I did not trust him.
But I told him I did, several times, and he believed me and let me go and I bounded exactly three steps toward the door, turned the knob and launched myself down the hall and flung myself down the stairs and hurled out the emergency exit, and I ran and ran and ran and it was so damn beautiful outside and I could hear the fire alarm ringing.
When my mom came home, I lied. I told her the job was over, the custodian no longer needed me.
Later a kid I didn't know approached me at school. He might have been a year older. He asked me if I had worked for the dirty old janitor and whether he'd gone after me because the same thing had happened to him. I didn't ask if he'd gone to the principal or told his parents and he didn't ask me. It would have been the stupidest question in the world because no one would have believed us.
No one ever believed kids back then. About anything. The school administration wouldn't have believed us about the English teacher who kept pot in his desk or the algebra teacher who seduced my friend or the driver's ed instructor who grabbed my classmate's breasts right in front of me and my best friend.
We Gen X kids understood the world as it was: survival was up to us. Adults didn't care; adults wouldn't help. Decades later, when I told my mom that story, she admitted I was right. "I assumed you were lazy," she said about my quitting the job.
If you've never been a victim of some kind, you may find this strange, but there is something worse than knowing (or suspecting) that you may not be believed, and that is coming forward and letting cops and courts and human resource officers decide for themselves, based on the evidence and their biases, whether they believe you or not.
As long as you keep your victimhood to yourself, you know your experience was real.
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