"I can't be pure again. But I can control who takes what from me." - Julia Scheeres

I'm six years old, home from California to visit Nana. Daniel is her nephew; he is sixteen and wonderful. I love his dark hair, his braces, the way he treats me like a real person and not a kid.
Nana has a rope swing hanging from the big tree out front. She had it made for me, and there are interchangeable oak seats - the small seat and the wide one where Nana and I sit and read books.
Daniel takes me out to swing. It's the small seat. I sit on his lap but I'm afraid I'll fall off when we swing backwards. He tells me it would be easier if I turn around, so we turn me around, but when I try to sit his lap is suddenly angular and uncomfortable. I try to squirm away, try to tell him that we need the wide seat, but I'm six and he's sixteen and he holds me still and I start to cry and he coos and comforts me like he did when I had a bad dream, but there is no escaping this.
I never tell. And I never use the swing again.

When a honey bee stings you, it releases pheromones that draw the swarm. Is it like that? Can a person be tainted, marked as prey? Or is it an internal process - when that part of you is stolen, does it leave you crippled in some discernible way, attracting predators the way blood in the water attracts a shark?

I'm eight the first time my stepfather comes to me, stumbling and reeking of marijuana. He's a bad man; I think he's come to kill me. I'm soon wishing he had. I'm too scared to move, to cry, to scream. Paralyzed, I think of the swing.
This time, I tell. It doesn't help. He keeps coming back. I stop telling.

I've been used so many times. I suppose I let them. I don't know how not to and I don't care, really; what's it to me if they use me or not? Even if I don't let them, the truth is that they still want to. I'm an intricate network of easily-exploited weaknesses. I'm holding out for someone who chooses not to exploit them. For all my bullshit tough-talk I really am romantic. It's not rescue I want but protection, the white knight who sees the beauty and goodness at the heart of me and wants to defend that from all who would sully it again.

Maybe I'm just bullshitting myself. Maybe I'm just imagining that there's still beauty and goodness at the heart of me. You know what they say - fool me twice, shame on me.