History

First published in From Arthur’s Seat Vol. 5
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She got the first one when she was ten. It’s near her right armpit, a purplish splotch on the creamy underside of her arm. Emma was walking home from school, in her sprawled suburban neighborhood of split-levels and parched lawns, when she turned onto the third street from her house and a flurry of motion caught her eye. A man was sitting halfway out the driver’s seat of his car with his pants pulled over his knees and his hand moving up and down between his legs like he was trying to get ketchup out of a bottle. He was smiling at her.

Emma’s face was hot. She felt ashamed, though she wasn’t sure why, and she hurried up the street and around the corner. She turned back once to check if he was still looking at her but all she could see was his open car door. She didn’t tell her parents—it would have made her feel even more ashamed, to talk about it—and the next morning she noticed the splotch. When her mom grabbed her arm and asked, “Honey, what’s this?” Emma said it was just a bruise from the monkey bars and from then on she wore longer sleeves.

The spot got a little bigger when she was seventeen. She stepped out of a friend’s car on a hot summer day and the memory of another man in another car came back to her, sharp and sudden. She breathed through her teeth as she understood more fully what had happened, what she had been made part of, and the splotch grew to the size of a small child’s hand. But by then it wasn’t her only one. She got the second when she was thirteen and a guy pinched her ass at the mall—on a dare, she heard. The spot showed up right where his index finger had really dug in. She thought it was a bruise, but it just never went away. When, in junior year, a senior boy sent a group of her friends a picture of his genitals, a splotch bloomed on the back of her knee.

“You mean you don’t get stuff like this, after guys do things like that?” she asked her friend Corinne the next day. Emma had thought they would be comparing splotches, but Corinne had only stared at her.

“That’s crazy, dude. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Like my spots or like… that?” Emma nodded meaningfully toward the blank screen of her phone, which was heavy and potent with the new threat of things it could show them.

“Like those,” Corinne said, gesturing to the parts of Emma’s body where she had just shown off her marks. “You get them any time something like this happens?”

Emma nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Weird. I can’t believe you don’t have more.”

The biggest one stretches across her lower abdomen. It looks like an upside-down map of Africa, with everything north of the Sahara dipping below her underwear. This is what she can remember: she woke up on a stranger’s couch after a party in college, walked home with her head blasted to bits, and found the new splotch when she undressed to take a shower. She freaked out and went to urgent care, where she told them she needed a rape kit.

“Do you wish to report the incident to the authorities at this time?” the nurse asked her.

“I don’t know who it was,” Emma said. “I don’t remember anything from last night.” She felt like crying.

“Then how do you know you were raped?”

Emma explained the splotches. She lifted her arm and told the nurse about the guy jacking off in his car. She pointed to her ass and to the back of her knee and said that she got a new one each time something like this happened.

“That seems a little extreme,” the nurse said. “Are you sure you’re not just overreacting?”

• • •

She tried scrubbing, scraping, bleaching. Serums and cleansers and toners and peels. Her acne scars faded, but the splotches stayed bright and vivid as ever—and every so often a new one appeared. She avoided tank tops, shorts, thin fabrics. For a while she couldn’t face the sharp edges of the world at all; she avoided bars and off-peak public transit and certain aisles of the grocery store. The marks were memories, too, and it was about living with them just as much as it was about looking at them.

Some of her close friends told her to show them off, like they were evidence, like her body was some kind of a living rebuke. Her mother gently suggested that she wear more jewel tones, to avoid clashing. Once, Emma psyched herself up enough to wear a pencil skirt to work. She spent the whole day tense, waiting for someone to ask, “What’s on the back of your leg?” But nobody did. Her friend Chloe sent an email after lunch that said, “Girl, you are ROCKING that look. You’re so strong and I’m proud of you.”

When Chloe invited her down to the Outer Banks for a long weekend at her family’s beach house, Emma wanted to say no. She pictured herself in a swimsuit, her splotches bared to the world, and cringed. But Chloe worked on her, promising to lend a sundress and make endless blended drinks, until Emma relented. Until she was even a little excited to feel the sand between her toes.

That was where she met Andrew. She blushed when they met, and she blushed when he set up a beach chair next to hers, and her eyes followed him wherever he moved. On her second day there, spurred by a little day-drinking and by the heavy, comforting heat of the ocean air, Emma took off her borrowed dress and waded into the water with Chloe. She was wearing an old bikini, the only swimsuit she owned, and the mark on her stomach was a loud fuchsia dipping in and out of the water. She lay back and let the waves hold her, and when she closed her eyes she found that she could breathe easily. She didn’t feel horribly visible; she was just a part of the ocean’s surface. Emma spread her arms wide so that the armpit splotch winked up at the sky. The sun was warm on her eyelids and she tasted salt on her lips. When she came back onto the sand, she glanced over at Andrew to look for any signs of change in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. But he only smiled at her and asked if she wanted his towel; it was dry.

They exchanged numbers. The next week he drove four hours up to D.C. to see her, and she blushed at this too. When she hungrily invited him home, she didn’t worry about showing him the splotches because he had already seen them back on the beach. She savored the ease of it. His hands ran over the marked parts of her body like they weren’t even there, like they were just skin.

When he slid his boxers off, a flash of color caught her eye. There. On his left hip. The same pinkish-purple as hers, like the flesh of a ripe plum.

“Oh my god,” she said.

Emma sat up and held her hands up above his body, suddenly afraid to touch. To break. She searched his face, hoping it would tell her the right thing to say. She felt like crying.

He reached for her hands and set them softly onto the mattress, close to the heat of his chest. His thumb roved across her knuckles. “We can talk about it if you want,” he said. “But we don’t have to. I don’t know about you, but it’s such a relief not to have to talk about it.”

Emma lay back down. She wrapped her arm around his torso and squeezed, as gently as she knew how.