Life Is but a Dream

I was walking home from school and thinking about all the things that had happened. It was my first day of my senior year of high school. I was 17, almost 18 to be exact, and high school was alright, for the past three years I had been involved in everything possible and I hated it. It was supposed to be the best four years of my life or that’s what my mom, the ex-varsity cheerleader, kept telling me. She had come into my room this morning to scrutinize my outfit for an hour as she did most days that I had school over the past three years, before sending me to school ten minutes late. She had finally settled for a tight black v-neck t-shirt, a dark jean skirt that was hardly dress-code, and a pair of Steve Madden sandals. It was actually pretty embarrassing; she wouldn’t even let me have a back pack I had to carry this ridiculously large Juicy bag. I felt like a slut, but people sure did notice me, which of course is always the point with my mom. Ever since I was a baby she has been trying to get me notice, she would always dress me up in ridiculous outfits. I know she missed the days that I wouldn’t and couldn’t fight her about what I should wear.

As I walked I thought of a boy I once knew, I thought of all the years I knew him through elementary and middle school. He was a sweet and shy boy; I always wondered why he did what he did every day for lunch. He was a small boy, short and extremely thin. He didn’t seem like his family was well off, he always wore ratty clothes and his hair looked greasy. He certainly wasn’t the standard of boy that my mother wanted me to hang out with. But for whatever reason, on the first day of third grade at lunch he walked up to me and gave me his apple. I didn’t even know who he was and my friends all laughed at him but I took the apple anyways and thanked him before he walked away. After that every day at lunch through the rest of elementary school and middle school he gave his apple. He would smile, looking at me with green eyes through his greasy black hair, he never said a word just handed me his apple, smiled, and walked away.

My friends thought for sure that this boy and I had something going on between us. I tried to tell them that I had never even had a class with the boy but they remained unconvinced. They bothered me about him for years before giving up when I couldn’t tell them anything other than the truth. I tried to find him the yearbook a few times but he was never there, I always assumed he was one of the blank pictures with a name below. It’s for that reason that I call him Charlie. I had tried to ask him what his name was but he would always just shake his head smile and leave, never saying a thing. I had all these plans for finding him or his friends at lunch and convincing them to talk to me, but it seemed he didn’t have any friends and if he did they all hid somewhere at lunch. I could never find him or anyone that talked to him no matter how hard I tried. Today while I was waiting at lunch, I waited the whole lunch hour and he never came to see me.

Every once in a while, usually as I walk home from school, I start to wonder what happened to Charlie. I won’t lie and say that I was kind of disappointed when he didn’t find me at lunch on my first day of high school and give me an apple. For a while I thought maybe he just didn’t know where I was sitting anymore, maybe he just hadn’t found me. I hoped that he would come just so I could see a friendlier face then the ones I always sat with every day. The people I was friends with weren’t great people, some of them were alright but for the most part they were spoiled rotten. Every day before lunch I would cross my fingers and say a silent prayer that he would be there today, but no he never showed up. I crossed my fingers my whole freshmen year of high school, but eventually you have to give up. When I do think about it I wonder if Charlie maybe moved away, like one of his parents got a job out of state and they were forced to move. All I know for sure is that when I do think of a Charlie it is always with a smile on my face.

I shook the thought away and looked up at the road signs; I was still a few blocks away from my house. My mom liked me walking home even though it would make her look better if I drove a fancy car to and from school. She liked me walking the ten miles from home to school and back so I would get more exercise and be warmed up for cheerleading. As I walked down a side street between a small piece of empty land that was filled with a small sparse woodland made up of small trees and shrubbery and on the other side of the street a few scattered unoccupied houses, there was one house every 100 or 150 feet. My parents owned one of those big mansions outside of town.

I have headphones jammed into my ears and music is blasting through them from my iPhone. It’s the only time that I get to listen to music that I actually like and not listen to stuff that I have to pretend to enjoy. I always walk home to a Pandora shuffle of the Misfits, Harry Connick Jr, Blake Shelton, and The Fray. I try not to think about the intense work out that I am going to have to endure once I get home, it seems like my whole life my mom has been trying to keep me in tip top shape and it has never been for my own good. In fact I might have been happier if I was a little curvier but my mom couldn’t handle that, she needed a stick thin model for a daughter. I’m actually kind of surprised that she hasn’t ever tried to bleach my hair, instead she leaves it with the natural chestnut brown color she abandoned years ago. I try to only think about what I get to do after my workout, I’ll take a long hot shower, try to avoid my mother’s prying questions about whether any boys had asked me out yet and when my first cheerleading practice is, before I retire to my room claiming an early night just to watch netflix in sweats. I smile at the thought and start walking a little bit quicker as I look out over the small woodland to my left.

I hear a car coming up behind me and make sure that I’m as far to the left as I can be and hope they just drive by. It’s a fairly small road that I am walking on and I know they will block most of the road so they don’t hit me. I am starting to wonder if there isn’t really a car behind me when I hear the engine rev and turn just in time to see a black VW hatchback speeding toward me. I gasp and try to jump out of the way but the car is moving too fast and I feel the bumper hit the back of my legs and send me flying forward maybe five feet onto the asphalt. The breath is knocked out of me and my legs burn and sting where they lay against the ground. Groaning as I slowly lift my head from the ground and let a slow cry as I see how badly scrapped up I am, my shins have severe road burn, a few of my toe nails are torn back and bits of asphalt stick to the wounds. I try to roll over sit up but everything huts too much, I’m worried I might’ve broken something. As I gather the strength to push myself into a sitting position I hear the sound of two car doors opening and slamming shut followed by hurried foot-steps.

Suddenly I am lifted off the ground and I am being hurried into the woodlands at the side of the road. I try to get my bearings as my heart pounds and sends adrenaline coursing through my body. I see on man at my head, he is holding onto my wrists and rushing backward toward the trees. He has on a pair of sunglasses, a baseball cap and his face is scruffy with five o’clock shadow. As I fill my lungs to scream another set of hands reach out and clamp themselves over my mouth to stifle the scream.

“Hold up a second let me get the duct tape over her mouth.” The voice of the man holding my mouth says, I start to struggle harder against the other two men as we reach the shade of the trees. I try to bunch my body together and force my legs out from me but all that does is case the third guy holding my legs to curse and dig his nails into the road rash on my shins. I let out a stifled scream and keep trying to push them off of me. They move another ten feet into the trees before stopping and throwing me down on the ground, before I have a chance to get up and run the first one is on top of me holding my arms down with one hand and pressing his hand over my mouth with the other.

“Will you hurry up with the fucking tape?” The first man says, his voice is gruff and angry, it cuts through me like a knife. I finally hear the tug of duct tape and hear the second man rip a piece of tape off with his teeth and then feel him slapping it down over my mouth. He and the first man start to wrap my hands together in the tape. I can’t hear anything over the frantic beating of my own heart, my lungs catch as I try to force more air into my lungs. I can’t see the third man I just feel his warm calloused hands holding my legs down so I can’t kick out at any of them. Once they are done taping my hands together the second man starts pulling me toward a nearby tree. He drags me to my feet with the help of the first man, they use more duct tape to attach me to a low hanging tree branch, once I am secured they all step back panting.

“Holy shit!” The third man gasps and kind of smiles crookedly at the other two. My heart is pounding against my rips, as if it’s trying to escape my chest cavity and pound home. I feel tears sliding down my cheeks and blood running down my legs. All three men are wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, two of them have dark hair and one has blonde, only the first one has a scruffy face. They range in height and build, none of them are over six feet tall and none of them are over-weight. They are all wearing plain jeans of varying shades and t-shirts of different colors. As I study them as hard as I can trying to commit everything to memory as I pant for air and shiver from fear.

“Look at this little whore. She’s begging for it, panting like a fucking dog in heat.” The second man sounds slightly disgusted as the other two laugh. He steps closed to me, I feel his eyes roving over my body like he’s using heat vision to scan me. The other two spread out behind him so they can see what he is doing to me, the third one keeps glancing behind them to see if anyone is coming down the road, I can only hope that someone will come down the road soon, see the car and my bag on the road and know that something is wrong. The second man is right in front of me now, I can feel his breath on my face and I consider trying to bring my knee up into his groin but I’m stuck to the tree and there are two more of them. I don’t have any chance. He smiles wickedly down at me and lets out a breath that smells of stale cigarettes and cola.

“Don’t you try anything stupid, you are outnumbered and there is no way for you to get out of this.” The first one smiles down at me from the left he stands closely to the second man and the third is walking up behind him. I feel the second man’s hard penis jabbing me in the hip through the rough fabric of his jeans. He flicks open a pocket knight and with a smile that shows almost all of his yellowing teeth he brings it up to the v in my shirt. With a quick flick of his wrist he has cut the shirt right down the middle and exposed my black sparkly Victoria’s secret bra. He bends his head down to the crests of my small breasts, that are being thrust up by my push up bra, and bites down hard drawing a small muffled scream from me as well as blood. His friends laugh but it sounds almost like they are in pain, like they wish they had been the ones to bite me but they don’t want to disagree with the second man. He uses the knife to cut open the front of my bra, it takes a bit more time than the shirt did and a few more curse words before he is able to break it open. My breast spill out of the cups as my bra falls open like a vest to uncover me. The tip of the knife cut into my sternum when he was cutting my bra off and a drip of blood traveled slowly down my torso going past my naval piercing and through my belly button before hitting my skirt.

All three men stare at my breasts for a few minutes not doing anything, they are all still huddled around me. They are all breathing quickly, panting from their mouths, their breath blending together around me hovering in the air before me. Slowly the second man steps away and nods for the third one to step up to me and have a go. His hands shake as he walks closer to me, the other two men looking on from over his shoulders. They both have their penises in their hands and are slowly playing with themselves as the third man finally gets the courage to reach out his shaking hands and grasp my breasts. He lets out a shaking breath as tears fall down my cheeks and my body goes into shivering convulsions.

“Shhhhh, stop whimpering, I don’t like that.” I didn’t even know that I was making any noise, but I try my hardest to swallow all sound as he leans his head down to take a taste of my breasts. I feel gorge rising up my throat and have to force it back down.

“Get on with it before I step in for you.” The voice of the first man rings through the trees, finally the second man moves away from my breasts. I feel his hands fumble with the button and zipper on my skirt. I try unsuccessfully not to move as he does this, but I can’t stop my hips from trying to rock away from him. His hands stop moving for just a second but eventually with a deep breath he manages to get my skirt undone and pulls it roughly off of me with my panties. I am hanging there from my wrists completely exposed in front of three strange me that intend to rape me. It’s every woman’s worst nightmare. With a low chuckle the other two step forward, the second man pushing the third one back and points to each of my legs as he steps between them. He stands there, pants around his ankles, penis out and fully erect. The other two grab hold of my legs and lift them off the ground spreading them wide enough for the second man to move in between them.

“Let’s see how big of a whore she really is.” He moves forward and in one swift movement he thrusts his way into me. I let out a muffled cry of pain as his penis moves within me, it’s all friction and heat. He starts to move faster, setting a tempo that the other two watch with envy. His penis is covered in blood which starts to lubricate the thrusting making it slightly less uncomfortable. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to think past this, try to think around the pain of the man’s continual thrusts and the other two holding my cut and bruised legs too far apart. With a growling grunt the second man pulls away from me panting. I slowly crack open my eyes right as his hand comes flying toward my face slapping me with the back of his knuckles across the cheek bone on the right side of my face. I hear his zipper go up and see the first man come forward for his turn.

By the time they had finished with me I wasn’t even myself anymore. They had each had a turn with me, inflicting some kind of final blow once they had finished. Only the second man had blood all over his penis when he stepped away from me. The other two, after all, didn’t take my virginity. There was dried blood on my thighs and at some point I had bitten into my tongue so hard that it was bleeding into my mouth. My body was battered, bleeding, and bruised all over from their brutal attack and being run down with their car.

“You were asking for this you little slut, don’t you ever forget that. This was your fault and no one cares what happened to you. I bet if you went to the cops right now they would just blow you off. Because anyone that sees you knows that you want it.” With that the first man yanked the tape off my mouth and walked away, the other two followed him. They walked so normally it was like they thought they hadn’t done anything wrong. I had stopped crying and stared after them blankly not really caring anymore. I couldn’t even shiver, my muscles wouldn’t tense. I just let myself hang there from my wrist, my lets crumpled under me. Instead when they had finally left me for good, my arms still firmly tapped above my head, I started to sing.

“Row,
Row,
Row your boat.
Gently down the stream,
Merrily,
Merrily,
Merrily,
Merrily life is but a dream.”
I slowly hum my head shaking from side to side, hitting my shoulders and bouncing back to the other side. A small smile pulled at the corners of my lips and I let my eyes slide closed. It was so nice here in this small cluster of trees, so relaxing the air still warm with the memory of summer. Slowly after what feels like hours the sky starts to darken and the air starts to cool as the lightening bugs come out around me. It was so lovely watching their small lights blink on and off. I giggled at the thought of my own butt lighting up like that, for seemingly no reason.

“Buzz, light on, buzz, light off.” I smiled again and continued to hum my song. I heard something coming toward me and a bigger light was shining on my face now, “A giant lightening bug.” I laughed and let my head fall back against the tree and my eyes slide close, my body quickly welcoming sleep.