met.
“He was always looking at me. And then he didn’t just look, he . . .” I twist my fingers in the air, this helpless, shameful little gesture, a shrug that says what I can’t. It’ll take until session 117 before I can say the words he molested me, but I don’t know that at the moment. All I know is that I can’t say it, even though I need help with it, because I’m scared what it makes me. Because I am terrified of how I might react if Wes gets too close before I’m ready or prepared. “At first, I just froze. It was like it was happening to me, but not to me. I could see it, I could feel it, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I was . . . not there. And then, outside, someone’s car alarm went off. It was like I’d been playing dead and that sound woke me up.”
Margaret waits. I still can’t look at her. If I tell her, what will she think?
She’s not normal. That’s what the last woman exposed to the results of my fight-or-flight instincts said.
“I tried to pull away. He was too strong. My mom’s knitting basket was sitting next to the couch. It was the only thing close enough to grab. I had to get him to stop.”
Margaret can’t keep her pond-placid mask from slipping as the realization fully grasps her. “You defended yourself with knitting needles?”
“It made him stop because he had to try to pull them out of his leg,” I say, and it’s a very simple, very neat way to talk about it when there had been nothing simple or neat about it. It’d been bloody, and the needles were thin because they were from Mom’s delicate work, but they were still knitting needles, so they were dull and I wasn’t very strong. I’d dragged them up his thigh as far as I could and hit something that had made it gush. He’d howled in pain, and I’d been so sick and scared at once, an overload of adrenaline as the shaky run, hide, fight got reversed to fight then hide then run.
Margaret’s quiet, and it’s not a waiting-quiet this time. I don’t know if I’ve thrown her or if she’s just adding this to her Nora’s fucked up file.
“I know it’s messed up,” I say.
“What he did to you is very messed up,” Margaret agrees, and when my face twists, she lets out a little sigh. “Oh.” And she can’t stop the sympathy leaching into it that’s more like pity.
She folds her hands together, leaning toward me. She wears an oversized moss agate pendant on a long chain, the way older, elegant ladies sometimes do. It glows against her gray sweater, and I can’t stop staring at it because if I don’t, I have to look at her and receive a truth I’m not sure I’m ready for.
“You defended yourself, Nora,” she says quietly.
“I’m violent.” She’s not normal. It echoes in my head.
“What was done to you was violence,” she corrects. “You met violence with defense. There is nothing wrong with that.”
When I don’t say anything, she continues, “Have you ever initiated a fight? I know you’ve been in a few. We’ve talked about them in the past.”
I shake my head.
“Have you ever engaged anyone that wasn’t in defense of yourself or someone else?”
I shake my head again.
“And you’re not going around school, conning people into throwing the first punch?”
“I mean, I could . . .”
“But you don’t.”
“No.”
“I don’t think you’re violent, Nora. I think that you react a specific way when you have no way out. Some people freeze. You fight. Neither of these reactions are wrong.”
I have to say it. I have to ask her. Because I’m scared. I’m scared that the flutter that I feel when Wes catches my eye for too long will turn into something else when he gets too close. When his hands slide around my waist or eventually under my shirt. I want to be able to have this. I want to have this. I want this to be the thing that isn’t warped or taken from me because of the girls before.