My daughter will be 6 this winter. She’s dying to have a sleepover at our house, she wants to go to one even more. She asks me weekly when she will be old enough. And I want to say never.

When I was 8 a new family moved in next door. I was thrilled because the family had a daughter who was 9. We quickly became friends. She had a brother who was 11. He creeped me out.

We all used to play together a lot, many imaginary games involving us all owning stores. One time, another little girl and I went to the brother’s (let’s call him T-Bone) store. It was in his room, but we couldn’t see him. We opened the closet and found him on the floor with his sister. He was kissing her and had his hand up her shirt. The girl and I ran away and never spoke of it.

Sometimes I feel bad, like maybe we should have told somebody. But we hadn’t heard of bad touching, or incest or anything like that. T-Bone made me uncomfortable whenever we played, his “character” always said suggestive things to my characters. He was always trying to get me to be alone with him.

When I was a bit older and made a point of avoiding him, T-Bone started calling me “Jezebel.” Adults heard him and thought it was cute but it made me scared. I remained friends with his sister and when I was 10 I agreed to sleep over at her house. T-Bone wasn’t supposed to be home for most of the evening, I think, and the sister and I were to sleep on a pull-out couch in the TV room, which was next to the parents’ room.

Looking back, I don’t know why no one thought it strange that they’d moved the sister’s room from next to her brother’s to the floor below, across from the parents. Or that the grandmother’s room was moved up to the 3rd floor. I don’t know why I didn’t blink when we were told to sleep in the T.V. room. I don’t know why I didn’t fake an illness when I found out her parents were going out but T and is friend were staying in. I was 10. I just wanted to stay up late and watch movies with my friend.

We did that. And then we went to sleep. At some point T-Bone and his friend came into the room and jumped on top of us. T-bone pushed my nightgown up and started clutching at my non-existent breasts. I thought, at first, that they were trying to wrestle with us. But then T-Bone starting calling me “whore”.

When he went for my underwear I started scratching and kicking. He slapped me across the face, then suggested to his friend that they “trade.”His friend was like, “But that’s your sister!” The friend went up the stairs. T-Bone followed, snarling all the while.

The sister tried to make it sound like they were wrestling and we had beaten them. I didn’t feel like a winner. I felt dirty.

It didn’t help that T-Bone called me those names whenever he saw me from then on. Jezebel. Whore. Slut. I never went to that house again, but it didn’t really matter. We lived next door in an era where kids played outside unsupervised all the time. He called me those names in front of the other kids. He called me those names after I kicked him in the balls. He called me those names after he tried to lock me in a play house.

He called me those names when he chased me. He called me those names until I was 16 and he had me backed into a corner at the neighborhood 4th of July barbecue. By then he’d been away at college and I hadn’t had to run or kick in a long while. I was so stunned that he was there and that he would still call me those names that I just stared at him. I like to think I would have let him have it, especially since no one was near us, but another neighbor came up then. He was my age but he was a lot bigger than T-Bone. He told T-Bone to leave me alone or else.

I will be grateful to that guy until the day I die. Of course, even though T-Bone stopped calling me those names, it took me a lot longer to stop hearing them. I still can’t stand to be touched when I’m sleeping.

Do I think it’s likely that the same thing will happen to my daughter at a sleepover?

No, I don’t…

…but that doesn’t mean I don’t have nightmares about it.