Chapter 2: Kelly's Victim
Below is an abridged excerpt from the statements made during his sentencing of Arrous L. Arroba, an Agvalonan immigrant and father of Kelly Arroba, the victim in question, along with Robert Tripto.
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Your honor, my name is Arrous Arroba. My lawyers have advised me not to disclose what I have determined to today, in the fears that the jury may find an account of my experiences vulgar and despicable. I admit that I myself have toiled for many weeks since the incident to find a justification for my behavior, and I confess my yoke lightened only when I decided I had none. I had sex with Kelly. I forced myself upon, and I had my way with her. The semen deposits Glorium County swabbed out of her demonstrate as much. But the act was no more illegal, and certainly less heinous, than the innumerable sexual invitations my daughter made at me and for which she ought to be condemned. To characterize a proud father as a libidinous beast is to paint his daughter, at the height of recklessness sensuality, as an unadulterated innocent. Make no mistake: I am the victim here.
Allow me several illustrations of her demonic techniques of sultry seduction.
Summer 2004, when Kelly turned 18.
After a festive celebration, she pulled me into her room and sat me down on the edge of her bed. "What's the matter, Kelly?" I asked. She didn't respond for several minutes, and then abruptly blurted out, "Dad, I'm 18, which means I'm an adult now. Without Mom here, I don't know if I'll be able to, I don't know, navigate or whatever my way through womanhood. I've never kissed a boy, Dad. Don't you think that's something I'm missing?"
I knew how to handle this, your honor. I have had to parent my daughters to hell and back, and for a good portion of it, alone. What I thought she was talking about, though, was normal growing-up. What I didn't know was that she meant more.
"Sure, honey, the boys here just haven't been good enough for you. It's a small town. You're 18 now, and soon you'll be at college surrounded by tons of new people, some of them, you'll be pleased to know, attractive men."
But she would have none of this. "I don't want them. I want... someone goofy, but strong. A whirlwind concoction of decisiveness, contentiousness, brazenness."
I laughed. "Sounds like you've got your ideal man figured out."
"Yeah, someone like you," she said, and laughed.
Something about this comment struck me, gave me pause. Or maybe it was the way she was fingering her ear and pushing her blond hair back as she spoke. Or maybe it was when she placed her hand on my thigh and said, "Daddy, you have no idea how much I'll miss you in college."
December 2004, when Kelly came back home for vacation.
She had had a tough time in college, and one night after some teenage reveling with her boyfriend, with whom she was still dating despite the long distance, we sat down to talk. She told me how many nights she'd thrown up from the partying, how many tests she'd failed, and how many boys she'd drunkenly hooked up with. She felt so ashamed, I thought. Now in retrospect, I suspect she was secretly proud of the sudden and steep drop-off in moral inhibitions and rapidly accumulating nights of inebriation. She slept with a boy, never to talk to him again, on the first night of college. She'd lost her moral scruples as quickly as she'd pulled down her skirts.
I was uncomfortable about her open disclosure with me, and more so her new dissolute lifestyle, and, as the night wore on and her diffidence wore down, I became frighteningly uncomfortable with her advances on me.
At one point in the conversation, after a vivid description of a raucous tryst with a 25-year-old teacher's assistant, I expressed my disgust.
"Kelly, look, I really don't want to hear you talking about how you... you fucked a man, okay? Keep that shit to yourself!"
"Why, Daddy? I'm trying, I'm only trying to tell you what's been going on!"
"Well, some things are better left private!"
"I have no one else to turn to!"
She was in tears.
"Nick won't understand." She started crying.
I sat down next to her and caressed her hair. "It's okay, honey. As long as you've repented for your sins."
And this is when she seemed to turn the corner, placing her hand in mine. "Yes."
"We're all sinners, Kelly," I told her. "But we will find the path back home. All roads lead to it, if we just listen and have faith."
"Yes," she said, and placed the back of her head on my lap. I stroked her soft, blond hair. She said, "I've sinned, Daddy."
I couldn't discount that statement, harsh as it sounded in her mouth, because I truly agreed.
"Can you just... can you just stay? Let's just rest here for a bit?" she asked me. "For just a little."
She obviously needed the moral support, so I said, sure. I began to get up to go to the bathroom, but she stopped me with a hand to my crotch.
"Oops, sorry," she said, and quickly rose and turned off the lamp at the other end of the couch. It was when she came back to the couch that things turned strange. She placed her head back on my lap, but this time overshot it and landed with the side of her head on my crotch. I desperately need to urinate.
She said to me, in a coy voice, "Well someone's happy to see his daughter back from college."
I kid you not, those were her exact words. And worse, she not only did not move off, but proceeded with nimble and experienced fingers to my zipper. Her wanton intentions, your honor, should be clear. And my virtues must be as well, because after I pushed her away, I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I didn't know what had happened to her with those co-eds, but that she was my daughter and I had had enough of these pranks.
