i already grew up by Brooke Xu (17, North Carolina)

[Content warning: sexual assault and sexual harassment]

You had a dream once. You were four years old, in preschool three times a week. You still cried when your mother took you to a new classroom and inevitably left you. 

In the dream, two men were smoking cigarettes next to a shiny red car. They smiled at you when you came up to them. “Do you want to play with us?” 

You shook your head. Mommy told you not to talk to strangers, to run when they gave you candy. 

“Come on, it’ll be fun. Why don’t you join?”

---

You shook your head again, violently this time. You’re almost sobbing and you don’t know why. Their hands are full of candy. 

“You’re lame,” they say. And then they touch you.

You wake up with fear, but you don’t understand. You don’t know what just happened. You think perhaps this is normal. Perhaps you’ve just never heard of it before. 



The first time it happened, you were five and you didn’t understand anything. It was your first year of preschool and all you cared about was finding roly-polies.

His breath was hot and sticky. You’ll never forget how it felt against your skin, your heart hammering with fear. You’ll never forget his fingers, grimy and dusty, skimming your five-year-old collarbone as he laughed drunkenly. 

You ran away before the worst could happen, the worst you didn’t even know existed. You didn’t have words for what had happened. Molesting. Sexual harassment. Sexual assault. Abuse. Pedophile. No, you had never heard those words yet in your life. 

You didn’t know it would happen again.



The second time you were eight. Alone in a dark room at your sister’s friend’s “party”, which you later figured was really just an orgy, and your sister forgot to lock the door. 

She should have known someone was going to come in. 

And in the dark, it didn’t matter if you had an eight-year-old body. You were still a girl. You had started menstruating last week. An early one, your doctor said later. You didn’t know what that meant, of course. Your mother told you periods were just something that happened. 

What it really meant was that you could have gotten pregnant that day, and it didn’t matter if you were eight. 



The third and fourth time you were eleven. A hand on your butt in class. Later you would always call it your ass, but at that time, you didn’t have that kind of vocabulary. Then happy and delirious at camp, ready for your first communal shower experience, your cool thirteen-year-old roommate told you to bring shoes so it was less gross. And she was right, until you heard the click of the camera. You hadn’t even seen this happen in the movies yet. 



The fifth time you were fourteen, giddy with excitement on the overnight trip with your friends and your boyfriend. This was going to be the best trip ever. Until that boy, also fourteen, invited the sixth grade girls to his room. 
You had known fear before, but not seen it. Back then, it was just you. Suddenly, it became more than that, and you were helpless, seeing the terror in their eyes and not being able to do anything about it. 



When you were fifteen you said goodbye to naivete. 

You enlarged those screenshots on your phone, squinting to make out the words your “friends” had been saying about you all this time. I bet she’s so tight. Why is she trying to hide her tits? They’re so nice. You trusted them, and here they were, ranking your body amongst all the other girls at school like an object, playing smash or pass, threatening you. You called them your friends, and they were really just waiting for you to take off your jacket to see you braless. 

 “All men are like that,” your mother would tell you. 

Are they?



And then it happened again. You didn’t think it would become worse. 

You weren’t eight anymore. You understood perfectly what was happening. And this time, it wasn’t a stranger, it was someone who manipulated your trust. Yet it didn’t hurt. You just felt numb. Empty. Lifeless, almost. 

Four months later when you lay on your bathroom floor in a pool of blood, you felt that same numbness.

​

Cross your legs. Your skirt must extend past your fingertips. Cover your shoulders, they’re distracting. Little girls need to protect yourselves. From what? Oh, don’t worry. You don’t know anything about the bad people out there and what they do. You haven’t seen the world yet, they tell you. 

But miss, you want to scream. Miss, I have. It’s already happened to me and it will keep happening. It’s happened as long as I can remember. I’m not a child, and I’ve never been.