“Hush… I’ll stop soon if you just shut up.” A tall, lanky boy from my gym class grunted as he shoved at me, prodding and poking my body. We were the only two on the far end of the track after the required mile was finished. I kept telling him to stop touching me, to get his hands away from me, but he kept grabbing at me and squeezing me. It went on for five minutes until my friend came racing to my aid to get him away and off of me. They punched him, beating him to the asphalt and threatening him to stay away from me. We rushed off, back to the rest of the class while his friends picked him up off the ground.

I told my friends what happened, they told our gym coach who wanted to hear it from me before they let me go see a counselor. A female classmate escorted me to the office so someone knew I got there safely without anymore issues. The walk up there was awkward between us. A girl I wasn’t friends with walking with me as I sobbed. She didn’t know what happened fully, but she knew it was bad enough for everyone to be pissed off at the star student who laid his hands on me.

She left me sitting in a cold chair shivering, sobbing, and fearful. All three counselors came rushing to me along with our principal and school resource officer. That was when the longest afternoon of my life had begun. I spent the remainder of my school day explaining what had happened on the track not leaving out a single detail. We were talking, he made some joke about kissing me, grabbed my shoulder, and then...

Two years have gone by and I have seen the lanky boy almost everyday as a figment of my paranoid imagination and every night in my detailed nightmares. They said it might never go away, the fear and trauma, but I had hoped it would’ve. I wish it would just go away magically. I wish and pray every day that maybe I won’t see him out of the corner of my eye. Or maybe he won’t be in any dreams when I go to sleep. But he’s still there… and I can still hear him telling me to hush.