When I was sixteen, I had my first boyfriend. We met on Facebook through a mutual furry, whose name I don’t remember nor do I wish to. Kyle lived in New Jersey, about 3 hours away from me. He was sweet, intelligent, attractive, and older – over twenty. He helped me build my first fursona, and convinced me to sign up on FurAffinity. Being young, I quickly fell in love and began planning to visit him. Rebelling against my weak-willed but overprotective parents was easy: I lied and said I wanted to visit his college to see if I wanted to apply there. It worked, train tickets were bought, and off I went during the summer of my junior year. I took an Amtrak for the first time by myself; the first time was a visit to Columbia in New York City. When the train departed Union Station, I was ecstatic – my first trip alone to see my first boyfriend.

He was waiting for me outside of the station when I arrived. We held hands as we walked to his car, swiftly driving me back to his dorm. The first day of the weekend trip was really fun – we went out to eat at Panera, because one of the bigger restaurants was a forty minute wait, and we talked about politics. I love politics. I’m hoping to go to law school in the next two years, but back then I naively wanted to be a journalist not knowing how treacherous that field is. Afterwards, we went back to his dorm and played Mario Kart with some of his friends. I always played as Yoshi, Yoshi’s island was my favorite game as a kid. Kyle told me to tell his friends that I was already in college, and that I was nineteen and not sixteen. I was wearing a St. Mary’s College of Maryland shirt, so I made up a story that I was a sophomore there studying environmental science, which is what my brother was studying.

We went to bed pretty late, and woke up late the next morning too. After getting breakfast, we came back to his apartment to relax and look at things to do that day. Kyle took my hand and kissed me, unexpectedly, but I reciprocated, wanting to show my boyfriend that I loved him. Things escalated, and Kyle held my arms to the bed while he raped me.

I didn’t process what was going on at the time. I wanted to stop, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything as my mouth was physically obstructed. I tried to look up at him, but he pressed my head down and ignored me. I tried to push myself off of him, but he ignored that too. I felt too weak to fight back – why would I say no to what my boyfriend wanted? He knew better, I thought, and it would just be easier to let it happen than to fight back. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents by asking for a rescue home. Even though I hated how much they controlled my life, I loved and respected them. So I stopped fighting back and closed my eyes, trying to escape internally, and waited for it to be over. I hated waiting, but I hated this more.

When we drove to a little town by the Pennsylvania border, he told me he hadn’t been checked for STIs (back then they were called STDs) in some time, and that he “thought” he might have HIV. I said “That’s okay, you should get checked though”. I thought “Oh my god, what if I have HIV?” over and over during the drive there. We hung around the town a while, sightseeing, looking at cute things like a cute couple would. I ignored what had happened. I bought a lot of incense, because I liked having my room smell of lavender and sandalwood. I told him I wasn’t feeling well so that we could go home, and so that I could try to sleep off the day. Never had I wanted to see my parents so urgently before.

The next day I went home. We hugged goodbye, and I took a picture of us to show my friends on Facebook that I really did have a boyfriend – a lot of them didn’t believe me, as I wasn’t very popular or socially apt. He shyed away from the photo, trying to obscure most of his face, maybe so he wouldn’t be seen by his peers as actually dating a sixteen year old. On the train back, I tried to shift my mind away from what he did to me and focus on everything else – I had a boyfriend that I visited on my own, that I was independent, that I was an adult. I was very much still a child.

Kyle came to visit me once afterwards. He drove to my parent’s house a few months later to stay a weekend, which my parents obliged after I argued that we should reciprocate his hospitality. I told them nothing of our relationship or the events that unfolded – I lied, and said he was someone who graduated from my highschool the year prior. He arrived, greeted my parents, and immediately took me into my room to try and initiate sex. I wanted no part in it, even after he stripped down and tried to pull my clothes off. He kept going, and tried to give me oral sex even after I said no. I told him that my parents were in the next room, that they could probably hear what was going on. He turned pale and immediately stopped. That was the moment I knew something was fundamentally wrong with the relationship.

The rest of the visit was sad, but uneventful. I went to lunch with his friends, and felt out of place as the only teenager at a table of 20-something adults. We went to some museums by ourselves, as Kyle wanted to keep me separate from his friends – I knew he wanted our relationship to remain a secret. The next day, he came downstairs from the guest room clad only in underwear, walking past my brother four years my junior and my parents. I rushed to get him packed, embarrassed about his behavior and embarrassed that I had brought someone like him into my house. When he left, my parents told me I could not bring anyone home overnight unless they met him first. For once, I agreed.

Kyle broke up with me soon after that visit, saying that it didn’t ‘feel right’. Maybe those were genuine feelings, but I strongly suspect that he did not want to be found out about dating a child, or raping one. At the time, I was distraught when he broke up with me: he was my gateway to adulthood and a means to escape my anti-social highschool experience. Time went by. I graduated, enrolled in a regional-tier school north of Baltimore, and tried to forget what happened. I became anxious about sex, switching between having lots of risky anonymous encounters, to becoming extremely attached to the few people I thought I liked beyond casual sex. I experimented with hard drugs, eventually resigning from my RA program to seek treatment. For months, I went to class, had lunch, and immediately returned to my apartment, shunning all offline social interaction because of how depressed I was.

Things got better. Therapy helped me realize, process, and understand what happened to me, and I started going out again. I transferred schools to stay at home with my parents for a year, which really helped – my relationship with them is stronger than ever as a result. I’m successfully finishing two majors and two minors at the end of this academic year, and hoping to apply to a Top 14 law school as a result of my LSAT score and GPA. I live with old friends from highschool and new friends from college, I rushed a fraternity, I stayed out late enough to avoid DC’s ridiculous surge pricing on weekends. I also began piecing together evidence of what happened in order to file charges against Kyle – a realization made during one of my law classes, strangely enough.

This story ends abruptly, because it is still very much in the present for me. The last sentence of the previous paragraph envelops a significant part of my life now - I worry about going to court and presenting evidence in front of a skeptical legal apparatus, or having my identity outed to my friends in the fandom and falsely decried as a fraud, or having this part of my life revealed to the very normal group of friends I hold on campus and elsewhere. I truly wish this was a work of fiction, but this is part of my life.

I still pray for him every day, so that he doesn’t hurt someone else like me, or unlike me, or anyone at all.