We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,35

errands and saw the police cars lined up outside the Payless where I worked. But in that moment, it just seemed surreal to suddenly have them there.

“Calm down,” my dad kept saying, over and over again, as he touched my shoulder. I couldn’t speak to tell him what happened and I couldn’t imagine telling him anyway.

The cops were radioing dispatch and other officers using police codes, a jumble of numbers wrapping around my head. None of them meant anything.

But Kelly was majoring in criminal justice. And I saw her face when she recognized the police code for rape: 261.

She whispered in Dad’s ear. And the way he looked at me after, oh my God, is still a nightmare. I sued Payless for negligence, but I wanted to sue them for my dad looking at me like that. I HATED THAT. To this day, I HATE IT.

The look was: Damaged. Victim. Guilt. Fear. Like, I was my dad’s prize. He didn’t acknowledge it in words, but I was his favorite because I was the most like him. As far as he was concerned, I followed the rules. I was the kid you bragged about. I got great grades. Was the perfect athlete. Blah blah blah. And in that moment I was damaged. It was as if someone had broken his favorite toy.

I was taken to the hospital. After having my dad see me in that moment, my boyfriend Alex came to the hospital. And he too was destroyed. We’d been together about a year. His family was Greek and Mexican, and they were completely opposed to us being together. They called him a nigger lover.

“But you’re an interracial couple!” he would answer.

“Why do you have to go to the extreme?” was the response.

Yet in the moment of Alex finding out I’d been raped and his parents having to deal with their child being crushed, they finally realized that our thing was real. I was, to put it mildly, very resentful that it took my being raped for them to not have a problem with interracial dating. But anyway.

My mom arrived, quiet and scared. I flashed to the advice my mom had given my older sister and me for how to handle anyone who wanted to mug us or worse.

“You know what you do, right?”

We would say in unison with matching eye rolls: “What do we do, Mom?”

“You say ‘Shit, shit bastard!’ That’s what you do.”

Shit, shit bastard. She thought a woman spewing out a string of nonsense swears would shock an assailant into confused submission. To this day my sisters and I will just text those words to each other, or leave “Shit, shit bastard” on each other’s voice mails.

She didn’t know what to say to me. I’m sure she was shocked because it happened to the one daughter she didn’t think she had to worry about. I had always been the strongest one, taking care of myself. They had never seen me show fear. You move your kids to this all-white community and force them to go to these all-white schools. You think you’ve priced yourself out of this shit. You’ve done all these things and then this happens.

A FEW DAYS LATER, THE GUY STRUCK AGAIN IN A NEIGHBORING CITY. You could see him on the security camera at Payless this time. He walked in, saw the camera, and walked right back out. But then I guess he was just amped up to keep this crime spree going and he walked into a Clothestime store. I knew the girl there. He’d become more brazen, bolder, and he hurt her even more then he hurt me. By then the manhunt was reaching fever pitch. Within the week, he turned himself in. Because they knew who he was, the cops had started watching his mother’s house, and she got him to surrender.

My dad was the one who went to every arraignment. Every single court hearing. I remember Dad saying, “I want him to see me.” He is one of those parents who can rule with a look. Discipline with a glare. And he really thought that the same glare that got us to stop jumping on the bed, or to eat our vegetables, was going to work on someone who’d raped women. But he was there. Glaring.

“Now I feel bad,” my rapist would say. “Not when I was smashing her crying face or leaving her in a heap. Nope. But her father’s glare. That did it. That’s what made me see the