The Head and The Heart

By Michelle Lori

Shockingly, approximately one in five women and one in seven men first experience rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner between the ages of 11 and 17. 

The Head and The Heart 

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637303375

Book preview

Foreword

By: Dan Lori

The first time I knew Michelle had an incredible internal strength was when I kept her from a sucker that was hopelessly tangled up in the mane of her lion costume one Halloween. She threw a fit for what seemed like forever. As we made our way back to the house to find something to cut it out, she fought the entire way, solely focused on that sucker and not willing to give up until she got it. After we got home and the sucker was safely removed, she eventually cried herself to sleep in her crib, still not willing to give up on that furry sucker.

When you enter an open, caring relationship with someone, trust is something that is often assumed but not given. You trust they will respect you, value you as a person, and do the right thing even when it is the hardest thing to do. You don’t assume they will play games and try to hurt you, but it happens. What do you do when it does?

Michelle’s experiences and strength can help readers avoid harmful situations, and if they are unfortunate enough to fall into a trap, help them get back up again. I am so proud of my little girl for sharing her trying times to help others. It’s one of the hardest things to do in life, and it’s the right thing to do.

I love you, Michelle.

Dad

Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

Regardless of what has brought you to these pages, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for choosing this book.

I’d like to share with you what has brought me here.

As a high schooler—a vulnerable sixteen/seventeen-year-old—I experienced relationship abuse for the first time. This relationship and the dismantling of it lasted for well over a year of my life. But the danger of dating violence and relationship abuse lies not only in the time a person stays with an abuser, but in the months, years, or even decades that follow when the pieces must be picked up, the memories shaken, and the fear subdued.

Rebuilding oneself after the loss of humanity that inevitably comes with being involved with an abuser is no easy task. In fact, for me, it’s been the longest lasting and most exhausting battle I’ve fought in my life—one I must face every single day. Months after I left the girl who abused me, I was experiencing debilitating headaches (among other things) of which the onset was my relationship with her. I was sent to a neurologist whose goal was to teach me stress management techniques to reduce my headaches. Our first session was solely dedicated to determining what the cause of my stress was. It took her about ten minutes of questioning before she looked at me and said, This isn’t an official diagnosis, but I can tell you that you certainly seem to display many symptoms of PTSD. While I wasn’t shocked, her words seemed to move me, to urge me on to something I realized I needed to do: speak.

In February of 2021, four years after the abuse occurred, I was officially diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

Back when I was seventeen, at the height of the chaos and ugliness that ensued immediately after I ended the relationship, I sat around a fire one night with my friends and told them the things this girl was doing to me. One of my friends looked at me and said, This sounds like a book or a movie or something. Stuff like this just doesn’t happen in real life. When I agreed the events I was experiencing were unbelievable, to say the least, she said, Honestly, you should write a book about this. After a few months of such a thought incubating in my head, one morning I woke up, said "What the heck," and started typing away. Ten months later, I had a manuscript that was over 120,000 words of fear, anger, distrust, and oftentimes bitter cynicism. These were 120,000 words for me to hold in my hands and say, "This happened."

Around that same time my neurologist looked me in the face and said those four letters that jolted me awake: PTSD. Suddenly it was no longer about me. It was about the sixteen-year-olds I could imagine sitting in that chair in three years’ time as a different person, struggling to shake the headaches and the memories and the tendencies and the fear. I envisioned the sixteen-year-olds who would so readily take any and all the abuse thrown their way because they didn’t know any better, or because they thought that’s what love looked like. The sixteen-year-olds who lost their voices and needed them back, or the sixteen-year-olds who still had the opportunity to preserve theirs. That was when I decided to press on and hope in the years to come, someone might take a chance on my voice and give me the opportunity to tell my story, so any person might pick it up and see their reflection in it. So that any person might realize our lives are our own, that we are at the helm of our ship, and we do have the power to steer ourselves in a different direction if we find our current path has depleted our happiness.

I must once again bring up the words of my friend: Stuff like this just doesn’t happen in real life. Of course, novels are fictional, but I’m here to tell you the story you’re holding within your hands is real. The things you will read in this book are things that happen, and happen frequently among all people, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, or any other construct by which we define ourselves. Stuff like this does happen in real life, and it is each of our responsibilities to change it. It’s my hope every single one of us will work to make our relationships with one another safe, respectful, loving, and healthy. It’s my hope we will become aware of the dangers of dating violence and relationship abuse so we may work to make sure it no longer has a place in our world or in the world of our children.

With that being said, some of the topics addressed in this book may be challenging or triggering. This story deals with issues like abuse, sexual assault, violence, bullying, suicide, and sometimes depicts these topics in a graphic manner. Please read at your own discretion. Please also bear in mind if you are struggling with any of these issues, you can seek help. There is no shame in reaching out.

I wish for you to take away whatever you find of value from my story, but more than anything, I hope you realize the value of a story itself, including yours. Your voice is important; let it be heard.

Your story is important; tell it.

Part 1

Everything Looks Different in Darkness

Chapter 1

I still remember the first time I saw Lacy, for how often does one forget a first encounter with someone like her? I remember the way her dirty-blonde bangs fell over her forehead; the rest of her hair just barely reached her shoulders. I remember her black jeans and her gray t-shirt. I remember her blue eyes set upon her soft face, and how they scanned the dimly lit, damp-smelling building I wasn’t supposed to be in.

I skipped basketball practice to be there that day; one of my friends had a bowling match and the alley was only about ten minutes from school. It was an odd sort of trademark in Orange County; the city was pretty high-end, but that bowling alley was so old and nasty-looking and probably hadn’t been touched since it was built. People still loved it, though. I skipped practice because I didn’t really need to go. I had been sitting out since the beginning of November with a concussion. Now it was nearly the end of December, and I had no hope of getting back on the court again. It wasn’t at all the way I expected to spend my junior year basketball season, but we all run head-first into things we don’t expect. Sometimes it’s your own teammate, and she clocks you so hard between the eyes that it changes your life forever.

My teammates wouldn’t realize I had skipped. I was sure of that. When I first got hit, as per my doctor’s orders, I spent an entire week holed up in my room in the quiet and the dark, coloring pictures of different cartoon characters wearing Santa hats. The best was a tie between Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob. When I finally came back, happy as ever because I no longer had to worry about going stir-crazy, not one of my teammates seemed to notice I hadn’t been there. I knew I wasn’t that great of a basketball player. I mean, if I couldn’t move quick enough to save my head from being bashed, who was I ever going to stop on defense? But they didn’t even miss me as a person, and that’s what rattled me. It’s good to miss people every now and then; it means you care. I was mad about it at the time, but not so much anymore. I’ve learned it’s just how people are: selfish, whether they mean to be or not. I guess it’s human nature.

I was selfish that day when I skipped basketball practice to go to the bowling alley. Maybe if I was where I was supposed to be, I wouldn’t be telling this story at all. Maybe if my teammates cared how I wanted them to, it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe if I would’ve dodged my teammate’s flailing head, things would be different. It’s funny how many things must align one after the next just for one single moment to happen. I guess that’s why some people believe in fate.

I saw her as soon as I sat down on one of the stools at the concession stand. She was standing at the very last lane, almost in the corner of the building, talking with a group of people whose faces I recognized from the hallways of Orange County High School. Something about those blue eyes of hers wouldn’t let my attention waiver. They held everybody else’s too; everyone around her was drawn to her. They never looked away when she talked, and they laughed at almost everything she said. Parents cheered on their kids and pins crashed and cash registers popped open. The grill sizzled behind me. None of it mattered a bit. I’ve never been able to understand why, but from the moment I laid eyes on her, it was impossible to care about anything else.

I had to know who she was. No. I had to know who she was. I had to have her in my life, and there was no explanation for it. It was as if someone somehow had reached inside my heart and dropped this seed of curiosity—of desire. Simply by existing, she covered it with soil and patted it down and promised it would grow, and it did.

Chapter 2

From the second I saw her, Lacy was always showing me the vices a human was capable of committing. That’s because my desire for her existed despite the fact I already had a girlfriend. Her name was Sam Sheppard. We had been together for about a month, and our relationship was hidden from just about everyone. The only people I had come out to were my older sister Quinn and a select handful of my closest friends.

Things change when you come out. A teammate of mine came out to our basketball team our freshman year, and I watched a handful of girls spend the whole year whispering to one another in the locker room every time we had to change in front of each other. A handful might not sound like all that much, but the fear of even one person treating you differently is enough to shut you up for a while, especially when you’re sixteen. Because of that I was, for all intents and purposes, closeted. Sam, on the other hand, had been out almost all of high school.

Sam was my first real girlfriend, or real relationship for that matter. I dated boys in middle school, three of them actually, but does that really count? (The correct answer is: of course not. Everybody knows middle school relationships barely exceed the what’s up nothing much hbu text altercations and the avoiding-each-other-at-school-because-you-were-too-nervous-to-talk-in-person phase.) The honest truth about Sam was I liked her. I really did. She was a caring person. Thoughtful, too. When she asked me to be her girlfriend, she did it by burning me a CD with eighteen of my favorite songs. The sixteenth song skipped toward the end, but it was still the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I did like her. But the problem was I didn’t like her. You know, in that way. Sometimes you just have to figure yourself out, and I wasn’t quite done doing that yet. I really don’t think we ever are.

It’s also pretty hard to figure yourself out if you’re a liar. I never was much of one myself, but certainly we all have moments where we act out-of-character. Believe me when I say lying to yourself is the worst kind of lying. Once you have yourself fooled, there’s no way you can be honest with anyone else. Believe me, I know.

On the night I broke up with Sam—about a week after I had gone to the bowling alley—I let myself believe a terrible, hurtful lie. I was sitting on my purple bedspread (purple wasn’t my favorite color—it was red—but my sister and I had to find colors we both liked since we shared a room). I was writing a song on my guitar (don’t be impressed; they were never very good) when I got a text from Sam:

Mallory, I think my brother knows about us.

Sam’s brother was a jerk. He was in my grade, and I hated that guy. He had hooked up with one of his best friend’s girlfriends and didn’t even feel bad. My heart hurt every time I saw his friend at school. We had psychology class together, and for about four weeks after it happened, I remember he looked like he was on the verge of tears every day. Sam’s brother didn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own, and if he knew about me and Sam, my secret wasn’t going to be a secret much longer. I quickly tapped the call button under her contact name. She answered right away.

Hey, she said as I set my guitar against my bed and stood up.

Hi, I responded and started pacing my room. What happened?

Oh, he just made some comment about how he’s seen me talking to you a lot. That was it, but the way he said it made me think—

Sam, I interrupted. I stopped pacing when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror of Quinn’s dresser. Sam, I— I stuttered.

I stared at myself. My hair was pulled back in this crappy ponytail and I almost looked bald. My hair was dark brown because I had just dyed it. It used to be blonde—I wish it was still blonde—but I was always so stupidly trying to be something different than what I was. For example, I wore these vibrant-green contacts all throughout 8th grade. They looked so unnatural, so who knows why I thought that was a good idea. My eyes were green anyway. Usually. They change color a lot. I know people hate people who say that, but they do. Luckily on the day I got my license they looked blue, so legally I have blue eyes. They’re hardly ever blue though, and when I looked at myself just then, they were almost completely gray: much darker than usual.

Sam, I said, still staring at myself. I’m just not ready for this. I really believed what I was saying.

Mallory, we’re fine, she said gently. I’m here for you and it’s gonna be fi—

I can’t do this anymore, I said. I’m sorry. I really was. I’m a person who’s sorry a lot, but it’s always for different reasons than what most people are sorry for.

I looked away from myself and paced back to my bed. I’m just not ready, I repeated.

I swear I believed it. I really did, but that was only when I didn’t let myself think a whole lot, of course. You can’t really lie to yourself if you think a lot, and as soon as that day in the bowling alley even crossed my mind, I knew I was lying. Deep down, I knew I was leaving out the truth. Those two things are the same thing, you know? Some people don’t like to admit it but lying is the same thing as not telling the whole truth. Maybe it’s even worse, because you’re trying really hard to make yourself look honest when in reality, you’re too much of a coward to say it all. The only truth is the whole truth.

So, I was a coward and left out the detail that I had an inclination toward someone else. I let myself believe it would hurt Sam less if she didn’t know that part, and I was terribly wrong. Sometimes we let ourselves believe lies will keep people from hurting. They don’t. They really don’t. All they do is cause the hurt that people feel.

I understand, Mallory, Sam whispered after a long moment of silence. That was the sad thing about it: she was too respectful to fight it at all. She believed my lie of omission, and it wasn’t because she was naive or gullible. It was because I believed it too. If I had myself convinced, who could question me? I can’t look back on it without getting sad. It sure is easy to hurt people when we don’t understand ourselves.

* * *

Lacy Randolph (I found her full name quite easily after visiting the softball roster on a hunch) was one of those people in high school that everyone knew. While the same could have been said of me, our popularity was for different reasons. When the name Lacy Randolph was uttered, the immediate correlation to any listener was something like, oh, the alpha-lesbian of OCHS. And even if it wasn’t in such terms, it was at least, oh, the lesbian. Specific diction aside, Lacy Randolph was the most well-known lesbian at our school. Me, on the other hand… The utterance of Mallory McClarin would likely cause a thought like, the golfer, or, the basketball player, or more simply, the athlete. My popularity was because of this, and also because I had many friend groups. Being gay was something people didn’t yet attribute to me.

In this day and age, the way we determine our opinion of someone is largely based on what we glean by stalking them on social media (and yes, that’s stupid, but it’s true). As for Lacy, her Instagram told me (as I cyber-stalked her from the comfort of my purple bed) that she was a sophomore (fifteen years old), that she played guitar (just like me), and that she had a sense of humor.

It also rudely informed me she had a girlfriend, and the two seemed deeply in love, judging from their handholding, face-cupping, forever and always posts. Plus, they had each other’s names in their bios. That’s how you know high school lovers mean business. Morgan Ackerman was her name, and she lived in Indiana: an entire five hours away. (Four days by foot; Lacy wasn’t old enough to have her license yet.) They had been dating for almost six months.

It was a boundary some would argue should never be crossed. Who was I to even try to come between two people who posted such sappy things about each other? The voice of rationality in my head whispered, you can’t do that. But there was another voice, too,