Operation Endurance

Prologue

Julie panicked as the rough hand ripped the thin fabric of her bikini top. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. She’d snuck the bikini into her clothes purchases, knowing it showed off her over-developed breasts so she looked much older than her eleven years. But if this is what older got you, well then she changed her mind.

She tried to kick at him, but her small size was no weapon against the much larger fourteen-year-old Bradley pressed up against her. Her eyes watered in fear and pain from the bruising grip he had over her mouth and the legs which pinned her down. She tried to scream, but it came out as a muffled sound from behind his punishing hand. Besides, the only one here to hear her was Rachel, her older sister. Bradley was Rachel’s boyfriend and Julie didn’t want him to hurt her, too.

She twisted her torso under him but that just seemed to excite him more. His eyes were positively gleeful as he looked down at her now exposed breasts. He licked his lips before reaching down and grabbing one of them hard. “You have more than a handful don’t you? And it’s all here for me.” He tightened his grip on her breast with a punishing turn. She couldn’t breathe as he pushed down on her more forcefully.

Julie shut her eyes to get away from the reality of what was happening to her. She should have listened to her mother when she said Julie was too young for a bikini. She tried to ignore the teeth biting at her and retreated further into her mind.

From here on out, she’d do everything her mother said: she’d clean her room, she’d be nice to her younger brother, Owen, she’d eat her asparagus, she wouldn’t complain about ballet class, she’d…

No, no, no! There was a pull at her bikini bottoms and her eyes flew open. She struggled against him again, but it was no use. She couldn’t buck him off. She thrashed and with his distraction with her bottoms, she managed to free a hand. She pummeled at his face and scratched him with her nails.

He redirected his attention to her face as he snarled, “You bitch,” and raised the hand that had been holding her mouth to hit her.

In that moment, she screamed, but it was mere seconds before the hand was back as a fist that punched her face. The pain was immediate and edges of black closed in around her head. She welcomed the coming darkness, anything to escape the reality of what was happening to her.

When Julie came to, the pain was immediate, but the clarity of what was going on was not. She worked to open her eyes, but they didn’t want to cooperate, especially the left one. Someone held her hand and immediately she began to scramble away. But it was Rachel’s voice speaking to her. “Shh, Julie, it’s going to be okay. He’s gone. You’re safe.”

She finally managed to get her eyes open to look into the worried face of her sister. They were still out by the pool and she frantically looked around, but couldn’t see Bradley anywhere. “What happened?” she managed to croak out.

Rachel was crying when she said, “I hit him with Owen’s bat and he took off. I stopped him before he…” she trailed off as she gestured down at Julie’s groin.

Julie sat up. Rachel had covered her with a towel. She cringed in embarrassment and whispered, “What are we going to do? We can’t tell mom and dad.”

They’d broken the rules. Bradley wasn’t supposed to be over when their parents were gone. Both girls wore skimpy swimsuits their mother strictly forbade. If they told their parents what happened, they’d both be grounded forever.

Rachel shook her head. “We have to tell them. They need to know what happened. Besides they’re going to notice your black eye.”

Julie scrambled up as quickly as her bruised body would allow. She wrapped the towel around her trembling form. Despite the pain it caused, she shook her head. She gestured down to the bat lying on the ground. “We’ll say we were playing around with the baseball and you hit me in the face with it by accident.” She had to convince Rachel to go along with this. No one could ever know what happened here. Rachel was the perfect one. The perfect grades. The perfect beauty. The perfect daughter. Now she just had to convince her to become the perfect liar.

Rachel looked at her skeptically, but she could tell that she was beginning to convince her. “Come on Rachel. I know you don’t want to be grounded for the rest of your life.”

She whispered, “What about Bradley? He was hurt after I hit him with the bat.”

“Good.” Was it wrong to think that? That she wanted him hurt just as much as he’d hurt her?

Rachel’s responding giggle was a little hysterical. “What if he tells someone?”

Julie sighed. Sometimes it was debatable which one of them was the older even though Rachel was three years older than her. “Rach, he’s not going to tell anyone. If he did, he’d have to admit what he did here.”

A shudder of revulsion spread down her spine. She couldn’t think about it right now. She started making a mental list of how to cover all their bases: convince Rachel to lie, find clothes to cover her bruises, find a baseball so their lie was believable, find a trash bag for the shredded bikini…

Rachel interrupted her mental lists. “Okay, I’ll agree to this, but you have to agree to help me convince mom that we need self-defense classes.” She gestured toward Julie’s chest. “Looking the way you do, this isn’t the last time you’re gonna have a guy trying to push you to do something you don’t want to do. You need to know how to protect yourself.”