by Mary Adkins
Despite my reporting the rape and doing all I could to follow proper procedures, the administration has done nothing to ensure that this doesn’t happen again to me or to anyone else. He is still here on campus. And so am I.
Two months ago, I was a student with some good stuff going for her: a psych major, a bassoonist, and an older sister. Now I am a rape victim.
I assure you, that is not a status anyone wishes on herself.
My fear, my flashbacks, and my constant ruminations (should I have worn something different?) consume the portion of my brain that used to think about other things, like my music, my classes, and my goals. Being raped has colonized a whole district of my brain. And while I hate the person who did this to me, a person I fear and dread seeing every day—that part? I hate even more.
If I want to leave you with one idea, it’s this: You don’t speak when you know no one’s listening. You don’t fight back when you know you’re going to lose.
#MeToo
Comments:
nasseravid: I heard from a reliable source that she accused him of doing it twice. If that’s true, I think the fact that there are even two times to speak of says it all. Why would you go out a second time with a guy who raped you? Because he didn’t.
RRniner: what’s wrong with her legs?
HamBam: real brave to bully a disabled person. you’re a real man.
nasseravid: how is she disabled? That’s just a skin disease lol it’s not like she’s handicapped.
nasseravid: Who ISN’T disabled now according to the libs???? SCOPE CREEP
. . . and 71 more
20
Bea
LATE OCTOBER–EARLY NOVEMBER
“What a fantastic opportunity for you to observe and reflect on the language people use to talk about justice, particularly given your initial reservations about taking on the case.”
Dr. Friedman sat cross-legged facing Bea in the sitting room area of his hotel suite at the Carter Boathouse, the only hotel on campus, where he held weekly one-on-one meetings with the Justice students. He and Bea were discussing the Bridge incident. Since his case had concluded, she was no longer Tyler’s advocate, but Dr. Friedman was constantly pushing for what he called “radical real-world reflection.” That’s what, he believed, would lead to radical justice.
“Get out there and learn from what you see and hear. Don’t just trust what professors and books tell you. Draw your own conclusions. Set aside this week’s reading assignment if you need. Write your reaction paper on this.”
“Okay,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s just that the application for the fellowship is due in two weeks, and I have to submit the academic paper as a writing sample, and I didn’t like my one on distributive justice or the one on the plea bargain state. Do you think I could write one about this that’s . . . rigorous enough, I guess?”
He smiled. “Bea, your qualifications for the fellowship are very clear. Don’t worry.” He winked. “Now go out there and listen. Ask yourself hard questions. Get gritty.”
BEA REREAD THE op-eds, letters, and dozens of online comments that had been published. She followed the various threads of argument and considered their merits. There was discussion about the reasons why someone would “out” their rapist in this way. There was discussion about university hypocrisy and censorship. Around the country, people were posting #MeToo on social media, and the phenomenon bled onto campus. Someone made stickers, and girls walked around with them on their shirts: #MeToo. But the one thing everyone seemed to agree on at first was that painting TYLER BRAND = RAPIST!! on the Bridge wasn’t okay.
Then, on social media, girls everywhere—the news had traveled beyond Carter—began to come to the defense of the mystery victim. (Bea stayed quiet about knowing who’d done it. She found herself impressed with Annie. She hadn’t thought the girl had it in her.)
Clearly, people argued, given the multiple exclamation points, this person was acting in a fit of rage. Could we really blame #mysterygirl for losing her cool and taking it to the one place she knew she could speak up and be heard? The place lauded as a safe haven of speech? #Mysterygirl was being held to an impossible standard of human behavior. So she lashed out! She was human!
#Weareallmysterygirl began to trend.
“This is how it always is with women, isn’t it? We take it, and take it, and take it, and when we finally snap, WE’RE out of line. Gaslighting on cue,” one tweet read.
Another: “Once again, a man’s reputation matters more than the substance of the claim.”
And finally: “We must remember that whoever this is, she was likely raped. Let’s consider that before we all jump to judgment of her.”
On a cold Monday night in early November, the black ice on the roads causing the buses to creep cautiously between campuses, Bea made her way to a meeting room in the student center. A sign that read “Sexual Assault Panel” hung from a hook on the door. She entered and took a seat. The room was chilly and utilitarian—taupe carpet, symmetrical rows of metal chairs, fluorescent bars of light.
Her phone dinged, startling her. She never turned her phone off vibrate and must have by accident. She fetched it from her bag. The text was from her lab partner.
When are you going to make up the lab??
Without responding, she quickly silenced it as someone took the seat next to her. Within a few minutes, at eight, the scheduled start time for the panel, half of the chairs in the room were loosely occupied. The moderator, a third-year with lavender hair who introduced himself as head of the Student Relations Committee, announced that the student government had issued a resolution urging the administration to review its policies on sexual assault reporting and investigation. The room erupted into applause, and Bea clapped along.
Then he introduced the panelists—a Gender Studies professor, a cop from campus police, the president of Sigma Chi, and Annie. Bea noticed on the placard placed in front of Annie that her last name was misspelled: “Annie Stodard,” it read, with one D.
“I’d like to turn the floor over to you, Linda,” the moderator said.
“Thank you, Kai,” said the professor, facing the audience. “In our Gender and the College Experience class this fall, which Kai is in”—they exchanged smiles—“we have been talking about power. Institutional responses to sexual assault really tee up questions of power. I’m happy to be here as a part of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation with the larger campus community. Not just in here.” She lifted her hands and pointed both downward, pumping them. “But out there.” She flipped her palms so that her hands were pointing outward.
“Rory—you look as if you want to say something?” Kai said.
“Sure,” the Sigma Chi guy said. “I just want to second what, uh, Linda said. I am really happy to be here and just, you know, proud that we’re tackling this topic. So thank you all for coming. I think you all deserve a round of applause just for being here.” With that, he began to clap, and a handful of people joined in.
So far, Bea thought, there had been a lot of clapping and not much said. She could imagine Dr. Friedman becoming impatient with the lack of substance from the get-go.
“Annie,” Kai said. “Would you be willing to start us off? We’d love to hear from you about your experience with the administration on campus. Anything you’re comfortable sharing.”
“Well, I guess I think . . .” Annie paused. To Bea, she seemed very nervous. “I think this panel is an example of what’s wrong.”
She paused again. The room was quiet apart from a few low murmurs.
“Who are we talking to?” She gestured to the rows of chairs. “These people aren’t the problem. The people who really need to talk about rape are frat guys. I think the frats need to be held accountable.”
When she said “rape,” Bea sensed a shift in the room’s energy.
“Annie,” said Linda in a practiced gentle tone, “you’re so right about the importance of i
ncluding a broad spectrum of people in the conversation. That is what I was getting at a moment ago. I do, however, want us to be careful not to essentialize who is ‘doing’ what or who ‘needs’ what. The language we use is powerful, and categorizing people into buckets can obscure the real issue.”
The Sigma Chi panelist leaned forward to speak, his large elbows resting on the table, which creaked under his weight. “Don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say here, but I think the reason for this panel is honesty. And so I have to be honest and say I think this issue is more complicated than that.”
“How so?” Kai asked brightly.
“All right. If your buddy confesses to you that something happened that he doesn’t feel comfortable about—maybe that he doesn’t even remember that well because he was drinking and whatnot—and he’s confiding in you, your job is to give him advice and so forth, but I don’t know if it’s fair to say that your job is to report him. That’s unrealistic. And I think we aren’t gonna change things until we can acknowledge that that’s a hard situation to be in as a friend.”
In the audience, though they were silent, people were nodding thoughtfully.
“Thank you, Rory,” Kai said. A hand two rows in front of Bea shot up.
“My question is for Linda. Are you saying that guys can be victims, too? Or are you saying that we shouldn’t use gendered language when talking about sexual assault at all? Those seem like different points.”
“I’m saying a bit of both, really.” Linda the professor drifted into a lecture as Bea thought about what the fraternity president had said. Everyone had just moved on, but it seemed like a really important point. He’d said that guys weren’t going to report their friends. But if people weren’t accountable to their friends and their friends were the only people around, who could change anything?
“Officer Hal,” said Kai when the professor stopped talking. “We haven’t heard from you yet.”
Officer Hal cleared his throat. “You okay, miss?” he asked quietly, looking at Annie. It was nearly a whisper, but thanks to the small mic in front of his face, they all heard it.
“Not really,” she said softly, but, amplified, her words filled the room. Then, as if she were summoning strength from someplace else, she said, “You know, the worst part of this entire process has been stuff like this. When I got the decision letter in my case, it talked about how maybe the fact that I actually had confidence in my looks for the first time made me crazy. That was included in the report. As if that’s okay to even suggest. And here, how do I feel right now? I’m being treated like the crazy one just for saying what I think.”
Bea stopped breathing.
“You aren’t crazy, Annie,” Linda hurriedly said. “You aren’t.”
“We believe you, Annie,” Kai said. “You’re here because we believe you and respect you and want to hear from you.”
The applause that followed was different from the earlier clapping. This applause had heart behind it. People began to yell, “We believe you!” Bea only clapped a few times as a pit began to take shape in her gut.
“Thank you,” Annie said quietly.
Then Officer Hal said, “My turn then. I’m honored to be here.” Bea found his friendly demeanor and southern accent disarming. “I guess I’ll, uh, use this opportunity to say that you can always come to us with anything. We’re here for you. And we just ask that you do your part, too, like reporting suspicious behavior and taking standard precautions. We have key cards for a reason. Don’t let just anybody follow you into your dorm from off the street. Once people are in the dorms, it’s harder for us to protect you.”
As he spoke, Bea stood quietly and hurried out.
ON HER WAY to the shuttle stop, Bea knew at once what she needed: alcohol. Who did she know who could get alcohol?
Chris.
You around? she texted him. Within minutes she was standing over his mini fridge holding up two shot glasses she’d spotted on top of it.
“Really? Shots on a Thursday at”—he checked the time—“eight thirty?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
He poured the vodka, she counted down, and they took one shot, then another.
To her relief, Chris was happy to decide what came next. They sat side by side on his futon as he pulled up video after video of his favorite comedy sketches on YouTube. An hour in, she felt tipsy enough to lean into him.
He gently pressed a hand against her shoulder, not letting her come closer.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“Are you sure? Because I feel like you’re not okay.”
Her gaze fell on the corner of his room, where a cluster of dust bunnies had gathered, quivering under gusts from the furnace.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Can I guess?”
She shrugged.
“Did someone die?”
She took a deep breath.
“You know the feeling when you think someone you respect would be disappointed in you if they knew what you were doing?”
“Of course,” he said.
His response encouraged her to go on.
“I was the support person for this guy who got accused of rape, and I sort of, like, gave him ideas for things he should say to attack her character. And he did it. And she read the things he said because they were in the case report, and I heard her on a panel tonight talk about how they made her feel. And now . . . I guess now I feel like a giant asshole.”
“Why’d you do it?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“Because I was his advocate. I was supposed to do everything I could to help.”
He thought about it.
“Then maybe whomever you’re thinking of wouldn’t be disappointed in you, if you were just doing your job.”
“Can we keep watching?” she said, pulling her knees up.
“Sure,” he said and turned up the volume.
SHE LEFT JUST before midnight. Despite the cold, she decided to walk the mile to South Campus, putting in her AirPods and searching her library for Whitney Houston. She tapped on “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and walked rapidly, her breath clouding in the thin winter air. Chris had run out of vodka two hours earlier, and she’d since sobered up, opening up a channel for the weight she’d felt during the panel to pool again.
Several minutes into her walk, the song changed, and Bea scrambled to a stop, searching for her phone at the bottom of her bag. “Run to You” had started up. This was not acceptable. Her fingers found her wallet, her keys, a tampon, a tube of ChapStick but not her phone as Whitney cooed the first few lines of the song. When her hand finally closed around the phone, it was too late. She sat down on the curb and let the song continue to fill her ears.
In 2009, Bea was ten, and Whitney had just come out with a new album and was promoting it on Good Morning America. Bea and her mother went to Central Park, two long blocks and six short ones from their house, to hear the legend debut her new album. Just before singing the opening to the title track, “Run to You,” Whitney had devoted it to her own mother, who was in the crowd.
“That’s my mother, y’all!” she yelled. Everyone cheered. Then she said, hoarsely, “I’m gonna try to do this.” Of course, she could do this, Bea remembered thinking. She was Whitney Houston.
Then she sang, and as they listened, Bea looked up to see her mother crying. She’d never seen Phaedra cry until then and wouldn’t again. Not one other time. On their walk back to their apartment on Lexington Avenue after the concert, Bea asked why.
“Because she’s so broken,” she said. “Her voice is destroyed.”
Bea remembered being confused. She hadn’t heard that at all.
Three years later, Whitney died. Bea and her mom watched the funeral on TV. Her mother didn’t cry. Four years after that, after her mother’s funeral, Bea found the video of that performance on You
Tube, the one they’d seen together in the park.
Watching it in the wake of Phaedra’s death, it was so obvious what her mother had meant. It had been a mystery to her as a child, but somewhere between nine and sixteen, somewhere between having a mother and losing her, Bea had learned to hear brokenness.
Bag in her lap, Bea sat on the curb in the darkness and listened to the flawless recording of the song she and her mother had once heard live, gravelly and cracked.
“Am I making a mistake, Mom?” Bea whispered. “Am I the bad guy?”
21
Stayja
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24
Stayja’s car wouldn’t start.
“Motherfucker,” she said, turning the key a fourth time, a fifth time. Her shift started in ten minutes. She’d been letting it run on fumes. She told herself that it was because the Citgo where gas was cheapest was ten minutes out of the way, that it was too easy to push it off another day, then another. In truth, every time she got out her debit card to pay for anything she thought of that IRS bill, tucked away in her bedside table, burning a hole through the wood. It was due in six days.
She couldn’t pay it off right now, and she’d rather not think about it. So in a drawer it lived until she could figure something out.
“Hey,” a voice said. “What’s wrong?”
LA opened the driver’s-side door and gestured for her to get out and hand him the keys.
“Why aren’t you at work?” she asked.
“I’m sick,” he said, then faked a cough. “You and Nicole both,” Stayja said. He climbed in and tried to start the engine just as she’d been doing.
“Brilliant strategy,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“When was the last time you filled it up?” he asked.
Stayja groaned. The gas light had been on for days. “I don’t remember.”
“You mean you don’t remember as in two days ago or you don’t remember as in two weeks ago?”
“I don’t remember,” Stayja said again, checking her watch. “Dammit.”