There he is. Watch yourselves, boys.
Laughed after. Like it was nothing. Like it was funny.
Some guys laughed too.
Wednesday there were more.
Don't drop the soap around Callahan.
You sure you wanna be in here, sweetheart?
Careful, he's been staring at you.
Every single day. Some variation of the same joke, delivered with a smile, technically harmless if you wrote it down. The kind of thing that can't be reported because individually it's nothing. Collectively it's everything. It's the very air in the room. It's the thing you breathe every day until you can't remember what the air used to feel like.
Then my gear started going missing. First time it turned up on the shower floor. Soaking wet, soap everywhere, every singlepiece of it. Second time it was piled in the equipment closet. Someone had writtenhomoall over my uniform in permanent marker.
I reported it to the trainer and he said he'd look into it.
Nothing happened.
He never did.
More of the same. More days. More variations of the same joke. More missing things. More mornings walking in and feeling the room shift when I entered it. And then the last incident.
I started waiting for everyone to finish showering after practice. Easier that way. One less thing to get through.
They waited too.
Waited until I was alone.
I don't know how many there were.
Two. Three. It stopped mattering fast. Too many.
The first hit came from behind — hands grabbing my shoulders and driving me forward into the tile wall hard enough that the impact cracked through my teeth. My cheek split against the corner of the soap shelf. I felt that before I felt anything else — the sting of broken skin, the feel of the blood running down the side of my face mixing with the shower water.
Then I was on the floor.
I don't remember going down. Just the tile against my hands and then my knees and then my face and then the first kick landing in my ribs and driving the air out of me completely. I curled in. Arms over my head. Knees pulled up. Made myself as small as possible because that was the only thing that made sense — the less I gave them the less there was to take.
It didn't stop them.
The ribs again. My back. The flat of a shoe against my shoulder that sent me into the base of the wall. My ears were ringing from the first hit and everything had that hollow qualitythat comes after impact — sounds arriving slightly after they should, muffled in my ears, the world taking a second to catch up with itself.
The water was still running. Cold now. Running over everything. Over my hands braced against the tile. Over the back of my neck. Over the places on my ribs that were going to be dark purple by morning.
I kept my face down.
Counted the grout lines.
Breathed when I could.
Watched the blood slowly spiral over the drain before disappearing.
Waited for it to be over.
When the door finally shut the silence was everywhere.
