Grey.
When trying to work out how she felt, that was all Rachel could come up with. Grey.
That was how she saw things. She thought of emotions as colours, rather than words. Happy moments, she considered yellow. Sad ones, darker colours, like blue or black. If she felt proud, that was a gold sensation for her. The one time she’d been stoned, argyle.
She allowed herself a smile. She’d gone off on so much of a tangent that she’d forgotten about her here and now.
Shit.
Thinking like that had dragged her back to her greyness. Her empty, grey self. To put it in more conventional terms, Rachel Desdemona O’Ferez was not a happy girl.
In fact, the only reason she wasn’t thinking about killing herself was because she was having serious trouble believing she was still alive.
She shifted in her chair. Only as far as she was concerned, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t sitting sullenly in her bedroom on Saturday. It was Friday again. Skye’s house, on Friday.
Events replayed themselves in her head. Gloria’s coming-out party. Rachel and Sierra had gone mostly because Rachel had been feeling really good about herself (or very lime-green, as she put it, leaving Sierra to doubt her sanity in colour choice) for the first time in quite a while. For the first time since the Cindy Affair, she was really enjoying herself.
God...that was less than twenty-four hours ago. This time yesterday, none of this had happened. I was still me.
The Cindy Lack Of Affair, she should have really called it. Cindy was a curious person who, despite the hints of nomenclature, somehow managed to escape being classed as either male or female. Earlier in the year, Rachel had fallen quite deeply in love with him, only to find out that Cindy’s sexual preference was for as many genders as she appeared to be, ie none. As gently as Cindy had tried to do it, being turned down had still hit Rachel rather hard.
And I thought that was bad. Didn’t know how to count my blessings.
Her mind back at the party, Rachel was once more slipping into conversation with him. She didn’t really know him all that well - she barely knew his name, in fact - but he was seeming like a nice enough guy. Funny, good conversation...just the sort of thing she liked at a party. He made some remark about the weather, and suggested that they go inside.
Why did I agree? What the hell did I do? A simple ‘no, I like it fine here’ would have done it.
Rachel didn’t quite know how - not knowing the house, she had no idea of what led where - but he led her up to one of the bedrooms. She didn’t think to ask why. Was she out of it? Did she just think they were looking for a spot with a non-deafening noise-level? She didn’t really remember this part. The next she remembered was when they’d been talking some more, and he’d...touched her. The first couple of times, she’d been able to gently move him away from her, but then...
Then her memories started running all together. A horrendous mixture of fear, pain, guilt, despair, both as murky as cut crystal and as clear as a polluted swamp. Memories of the moments that she would now give anything to unmake.
Unmake them like they’d unmade her. That’s what had happened. She hadn’t felt like herself since then. She hadn’t felt like anyone. She couldn’t be her. This would never happen to her. It had happened to her. It was still happening to her. The more she tried to force the memories out, the more they rammed themselves home.
Involuntarily, she made a sound. No, not just a sound. A noise. A specific noise, the same noise she’d made last night. A scream that couldn’t get out before it had choked. Tears ran from her eyes, following the tracks that their elder sisters had been leaving since she got home.
She didn’t remember coming home. She knew she must have, of course. This was where Cindy - who had since become Rachel’s self-appointed protector - had found her earlier, before circumstances had pressed the androgyne into leaving, although promising to return.
Somehow, the imprecise memory of Cindy sifted a small sliver of colour through the grey. Still only vaguely aware that the messy collection of DNA that she was moving was in fact her body, she lifted herself from the chair that had been her home for the past fifteen hours. The faint sticky sensation from where sweat had tried to bond her to the woodwork brought her slightly closer to reality. She made her way across to the bathroom.
Why did it happen? What did...how have I let it happen? In her mind, she’d gone from ‘Rachel O’Ferez - student, poet, Trekker and flute-player’ to ‘The O’Ferez girl - brought it on herself’. I should have done something. Anything. Why the hell did I go to that bloody party in the first place? I could have just hired The Princess Bride and asked Sierra round. Sure, she can drone a bit when I’ve got her on her own, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being raped. Only since last night did she realise what she meant when she said things like that. This time yesterday, she would have cast a mind back to Sierra metricizing the full distance walked in The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and said something like, ‘Then again...’ She didn’t even feel remotely like trying to form jokes right now.
She almost didn’t recognise the pale image in the big bathroom mirror. Her reflection looked closer to fifty than fifteen. Dark blue lines ran down her cheeks from the several volleys of tears that had ploughed through her make-up. Yesterday, she’d thought it slightly cute the way her natural red was growing back into the sky blue of her hair. Now it just looked shabby. There was a bruise on her forehead, which gave her cause for confusion, as out of all the things he had done, she was fairly sure he hadn’t actually hit her head at any point. Holding up her hands, she saw what had once seemed like beautiful and intricate tartan nailwork, now seeming on these digits to be garish and unnecessary. Where once she had seen an urchin teenager, she now saw a faded whore.
She looked at her clothes, then really wished she hadn’t. Buttons were missing from her shirt, loose threads and small rips of silk betraying where they’d been ripped off. Her skirt was torn at both the bottom and the top - lingering evidence of his indecisiveness about how he was going to achieve his aims. She stared at the clothes for a moment longer, then - in a show of speed that had hitherto been absent from her - removed them. The association had become too much. Trying not to dwell on the realisation that her bra must have still lain where it had been discarded the night before, she bypassed the laundry basket and stuffed the garments straight into the bin, not caring if she ever saw them again. What had once been Her Favourite Clothes were now The Clothes She Had Been Raped In.
Her appearance sans clothing wasn’t any better. She found that the bruise on her forehead was in a line with a series that ran down over her chest to her hips, and finally realised that that was when she had slammed into a door frame in her eagerness to leave afterwards. Casting her eyes down below her poor excuse for a chest, she saw some scratches over her stomach. Whether they were his doing or the results of her backfired attempts at resistance, she couldn’t say.
Her eyes started to drift downwards once more, but she snapped her head back up. Not there, O’Ferez. For fuck’s sake don’t look there. It doesn’t exist for now. Really, you don’t need to see.
Her efforts at trying to clean herself (at least superficially) with a shower were short-lived. She found the water either too hot, which was uncomfortable to her body, or too cold, which was uncomfortable to her feelings.
Not even bothering to dry herself properly, she grabbed a robe and eased herself back to her room. She dropped herself onto her bed rather than the chair this time, but she still didn’t feel much better. She was beginning to feel like someone again, but she wasn’t sure if it was someone she really needed to be right now. And so she lay there and waited. Waited for Cindy to return. Waited for some silver lining to emerge from the grey.