I wound up spending the night with Emmy on Friday, but one night of sleeping on her couch was enough for me, and I decided to go back to the dorms on Saturday evening. Emmy tried to convince me to stay until Sunday, and Lula even offered to let me sleep with her, but I really cared more about just being alone than where I slept. Besides, Lula tended to kick in her sleep.

The truth was I just felt like I needed to have some time alone. I felt so confused and overwhelmed with hurt and anger that I couldn’t make sense of half what I felt, so after spending the better part of my day playing with Lula and Tibby while Emmy kept asking for my opinion on her newest design, I hit the road and headed back to the dorms.

Just as I had hoped the dorms were mostly vacant. Only a few other people were there, but it wasn’t anyone I really ever talked to, so I checked in with the girl who was filling in for the regular RA on my floor and sought refuge in my room.

I busied myself with unpacking my bags and reading Harry Potter, but I couldn’t stay focused on the book, so I decided to listen to music and lay in bed. That was all I felt like doing anyway. None of my music sounded very appealing. I couldn’t even listen to my depressing Fiona Apple mix because it made me think of Drea, and every time I thought about her, I wanted to cry.

So after giving up on my music collection, I went over to Shalee’s stack of CDs and started looking through them. I paused when I came across a case with a picture of orange headphones on the front. I vaguely remembered Shalee showing it to me and telling me that it was Hanson’s newest CD.

I picked it up and opened it. I had promised Zac that I would listen to his and his brothers’ music at some point since the only song I had ever heard from them was Mmmbop, but I had yet to follow through. Since I didn’t feel like doing much else, I took the CD out of the case and popped it into Shalee’s CD player. I figured that there was no better time to experience new Hanson music than the present.

As the music started, I walked back over and laid down on my bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the music. Some of the songs were hard to understand, and I recognized that Taylor was the one singing and didn’t find it all that surprising. Shalee had warned me of his enunciation issues. Despite the fact that I didn’t catch all of the lyrics, the music was still good. It was a lot different from what I was expecting, and I was surprised to decide that I really liked it.

But it wasn’t until the last song that the music and words really caught my attention. I let the song play through once and I laid in bed with my eyes closed, letting the spirit of the song fill me up. And after it finished, I opened my eyes and walked over to the CD player and started the song over. I turned the CD case over to find out the name of the song before I pulled out the jacket and looked for the lyrics to Believe.

I let my eyes sweep over the words briefly before I restarted the song again so that I could read along as the song played. I walked over to my bed with the CD jacket in hand and sat down as Taylor began to sing.

I thought about the words and found it odd how they related to me. For so long I had been holding onto everything from the past. Memories played in my mind constantly, almost like a movie. Thoughts of my mom and how life was when she was still alive usually consumed me. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when she first died. After she died, I was consumed with thoughts of her, and it was almost too painful to remember.

Over time though I had begun to let the pain subside and learn to pick and choose the things I wanted to remember about my mom. Most of the time my thoughts of her were good. And they were like a safe haven for me. Whenever things became too painful for me, I usually thought of my mom. I always imagined what she’d say in the situation and that would be my comfort.

However, I also had memories of Drea and myself when we were younger. I often thought about those times. It had all been so simple back then. We were young and innocent. We had our whole lives ahead of us. We knew nothing of real pain and sorrow. Sometimes I longed to go back to those days. Life was so much easier when I didn’t know about the things that could hurt me.

When I was little I used to be scared of the boogeyman, but my mom told me that he wasn't real. I believed her and quit being scared even though my fear of the dark never went away. But despite that fact that the boogeyman was just a myth, that didn’t change the fact that the truth was that there were real scary things lurking around out there. Things that go bump in the night. Sometimes I wished I could be like everyone else and shrug it off, but I couldn't. Not anymore. I knew now what could happen if I wasn’t careful and didn't look over my shoulder or make sure every lock in the house was secure. Bad things really did happen to good people. And I knew it, firsthand.

Before I knew all that though, I felt so safe and secure. I thought I knew who I was. The Jude Ryland I used to be was so strong and proud. Sure I was quiet and kept to myself, but I knew who I was and what I wanted to be. I knew what I believed in, and I had control of my life. It didn’t even bother me back then that my dad still thought of me as a baby. I was okay with that because I had enough self-confidence to look past that. There was room for him to still think of me as a child while I was growing my wings and starting to branch out.

That all changed though. That Jude was gone. Everything I knew about myself was destroyed in one night. All the things that I found comfort in were gone, and I couldn’t go back. That was why I spent an entire summer trying to disappear, hoping that if I stayed in the shadows long enough maybe the walls would swallow me up and allow me to disappear completely.

I was so busy with keeping myself closed off from everything else that I had reduced myself to nothing more than a shell of the girl I used to be. And in doing so, I never got to really look inside and find the new Jude. Just like the lyrics to the song said, I was ‘busy keeping less never getting more.’

I listened to the song and read the words. It was unbelievable how much I could relate to them. It was true too. I knew I couldn’t afford to live like I was for much longer. It had nothing to do with money. It was more about my soul. I felt so broken all the time. I thought I hid my pain well, but I knew it was just a matter of time before I was really going to crack, and everything would fall apart at the seams.

It was already beginning. The one person who I had always been able to count on had betrayed me in such a way that I had no idea how I was ever supposed to trust anyone again. Even as these thoughts crossed my mind, I knew that if I was ever going to trust anyone again, I had to learn to trust myself first. At that moment, I really didn’t. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. How was I supposed to trust myself if I didn’t even know who that was anymore?

I felt torn in so many ways. I’d just asked my dad to give me my independence, but just before that I had been crying on my sister’s shoulder, longing for comfort, wishing that she could make it all better. In retrospect, it felt like such a contradiction. I couldn’t be independent and expect other people to fix my problems for me. I knew I had to step up to the plate and start fixing things myself. I just wasn’t sure I could do it.

As the song said I wanted more than anything to believe that there was something worth believing in. I wanted to have something worth living for. Over the summer I moped around, crying and feeling sorry for myself most of the time. Once Emmy had tried talk to me around midsummer. She tried to break through the overwhelming sense of despair I was feeling. She kept telling me that I had to get up and get moving again. She told me that I couldn’t live in the past, and that I had so much more to live for.

At the time her words had agitated me. I didn’t need her to lecture me and tell me how to feel. What did she know anyway? She wasn’t me. She didn’t go through what I went through. She only saw the result of it, but that was nothing like actually enduring it firsthand.

While she was talking to me, I sat and stared at the wall as my anger grew. Everything she said nagged at my very being. Finally it boiled to the surface and I lashed out at her, screaming, “”Oh, yeah? What would you do if you were me, Emmy? What would you do if you were raped and almost murdered in your own fucking bedroom? Tell me, please, what would you live for?”

Emmy never answered though. Instead she just turned and walked out of the room. It was her that found me the next morning, beaten and bleeding to death. I knew it still haunted her, and I knew she just wanted me to get better, but I didn’t want to get better then. I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to disappear.

I had nothing to believe in then.

Even a few months later I still felt I had nothing left to believe in. I just woke up one morning in August and decided that I was okay though. I didn’t talk about what happened to me and my family didn’t ask. I just told them that I needed to start getting ready for college and that was it. From there we acted as if things were normal again. I think they just wanted to believe that I was really alright. I wanted to believe it too, but I knew it wasn’t true.

I had been to Dr. Wisely over the summer to talk to about “the event” as she often called it. I didn’t do much talking though. She mostly asked questions, and I answered in as few words as possible. She knew I wasn’t alright. Not really. At least she was good for something.

Even though I did next to nothing – besides sleep, cry, and mope around -that summer was easily the hardest one of my life. Summer was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be a time of celebration – especially that summer since it would be my last one before I went away to college. Somehow I had a hard time enjoying it though. After spending a month in the hospital, missing my senior prom, and attending my graduation on crutches as people looked at me with pity, all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die.

Sometimes I wished that I had just died. Sometimes I wished that Emmy never found me. Then I wouldn’t have to relive the nightmare every night in my sleep. But she had found me – just in time too.

As much I knew I should be grateful, I couldn’t find it in me. I sat in the house all summer wishing I had died. The sun and the sky and the birds and everything else outside made my insides ache because I felt nothing but emptiness within.

I wondered how it was possible Isaac, Taylor, and Zac had been able to capture that feeling. I knew I had to ask them later what they were going through when they wrote it. It really felt like they had crawled up inside my head and read my mind. However, they managed to put those thoughts into words. That was something I had never been able to do.

I listened to the rest of the words of the song and tried to keep my thoughts at bay. It seemed odd that I was thinking about all of those things now. It hurt to recall the summer, but it was almost a relief to let myself think about it. It gave me a headache trying to keep it all out of my mind at times.

But apparently the time alone was just what I needed. It gave me time to think, and the fact that I was actually thinking about the past – or more specifically – “the event” on my own accord gave me a bit of hope. Dr. Wisely had always said that I’d think about it and talk about it when I was ready. I thought she was just a quack at the time, but while I wasn’t ready to actually talk to anyone about it, the fact that I was actually thinking about it made me rethink judgments I had made about my doctor.

I knew I was a long ways from talking about it though because I had no one to talk about it with. I always thought that if or when the time came, Drea would be the first person I would talk about it with. Now that seemed impossible. I never wanted to speak to Drea ever again. She had hurt me beyond repair as far as I was concerned. She knew that Paul was sacred to me, and once she crossed that line, there was no going back.

I didn’t want to talk to Emmy about it. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I think it was partially because she had been scarred by it probably almost as much as I had. It was too heavy. She was too close. She had seen me a way I never wanted anyone else to ever see me, and I just couldn’t talk about that with her. Everything else in my life was fair game - just not that.

My friendships with Zac and Shalee were still too new. I couldn’t talk to them about it. I had no idea how I’d ever even bring the subject up. Not to mention I was afraid they’d think I was a complete freak if they found out about it. As far as they knew, I was just a normal girl, and I wanted to keep it that way. It was bad enough I felt like the poster child for victims back in Roland. Everyone there knew what happened to me, and when they looked at me, they pitied me. I hated that. I didn’t need their pity.

Life at the dorm was different. No one knew about my past. They only knew as much as I told them, and I liked it that way. While I felt broken and confused inside and sometimes looked over my shoulder, feeling an overwhelming sense of anxiety about who was behind me, no one had to see it. On the outside, I seemed fine. I even convinced myself I was fine most of the time. I really was a lovely delirium.