The Dullness of Yellow

Rose petals. Candles. A soft, white mattress. Or maybe, a cozy blanket on the beach, the sound of the waves echoing in your ear. Not necessarily true love, but trust. Connection. Vulnerability. That’s how you imagined it. That’s how it was supposed to be. 

But there you were, on the floor of a white pick up truck, the seats lifted in the back revealing the metal bolts underneath. No candles, just shadows. No waves, just cars driving by. No trust, just fearful surrender. But the vulnerability overlaps, containing its other, more hostile definition. 

When you tell your best friend what happened, she asks if you said “no.” Well, not those exact words. Her mom says you were weak. Her mom says you weren’t strong enough to say “no.” Her mom asks if you had sex with him. No, I didn’t. Her mom asks you if you’re lying, because you wouldn’t be this upset if you didn’t have sex with him. You want to correct her: rape, not sex. There is a difference, though none of those things happened to you. You don’t really know the correct terminology for what he did to you. Months after this afternoon, you still don’t. 

One day, you remember what happened to that girl during the summer before sixth grade. There was a party at the middle school’s pool for incoming sixth graders. One girl was changing into her swimsuit in the girl’s locker room when one of the boys took a picture of her. He put it on the internet. He was expelled the next day, before the school year even started. 

You contemplate telling your high school what happened to you; what he did to you. Maybe then, you wouldn’t have to be around him during school. Maybe then, he would be expelled, just like the boy who took the picture all those years ago.

He is not expelled like the boy who took the picture. In fact, nothing happens at all. You are confused. You are embarrassed for causing trouble. You are embarrassed for saying anything at all. When the dean tells you to “just forgive him,” your cheeks turn red. Your eyes begin to flood, but the sturdy dam of your eyelids holds them back. You want to give a big, long speech about how people like her are the reason victims continue to be silenced and suppressed, but instead, you smile and thank her for her time. You consider yourself a feminist, but what kind of feminist just sits there, absorbing her ruthless invalidation without expressing your disagreement? A feminist who isn’t sure if she disagrees. A feminist who feels like it was all her fault. A feminist tired of paying the price for his actions. A feminist who isn’t sure if justice is worth the fight. 

You used to love school. Now you just want to run away. So you walk out of the dean’s office, straight to your car, and drive home. You’ve never ditched school before. You wonder why you aren’t nervous about breaking the rules, about getting caught by the dean. As you pull out of the school driveway, you realize it’s because the dean has broken so many more rules than you. 

A few months later you sit in a chair, a kind lady standing behind you attaching wires to your head. You look like a character from a sci-fi movie being experimented on by the evil, crazy scientist. The kind lady tracks your brain waves as you watch Finding Nemo. Nemo gets lost. Nemo finds his dad. They live happily ever after. The kind lady pulls up a graph. Yellow means your brain was processing trauma. Blue means your brain was calm. All you see is the color most often used to represent happiness, though now, it does not. Yellow used to be your favorite color, but there are five other colors in the rainbow that now seem to shine much brighter.

You transfer to a different high school, four whole miles west of your old school; four whole miles west of him. You figure you will like school again, you won’t be scared to sit in a classroom. Your first-period English teacher is wearing a t-shirt with “Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum” written on it. You know you have someone on your side. You let out a sigh of relief. 

In second-period U.S. History, you sit in the first row of desks watching a documentary on how U.S. Soldiers raped Japanese women and girls during the Battle of Okinawa. The other students glare at their phones or doodle in their notes, some even asleep with hoodies over their heads, ignoring the horrors pictured in front of them. You look around the room, wondering if 

anyone else is as distraught as you. No one seems to care. You look back at the screen. A Japanese woman describes being raped as a girl by an American soldier. Your arms begin to twitch in the same direction as always, as if they are still trying to push him off. Your uterus clenches from within, trying to push a certain set of fingers out of your body that haven’t been there for over a year. Though these involuntary movements are too small for anyone to notice, you are embarrassed by the uncontrollable remnants of unprocessed trauma. You get up and ask your teacher if you could use the restroom. He nods his head and you run to the door down the hall, locking yourself in the middle stall. You think you might be sick, but tears emerge from your eyes rather than food from your stomach. You did your makeup special for your first day at your new school. Now it is all ruined. 

You hear the door open and see a pair of yellow Converse walk into the stall next to you. You put your hands over your mouth to muffle your sobs until you get control of yourself. You walk out of the stall and wipe the smeared mascara off your face with the familiar brown paper towels of your childhood. You recognize them from elementary school; the whole school district has used the same odd-smelling, cheap paper towels for decades. 

The other girl walks out of the stall. Melody. Melody Thomas. You were in the same preschool class as her fourteen years ago. You remember small, random things like that; what you were wearing on every first day of school since kindergarten, the score you got on your first-grade spelling test, all of your lines from your fourth-grade school play about California history, every lab partner you had in fourth-period Science during the sixth-grade. Some of your friends think your practically photographic memory is creepy, but you find it useful. It’s one of the reasons you excel in school: you remember every lecture, every vocabulary word, every study guide. It’s why you get perfect scores on standardized state testing and had the IQ of a Harvard Graduate when you entered high school. When you sit across the table from the police officer with a recorder facing towards you, however, no matter how hard you try, your memory often fails you. It’s unlike yourself to have trouble remembering. You are mad at yourself for this. As if you have control of the unruly symptoms of PTSD. You don’t remember the exact dates it happened. You don’t remember the specific words he said. You don’t remember the order of events. Yet, you remember that you were wearing bright yellow underwear, that at some angles his eyes were the exact same color as the chocolate river in Willy Wonka, and the scent of his musty, yet masculine, cologne. 

You, nor Melody, say anything, though the eye contact she makes with you verifies that she recognizes your face. You wonder if she, too, remembers your name. Probably not. She leaves the bathroom and you are left there, alone, looking in the mirror at your blotchy, red face, wishing so deeply that you could go back to playing dress up in preschool with the girl whose name you still, somehow, remember.

Katin Sarner is an 18-year-old from Los Angeles with a passion for sharing her story through words. Katin is currently studying Creative Writing, Music, and Education Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She plans to become a high school English teacher and hopes to eventually advocate for education reform at a national level. Katin was the winner of the 2nd annual New York Times Narrative Contest, as well as a Gold and Silver Key recipient in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Katin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic: Choices, Harpur Palate, The Hellebore, The Novillian, Pear Shaped Press, and HerStry. She owes her writing success to all of her middle and high school English teachers who inspired her to find her voice through words.