The Attack
When it happened to Mimou, she was seventeen. She was so perplexed and stunned when it went down, that she felt later she had not sufficiently opposed, and wondered for years if she could have fought him off instead of the pathetic attempts of a surprised school girl's feeble verbal nos. Yet at the same time she was full of childish astonishment and wonder: was that the way it was done, was that – abyss - what being an adult was all about? Did everyone else go through it, too? Was being with a man like that, forced, a secret rite of passage? She was stupid. Afterwards, she never told anyone except Peri, and even then she would not use the actual word for it. She wouldn’t use it for another twenty years. The guy was flamboyant and suave, he wore a striped jacket, had carefully disheveled hair with too much gel in it. He had a gap between his front teeth. He wrote her a poem on a piece of napkin. He went to an extremely prestigious and hard-to-get-in art school. Ten years later, a mo