a kinda serious one

This is not a post about PDG.  It is also not meant to change minds, cast blame, remove responsibility or simplify a complex and awful crime that happens far too often.  It is just what's on my mind, so I'm sharing it where I share such thoughts...

One Sunday night in 8th grade my parents told me they needed to talk to me.  They had on their serious faces and hushed voices.  I immediately felt guilty, figuring I had done something wrong.

"Sometimes," my mom began, looking to my dad for support, "bad things happen to good people.  And when they do, it's up to us to be their friends."

It should say something that I can still quote this moment from fifteen years ago.  I remember that night very vividly.  I remember my mother explaining to me, as my father sat silently (and what I can only imagine as uncomfortably) by, telling me how the older sister of my best friend at the time had been raped at a party that weekend, and how by the next morning she was sure the rest of my classmates would begin to learn about it.

The details aren't important.  Ok, they are important.  They are unforgettable and life-changing to the people directly involved. I guess I mean that, in retrospect, the details didn't change what I needed to do.  My parents didn't speak with judgment.  They didn't elaborate on the drinking.  They didn't know what all took place at the party or what "kind" of rape it had been.  They didn't know who believed her and who didn't. In order to be good friends they didn't need to know, and neither did I.

My parents only told me what happened at all because they understood the world, especially the world of a smallish town and adolescent gossips, far better than I could just yet.  They told me so that when I saw my friend, I wouldn't have to say anything.  So I didn't.  Turns out, that was the best thing to do.

The reactions were immediate.  I went to a private school, twenty eighth-graders total, many of which would move on to the same 900 student high school where both the girl and the two boys whom she accused currently attended.  By Wednesday my friend seemed outside herself.  An already angst-filled, poetic spirit who wore her heart on her sleeve with a screw-you-world, Alanis Morissette "One Hand in My Pocket" attitude, she worried me that the pressure on her sister might make her break.  We skipped science class to sit outside by the main office as she finally told me all about it.

She told me what her sister had told her about the night - things I later allowed myself to forget.  She told me how her sister's friends were taking sides.  How they blamed her and the alcohol for what had happened.  Or said it hadn't ever happened.  Or that she'd wanted it.

As the weeks passed and court dates came and went, she shared how her driveway had been vandalized with the word "slut" painted in huge letters across it. I'd seen it.  You couldn't miss it.  She told me of how alone and vulnerable her sister felt for having admitted what happened.  How everyone at school seemed to wish she hadn't said anything.  We imagined how she must've wished she hadn't had reason to say anything.

Eventually sentences came through. Still, no restraining order, juvenile servitude, or removal of graduation attendance privileges would undo that one night.

I learned a lot about friendship that year.  Even now, despite having drifted apart years ago, I think of her incredibly often.  When I drive past her old house, I flash back to the vandalism as frequently as I remember sleepovers and birthday parties.  I wonder if she knows how much I wanted to take that pain away from her and her family. How helpless I felt to undo what two careless boys had done. I still get angry, practically rage-filled, when I think about the whole situation.  I don't know if I knew anger like that, or mistrust like that, before I came that close to seeing what two "promising young men" could do to their "friend." And I was just an outsider - just the friend of the sister.

I wish I could say that this is the only example where I have known someone during the time or after they were violated.  That is sadly just not the truth. And though the women I know are strong and fierce and happy now, there is no way to erase the past.

I don't have answers.  I don't have some perfect insight or broad resolutions.  I just know that right now, as the nation discusses the rape of one girl, in one town, I can't help but think of just how insidious that crime is.  Just how awful.  Just how disgustingly vile.  And just how many people it can affect for far longer than the judge may proclaim.