Chapter 2: The Sentence and the Stripping

The walk down the courthouse steps took forever.

I remember that most vividly—not the stripping itself, not the judge’s words, not even my mother’s screams. I remember the steps. There were seventeen of them, gray concrete worn smooth by decades of feet, and I had to walk down them naked while the world watched.

Seventeen steps. I counted them because counting was the only thing that kept me from collapsing. One. Two. Three. Each step a lifetime. Each step a new layer of humiliation peeled away like skin.

The reporters were everywhere. Their cameras flashed like dying stars, blinding me, freezing me in frames I’d never be able to erase. I could hear them shouting questions, their voices overlapping into a wall of noise. “Julia! Julia, how does it feel?” “Do you have anything to say to the judge?” “Julia, look this way!”

I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I kept my eyes fixed on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, on the crack that ran through the concrete like a scar. If I could just reach that crack, I told myself. If I could just make it to the crack, everything would be okay.

It was a stupid thought. The kind of thought a child has. But I was a child at that moment, stripped of everything that made me an adult: my clothes, my dignity, my illusion of control.

The crowd was smaller than it looked from the courtroom window. Maybe fifty people, maybe sixty. But they felt like thousands. Their faces blurred together into a single, monstrous entity: a creature with a hundred eyes and a hundred mouths, all of them hungry.

“Slut!”

“Thief!”

“Look at her! Bare as the day she was born!”

I heard my mother screaming somewhere behind me. “Leave her alone! She’s my daughter! She’s my baby!” But her voice was swallowed by the crowd, drowned out by the jeers and the laughter.

My father was walking beside me, his hand on my elbow, his face a mask of stone. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anyone. He just stared straight ahead and guided me through the crowd like I was a prisoner being led to execution.

Maybe I was. Maybe this was the execution. The death of everything I’d ever been.

The car was a police cruiser, the kind with cages in the back. They’d put me in the back seat, naked and shivering, while the officer who’d driven me to the courthouse sat in the front with his partner. They didn’t look at me. They didn’t say anything. They just started the engine and pulled away from the curb.

I pressed my face against the window and watched the courthouse disappear. The building was old, built in the 1920s, with columns and a clock tower and a statue of Justice on the roof. She was blindfolded, holding scales and a sword. The scales were tipped to one side, always, because the wind had bent them years ago. No one ever fixed them.

I thought about that statue. About how blindfolded meant impartial, supposedly. About how she was supposed to be fair, supposed to weigh evidence and deliver truth.

But she wasn’t fair. She’d never been fair. She was just a piece of bronze, corroded and broken, a symbol of something that didn’t exist.

Just like the judge. Just like the law. Just like everything I’d once believed in.

The ride to the station took twenty minutes. I spent most of it staring at my reflection in the window, a ghostly image of a naked girl, her eyes hollow, her skin pale, her body a map of shame.

I’d always hated my body. Even before the sentence, even before the judge’s words, I’d looked in the mirror and seen someone who wasn’t good enough. Too curvy in some places, too bony in others. Skin that broke out when I was stressed. Hair that frizzed in the humidity. A face that had never been beautiful, not really, not the way the girls in magazines were beautiful.

But I’d never hated it like this. I’d never wanted to tear it off, to shed it like a snake’s skin and leave it behind. Because now my body wasn’t mine. It belonged to them. To the judge, to the crowd, to every man who’d ever looked at me like I was a piece of meat.

They’d taken it from me. They’d made it public property. And there was nothing I could do to get it back.

The police station was worse than the courthouse. Fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered. Linoleum floors that smelled like bleach and desperation. Officers who looked at me with a mixture of pity and disgust, like I was a stray dog that had been hit by a car.

They processed me. That’s the word they used. Processed. Like I was a piece of meat, a package, a thing to be catalogued and stored. They took my fingerprints, my photo, my statement. They asked me questions I’d already answered a dozen times.

“How long were you planning this?”

“I wasn’t planning anything.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because I was desperate.”

“Desperate. That’s what they all say.”

I stopped answering. I just sat there, naked, shivering, my hands cuffed behind my back, and waited for it to end.

It didn’t end. It never ended. It just kept going, wave after wave, each one worse than the last.

My father picked me up at midnight. He’d had to sell his fishing boat to pay for the bail—a boat he’d owned for thirty years, a boat that was the only thing he’d ever loved besides my mother. He didn’t say anything about it. He just drove me home in silence, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.

I sat in the passenger seat, my mother’s coat draped over my shoulders, trying to cover as much of myself as possible. The coat was too small; my mother was smaller than me, always had been, and it barely reached my thighs. I felt exposed, vulnerable, like a child playing dress-up.

“Daddy,” I said. I hadn’t called him that since I was ten. “Daddy, I’m sorry.”