Lies Left Unsaid

Caitlyn

I tap each finger on my left hand, drumming them back and forth on the counter, waiting impatiently for him to arrive. I stare at the mangled stump where my pinky finger used to be. It's a useless appendage anyway and if there is one thing my experience with men has taught me, it's that there are other female body parts they are far more interested in. Like Terry for instance, he loved toes. He was one of those sick freaks who liked licking them, touching them, massaging them. It was one of the few things I allowed him to do to me. Well, let me rephrase that. He may have thought he was doing it to me, that he was in charge, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

Terry is a narcissist, and like all narcissists, his greatest weakness is his ego. His narcissism allowed him to think no one could outsmart him, which in turn made him easy to manipulate. I played into it, asking if I could witness the great Dr. Terry Patrick at work, watching him perform surgeries from behind the glass viewing window and interviewing him with specific questions, all of which allowed Martìnez and I to remove a couple of minor appendages in order to frame Terry. It probably seems insane, that I was willing to cut off my own body parts. I wasn't always this...calculated, but like most dramatic personality changes, it was triggered by a traumatic experience, oh, and a lifetime of mental and emotional abuse. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Remember that day I told you about? The one where I was almost raped and murdered on the way to my internship? I'd never felt so helpless before in my entire life. I was at the mercy of those men and they had no intention on showing me mercy. I never wanted to feel that way again. I never wanted a man to have power over me. I never wanted a man to be able to take something away from me that I wasn't willing to give. I'd always been a good girl. It was a role that came easily. It fit. It was comfortable. People liked viewing me as a good girl. I was intelligent, polite, pretty, all the things society wanted from me. My future looked bright. But that day in the ghetto, none of that mattered. Those men intended to change my destiny without my input or permission. I would have become the damaged girl, the one girls pitied and boys didn't want to touch because I was "ruined." I swore to myself on that bus ride home that I would never again be weak, or scared, or "good." I would stop being complacent with the role society had deemed appropriate for my gender. I would never again let a man decide my fate. As a woman, I was vulnerable. A man could do whatever he wanted to me, that is unless, I did it to him first. I was weaker physically. I couldn't overpower a man, but I could outsmart him. How do you survive in a man's world, a place where everything is stacked against you? You become one of them, that's how. So that's exactly what I did. The innate superiority men feel simply by being a man is something that blinds them to the true inner strength of a woman. It allows them to make stupid mistakes, because how could a woman, especially a teen girl, pull one over on a man, right? How could I play the player? Well for starters, you don't just play one.