Part IV: Spin – God’s Wild Children: #11 (Chapter 74) (***Trigger Warning***: Contains Sexual Violence)

We sat lotus-style on the living room floor and took turns spinning the bottle.

At first, the game was sort of fun: a few kisses here and a few giggles there.

But then after I lost a spin, Danny slipped his hand inside my bathing suit top.

I pulled away.

“No fair,” Danny said, pouting. “You have to do what I tell you.”

“I don’t want to.” I hid my face in my hands.

“Then I won’t sew your name on your stupid towel.”

I took his hand and moved it underneath my top.

“Take your suit off.”

I obeyed.

The bottle continued to spin.

After Danny ripped off his own suit, we stared at each other: I felt his eyes locking onto my nipples, now just beginning to develop, my flabby stomach, and my bubo, hairless and white. Danny’s white groin and buttocks were the only unfreckled parts of his body; his thing bounced up and down, even though he was standing perfectly still.

He circled me, his eyes never leaving my body because I could feel them burning into me.

Danny reached for my nipples.

I shrank away.

“You gotta follow the rules,” he said, grabbing for my nipples. This time, as his fingers latched onto me, I felt something strange, not quite pain, but not pleasure either, something in-between, something scary and wild.

A Mortal sin. Danny and I would go straight to Hell if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing right now.

“NO!” I jerked away from him and ran for the bathroom.

Danny caught me before I could slip inside and lock the door. “You gotta play now,” he said, pulling at his thing, making it stretch like a rubber band.

Part of me wanted to continue, to see what would happen, to feel his hands on my body, his fingers on my bubo. But mostly I wanted him to stop, to go back before we were naked, to play a simple game of Monopoly, maybe even getting into a squabble over “Passing Go.”

Anything but this!

We blurred into a menagerie of naked bodies, running around like wild animals, shrieking – mostly Danny laughing, I screaming and crying, but sometimes laughing when Danny reached for my nipples or bubo.

I will have to confess!

I pulled away again.

Danny latched onto my bubo, his fingers poking and probing, pushing into places I never knew existed, my fingers touching his thing, the first boy’s thing that I had ever touched, and it rose and fell, sometimes feeling soft like a rubber toy and sometimes stiff like a chicken bone.

Something was terribly wrong with Danny, surely his thing would grow and grow and then explode, splattering bits of thing-flesh all over the living room wallpaper.

How would we explain the mess to Nana; how Danny would ever pee again?

But Danny did not grow bigger.

The Secret Game.

Danny ordered me into Pappa’s dark bedroom and told me to lie on the big bed, legs spread apart.

I must have obeyed, because, somehow, I was on the bed, on my back, my legs apart.

The dark is my friend.

I couldn’t stop: somewhere else now, I looked down from the ceiling as my body lay inert below, legs stretched wide apart, Danny climbing on top.

I slipped inside my body again as he poked his thing all around: on my leg, stomach, belly button, and above my bubo.

“What are you doing?”

“Shut up!”

His thing rammed somewhere between my legs; a rod filled with splinters buried itself deep into my body.

“Stop it!” I drew my knees up and tried pushing him away.

“Hold still!” He pinned me back to the bed and pushed his body further into mine.

I prayed to God for a knife; I wanted to cut his thing off, so that it could never find its way into my body, ever again.

But God wasn’t listening.

I must have screamed, maybe just in my head because Danny acted like he didn’t hear me. I pleaded with him to stop this game, to let me go back to being just a sunburned girl in a bathing suit.

Even then, I knew this moment would forever chart the course of my life, lurching me forward into currents, swift and unpredictable.

Even more dangerous than The Big Muddy.

Danny pushed deeper, grinding as I struggled, fighting to get him away from me, but he was too strong, too in control, too hungry for something far beyond what I could offer or even understand.

Then it was over.

He rolled off me and lay beside me, sweating, breathing hard, his thing almost invisible now. He mumbled something unintelligible and fell asleep, snoring like an old man.

The dark will be my friend.

My body hurt, sunburned skin, sore groin, stiff leg muscles.

I pulled myself up from the bed and ran into the bathroom. I locked both doors.

Our towels hung together on the rack, Danny’s with his name across the top, mine with single threads popping out.

I would never see my name on it.

Blood ran down between my legs and dripped onto the linoleum.

Please, let me go into the dark!

I yanked his towel from the rack and wiped the blood from my groin, the spaces between –

DAN

– filling in with red stains.