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His father rapes him in the library, the first time.
Harry at fourteen is a fairly well-adjusted, if somewhat self-conscious, young man. He fits in at his boarding school, though he has made none of the lifelong friends his father promised him. He plays multiple sports, though he excels at none of them. He misses his sister when he’s away, though he doesn’t spend much time with her when he’s home. He does not lean towards an extreme in either direction, neither brilliant nor dull, not popular nor a pariah. His father might’ve called him mediocre, if his father didn’t love him so much.
During his breaks from school, he spends most of his time in the library. Not to read, really—he lacks the interest and the patience for his father’s collection of first-edition tomes. But the library is the oldest and most cloistered room in the house. Hardly any light gets in, even on the sunniest days in June. Hardly any air gets in either, and it always smells like damp and mildew. But it’s cool, and quiet, and here he does not have to deal with his sister’s superior remarks or his mother’s questions about how he’s doing in school. Sometimes he sleeps. Often he draws, pulls down a book from one of the shelves about Greek columns and attempts to recreate the patterns in the structures. He thinks he’s not unsuccessful, but the only time he attempted to show off his creations, his father had stared at the drawing for several long, silent seconds before giving him a patronizing pat on the head, his smile almost like a sneer.
Sometimes, on very rare occasions, he thinks his father would hate him, if he didn’t love him so much.
Still. His father spends time with him, in here. Sits at the desk and reads while Harry tries not to even make a sound with his breathing, lest his father look up and cast him out. Go enjoy the sun. You look sickly, my boy.
Watching his father in this room, Harry learns him. Learns to read his mannerisms and anticipate his desires. When his father looks around, curses, it’s Harry who picks up the book forgotten on the floor and places it on the corner of the desk. When he presses his thumb and forefinger to his eyes, Harry finds his reading glasses left behind somewhere in the house. When he clears his throat, Harry decants the whiskey and pours his father a glass. Each time he’s rewarded with an affectionate glance, a carded hand through his hair.
It happens on a humid night in July, two weeks from his fifteenth birthday. Harry is startled away from a vague, hot, breathless dream by the sound of the door banging open. His father stands illuminated in the doorway.
Harry scrambles upright, knocks over the stack of the books he’d been leaning his weight on as he dozed. His skin feels warm and sweaty, his mouth dry. He looks around, dazed. It was still light out when he’d fallen asleep.
“Your mother and I have been looking everywhere for you,” his father says, tight and furious.
Harry blinks. The light coming in from the corridor is too bright. It’s hurting his eyes. As if sensing that, his father steps into the room and slams the door shut behind him.
“I—Pardon?”
“You—” his father begins, and then stops. Continues, colder, “We were going to visit your grandmother this afternoon. All of us. But we couldn’t find you, you ignored us calling your name. We had to leave without you.”
“I—I fell asleep.”
“Is that any excuse?” his father roars, and Harry cringes in on himself. “Do you have no sense of responsibility? Of gratitude? Who knows how long my mother has left on this earth, and I had to tell her that her waste of a grandson couldn’t be bothered to spend a single afternoon with her!”
Harry stares at a blank spot on the floor, shaken. He knows he can weather this. He has seen his father throw crystal glasses at walls, slam his fists on the dinner table, rave and rant until he exhausts himself—and he always exhausts himself eventually. Always finds something to distract him, to bite down on, like a dog with a bone.
But there’s nothing in the room except Harry.
“Look at yourself,” his father spits. “Look at you. Is this what you’d rather do instead of seeing your family?”
Harry looks down at himself. He flushes, humiliated, and pulls the hem of his shirt down to cover the tent in his pants. Whatever he’d dreamt of had slipped out of his memory the moment he’d laid eyes on his father, but it remained with the rest of him.
“You’d rather pervert yourself. You’d rather laze about in here all day like you haven’t a care in the world. I’m raising a wastrel.”
“No, no, I—”
But his father doesn’t hear his denial. He stalks towards him, three steps, and grabs a fistful of hair at the back of Harry’s head. Harry cries out, fingers scrabbling against the back of the hand that holds him.
“Look at this,” he says, shaking him a little. With his other hand, he flicks a lock of golden hair curling below Harry’s ear, and then he tucks it behind that ear. “Don’t they make you cut your hair at school? When I went there, they had uniform standards.”
Harry can hardly breathe for how terrified he is. The pain in his scalp is unlike anything that has ever been done to him. His father has never so much as raised a hand to him before.
“Or do you think you’re above it? That you can break the rules, so you can look like a girl? Is that what you want? To be a girl?”
“Father—“ Harry’s voice comes out a thin, pained whine.
His father stills. After a moment, he loosens his grip. Harry nearly gasps with relief, almost tears himself away from the hand cradling the back of his head tenderly now.
“Harry,” he says in a tone all of a sudden soothing and conciliatory. “Don’t you remember what I’ve said about that?
He remembers. Of course he remembers. He remembers when his father joked that if he wore a dress no one would be able to tell the difference between him and Maggie, and he remembers the moment the joke ceased, vanished, withered dead and mirthless. Harry remembers him saying No need to call me that when we’re alone. You can’t be a supplicant your entire life, son.
“Harrison,” he corrects, and when his father moves the hand to the nape of his neck, he flushes with relief. It’s over, he thinks. His father will kick him out now, send him to bed without dinner, and by morning, he’ll have forgotten.
“Get up.” And the grip on his neck tightens as Harry is hauled to his feet. Getting up is an awkward, bowlegged process with his legs still half-asleep and his pants still uncomfortably tight. His father pays this no mind when he shoves him forward. Harry stumbles, catches himself on the desk in the center of the room.
A hand between his shoulder blades. His elbows crumple. His cheek meets hardwood. He feels a sudden dizziness, a sense of vertigo. The world is horizontal now, when he’s certain it was vertical just moments before.
“Dad—”
The hand on his back presses down, and whatever Harry had been about to say cuts off with a wheeze.
“What did I just say?”
Harry swallows, thick. “Harrison.”
“Better,” his father murmurs, hand smoothing down his back, over his hip. Harry shudders, his skin shivery and sensitive, but he keeps silent. He just has to bear this. Protests will only make his father angrier, and then this’ll drag on forever. Whatever this is.
He yelps when his pants get shoved down, baffled, and then freezes when he hears the clink of a belt buckle. He’s going to whip me? Harry thinks, absolutely horrified. Does that not seem excessive? Has he lost his mind?
“What are you—” Harry makes to lift himself, but his father’s hand returns to his back and slams him back down. “No, I—I just fell asleep, I promise, I didn’t ignore you, sir, I would never—”
“Stop babbling.”
“Please—“
“And for god’s sake, don’t beg.”
“Mother won’t—“
His voice catches, dies off—abruptly, when he feels his father’s weight settle close to him. His mind goes blank. He doesn’t wonder what’s happening, what’s about to happen, he doesn’t have time, and then—
It hurts. His first thought, at the start of a long and searing pain. It hurts so much that he can’t scream, all the breath leaves his lungs, and each time he tries to draw it back in, Harrison sinks deeper inside him. Is that what’s happening? Is this happening?
“You don’t even flinch,” Harrison says, voice so steady that—maybe nothing is happening, after all. “Like you’re used to it.” A sharp thrust, and Harry’s vision blurs. “I bet you are. Look at you. I bet the other boys at school have fun with you, pass you around. And you let them, don’t you? You like it.”
The beginning was the worst. The moving, the back and forth, once it starts, that’s—Harry thinks that’s fine. He doesn’t know if it would hurt worse if his father hit him. Maybe this is better. Maybe it’s easier, this way. He presses his cheek harder against the wood. He can smell the faint damp, the old paper, the older wood. There’s no air in the room. There’s only the smell.
“I’m raising a pussy,” Harrison hisses. His voice sounds closer, and when Harry blinks his vision clear, Harrison’s arm is braced on the table right before his eyes. “A little girl. That’s what you are. You’re a frivolous, empty-headed little doll.”
The next thrust rocks the table, jerks him forward across it. Harry thinks his bones might be breaking. He thinks it must reach into his entire body, all the way, and it must break everything in its path, it must carve through him. I don’t want to die is the single thought that surfaces above all others, and he pushes back against Harrison’s next thrust—wanting it in him sooner, wanting it over quicker.
For a second, Harrison falters. That’s almost worse; the break in the rhythm gives Harry nothing to focus on but the hurt. He wriggles, near tears. He wants it done with. He wants to go to bed, and wake up tomorrow, and see his father again.
Harrison laughs, breathless, startled. “You can’t even pretend not to want it. I should’ve known.”
When he resumes, Harry tries to hold onto the sound of that laugh, so genuinely amused, so pleased. He can’t remember his father ever being so delighted by him. He keeps his eyes open as Harrison’s thrusts quicken and become erratic. He focuses on the space just beyond the bracket of Harrison’s arm—a book with its spine facing him, Florentine Domes in Renaissance Italy. Harry pictures himself standing in the center of an Italian chapel. Imagines looking up into the grandest dome, at each connected plane growing smaller and more intricately wrought, converging at a single center point. The center of all things.
At the final moment, Harrison reaches around him and cups him through his underwear still covering his front. And it’s this, this, not anything else, that makes Harry cry out softly. His face is wet with tears.
If the world was kinder, he might’ve been spared the burden of awareness for the immediate aftermath. But no. He slumps down to the floor, clings to the desk to stop himself lying completely prone. He can’t lie down. Who knows what will happen if he lies down. His father turns around to tuck himself away. This doesn’t strike Harry as odd. It doesn’t strike him as anything. And when his father turns to him, when he regards his son’s tearstained face, when he says, “Oh, hush now,” Harry sobs and reaches out for him. His father does up his clothes, gathers him close, and carries him all the way up the stairs to his room. The last thing Harry remembers is the gentle hand on his cheek as he lay in bed, eyes closed. When he turns his face into the touch, beseeching, his father’s skin carries the smell of damp, dark wood.
Fifteen years later, Harry stands in the library and does not recognize a single surface in the entire room. He breathes in. The air smells like varnish and cigarettes. He draws back the gauzy curtains, and the sun pours in.