Monsters Among Us: To Be Believed

To Be Believed

I keep trying to remember the color of his eyes that night. I lean toward blue but that’s probably wrong. I remember I was wearing jeans. I think my shirt was pink. It’s been a while; my freshman year of college was nearly eleven years ago.

I remember I’d had about a tenth of a beer, because it was disgusting, and that the table in the basement of the fraternity house was cemented to the floor and scratched all over with words and symbols and crude drawings. We were playing a card game, perhaps six of us.

The boy next to me put his hand between my legs. I told him to stop, that I was dating someone. He apologized, then, a minute later, did it again. I went to get my boyfriend, who, I didn’t know at the time, I’d marry four years later. They talked out of sight. My boyfriend, thinking all was well, went back to his friends. The boy came back to me.

He was furious. He got in my face, backing me against the wall, hands on either side of my head: “Bitch, I never touched you.”

The room stopped like a movie paused mid-frame. Everyone was staring, all the sound gone from the room until he was pulled away from me. I ran.

I didn’t know it then, but this was a pattern of behavior with this person. Later, it would escalate, and he would be ejected from the fraternity, a fairly rare occurrence, especially considering he’d been a “brother” for several years.

It wasn’t that bad. I tell myself this now because I’ve heard other stories. I compare it to ice water rushing up, over my ankles, before retreating, leaving me shivering and scared but otherwise unharmed. I wrote Monsters Among Us for those who drowned. The victim I might have been if there hadn’t been so many people around, if he had cornered me upstairs, perhaps, as I’d come out of the bathroom. Life is full of what-ifs. And in this scenario, I wonder if I would have been believed: a girl in tight jeans at a

fraternity house at two in the morning, some beer in her blood. Likely not.

In her memoir, Lucky, Alice Sebold writes about her college attack, one that created in her the ideal victim: she was raped on broken glass by a stranger who dragged her into an alley and used a knife; she was wearing sweatpants; she reported it right away. It’s a visceral story of survival, but what struck me the most was the police response to a victim of sexual assault. How there are boxes to tick before you can proceed towards some kind of justice, as though you’re selecting all the images of street lights in order to prove your identity—that you’re not a robot, that you’re not lying. That you didn’t, somehow, deserve what you got. 

I read Lucky the year before I started college. I thought about Sebold’s story that entire night, after I’d gone back to the dorms, because I did not sleep. Instead I had a voice in my head calling me stupid and weak, blaming myself for all of it. I was angry at myself for the beer, for being foolish enough to tell someone when that had just made it worse, for being there at all; I didn’t even like card games.

Monsters Among Us is a story about believing victims, no matter if they were attacked on broken glass or not. Beer or no beer. If they can remember the color of their attacker’s eyes or if trauma and panic blurred their memories like watercolors. It is also a story of male entitlement; drawing on themes from Wuthering Heights, it explores the line between passion and obsession, chronicling a woman’s journey to self-resilience and healing absent a romantic attachment.

In Monsters Among Us, Catherine Ellers wrestles with her own thoughts, struggling to come to terms with a sexual assault and what that means for her life now. She alternatively blames herself and refuses to think about it at all. It’s only when another trauma occurs that she is able to focus her pain and confusion into a concrete goal: catch a killer. She has no hope of justice for herself, but maybe she can avenge another girl’s pain and destruction. In doing so, she learns valuable lessons about resilience and regret, about what it means to survive with your soul intact, to unearth yourself from a trauma the world has taught you is a choice you made, a bed you have to lie in, a hell you have built with your own hands.

Monsters Among Us dismantles lies, and then it tells the truth: that it happened and it’s not your fault. No matter what you were doing or wearing or drinking at the time. Even if you didn’t report it, even if you ran from it as fast as you could.

Even if you still can’t remember the color of his eyes.

—

Monica Rodden lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, Greg, and a dog who loves to chase everything. When not preventing Hamlet from terrorizing the local squirrel population, she writes adaptations of classic novels for a young adult audience. Her first book, a modern retelling of Wuthering Heights called MONSTERS AMONG US, will be published by Random House on October 27th. If she ever gets a break from Hamlet and from writing, she goes on a date with Greg and spends most of dinner asking him about hypothetical injuries she could give her characters because that is why he went to medical school. Monica enjoys true crime, subversive female characters, and never Marie Kondo-ing her books. Her dearest ambition is that one day Stephen King will respond to her on Twitter.

Website: monicarodden.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/monicaroddenauthor

Instagram: Monica_Rodden 

Twitter: @MonicaRodden

MONSTERS AMONG US

Fans of Sadie and You will be riveted by this compulsively readable new thriller about a survivor of dating violence who uses her newfound awareness of everyday evil to hunt for a killer.

When Catherine Ellers returns home after her first semester at college, she is seeking refuge from a night she can barely piece together, dreads remembering, and refuses to talk about. She tries to get back to normal, but just days later the murder of someone close to her tears away any illusion of safety.

Catherine feels driven to face both violent events head on in hopes of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice with the help of her childhood friend, Henry. Then a stranger from college arrives with her lost coat, missing driver’s license—and details to help fill in the gaps in her memory that could be the key to solving both mysteries. But who is Andrew Worthington and why is he offering to help her? And what other dangerous obsessions is her sleepy town hiding?

Surrounded by secrets and lies, Catherine must unravel the truth—before this wolf in sheep’s clothing strikes again.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50309591-monsters-among-us

Purchase: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616912/monsters-among-us-by-monica-rodden/ 

 

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Category: On Writing