Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  “No,” I said, desperate for her to leave my room. But after I wrote my testimony, she surprised me. In her same singsong voice, she asked me to redo it.

  “Can you maybe rework this so that it’s a bit more . . . assured? I think we really want no room for ambiguity.”

  So I had reworked it, this time by hand. I noticed my handwriting was different than usual, less careful; it was slanted and sloppy, with errant slips of the pen, as if I’d been writing quickly. It was more like my mother’s than my own, as if overnight I’d begun to write like a grown-up. As soon as I thought it, I revolted against the idea that being assaulted had matured me in some way; if it was true, I resented it.

  When I chose my character references (my orchestra conductor, Juan-Pablo; Matty; and my boss at the bookstore, Frank), Simone said sweetly, “Are you sure you don’t have any professors you could ask?”

  “Not any that know me. I was in big classes,” I lied. I was too embarrassed to ask a professor. Juan-Pablo was on the faculty, but since he wasn’t my professor and therefore wouldn’t be grading me in anything, he felt more approachable. (As if being raped, which had touched everything in my life, could somehow even affect my GPA.) “A Title IX case,” was all I’d said to him when I’d handed him the form.

  So a perk of the case’s being over was that I no longer had to talk to Simone.

  But that was it. Other than that microscopic silver lining, the weeks after my case was decided were heavy, lonely, dreadful. I spent all day every day terrified of a run-in with Tyler. As I moved between classes, my job at the bookstore, and orchestra rehearsal, I left my headphones on, playing nothing, so that if we did cross paths, I could feign being on a call.

  I didn’t tell people. I told one, other than Matty—of my orchestra friends, my closest was Caroline, a tubist from Des Moines. I’d wondered before if we’d bonded solely because we were both small girls playing giant instruments. She loved video games, sci-fi novels, and coding club, all of which were foreign to me.

  “You’re kidding,” she hollered over and over when I told her the story while walking home from rehearsal one evening. She was so loud that I stopped talking, which she didn’t seem to notice. She’d told me a story about another friend of hers who was raped, and I’d been left to express the appropriate horror and anger over a stranger’s assault.

  After that, telling people hadn’t seemed worth the trouble.

  Sometimes I noted, with interest, how abruptly my thought patterns had changed. Before, I would lie in bed at night swaddled in guilt. I had so much “on paper,” as they say: good parents who loved me—parents who’d immediately accepted my brother when he came out; a kind and gentle sibling, even as a teenager, who looked up to me; a loan-free education at a prestigious school; my own room!; and, finally, a body I didn’t feel the need to hide. I feared that perhaps I was unable to acknowledge my good fortune, unable to just accept it—I wanted more. Always more. To look better, to feel better, to be different, to accomplish more.

  Now I wanted nothing. I cared about nothing.

  And then there was this: I didn’t understand how this new pain in me had been created.

  It wasn’t there, and then it was.

  Did it not defy a law of physics? Wasn’t energy supposed to be preserved?

  The more I considered it, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Tyler had passed on pain to me he was supposed to feel for himself, leaving me to suffer it on his behalf.

  I WENT TO the dean’s office on a Friday afternoon in early October, almost two weeks after my case had been decided.

  “Is Dean Sharon available?” I asked the woman behind the desk in the small waiting area outside her office, to which the door was open.

  “I’m here! Come in!” the dean called from inside.

  “Hi, Annie,” she said as I entered. I remembered why I’d liked Dean Sharon from the start. She’d seemed down to earth, with a no-nonsense kind of energy that was nonetheless upbeat in the way a girls’ volleyball coach might be portrayed on TV.

  She was wearing a tailored gray suit and very little jewelry—a gold wedding band and, in her ears, gold studs shaped like leaves that peeked out from beneath her cropped hair.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. Doing was how people asked when they assumed you weren’t well. If they said “How are you?” without the doing, they were just treating you like everyone else.

  “Not really okay,” I said.

  She nodded, as if she expected to hear this. “Are you still seeing a counselor?”

  “No,” I said, leaving out that I’d never gone to Student Mental Health after I’d been encouraged to, both by her and by Simone. “I feel like that’s not the problem, though.”

  She furrowed her brow.

  “I don’t understand how he just got academic probation,” I heard myself say. “I don’t see how that has anything to do with rape.”

  “Annie,” she spoke slowly, carefully. “Perhaps it would help to think of the academic probation as the more punitive piece, while the alcohol treatment is the more rehabilitative piece.”

  “But . . .” I forced myself to pause and take a deep breath to halt the quaking that had seized my voice. “I don’t understand what alcohol treatment has to do with rape either.”

  She smiled at me sadly. “I know you’re hurting. And I’m glad you came to see me. Would you reconsider going back to talk to someone in Mental Health? I don’t know who you saw before, but it doesn’t have to be the same person if he or she didn’t suit you. We can expedite intake, get you in today. There are some very capable counselors over there. I’ll personally make sure you get someone you feel you can trust.”

  It was kind, and so I began to cry. She stood, walked around her large desk and took a seat in the chair next to mine. She reached out to put one hand on my knee. She waited.

  “Okay,” I said after a minute.

  “Okay,” she said, lingering a moment longer before standing and giving my leg a final pat. “I’ll call now. You can head straight over.”

  MY COUNSELOR, LORETTA ESPOSITO, Psy.D., was an Italian American woman who looked to be somewhere between the age of my mother and that of my grandmother. She wore a geometric print silk scarf and skinny jeans with black suede ankle boots, far more fashionable than my mother or grandmother would ever be. Her silver-streaked black hair was swooped into a messy bun, and in her lap rested a yellow legal pad and a glossy pen that looked expensive, the permanent kind you’re gifted for a birthday in the second half of your life and then buy refills for.

  “What brings you in?” she began.

  I cut to the chase. I told her I’d been raped—the word I used—but didn’t offer up details right away. I told her he’d been found guilty or, as the university put it, “responsible” for not “respecting me sexually,” whatever that meant, but that he remained on campus. I told her what Dean Sharon had said about the punitive piece and the rehabilitative piece. Only then did I pause.

  “How do you feel about that?” she asked. “What Dean Sharon said.”

  I considered it for a moment. “I feel like a piece is missing,” I said. She nodded, not in a performative or condescending way but in a way that seemed to imply agreement. I felt the muscles in my torso release, my jaw loosen. “I feel like, if he raped someone, why should he even be allowed to stay here? You know?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what you think. How does it make you feel?”

  My fingers began to tingle, and I noticed I was sitting on my hands. I pulled them out from under me and rested them on my lap.

  “Let down. I feel so disappointed in this place.”

  As soon as I said it, I wanted to sleep. Words, words. Ever since reporting the rapes I’d been asked to come up with words. I was so damn tired of coming up with words. Wherever Tyler was, I doubted he was being made to be William Shakespeare.

  “Annie,” Loretta said, seeming to pick up on my sudden mood shift. “I am with you one hundred percen
t. And you know what I have to say about this case? Fuck. This.”

  I blinked. Were therapists, or as Dean Sharon referred to them, counselors, supposed to speak this way? A surge of something—vindication?—prickled through my body.

  “You aren’t just disappointed,” she said, her accent thicker than I’d realized. “You’re angry. Because fuck. This.”

  Now I was the one nodding.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  “And you should be.” Loretta didn’t break our gaze as she matched the rhythm of my nodding, her eyes wide, sparkling. She tapped her fancy pen against the yellow paper with a sharp thwack.

  “None of this you brought on yourself. Do you understand that?”

  Did I? I nodded, but it must not have been convincing enough.

  “Repeat after me: None of this I brought on myself.”

  “None of this I brought on myself,” I said.

  “Again.”

  “None of this I brought on myself.”

  “Louder.”

  “None of this I brought on myself!” I obeyed her instruction three or four more times, until she had heard enough. Until I imagine she had heard, in my voice, a sliver of openness to the possibility.

  14

  Bea

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

  Wrapped in a towel, her shower cap still on, Bea sat at her desk and read the decision quickly. Her first reaction was that it seemed fair and relatively inconsequential for him—he wasn’t suspended or expelled. He’d told his parents several days into the investigation, and while they’d insisted on bringing in a lawyer from Atlanta, he’d already been interviewed by the investigator by the time she arrived. The lawyer, a middle-aged woman always in hose and a tailored skirt suit, made a lot of loud noise about this, of course, along with everything else—the time line, the lack of evidence, the presence of alcohol. If there was a stink that could conceivably be made, this woman made it. Ultimately, though, the case seemed to have come down to his word against hers, and reading through the report, Bea found that she sympathized with the Title IX officer for having to decide whom to believe. There was no way of knowing for sure what had happened, since only Tyler and Annie had been there.

  Bea had helped Tyler think about how to present Annie’s behavior in a way that she could be viewed as unreliable. Bea hadn’t seen this as unethical in any way—first, because there was a bias against him going in, something even she had felt. Someone needed to help correct for it. Plus, everything he’d said about Annie in his interview and testimony was, it seemed, true, or at least he believed it to be so. He and Bea had never hinted at the idea of fabricating facts to improve his case. Tyler had seemed genuinely convinced it was a misunderstanding, and, as far as Bea knew, it was.

  Yet there was a small part of her, a part she tried to dismiss, a voice she told herself was the bias talking. This part of her believed Annie Stoddard and had wanted Tyler to pay.

  When she was with Tyler, she found it easy to be on his side. In hearing more about his background, she’d found that she related to it more than she cared to think about: the solitary early years of childhood, when she would turn the decorative throw pillows of her mother’s bed into friends, followed by the mixed bag of boarding school, where she missed her mother desperately but also was nurtured by the friendships she formed there. Spending time with Tyler and then in class or in discussion with Dr. Friedman, she’d felt at ease in her role.

  The cognitive dissonance of it she had found challenging in private flashes—reading the full case report once a copy was provided to Tyler; noticing Annie was in her abnormal psych lecture, which she never had before; or opening the decision letter via email that morning alone, the light slicing through the window to cast a single orange cone across the room. Am I on the wrong side? she’d wondered briefly, fleetingly, in these moments.

  How would her mother feel about what she was doing? She wasn’t sure—her mother had been a Democrat and against capital punishment, and she had been concerned by the rate of incarceration of black men in America. But she also had heard her mother use the term ambulance chaser to describe the lawyers who sued her and her colleagues, and once, when Bea asked if she had any interest in their neighbor Anthony, who was clearly interested in her, Phaedra had said absolutely not, that she’d never date a prosecutor.

  But how did she feel about defense attorneys? It had never come up.

  More than leaving Bea sad, the mystery excited her, highlighting how uncharted this path was for her.

  And still there, hovering not so far back in Bea’s mind, was the correspondence that hadn’t come—yet another day, day sixteen, in which Lester Bertrand had not written her back.

  For how long would she wake, disappointed, to his silence? When would she accept that she was just never going to hear from him?

  Seated at her desk, contemplating this question, she saw her phone light up. The screen read “Dr. F calling.”

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “Bea, did you see the decision?”

  “I did,” she said.

  “I wanted to let you know that I spoke with the Brands, and they sang your praises. They said Tyler had only wonderful things to say about you. Excellent job. You should be very proud. You triumphed over the qualms and hesitations you had in order to put your client’s needs first. That exhibits real maturity and commitment. I’m very impressed.”

  Dr. Friedman knew the Brands? It shouldn’t have been that surprising, Bea reasoned. Tyler had mentioned his parents were big donors to the school, and, of course, Dr. Friedman was always working to raise money for his program. They were clearly terrible parents based on what Tyler had shared about them, but there was no reason Dr. Friedman would know that side of them.

  “Are you still planning on applying to the summer fellowship with me?” he was asking.

  “Um, yeah, I think so?” She’d assumed she would, but between classes and C.U.N.T., she hadn’t given it much thought.

  “Applications are due at the end of October, and a decision will be made by the end of the semester,” he said. “I think you should.”

  “Okay,” she said, a smile creeping up her lips.

  “But a warning. . . . It’s not like other internships, not like the kind your peers will have. There won’t be too many opportunities for fun nights on the town. I’m talking late nights most nights, Saturdays in the office. Calling it intense is an understatement. We have a number of capital defense matters on our docket. That means the stakes are literally life or death. The only friends you’ll have time to see will be your coworkers. Social time will be a quick coffee or ice cream during which you’ll continue discussing work.”

  He let out an easy laugh.

  “I just remembered that Kyle, last summer’s fellow—I think I’ve mentioned him to you?”

  “You have,” Bea said.

  “The friend he was staying with for the summer called one afternoon to make sure he was alive after he’d spent three nights at the office. Literally slept on the floor.”

  “Man,” Bea said, awed.

  “That’s an extreme example, but it gives you an idea of how, at the CJRI, we understand the gravity of our responsibility and take it seriously. This is why, Bea, I think you’d fit right in.”

  The longer he spoke, the more she wanted it. Not wanted. The feeling was sharper than that. Bea ached for what Dr. Friedman was describing, which was bigger than a job and more important than an internship. It was a shared purpose, a community in which she’d be welcomed as a critical member—like the Turtles but with a mission that mattered. What he’d described was a family.

  When they hung up, Bea slipped on her shoes. It was time to close some doors.

  Improv had ignited in her a craving for the unknown, for stepping out before she knew what she would say and dwelling there, in uncertainty. The more she did it, threw herself into that terrifying spotlight with no clue what she was going to do inside it, the more she wanted to do it
again.

  So Lester Bertrand wanted nothing to do with her. Fine. She was done trying to be someone she wasn’t, done with premed, done trying to salvage a relationship that had never existed in the first place with a father who hadn’t bothered to make himself known. New Bea was an improviser—a good one—and a public defender in the making. She would apply for the summer fellowship; she would get it, and work late nights on cases with real stakes, and sleep on the office floor, and drink too much coffee with her new, impassioned comrades. She would help the improv team win nationals.

  Two weeks earlier she’d told Tyler that she’d been fine without parents, that she’d survived, when she was trying to reassure him that he would be okay. In the moment before uttering those words, she hadn’t been confident in them, but in speaking them they’d become truer, as if she’d brought the truth into being by stating it aloud.

  Now she was, if not certain, at least resolved: If she had no parents to make proud; she would make herself proud.

  The first step was to withdraw from physics. Bea dressed, packed her books for the day, and headed out. On her way to psych, she’d go by the academic advising building and pay a visit to her adviser, a tiny fellow with black plastic-rimmed glasses and a frantic nail-biting habit whom she’d met only once, the week that school started. That had been a box-checking kind of meeting, five minutes to confirm that she was, in fact, taking four courses and was enrolled. She figured there would be simple paperwork to complete, perhaps a justification needed. She was prepared to lie and say she was on the verge of a breakdown owing to stress if that was what it took.

  But as the bus crawled to a stop before her and a herd of students hustled forward to board, she received a text from Early.

  I GOT MUGGED!!!!!!!

  WHEN BEA REACHED her dorm ten minutes later, she found Early and two cops facing each other in the hallway in front of their room. The cops, a thin woman in a bun, and a stocky man with a belly, were clutching walkie-talkies. Early stood, arms crossed, her eyes wide and shimmering. She was texting on her phone in its pink, glittery case. Bea noticed the screen was shattered.