VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9780698195264
Version_1
contents
title page
copyright
dedication
introduction
PRELUDE: mic test
onein the name of love
stained glass curtains in my mother’s mouth
unclean
earthbound
directionally challenged
practice
chum
lovebrarians
poem for my favorite teacher
hippos
closeted shame
payback
amplified
first blood
fencing
cemetery girl
driven
ante-crescendo
packing for exile
IT, part 1—gasoline
IT, part 2—trees
IT, part 3—playing chicken with the devil
clocks melting on the floor
pain management
buzzed
ninth grade: my year of living stupidly
diagnosis
Salinger and me
speaking in tongues
locker up
scrawling yawps
gauntlet, thrown
candy-striped
ignorance
chronological cartography
cardboard boxes
peanut butter chews
high diving
germination
riding the undertow
the things I carried to Denmark
hvordan det begyndt / how it started
longitude meets latitude
om efteråret / in the autumn
om vinteren / in the winter
om foråret / in the spring
rødgrød med fløde på
bridging
commence reentry sequence
separation—AWOL 1
reunion—AWOL 2
hitchhiking with my father
strawberry-blonde fairy tales
manure
lazer focused
drawn and quartered
calving iceberg
sweet-and-sour tea
offending professors
grinding it out
scratching my throat with a pen
cave painting
if it please the court
how the story found me
Speak, Draft One, Page One
(from my journal)
twoPolyhymnia
conspiracy
tsunami
blowing up
collective
emergency, in three acts
librarian on the cusp of courage
inappropriate dictators
innocence
the word
wired together
unraveling
#MeToo
keys
Yourdick™
forgiveness
banish
triptych
overheard on a train
Danuta Danielsson
musing
anatomy
free the bleed
shame turned inside out
callout
ignore stupid advice
The Reckoning
sincerely,
not responsible for contents
Catalyst
face my truth
a boy, a priest unholy
loud fences
feralmoans
emerging
two opposites of rape
yes, please
Ultima Thule
adaptable heart
threemy peculiar condition arboreal
Ganoderma applanatum
sweet gum tree, felled
piccolo
lost boys
tangled
blood moon
ordinary damages
beeched
say my name
reminder
POSTLUDE: my why
resources for readers
acknowledgments
about the author
for the survivors
introduction
Finding my courage to speak up twenty-five years after I was raped, writing Speak, and talking with countless survivors of sexual violence made me who I am today.
This book shows how that happened.
It’s filled with the accidents, serendipities, bloodlines, tidal waves, sunrises, disasters, passport stamps, criminals, cafeterias, nightmares, fever dreams, readers, portents, and whispers that have shaped me so far.
My father wrote poetry, too. He gave me these guidelines: we must be gentle with the living, but the dead own their truth and are fearless. So I’ve written honestly about the challenges my parents faced and how their struggles affected me. The poems that reference people other than me or my family are truth told slant; I’ve muddled specific details to protect the identities of survivors.
This is the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one.
PRELUDE: mic test
this book smells like me
woodsmoke
salt
honey and strawberries
sunscreen, libraries
failures and sweat
green nights in the mountains
cold dawns by the sea
this book reeks
of my fear
of depression’s black dogs howling
and the ancient shames riding
my back, their claws
buried deep
this book is yesterday’s mud
dried on the dance floor
the step patterns
cautiously submitted
for your curious investigation
of what I feel like
on the inside
one
in the name of love
When he was eighteen years old, my father
saw his buddy’s head sliced into two pieces,
sawn just above the eyebrows by an exploding
brake drum, when he was in the middle
of telling a joke.
Repairing planes, P-51s, on an air base in England,
hungry for a gun, not a wrench, my father
pushed an army-issue trunk into his mind
and put the picture of his friend’s last breath
at the bottom of it.
Then they sent him to Dachau.
Not just him, of course, his whole unit,
and not just to Dachau, but to all of the camps
because the War was over.
But not really.
Daddy didn’t talk to me for forty years
about what he saw, heard, what he smelled
what he did about it;
one year of silence for every day of the Flood,
one year for every day from Lent until Easter.
The air in Dachau was clouded with the ash
from countless bodies, as he breathed it in
the agony of the dying infected my father,
and all of his friends. They tried to help
the suffering, followed orders, took out their
rage in criminal ways while their officers
turned away. My father filled the trunk
in his head with walking corpses who sang
to him every night for the rest of his life.
One day Daddy watched a pregnant woman
near the gates of Dachau
he matched his steps to hers,
then stopped as she crouched in a ditch
and birthed a baby.
My father, a kid on the verge of destruction,
half-mad from the violence he’d seen
desperate to kill, to slaughter, to maim,
watched that baby slip into the world
between her momma’s blood-slicked thighs
and it healed him just enough
that he wept.
He wrapped the newborn in her mother’s apron
and helped them both to the Red Cross tent
set up for survivors.
stained glass curtains in my mother’s mouth
Veteran of D/depression,
the German war and atrocities
a handsome boy married the tall girl
who looked like Katharine Hepburn
two kids adrift in a city far from home
two ships ripped from their moorings.
Mom told me the story when I was in high school,
on a night when Daddy’s drinking
drove our family to the edge
“He had to slap me,” she said. “It happened
before you were born.”
The image of my father hitting
my mother picassoed in front of me
like Sunday sunshine slicing
through the church windows, fracturing
and rearranging the truth on the floor.
They lived in Boston back then
Daddy studying to be a preacher
Mom trying to be a wife.
“He had to slap me,” she repeated.
“I was screaming,”
screaming for reasons
too many to count.
The full story came out in gingerbread
crumbs dropped to show me the way.
After the meltdown, the attack,
they had to ride the train home
to repair the damage to her face
home to the mountains, to their parents
to a clucking village of spite,
her broken teeth vibrating
in bloody sockets,
her husband horrified at the war
he’d declared on his beloved,
he turned toward the aisle
thinking of escape.
Her backbone crumbling
under the weight of her heart,
she fixed her eyes on the dark
forest just beyond the glass.
“I wouldn’t shut up,”
she said. “He had to.”
The lie told to friends was that she fell,
clumsy, tumbled down the stairs
so many broken teeth, poor thing
bad things happen
in big cities, you know.
The truth was that the stress
of fighting the ghosts in his head
broke him that night
and as they argued
my father didn’t just slap my mother.
He beat her.
But beatings didn’t fit in the fairy tales
she liked to tell herself
so she sugarcoated the story
to make it easier to swallow.
The town dentist, a family friend,
didn’t charge for his labor
gently apologized with every tooth.
They lived with her parents all summer
while her mouth healed,
waiting for the false teeth, they tiptoed
but they did not touch.
After the stitches came out
after she learned to mix
tooth powder with water
to make the glue
that held her mouth together,
after five miscarriages,
five never-born sons,
my parents tried again
and created me. He didn’t ever hit
her again, but she lived in the fear
that he would, which had everything to do
with her habits of silence.
unclean
I said “shit”
in front of the church ladies
gathered in our kitchen
for coffee and doughnuts,
three-year-old me:
parrot-tongued echo chamber
I fell down, scraped my knee,
and said “shit” in frustration,
the word I had learned
from my mother
crammed and dammed
into the corseted life
of a minister’s wife
where she couldn’t say
“shit”
if she had a mouthful.
But alone,
with me,
she could, and did
frequently.
That day in the kitchen,
as the church ladies
eyed my mother’s handmade
curtains, measuring her skills,
I baby-cursed and was snatched from the floor.
Shoving a bar of soap into the mouth of a child
was then a common practice, church lady approved,
for scrubbing dirty words from the minds
of the young, the violence
of generational silence
brutally handed down.
Ivory grooves deep-carved
in the bar by my baby teeth
Mommy’s bruising fingers
pinning me against the sink
My sobs captured in bubbles
heard only after they popped,
after I was jailed in my room
and the ladies of the church and my mother
sipped bitterness and shared crumbs.
I learned then that words
had such power
some must never be spoken
and was thus robbed of both
tongue a
nd the truth.
earthbound
My mother took me to a pond
when I was four years old
for swimming lessons. There was a beach,
of sorts, littered with pine needles and mothers
smoking cigarettes on towels,
wearing sweaters and warm socks;
summer in the North Country.
Mom tugged off my sweatshirt and shooed me
toward the crowd of kids standing
at water’s edge. The Lady of the Lake,
our swimming teacher, a giantess topped
with a rubber bathing cap studded
with plastic flowers,
began the lesson.
On our bellies, facing the beach,
hands in the mud
legs in the water, my feet motorboated obediently.
I didn’t mind kicking long as I could hold
on to the shore.
But then the Lady beckoned us into deep water
one by one. I refused,
even with the rest of the class staring.
The Lady hooked me under the armpits and pulled
me in.
Never trust anyone with plastic flowers
on their head.
I hollered so loud the Lady consulted
with my mother,
the other moms clucking and whispering.
I won
the position at the shallowest edge of the pond
where I pulled through a few inches of water
with my hands in the earth,
occasionally waving an arm in the air to pretend
like I was swimming,
a stubborn tadpole
suspicious of the deep.
directionally challenged
In first grade we moved
country mouse to the city
whiskers quivering, eyes wide,
couple days later Mom put my sister
in the stroller and we three
walked through a drizzle of gold
and ruby leaves up one hill, down
another to the new school, made of bricks,
registered in the office, Mom handed me
my lunch box and waved
a fast goodbye
I sat in the back row, played
hopscotch with some girls, and ran
hands in the air as the bell rang at day’s end
followed the crowd out the door,
the crossing guard our white-gloved guardian,