she took a sip. She winced and added more sugar.
“If there was such a thing as fate, then bad things wouldn’t happen.”
Piper snorted. “Those bad things are merely bumps in the road, leading us to the good things in life.”
“I wish I could be that positive,” I muttered.
“My mom always did tell me I was an optimistic person. The way I see it, there’s no point in dwelling on the bad. That’s just giving it the power to hurt you more,” she pointed a finger at me.
“Huh,” I soaked in her words, “I’ve never looked at it like that before.”
She shrugged. “That’s my little bit of wisdom. I hope it can help you.”
“Yeah,” I mulled. “I think it just might.”
6
“YOU SEEM… HAPPIER,” Sharon remarked as I sat down across from her.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” I said with a smile.
“Do you want to tell me the reason for this change?” She tapped her pen against her notepad.
“There’s this new girl in one of my classes and she said some things that just made me think.”
“What was it she said?” she scribbled something down on her paper.
“Something about, not thinking about the bad so much, that it only gives it the power to hurt you more.”
Sharon smiled. “She sounds like my kind of girl.”
“I really like her. She’s nice and she doesn’t judge me for being… me,” I shrugged.
“I must say, this is major progress, Katy. For as long as you’ve been coming to see me, Rollo has been your only friend. This is good. You need a girl that you can talk to. Did you go to the self-defense class like I suggested?” she raised a brow as she waited for my answer.
“I did,” I wrung my hands together and glanced sheepishly at the floor.
“Did it go well?” she questioned.
“Not exactly…” I bit my lip, looking anywhere but at Sharon.
“Tell me what happened,” she prompted.
“I went with Rollo but the instructor wanted to partner us up with strangers so… When Paul, I think that was his name, grabbed me, I just kind of… freaked. I don’t like being touched by anyone, especially strangers. The whole thing,” I shook my head, “it just brought back memories of that night.”
“Katy,” Sharon turned her head slightly, studying me. “I think maybe you’d feel better… start to heal, if you said it like it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you need to stop referring to it as that night or the event. I think you need to say what happened. You’re giving Preston too much power by referring to it that way.”
“What do you want me to say? The night I got raped? The night my whole life fell apart because he took a part of me?” Tears clogged my throat.
“Yes, I think it would be very healing for you.”
“No! I don’t need to say it that way! What I need is for my mother to just believe me! Instead she believed that prick! He raped me and all she did was laugh at me! Laugh! What kind of mother does that? Nobody believed me! I was dying inside and everybody mocked me!” I grabbed my bag and stood to leave.
“Katy, please don’t leave. You still have forty minutes left in your session,” she looked up and the clock above the door.
I shook my head. “I can’t do that. I have to get out of here.” I opened the door.
“Katy!” I heard behind me. “You can’t keep running from your problems!”
“Watch me,” I muttered under my breath.
I made it to my car and as soon as the door was closed the tears overwhelmed me. I hated crying over ‘the event’ but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. It hurt, so much, to remember what Preston had done to me. I preferred to block it from my mind. I hated him. Not just for raping me, but for killing some essential part of me when he did it. I’d never been the same since.
I went from being the happy, popular, captain of the cheer squad, to the most hated person in school. Nobody had believed that Preston raped me. After all, why would heart throb, star quarterback, Preston, need to rape anybody?
Even my own mother hadn’t believed me.
That hurt the most.
We’d never been close, but I thought she would’ve been there for me. Instead, it drew us even farther apart.
The only person that didn’t abandon me was Rollo.
Someone tapped on the window and I jumped. Wiping my tear-streaked eyes, I turned to see who stood