Alaleh wanted to get a sense of my background. Did I live in Palo Alto, was I working, what was my experience with drinking? I said I had gone to University of California, Santa Barbara. I heard myself growing defensive, knowing UCSB was known for its heavy partying. I stated that I drank in college, mostly gatherings with the literature kids, people reading poems at the top of a ladder, Bowie-themed living-room parties. I was dating a guy named Lucas, yes, I’d blacked out before. I found myself rambling, unsure of what I was trying to explain. I wanted her to see that I was normal; that I drink, sure, but I didn’t like being penetrated while unconscious. She said she went to college too, she understood.
My dad began asking questions, I could hear his frustration slipping through. He gets this pinched, exasperated look on his face, the same one I’ve seen when our flights have been delayed. I mean what kind of guy, how could he, I just don’t understand, wouldn’t it be a little ridiculous if, you can’t really tell me this is going anywhere. Alaleh confirmed his incredulousness, no doubt, it’s unfortunate the way these things, I know it’s hard to, luckily we have many, best to wait and see, but she also hinted that this was only the beginning, that nothing was predictable. I would later learn she’d already run into Brock’s defense attorney, who assured her his client would be receiving a misdemeanor for disturbing the peace. War had already been declared, but I did not know this.
It was dawning on me how little I knew about this process, how blindly I’d agreed. I thought I’d spend the hour hiding behind my parents as they protected me in this harsh territory. Instead I felt myself shifting from their hands to hers. If we proceeded, I’d be alone under the microscope, on the witness stand, my mom wouldn’t be holding my hand.
My character was now an asset my DA would need. Investigators may be watching me. I had an image to uphold, could not be reckless. Be on your best behavior. I turned this comment over in my head. If I kept drinking, would the defense argue I was never affected? If I uploaded photos of myself smiling at a party, would the defense say I never suffered? And worst of all, if somehow I was assaulted again, would they say, well then clearly there’s something wrong with her, not Brock, to get assaulted twice?
After the meeting I sat in my car, couldn’t get myself to go back to work. I had not gotten the confirmation I wanted that it would go away. Sit tight, she’d said. This is a long, slow process. For now just go back to your lives. I’d told my boss I was at a doctor’s appointment, but it ended up feeling like a job interview. They were deciding whether I’d make a good victim: is her character upstanding, does she seem durable, will the jury find her likable, will she stay with us moving forward. I walked out feeling like, You got the job! I did not want this job. I wanted my old life. But let him walk away? I could not let it happen. Pressing charges was my choice, they’d say, but sometimes you feel you don’t have one.
Alaleh had requested the voice mail on Lucas’s phone, but I had asked if she could wait; he was visiting in a week and I wanted to tell him in person. They were intent on collecting evidence, while I was trying to keep my life intact.
I drove to the airport to greet him, a spark in my chest when I saw his head in the crowd. We drove off to buy snacks for the evening. When we parked and stepped out of the car, I just held him, my face turned so he couldn’t see. He thought it was a welcome home hug, began ruminating over which snacks we should get, while tears escaped from the corners of my eyes, funneling neatly into the corners of my lips; a water system I’d perfected. I’d been living with two teacups filled to the brim behind each eye, gotten used to a little spilling over every now and then. I wiped my face, then cast a vote for gummy worms.
I didn’t realize how much I’d craved being wrapped in the arms of another person. When we think of people fitting together, we may think of a man inserting himself into a woman, but there are many ways we overlook. The way ears are thin as construction paper, allowing me to press the side of my face against his chest. Fingers can be interlaced without getting tangled. One hand can create a tiny chair for one chin. We are designed to bend and fold, to comfort ourselves and each other. We have so many small parts that need tending to. After the assault, I felt this need to be touched, but wanted nothing to do with invade, inject, insert, inside, only wanted the intimacy of being wrapped up safely in something.
That night, as we lay on our sides, his knees bent perfectly into mine, I decided it was very possible I could lose him. We’d only been dating a few months, and I remembered my dad saying that in every relationship there’s a point of disillusion; the introduction of the first obstacle, where you decide to surmount it or part ways. Now I had this ugly, public mess latched on to me. I would leave the door open if he wanted to opt out of this nightmare.
* * *
• • •
I was still navigating how to love and be loved. If you ask me what experience I had with boys in high school, I’d tell you that one time I asked a guy to a dance by creating a trail of toilet paper through the school that led to me holding an index card that said, If you gotta go, go with me!
Before meeting Lucas, I had been in one long and serious relationship: senior year of high school there’d been a guy, half Japanese, kind eyed, intelligent, broad shouldered. All I understood was that at track meets, watching him arch his back over the high jump made me light-headed. Before graduation, all seniors cut class and hiked down a steep cliff into a sandy alcove, to a pop-up village of multicolored tents, everyone drinking, bonfires, falling asleep by midnight. At seventeen I’d never tasted alcohol, smoked, or kissed anyone. This guy and I were sober, sitting on a log in front of the dark water, as the world slept behind us. We talked until the sun rose. When my sleepy friends emerged from their tent flaps, they whispered, What happened? What’d you guys do? I shrugged and said, Nothing. They were disappointed. Nothing? But it felt like everything. We shared my/his/our first kiss in my driveway on my eighteenth birthday. I made these elaborate life maps, tracing back all that had to happen for us to be at the same school at the same time, trying to understand how the universe had crafted a perfect human and then given him to me.
He and I departed to college on opposite coasts, my school at the beach, his school in the snow. I wrote notes to my professor saying my “cousin” was getting “married,” then took off on planes to see him. I called them honeymoons with homework. He had a pet fish, and when its jaw could hardly open, he used his thumbnail to cut each pellet into bite-sized pieces. This was his level of attention, care. For the next three and a half years, I grew up protected, safe, and confident, sleeping in his room, where the pipes clanged with heat. At the end of college, something gave way. Our relationship became a Jenga tower, and one by one we began pulling out the pieces, the structure increasingly fragile. Right before my graduation, there was a school shooting, pools of red blood, the same weekend he was on a boat, a shimmering blue lake. I learned the divide between unthinkable violence and ordinary life was paper thin. We were cast into different universes; my side suddenly dark, his light. We fought, or rather, I screamed into the phone while he became increasingly mute. When we arrived home in Palo Alto after graduation, the tower tumbled, blocks spilling everywhere.
I’d heard about heartbreak in songs, sure, but holy shit, damn. There should be a name for that feeling. It really winds you. How to exist without this person? In his shelter, I was brave, loved. I emerged single, twenty-two, naive, and starving. The space that remained was cavernous and I vowed to fill it.
I remember people always telling me there are other fish in the sea, and I said, Yes, that’s where they fucking live. But he had been a rare species of lionfish, and I’d lost him. What do you do when you lose someone, or when they choose to lose you? I went through anchovies, stodgy bass, pompous angelfish, to replace him. Sex had always been a tender, sacred, monogamous thing. But that summer I learned it could be a slippery thing, a floppy thing. A wrinkly thing. A feel-nothing thing. A
quick-as-a-blink thing. A terribly boring thing. An I-only-wanted-your-thing thing. As a young woman freshly out in the world, I realized I possessed a power. Or at least I thought it was power, as I let myself be consumed, swallowed whole, by fish.
That summer, I never talked about the shooting, never talked about losing him. I got a job at a Chinese restaurant, trained to pack rice into take-out boxes for ten dollars an hour. My drink of choice was the bright blue AMF, short for Adios Mother Fucker. I said adios and the next morning my friend would tell me I’d cried uncontrollably in a way that scared her, said I’d been sitting on the edge of the bathtub, rocking back and forth, talking to myself, You’re okay, Chanel, you’re okay, it’s going to be okay. But I never remembered this. Drinking was disguised as partying, when I know now it had been a sad kind of surrendering. I could not process the new realities I’d been given, could no longer tolerate the feelings inside of me, and believed myself to be worth very little. I drank to turn off the light, a pocket of death, a toe dip in and out again, with the promise of awakening.
But I grew tired. I’d had enough of the self-loathing that came from tossing myself into this churning sea. When I finally landed a new job, I was introduced to stability. I loved my new office, the natural lighting, planes gliding by my window. I was given a work laptop thin as a piece of paper, so sophisticated, it meant I was worth something. I began staying in. I went on dates with myself, driving to Bernal Hill, lying on the curve of grass to read for hours, drawing gorillas at the zoo, going to movies alone. By the time the sullen, alcohol-sunken summer came to a close, I was beginning to believe that being an adult on my own was going to be okay, maybe.
Late one Friday night, I woke up to my friend calling. She was at a bar, a guy was bothering her, could I come be with her. I arrived, swatted the guy away. All of a sudden this wedding party poured in, groomsmen in gray suits and striped socks following a dancing bride. One came up to me. His name was Lucas.
He had grown up near Palo Alto, was now living in Philadelphia to begin his first year at Wharton business school. He was tall, lean, laughed easily, and was a few years older than me. He knew things I did not: Spanish, rugby, math, confidence. He had gone to middle school in Japan, knew the texture of alpacas in Peru, dipped his toe in every corner of this little blue earth. Palo Alto was just a speck! I learned he’d won a belly flop contest in high school, had frosted tips in fifth grade. He asked me out to dinner the night before his flight back to Philly.
A few months after we started dating, I’d just woken from a nap when he said, I love you, out of the blue, as naturally as if he were to tell me, It’s raining outside. It had been an uneventful afternoon, we’d gotten milk tea and egg custard tarts in Chinatown, he bought me a turquoise ring from a sidewalk vendor, and I wondered when, on this ordinary day, he had realized it. I smiled, but told him he was nuts. He said love like it was an exciting thing, when I knew it could be terribly painful. But Lucas did not seem to mind, he was coolheaded, patient, and I realized he was not just another fish.
In December 2014, he’d asked me to come visit him in Philadelphia. When I arrived, there were large white poster boards he’d bought me for drawing, a freezer stocked with ice cream. I still didn’t know what to call our relationship, only knew that when I met him, the background of his phone had been Machu Picchu, and now it was a photo of me, smiling while wearing his bulky brown ski jacket, a happy potato mesmerized by the snow.
In January 2015, my sister would come home. We would go out to a party, where I would be found on the ground unconscious. Fast forward a few weeks and here he was in Palo Alto, sitting at my desk working, the sun streaming through my blinds, while I lay in bed. Maybe the universe had loaned me his presence to show me love was possible again, and would now take him back, leaving me to deal with this new eruption. At twenty-two I was beginning to wonder if adulthood was just a series of endless losses. What benefits were there to growing up? How do you feel all these heavy things for the rest of your life? Looking at the beautiful day outside, listening to him typing, I did not want to tell him. I wanted to sit in my room, with the light pouring in, and enjoy the afternoon with the man at my desk. I wanted this moment, to take it and eat it and live in it for eternity. Yet I was about to ruin it.
Do you still have that voice mail? He stopped typing and looked at me. Why? he asked. I just wanted to hear it, I said. He continued looking at me. His phone plopped into my blankets. I wrapped myself up, covering my face as I listened to it for the first time. The transcripts record it as follows:
VOICEMAIL LEFT FROM CHANEL TO HER BOYFRIEND ON 1-18-15 @ 3:39:34AM [ET]: Hi. Mm, (inaudible) fucking (inaudible). Hi, (inaudible) your phone. But all m-males present (inaudible) or whatever, and I like you the m-most. (Inaudible.) So I (inaudible), uh-huh. Uh. (Laughs.) You’re, you’re a dingus, and you know that. Even though you work so hard, I’ll reward you in the summertime. If you work 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day out of 30, uh, how many hours a day, but however many hours you don’t work, or work you by, you know what. But I’m making funny stuff. I, I like you, I like so m-much, and I want to, I want to tell you that. (Laughs.) Okay, byeeee. I, I like you so much, more than you think of me. Okay, uh, bye, (inaudible).
The words were indistinguishable, my voice sliding like butter in a hot pan, dragging from one to the next. Anyone who spoke to me would immediately have known I was incapacitated. Plus the message held my truest truth; even when my mind was muddled I had wanted Lucas, had called to deliver a sloppy valentine. I thanked blackout Chanel. Then I felt the eyes: starting a message with fucking would be a mark on my character. The defense could use this to prove I was vulgar, profane. If I wanted to be a good victim, I’d have to clean up my language. So many new standards I’d need to uphold.
I looked up to Lucas observing me. What’s going on? he asked. I shrugged. Nothing, I said. It scared me the way he looked at me so intensely. I watched him adding it up in his head, clicking his laptop shut, climbing onto the bed. We sat inside a mass of silence. Were you raped?The way he said it out loud, the bluntness of it, shocked me, the words too strong. I shook my head. I don’t remember.
He laid back in the pillows, staring straight ahead, somewhere distant. What happened, he asked. Nothing, I said. That’s not nothing, he said. Well, two guys stopped it, I said. They think it was only fingering. I don’t remember, but the guy ran away. They caught him. I still didn’t know how to tell my story. I smiled. How creepy it must have looked, how badly I wanted to appear unfazed.
I knew it, he said, I knew it, I had a bad feeling, I should have stayed on the phone with you. You were alone, I should’ve stayed on the phone with you, I didn’t know what to do. I shook my head to say no, this was not the reason it happened. I wanted to dissolve, watching the news sink into him. He was quiet for a long time. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you, he said. It was impossible, but right then I let myself believe it. I put my head on his chest, and he continued looking straight ahead. Hours and hours we spent like this, folded over each other in the quiet afternoon, the sun burning outside without us, the whole day taken.
He could have left, decided it was too much. But he crawled right next to the pain, planted himself. No matter what happens, I’m here. Later he’d tell me he read the police reports on the plane ride back to Philadelphia, had become nauseous, unclasping his seat belt, sidestepping down the aisle, to vomit into the tiny sink basin. I thought of him in that little bathroom, its folding accordion door, the line of people waiting outside while he heaved the images of my body out of him. Loving someone is a painful thing.
I recently asked him about all of this, after writing out the chaotic timeline of how we met, all that followed. I said, How were you willing to date me, when all that stuff was going on? He said, Because, you. I pushed back, Yeah, but what about the assault, my drinking, all of it. He said, What about you as you?
In late February, I was called into
the police station before work. Detective Kim said the purpose was to dig into the relationship. I pulled into the parking lot, fog still hanging in the eucalyptus trees, and was led into the same small room with cream of mushroom–colored walls, the black recorder on the table. I had learned to be skeptical of this little thing. I was asked for Lucas’s full name, how long we’d been together, at what point it got more serious than just talking, FaceTiming, email, and texting, if we had an intimate relationship, if we were exclusive, where he was from, how we met, how often we communicated, when I had last seen him before the assault, if I’d seen him since. I was then asked what my feelings were for him.
My answer to all of these questions was Brock Turner fingered me while I was unconscious. But I thought hard, trying to specify our exact timeline; the frequency of visits, the exchange of I love yous, the meeting of my parents. We’d gone ice-skating in Union Square, did that prove we were a couple? I didn’t know. I was self-conscious that somehow some of these answers could be wrong or insufficient. What was important, what was not, whose job was it to judge? Until then I’d never contemplated how to present love as evidence. I’d never documented the precise pacing and development of our relationship. I had just been living it as it was unfolding. Living, as people do.
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