Three Times
It happened three times in the fall of her thirteenth year. Men who wanted something from her, an awkward and ugly child with dark eyes and a lower lip ragged from obsessive chewing.
The first man was middle-aged, in a car, asking her, a young girl from whom nothing should be expected, he was asking her directions. Was he punching himself in the stomach? She saw nothing but this steady punch, but still she wrote down his licence plate number and later received a certificate of merit from the police in front of the whole school.
The second was a much younger man. She saw him across the park by the treeline hunched a little—as the other man had been—and she recognized the steady loose-fisted punch. Later the police came to her house and her parents said, “Well this is good, then.”
The third was a few days before Halloween with the nights coming early and the wind cool in the morning but washed with heat by the middle of the day. She had broken out in a rash under the thick, flannel shirt she had been sweating in, and scratched, uncomfortable, as the students and teachers were assembled in the gymnasium. The principal made an announcement. Everyone was to watch for an adult—male—who took advantage of children. An adult who offered them rides in his van, engaged them in conversation, who took advantage of their exuberance as Halloween approached. She listened carefully.
She looked for him everywhere. The man who took advantage. She knew what to look for: there were the eyes that came up at her as if out from under something, and, of course, the loose-fisted punching. She never found him, but he was included in her list anyway. Three times it happened, she told people because she had imagined him so clearly just as the teacher at school had described him—thin, brown hair in a dark-coloured van. There were plenty of men in her neighbourhood who were like this, who drove dark vans up and down the streets, to malls, to parks, somewhere else. He was there. She knew. He was there because she saw him so clearly.