Without The Words

Chapter 37

A/N: vote & comment, and don't forget to follow me!! (warning: there is self-harm in this chapter, read at your own risk) also, oliviarose85 has been a tremendous help now and then when i fall into this awful abyss of writers block, so you should follow her and check out her stories as well.

He is now considered a sex offender. They are contemplating charging him with rape, even though we've never had sex. I am innocent because I have selective mutism and could not "verbally communicate with him."

Those things are wrong. I am not innocent- I am as guilty as him. I was not allowed to go to court, only my father was, in which he probably mentioned my mother and how I could not speak since then, hence my so-called "innocence."

The banquet ended as fast as the blink of an eye. Mr. Lee had spoken with the lady who caught us- Leanne Herfourth, her name was. Mother of Deanna Herfourth, a member from the cross country team who had commented on my selective mutism.

It's been a week since then, a week of skipping school, getting up out of bed at 1:00PM, dragging myself to the bathroom and back, not a bit of food in my shrinking stomach. My father constantly tried to get me to eat. He'd rub my back and let me heave and cry into his shirt, but I wasn't crying into him because he understood.

My father didn't understand it at all- he thought I was a victim as well. Everybody probably did, at least every adult. I only cried into him because my pillow was far too soaked, and I was sick of suffocating myself with tears into an object. I needed human contact, even if it was from my father who didn't understand.

I was standing in the bathroom now, a pair of scissors in my shaking right hand, my other clutching the countertop to hold me up.

The bags under my eyes looked more like bruises. My eyes were sunken in, my lips cracked and dry. My hair was shoved into a pony-tail and so knotty that you couldn't even put your hands through it.

I didn't care. I didn't care about anything anymore. I didn't care about combing through my hair after every shower. I didn't care about standing under the shower water, either, even when it was so hot that I would come out with pink, splotchy skin.

And I didn't care now, that I was getting blood on the bathroom rug after every slice the sharp edge of the scissors would cut into my wrist. I didn't have a razor blade- didn't want one, anyways, because now anything sharp would do.

Mr. Lee was in jail. Gone. No more cross country with him. No more laughing with him- the only laugh that has ever bubbled in my chest.

I would never be able to put my hands through his hair again, or feel his warm lips, or his stubbly cheeks. I'd never be able to look through those beautiful blue eyes, at least not until a year or more from now, when I'd be in college.

And when I returned to school two weeks later, when I let my self-hatred subside at least for a little while, I realized school was an absolute hell hole.

Every class I'd walk to, I would get stares directed in my direction. Whispers would echo around me, snickers and disgusted expressions constantly coming into view.

Even the teachers looked at me differently, with so much pity that I would begin to feel bile rising in my throat as tears threatened to pour down my cheeks.

When I walked to Mr. Lee's class, though, every emotion I was feeling heightened and became exaggerated.

There was a new teacher- an old man named Mr. George who had a monotone voice and would have put me to sleep if it weren't for my bubbling anger and sadness morphed together.