My space

Final Draft of Memroir

Chelsea Stuvel

Sarah Allen

Eng 319

11 November 2008

Statistics

“If one of you want to, you can sit with me,” I said to the girls sitting in the seat behind me.  The bus was cramped and the girls behind me were sitting three to a seat.  Everyone on the bus had a partner, except me.  The girls looked at me for a while and mumbled phrases like “Oh, it’s ok” and “We don’t want to bother you.”  They were trying to be nice about it but failed.  I had known these girls for over six years and it killed me to see them act this way, like I was some disease that couldn’t be in a ten-foot radius.  “Ok, just thought I would ask” I managed to squeak out while holding back the tears.  I sat forward in my seat for the whole ride, looking out the window, and listening to my friends behind me giggle and talk about boy issues.  Not once did they talk to me till we reached the ball field and even then they would just ask me questions like “Have you seen my glove?” or “Are you hitting next?”

            I played an ok game that day despite my friends and the fact that my parents didn’t come watch.  It seemed there was no way of escaping what happened.  I would go to school and walk the halls alone, except for the rare occurrences when someone who didn’t know would walk with me.  Then I would go home, and shut my door hoping that no one would open it and see me crying; praying that my mother would not come in and refer to me as a slut or worse act as if I didn’t exist.  For the first time in my life, I felt like I wanted to die. 

            The week after it happened, I didn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep in certain positions because I would get flashbacks of that night.  No one noticed my appetite; I wasn’t the type of girl to just stop eating therefore no one worried about it, I just wasn’t hungry anymore.  Plus no one knew yet, so they just thought I was tired and in a slump.  Everything changed about three days after the day when a friend told everyone, the softball team, their family, and my mother.  I never understood why everyone pushed me away but they did.  This is my story:

            It was sometime early August between my sophomore and junior year in high school, and a friend of mine, Amanda, was having a huge party.  I had the whole evening planned out, I was going to go to a party with some work friends and then go over to Amanda’s.  When I went to the work party I misunderstood how much alcohol content was in HotDamn and drank a little too much.  Along with that the friend that I had driven to the party had to leave and hour and a half earlier than planned.  She drove me to my car, which we had parked in a Walgreens parking lot, and sped home.  I contemplated for a while what I should do, I didn’t want to drive because I HATE drinking and driving, but I didn’t feel like I could stay in the Walgreens parking lot and wait for a police officer to randomly stroll by and find me.  Therefore being young and very reckless I got into my car and drove to Amanda’s house.  I was very intoxicated and tried to take every back road that I could find.  For the last five minutes of my drive I balled on the phone to a friend named Courtney telling her I would never drink and drive again. 

            Of coarse all those emotions were gone once I got to the party, my impaired judgment took over and I thought it would be fun to drink more.  I went up to the first group of people, who happened to be all girls, and asked if they had anything to drink, they had some Jaeger, which I happily took two large swigs from.  After drinking I looked at the girls who didn’t seem very happy at the fact that I had just randomly ask for a small swig and was on my way to drinking half the bottle.  I quickly left their group and went to the next, which happened to be all guys.  I asked them what they were drinking which ended up being some kind of rum, which they gladly handed to me.  I did the same to their bottle as the previous.  I wandered around for the rest of the night doing the same routine. 

Halfway though the night I blacked out, I felt as if I was sleeping but other people had different stories.  All I know is I woke up puking in the bathroom with a guy named Richard holding my hair.  I stopped puking and had enough breath to ask Richard what had happened and how I got to the bathroom.  He, in turn, told me the story of how he watched me run around and then I announced to the room I was going to puke.  Ends up that I blacked out for about an hour and till this day I have no idea what happened. 

 I finished my puke-o-rama and decided it was a good time to go to bed.  I went upstairs, found a bed and started getting ready to sleep.  While doing so, I decided that I didn’t feel comfortable sleeping in a room alone in a house I had never been in, so I went downstairs and attempted to have a girlfriend of mine, Christina, sleep in the same room as me.  She shrugged me off and told Dustin, a good guy from school, to go with me.  I felt comfortable with Dustin; I knew he was a good guy and that I could trust him.  So we went upstairs and within the first ten minutes Dustin was out cold.  Before I went to bed I finished the water that a guy named Eric had gotten me and started to fall asleep.  I was at the between state of being asleep and awake, I understood what was going on and was almost sleeping when I heard the door to the bedroom open.  I wanted to get up and see who it was but I couldn’t move, my whole body felt lifeless.  The guy sat next to me on the bed, I was sleeping on my stomach so I wasn’t facing him.  He went through his movements slowly as if not to wake Dustin, who I could hear lightly snoring next to me.  I could feel the covers being lifted off of me and put gently next to Dustin.  The guy seemed to hesitate a bit before grabbing my shorts and underwear off and setting them on the floor next to my night bag. He played for a while before getting to “business”.  Tears rolled down my face the whole time, I wanted Dustin to wake up and see what was happening, I wanted to call out and scream but I couldn’t even lift a finger.  “Eric! Where are you?” I heard someone say from the other room.  He stopped, listened for his name again and threw the covers over me like I was a piece of evidence that needed to be hidden.  Eric left for about an hour. 

Within that hour I managed to crawl off the bed, put some jeans on, and dry heave in the bathroom.  I don’t know why but I crawled back into bed and laid there.  Eric came in at the end of my hour, I laid very still, but this time out of fear.  He pulled the blankets off of me and noticed my jeans; he stood there for a while till he finally just walked out of the room.  I slowly lifted my head half expecting him to appear behind me.  I got up close and locked the door, and laid in bed for the rest of the night listening to Dustin snore next to me.

            By the time nine o’ clock rolled around there was only three people left at the house, Amanda, Courtney, and Me.  They sat in the living room discussing everything that had happened that night as I listened.  After rehashing everything they looked at me and asked me what was wrong.  I asked them where Eric was last night and Amanda said that both of them hung out in her bedroom.  Amanda had, had a big crush on Eric for a while.  She asked me why I asked and I told both of them what had happened and how I was sure it was Eric.  Amanda yelled at me for accusing her crush and told me I was trying to steal him.  Courtney said that I must have really been out of it last night and that it was probably Dustin, if anybody.  Those words “probably Dustin, if anybody” made everything seem so casual as if it didn’t matter.  These girls made my experience seem like nothing.

            So many things went through my head that day.  No one believed me, and no one could act as a witness.  I drove home and took a shower and thought about how even if I would report something like this, it would never hold up in court.  So I washed all the evidence, leaving nothing behind.  I felt like I could make it disappear if everything was clean.  I didn’t eat and hardly slept.  I was able to tell one person about it but not because I wanted to, because I needed help getting Plan B.  I was not yet eighteen and could not get it myself.  Two days after telling her, she told everyone what had happened and my life was then turned upside down.  My mother stopped talking to me and when I would go to a game or to hang out with people my mother would say things like “No sex” or “Don’t go whoring around because I don’t know if I will be able to get you Plan B again”.

            I look back on this event of my life and see it as a building block to where I am today.  I know it is hard to believe but through everything I have managed to take that night and make it positive.  When people turned away from me I learned to rely on myself and look inward, and my mother referring to me as a slut allowed me to have a strong backbone to life.  Overall, I have been able to become a stronger more independent woman because of Eric.  I’m not going to say it was easy because my life was a dark place for a few years but I have managed to come out of everything all right and do not regret anything.  People ask me if I had the opportunity to go back in time and change what happened what would I do.  I simply tell them I would not change anything.  I know that’s hard to believe but the way I look at it is without that event I wouldn’t be the person I am today and I like the person I am and have become.  In my mind regretting that event is regretting the person I am today, and I don’t.  I have had my hard times, especially when it comes to relationships.  Most guys become uninterested in me because they feel like I have “too much to deal with” or they see me as broken.  I am the furthest from broken and I hate being seen that way.  I want to be seen for the progress that I have made in my life and not seen as a mirror of that night.  I want to be able to freely talk about what happened and not be ashamed, or thought of as a slut.  It seems that when a girl says that she has been raped people look at her as make it seem like she asked for it but who asks for something like that? 

            All of my relationships with people have changed since that night.  My mother and I talk but I have really distanced myself from her, it seems that she never fully recovered from the “news”.  The girls on the bus used to be my friends but after I graduated I ended up distancing away from all but one of the girls.  I look back on things and see that they were my “fake” friends.  My relationship with guys has, and probably always will be, a little rocky; it’s always hard to tell who I can tell and who I can’t.  Till this day my father does not know which I think is better because I think by telling him I would just be opening a can of worms.  Overall, through this experience I have come to understand what it is like to take something bad and turn it around.  I been able to stand up and say, “I’m a statistic and I’m still living.”