by Kelly Yang
“Dani, I watched your speech at Snider and I just . . .” She starts to cry.
“It’s okay; I’m okay,” I assure her. I tell her after I left the bar that night, Mr. Connelly backed off. “Thankfully, he didn’t try anything else.”
There’s a long pause.
“Well, he did with me,” she says.
Eighty-Three
Claire
On the day I’m supposed to go with Dani to the police station, my mom wakes up and walks into the living room in her silk robe.
“Dani came by yesterday,” I tell her.
“How is she? It’s terrible what happened to her,” my mom says, shaking her head.
“We’re thinking about going to the police,” I say.
My mom doesn’t respond. I know she’s still uneasy with the idea of me going to the authorities, but she’s been quietly calling up lawyers. I know because I see the caller ID on my mom’s phone when it rings. Still, the admissions letter to Terry Grove is taped prominently to the refrigerator, beaconing an easier solution every time I reach for a LaCroix.
“Do we have any espresso?” my mom asks. “I can’t think about going to the police without caffeine.”
I shake my head.
My mom makes a face. It’s been interesting being roommates with my mom these last few days. She still functions as though Tressy is here, leaving her towels and clothes on the floor everywhere. I hope I wasn’t like that when I first moved in with the De La Cruzes.
“We should get on that,” she says. “Do they sell coffee machines at Trader Joe’s?”
I chuckle. Ever since I took her to Trader Joe’s, she’s been obsessed. She even asked me who Joe was as she walked around in her red Versace feather skirt, looking like an out-of-place peacock while the other shoppers stared.
The doorbell rings.
My mom and I glance toward the door. “I hope it’s not another package from your father.” She rolls her eyes. My dad has been sending her apology gifts. He called twice, begging her to come back. Both times she put him on the phone with me, and he whined and complained that we both ditched him. I told him, don’t worry, we’ll be back soon, even though I hoped it wasn’t true. I hope my mom will stay for a while.
“Hey, maybe next week, we can go out to dinner with Zach,” I suggest as I go to the door.
I open the door to find the mailman standing there. He hands me a letter, posted by registered mail.
“Actually, I’d really like to go to the school and have a word with Mrs. Mandalay about how she handled this whole thing. Maybe I’ll go in with Dani’s mom. She’s got to be pissed too. . . .” Her voice trails off when she sees my face as I look down at the letter.
“It’s from Jay,” I tell her.
“A confidentiality agreement?” Jess asks. She slides her sunglasses off. We’re at Pinkberry, sitting outside.
I nod. The letter, sent from Jay’s family’s attorney’s office, proposed a nondisclosure agreement between me and Jay, whereby I agree not to reveal the facts relating to the dispute of what happened the night of Friday the fifteenth in exchange for a monetary settlement.
“How much?” Jess asks.
“Two million dollars,” I tell her.
Jess’s eyes go wide. Her frozen yogurt spoon falls out of her hand. “Claire, that’s fucking great!” she exclaims. “Are you gonna take it?”
I push the yogurt around in my cup with my spoon, watching it melt. “I don’t know. To not be able to talk about what happened? With anyone? Not even the police?”
“Claire, it’s two million dollars!”
When I don’t say anything, Jess leans forward. “Do you remember what I said before? About how there’s always a private solution?”
I nod, recalling the conversation we once had about her dad.
“Sometimes the private solution is just as good as the public solution,” Jess urges.
“And what is the private solution here?” I ask her.
“The private solution is you take the motherfucker’s money, transfer to another school, and move on. That’s enough money for you and your mom to buy a nice house! Start over!”
I shake my head. “But I don’t want a nice house . . .” My eyes slide down to my watch. It’s four thirty. Dani’s going to the police at five. If I want to meet her over at the police station, I have to leave now.
Jess lets out an exasperated sigh. “What do you want then? He already said he’s sorry . . .” She grabs the letter and thrusts it at me. “This is how sorry he is. Do you really want to go through a public trial? Your name will forever be tattooed to what happened . . .”
I consider my reply. “I can never get my name completely away from rape,” I tell her. “But maybe I can get it closer to, you know, justice.”
Jess laughs. She waves around her yogurt spoon as she says, “Girl, justice is something Americans invented to sell movies.”
Eighty-Four
Dani
Bree Johnson meets me outside the police station the next day. She’s a senior at UCLA now. We ended up staying on the phone until 5:00 a.m., until our eyes were empty and our throats were raw. Like me, she admired Mr. Connelly. He told her she was special, that she had a talent for debate he’d never seen in any of his other students. He used that to build trust with her, which he then violated during a tournament in San Diego, when he came up to her hotel room. She let him in, thinking he just wanted to run motions, but instead he cornered her and kissed her.
We hold each other in the police parking lot, clinging to the flesh-and-blood confirmation that we weren’t alone in what we went through, that it wasn’t our fault. I look down at my watch. I was hoping Claire would be here too. I told her we would be here at 5:00 p.m. Where is she?
“You ready to do this?” Bree asks.
I smile at her. I can’t believe I did this with my words. I brought us together.
I try Claire once again on my phone. I have been texting her all day to see if she wanted to come with us, but she hasn’t replied. A car pulls up, and I think it’s her but instead, it’s Ming and Florence.
“I couldn’t let you do this alone,” Ming says.
I turn to Florence. “Is Claire coming?” I ask.
Florence shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says.
I scan the parking lot one last time, at all the cars and the hot sun reflecting off the windshields.
C’mon, Claire, where are you?
Eighty-Five
Claire
I hug Jess as we leave from the yogurt shop.
“Trust me, the private solution is always the best,” Jess says. Her phone rings. It’s her dad calling—the first time all semester. She greets him with a big smile on her face. “Hi, Daddy! I miss you too! What? You were just in LA?” Jess’s face falls. She quickly hides her disappointment. “Oh no, it’s okay, next time. I was busy studying anyway.”
The crushed look on her face, as well as her chirpy words, stay with me as I get inside my Uber. I think about the torrent of emotions going through Jess, all the things she wants to say to him now but can’t. It’s like looking into a mirror. How many times have I chosen the path that saves the most face? Pretended along and swallowed? The private solution may work, but it feels like shards of glass, cutting you up inside.
“Wait, can I change where I’m going?” I ask my Uber driver.
I get to the police station just as Dani and the girls are walking toward the main entrance.
“Dani!” I shout. Dani turns around. I see Florence with Ming! The girls let out a big cheer as I step out of the Uber.
“We thought you weren’t coming!” Dani says.
“I’m here now!” I say. Dani hugs me, followed by Florence and Ming, and I quickly introduce myself to Bree. It’s crazy seeing us all together, knowing what we’re about to do. I inhale deeply, letting the empowerment expand in my lungs.
I know the odds are stacked against us, if we go to trial, Jay and the school will outspend us
, the media shitstorm will squeeze us, the jury will question us. Still, there’s something so powerful about ripping up the two-million-dollar offer and marching through those doors. To be able to take back control and not let any person, school, or trauma dictate my life—that’s why I came to America. I slip my hand in Dani’s, who joins hands with Bree. One by one, we all join hands. As we walk together to the police station, my heart beats with the power of five.
The police officers look up at us as we walk in. We tell them we’re here to file a complaint. A young officer named Officer Torrence comes rushing out of his office and introduces himself. He leads us into a conference room.
“Thank you all so much for coming in,” he says. “About six months ago, I received an anonymous tip from one of the teachers at American Prep saying there was misconduct at the school. I’ve been investigating the case, but I never had any idea of the magnitude.” He looks to Dani. “Until I heard Dani’s speech.”
Officer Torrence puts us in a waiting room and takes us individually to get our statement. Bree Johnson, the UCLA senior, goes first. While we wait, Florence and Ming and I chat about their app. Ming says it’s for parachutes and host families.
“That’s amazing,” I tell them. I tilt my head at Dani, jokingly asking her what she’d rate me.
“I’d give you one star for keeping your room clean,” she teases, to which I protest, “Hey!”
Then Dani looks at me, more serious. “And five stars for bravery.”
I smile.
Officer Torrence walks out. “Claire,” he calls. “You’re next. Are you ready?”
I get up from my chair. I look over at Dani, who squeezes my hand and mouths, You can do this as I walk by and follow Officer Torrence into the interview room.
When it’s over, we walk out of the police station together. We hug goodbye, promising to text the minute we hear anything. Bree drives back to UCLA, while Ming and Florence get in an Uber to go back to Florence’s place. Dani offers me a ride home, and I hop into Dani’s mom’s Toyota Celica.
Dani doesn’t start the engine right away. Instead, she sits in the hot car, texting.
“What are you doing?”
“Texting my mom and searching pro bono lawyers,” Dani says, fingers tapping on her phone.
Gently, I reach over and put a hand over her phone. “Hey, breathe. You’re not in this alone anymore,” I remind her.
It takes Dani a second to process this, and when she does, she puts down her phone. Her face relaxes.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
She thinks about the question for a long time. “Like I’m starting a tournament and I’m finally on a team I like,” she answers. “With someone with as much skin in the game as me.”
Wow. It’s an honor hearing her put it like that. And a little terrifying.
“And how do you feel?”
“Relieved,” I say, then gaze down at my hands and start thinking about my mom’s face when I get home—I hope she will have a proud smile, but I’m still not sure. “And like I might be sick,” I confess.
Dani starts looking around the car for a bag.
“I’m kidding, I won’t!”
Dani finds a brown paper bag and holds it up. “It’s okay. If you do, I’ve got you.”
I smile and reach my arms out to give her a hug. “I’m so glad I finally started talking to you.”
“Me too.”
As she starts the car, I put my feet up on the dash. Two girls from opposite sides of the earth, emerging from the ashes, stronger.
Author’s Note
In 2016, four “parachute” Chinese kids in Los Angeles were sentenced to prison for the violent bullying of a fellow Chinese parachute student. The judge said the case reminded him of Lord of the Flies. Ever since then, I’ve been researching parachutes, interviewing current and former parachutes, their parents, host families, and teachers, as well as visiting schools, including the school where the four kids attended. What I discovered from talking to these students was how unique their experience was growing up, grappling with issues of homesickness, privilege, identity, peer pressure, all while trying to navigate a new country on their own.
Currently, China sends the greatest number of international students to US high schools. Around two in five international students enrolled in American high schools come from China. The number of international high school students from China rose by 48 percent between 2013 and 2016.1 The American schools I visited view this new, full-pay pipeline as a godsend, but it comes at a steep price. Many of the Chinese students I talked to struggled with loneliness, alienation, or worse. Recent headlines of foreign exchange students getting sexually assaulted, raped, gone missing, or murdered are just some of the reminders of the perils parachutes face.
And it’s not just parachutes. The stories of Dani and Claire mirror the experiences of so many young women and men all over the nation. In 2017, the Associated Press uncovered seventeen thousand reports of sexual assault at schools across the United States. The AP found that “schools frequently were unwilling or ill-equipped to address the problem. Some administrators and educators even engaged in cover-ups to hide evidence of a possible crime and protect their schools’ image.”2
While most of these cases were perpetrated by other students, an alarming and increasing subset are being perpetrated by teachers. In 2014, almost eight hundred school employees were prosecuted for sexual assault.3 According to a study commissioned by the Department of Education, 10 percent of students surveyed said they have experienced sexual misconduct at the hands of school employees. Of the students who said they were abused, 38 percent were elementary students and 56 percent were in middle or high school.4 Many of these predatory teachers get dismissed and rehired, a system known as “passing the trash.” It’s a devastating problem that affects both public and private schools, including some of the most prestigious boarding schools in the nation.5
At the same time, Parachutes is also a very personal story for me.
Seventeen years ago, in my 1L year, I was sexually assaulted at Harvard Law School. My attacker was another fellow Harvard Law School student. I was only eighteen years old at the time. I had skipped several grades, overcome poverty, and beaten the impossible odds to get in. The last thing I expected would happen to me at Harvard Law was sexual assault.
I remember my attacker telling me afterward, “I should probably go to church for what I just did to you.” This followed by “And you should probably take a shower.” I did take a shower. I wanted to take a million showers.
The showers did little to assuage the fact that we went to the same school. That his apartment was across the street from my dorm. That he sat behind me in one of my classes. In the months and weeks that followed, I saw him nearly every day, walking around like nothing happened. I saw him at law school events and law firm interviews. Whenever I saw him, my stomach would twist into a knot so tight, I felt like I was going to hurl. And then I’d gulp for air, nearly choking.
Still, I did not formally file charges against my attacker because I was young, I was scared, and I had reason to believe that my attacker had a close and material relationship with the senior management of Harvard Law School. Instead, I went to the university nurse, got the rape tests done, told the dean of students what happened, switched dorms, and filed an anonymous report to the police.
The next two and a half years became a delicate dance of hide-and-seek, tiptoeing around my attacker, asking friends if they saw him in the library, and studying his patterns of migration like a zoologist. It might have worked if we were in the jungle or a big city, but Harvard Law School spanned about a street and a half.
Finally, in my third year of law school, with graduation fast approaching, I decided I had to do something. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him at graduation. I didn’t want my immigrant parents to have to see him, to have to watch their daughter get her diploma while sharing a stage with the guy who sexually assaulted her. So I talke
d to the new dean of students as well as the new dean of Harvard Law School.
Despite all the warnings of how long it would take if I brought charges and how difficult the process would be, I decided to formally bring charges of sexual assault against my attacker to Harvard’s administrative board. Harvard’s admin board is its very own mini court system, the “jury” made up of faculty members and students. In order to proceed with the ad board, the law school required me to write and sign a document saying I would not bring a formal criminal complaint with the police and that I was proceeding only through the administrative board.
The case was emotionally draining. It required me to sit in a room in front of my attacker and listen for hours as he called me a liar. In the end, I lost. The university decided that there was not enough evidence to suspend or expel my attacker, despite the fact that I had gotten rape tests done, told the school nurse, switched dorms, and even written my attacker an email after the assault saying, “What you did to me was horrible, unwanted, and illegal” to which he had responded, “My heart is bleeding.”
Then, the other bomb dropped: the university was now investigating me for “malicious prosecution.” The days that followed were the darkest ever as I waited for the faculty to vote on whether to yank away my own diploma all because I dared bring up the fact that I was sexually assaulted while at Harvard Law School.
When I was finally found not guilty, a faculty member actually came up to me and congratulated me. “Congratulations! You get to graduate! Let me give you a bit of advice,” he said. “Move on!”
And I did, sort of. After I graduated, I moved as far away from Boston and New York as I could, to Hong Kong. I moved away from law too. I started teaching kids. I started writing. I started having lunch at normal hours again, because I didn’t have to worry about bumping into him. I stopped looking over my shoulder. I got married, had kids. Before I knew it, a decade flew by and I didn’t think about my attack. I stuffed what happened to me in a box and buried it deep in my closet.