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around and left then. It’s not like he jumped on me right there by the front door, but I felt so dumb, so I went in anyway. So incredibly stupid.”
    The room is completely quiet. Everyone is looking at Malin, sitting there hunched over in her chair. Her muscular arms are wrapped around herself, as if she were cold or looking for comfort from her own body.
    “Okay, maybe the way I was dressed wasn’t that great either,” she says. “It was a very, uh . . . short skirt . . . I know, I know, people always say that doesn’t matter. Obviously that didn’t have anything to do with it. Obviously that shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. But sometimes I wonder . . . If I’d have been sober. If I’d have been dressed differently . . . like in something that was just totally unsexy. If I’d gone there after a run, really needing a shower, ugly, with really bad breath. Would that have mattered? Did I contribute in some way to what he did? Even though, obviously, it’s not supposed to matter what you wear.”
    Malin sighs again deeply, with her arms still wrapped around her body as if she were wearing a straitjacket.
    “Anyway. We talked for a while in his kitchen. Drank a little more beer. And . . . well, then we made out a little, and I was totally into that. But then suddenly something happened, it was like he changed, got rough. Or maybe I changed, because suddenly I felt like I didn’t want to do anything else, and I told him so. I told him to stop, that I didn’t want to. I said it a bunch of times. I may have screamed. I don’t really remember. But he just pushed me down on the kitchen floor and held me there with one arm on my neck while he shoved his fingers into me. And I . . . I just lay there because I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. He was so incredibly strong. I mean, I’m strong, but he was . . . And it was like he was furious at me, like he suddenly hated me, like he wanted to kill me. I can’t understand where all that rage came from, what I said or did that made him get so extremely pissed off. I’ve been thinking about it, I mean, since it happened, about why he got so mad. And then there’s that whole powerless thing. I’m so used to being a strong person, but I just lay there, totally powerless. Looking under his refrigerator, noticing that there was a ton of dustunder there, thinking that he must not have cleaned under there in ages. Dust and little bits of old cheese and food wrappers. Why do I remember that? Why would anyone ever think about something like that when—”
    Suddenly Malin stops talking. She sits there quietly with her hands clenched around her knee.
    “And then he did it.”
    “Malin,” I say, “sometimes it can be a relief to describe the actual crime in a little more detail. It often feels really uncomfortable, but in the long run it can help you move beyond the rape.”
    Malin nods mutely. She doesn’t look like she thinks it’s a good idea.
    I explain, “If you don’t want to say anything else about it today, we can come back to it some other time. You don’t need to feel like there’s any kind of pressure.”
    “No, I want to,” Malin continued. “Talk about it, I mean. The fact that he . . . raped me there, on the floor in the kitchen. He was shouting the whole time too, ‘whore’ and ‘cunt,’ stuff like that. And that’s when it clicked for me, that this was serious, that this was for real. For a while I thought it was just kind of a joke, a prank that was just coming off wrong, maybe. But then . . . even though I got that it was for real, it didn’t feel like I was actually there. It was like he was hitting someone else, someone else’s body. It felt like I was sitting there at that little kitchen table looking down at us lying on the floor, thinking, ‘This doesn’t look good. I wonder if she’s going to get away.’ Like I was some stupid sportscaster. I came to the conclusion that he was strong and