"Age Ain't Nothin' But a Number."

TW: rape, child sexual assault, self-harm.

*names have been changed

“Let me tell you something. Age ain’t nothing but a number.” Tonya* punctuated her statement with a hand motion as though she were flattening linens, in a cadence that did not belong to a high schooler. Nor, however, did most of the experiences she had just finished relating to me.

Tonya was unlike any kid I had ever encountered in the handful of inpatient mental health admissions I was beginning to count on both hands at age 16. In spite of a background that set her up for every risk imaginable, she steered clear of both drugs and self-harm—“I don’t see the point,” she was fond of saying, not without a touch of pride—and brought warmth to every group meeting on the floor. Tonya seemed to be able to befriend and was the first patient to greet new admits. Even Amber*, the psychotic girl whose eyes did not focus and was known to throw grape juice at other kids, became calm when Tonya was in the same room. “You just gotta talk to ‘em like anyone else,” she smiled, cooing at Amber while sharing Thanksgiving condiments. Amber seemed unsure of how to respond, but the shift behind her uneasy eyes was, for once, a peaceful one.

Tonya’s unconditional love and acceptance for strange humans was as baffling to me as her healthy attitude toward life, once she shared pieces of her own with me. “Mama say she don’t like me ‘cause I look too much like Daddy,” she said, annoyance disguising any pain in her voice. The daddy she resembled was long gone, replaced by a stepdaddy who liked Tonya too much. She did not reveal if this was the catalyst for her eventual introduction into the foster system, suffice to say that for Tonya, it was a transition from fire to frying pan. This was her second hospitalization in six months for running away from foster placements, something that to me spoke less to her mental fragility than the state’s lack of creativity in finding safe housing, for a girl who had yet to know what “safe” meant. Tonya, however, was convinced that she had learned its meaning during her last elopement, in the arms of a man old enough to know better, who harbored her in his apartment until the authorities discovered the arrangement—hence the salt in her declaration that age, as well as love, knew no numbers. While Tonya spoke of the man with the spirit of a woman bored by long-term intimacy, complaining of his lack of goals and participation in domestic chores, she spoke of his children with longing. She described joy in falling into the role of their caretaker, a responsibility she owned and loved, and the reciprocal affection the children gave her without hesitation. To Tonya, age truly was just a number when she could create and nurture the family she never had without finishing the 10th grade. And when you had that for the first time ever, 10th grade didn’t seem so important, no matter what the social workers said.

The afternoon before Thanksgiving Day, Tonya told me, “Looks like we gonna be rooming together.” The original cohort of kids with whom we had occupied the ward a week prior had gradually sloughed off as their treatment teams cobbled together discharge plans before the holidays. For Tonya, with nowhere to go, and with me awaiting admission at a supposedly therapeutic residential program in Illinois for others who cut and burned themselves, it made just as much sense to keep us put and keep us in the same room. Besides, I hated Thanksgiving and preferred her company to whatever my parents would be fighting about that week.

That evening, I took a shower in our now shared room. I stepped out of the bathroom, plumes of steam escaping as the door to our shared room shut with a ragged whisper: “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?” The whisper belonged to Mr. Berry*, the bald, goateed staff member who easily weighed 300lbs. I did not like or trust the man. Mr. Berry carried a nasally kind of authoritarian edge to his voice, and the gentleness in his tone now was startling; in fact, none of the staff spoke that way, trained at all times to deliver sterile directives and “no”-s with impunity. Not soft, and certainly not so cloying. He closed the door.

Tonya sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the dresser, saying nothing, leafing through a magazine. Silence settled over the room like the dissipating steam. I had begun to brush the snags from my short Manic-Panic red dyed hair when she broke it. “You know how some people can just get on your nerves…like Mr. Berry?”

I looked up. “Yeah, he bothers me sometimes too.”

“No, I mean, like…he really bothering me.”

And then, it unfolded: Mr. Berry had been doing a lot more than delivering evening medications while I was in the shower. And it wasn’t the first time. At 16, I was embarrassingly naive to the phrase “ate me out”, but it set off alarm bells in my head in a way they previously had not clanged. I knew that what she was describing was the same thing as the oral sex I had read about in the “What’s Happening to My Body” book that my mother had left me with as a teacher. I also knew that, by law, grown men weren’t allowed to do this to15-year-old girls, especially when those girls were in the hospital, in spite of Tanya insistence that he was “a sweet man”. I even knew that most grown ups weren’t interested in that kind of thing, and that there was supposed to be something wrong with the grown ups who sought out kids my age for dating stuff. However, Tonya’s reaction in the face of this knowledge, was hard to gauge. Something clearly was not okay. Nor was she outwardly horrified (and I had yet to learn what “numb” looked or felt like). And yet, her mom and dad certainly weren’t going to be asking questions. My ethical compass spun and spun.

“Tonya, we can tell someone,” I assured her, with all the confidence of a white suburban teenager who just knew the adults in charge of everything would fix this. “I’ll go with you.”

Tonya gave me a withering glance. “Look at where we are,” she snapped. “You think they gonna believe us? He’s the most respected man on staff. We just some crazies to everyone else.” Whether Mr. Berry and his walrus-like physique were respected was up for some debate in my mind, but the second half of Tonya’s argument was suddenly, painfully not. It was not the last time I would realize that my credibility was suspended for as long as the prevailing piece of my identity was a mental health diagnosis. But for all of the times in years to come when advocating for my own treatment fell on deaf ears, when complaints of professional mistreatment were batted away like moths, when others rolled their eyes and made finger-looping motions next to their temples, that moment with Tonya like the greatest defeat.

That night, the orange glow cast by the hospital campus’ many streetlights beamed through the Plexiglass windows and my skin crawled like never before. Each time a staff member shone their flashlight into the room for checks, my body braced for Mr. Berry’s enormous shadow to darken the doorway. Tonya appeared to doze soundly, a motionless shape facing away. I wondered if, perhaps, there really was no culpability or wrongdoing in this situation. After all, Tonya hadn’t said no, and some people said “no” needs to be understood first before sex for it to be rape. Maybe age was just a number. Wasn’t it? Maybe Tonya was exercising her agency in ways that the world had hitherto denied her, although why she would do so in this way was maddening. Maybe she was inherently more mature than I was. It wouldn’t be hard.

My mind did somersaults trying to justify this new secret, to water down disgust at the visual image of what Mr. Berry had been doing a few feet away, mere hours before, and to ignore an imbalance that filled every square inch of that room. My family had already taught me in so few words how to do this when reality became difficult.

My memories of that next Thanksgiving day are fragmented and blurred. The ward was quiet and each hour felt longer than its predecessor. Mr. Berry was back on shift; I heard him announcing boastfully from the nurses’ station that he just knew we would receive new admits that day. “Betchya a million bucks we do,” he crowed, mentioning how many times he had seen this happen on holidays.

The visit with my own parents spiraled downhill quickly, and they escorted me back to the ward with unfinished Thanksgiving pie in Tupperware. Staff firmly instructed them to leave as I continued screaming, secretly gleeful at having one-upped their own favorite pastime. Tonya entered the room as I continued to wail and dug my fingernails into the surface of my arms, the only coping skill I had learned to count on for relief from the pain inside. Rather than alert the nurses, she gripped my wrists with her stronger ones, calmly stating, “Nah, we ain’t gonna do that. Keep trying, ‘cause you’re just gonna wear yourself out.” Furious and immobilized, I lashed out with my words, my only remaining arsenal. I do not remember what they were, but the point was unmistakable: You, Tonya, are at fault for what that man has done. You asked for this. You are the reason I feel disregulated, and dirty. Tonya did not respond. In my mind now, her face disappears, becomes blank, and the scene fades to gray. I stopped struggling and became fetal on the bed for some time.

Before the sun rose the next day, my discharge papers were signed and my bags were packed for the airport. I crept over to Tonya’s bed to hug her before departing. In a gentle, sleepy voice, as if nothing had happened over the past two nights, she said, “Good luck, Laura. I love you.” I never saw her again. I still hope I responded with, “I love you too.”

The supposedly therapeutic program in Illinois for people who also could not stop cutting and burning themselves turned out to be not so therapeutic; I found myself in yet another ward of the same flavor as all the others two weeks later, tearing out fistfuls of my hair in the isolation room while a nurse played Sudoku several feet away. Once home, the maelstroms of my new explosive rages became the weekly occurrences that replaced my parents’ battles. Clinicians scribbled “symptoms of borderline” all over their charts until I turned 18 and decided, to hell with their charts and psychobabble. Then came the starving and purging, followed quickly by the drugs, both in orange bottles and baggies, and one bad boyfriend after another. My young adulthood years are peppered with more inpatient psych unit stays, each one more similar than the last. With daily chaos filling my life like a dust storm, thoughts Mr. Berry or Tonya, and what hearing “I love you” felt like after spitting cruelty in her face, dissolved into the haze.

At 26, my life finally shatters for real, leaving me in a circle of rubble, a graveyard of broken relationships and lost opportunities. Slowly, I set about picking up the pieces and organizing them into what I hope might become a meaningful arrangement in years to come, discarding what I do not need and scrounging for useful scraps that can be salvaged. I am forced to examine the past with an honest lens, to make sense of so many events I have struggled like hell to banish and block out. And once I have spent some time figuring out me, I begin to examine and analyze the environments and systems that shaped this tumultuous life trajectory. I start to remember Tonya, and that dreadful Thanksgiving on the ward. There is, of course, a deep rage that heats from a simmer to an outright boil: rage at the negligence of social services that failed my friend, which shoved her out of sight and out of mind instead of taking the time to ask her what she wanted and needed. Rage at the knowledge that, had Tonya looked like me, she might have had options in spite of her family dysfunctions. Rage at the man who knew all of this, who knew the ease of preying on a young girl without protections, who knew he had the power to protect his position and slithered away unnoticed, quite likely with a similar list of victims. Rage at myself for not understanding then what was suddenly so clear now, which merged with a wave of guilt. There is also grief that things might have been different if I had this same understanding then...and more grief in realizing that they might not have been different at all. There is regret. There is remorse.

One bright day in April, 2013 as the fog of my past slowly lifts, my friend invites me to an event called “Speak Out! Against Sexual Violence”. It takes place in an auditorium with a microphone, in the literal shadow of the same university hospital where Tonya and I crossed paths a decade before. People-- survivors-- have brought their words, stories, and poems together in this room to connect over what it means to live through the worst kind of betrayal and theft. I have come to listen, not to speak. But in the course of doing so, I realize that I have survived, and that I share that identity with someone who is not there to speak. No matter what happens and where we are in this world, Tonya and I will always be bound by the story that has not been told yet. When guests are invited to take the mic and tell more stories, I am the first to stand up. I tell this story.

#MeToo becomes a hashtag four years later. Somehow, it is these two words, and not an apology to Tonya, that say everything