“I told her not to take a drink from anyone. I told her not to be alone with anyone, that we needed to stick together. I told her that these guys were older, that she needed to be careful, and keep her wits about her because no one even knew where we were. I thought that was enough. I thought I was taking care of her. It wasn’t enough. Not even close.” She barked out a sharp laugh and let her head fall forward like she was hanging from a broken marionette string. Unable to resist the urge, I pulled her into my chest and silently urged her to get the rest of the story out, to let that storm howl and rage until it passed.
“She started smoking pot as soon as we got in the door. She was high, had too much to drink, and before I knew it she had disappeared somewhere in the house with a couple of the guys at the party. Her drink was drugged and when I finally found her, she was naked, passed out, and there was no doubt that she had been raped. I wanted to call the police and an ambulance. I needed help, but the guy that invited me to the party took my phone and told me there was no way I was going to narc on his friends. I was so mad and I was terrified for Autumn. She was out of it, but I knew when she woke up, she was going to be in a bad way. She wasn’t a party girl, she wasn’t like me.” Avett hiccupped on a strangled little sob and I felt her hands fist into the sides of my T-shirt as she started to shake. “I took a swing at the guy, never once thinking that he would swing back. He clobbered me. I remember being stunned at how badly it hurt, and I can still summon up how it tasted when my own blood was filling my mouth. I’d never been hit before, and even with the way I liked to go balls to the wall, I’d never felt unsafe until that moment. I couldn’t protect my friend, and I couldn’t protect myself.”
I tightened my hold on her, imagining what kind of animal could possibly attack her when she was so small and vulnerable. It made me feel all kinds of defensive and territorial.
“The guy told me to keep my mouth shut or I would end up just like Autumn and then he hit me again. At some point, Autumn started to come around and puked all over the room they had her in. She was disoriented, scared, and getting sick every few minutes. I thought she was going to die right then and there.”
She took a shuddering breath and tilted her head back so she could look at me. “She begged me to get her out of there, to take her home. I tried to tell her that we needed to go to the police, that we had to have a doctor look her over, but she kept crying and telling me that after everything she had done for me, I had to do this for her. She wanted to go home, so against my better judgment I helped her up and out of the house, and took her home. The only reason the guy that took my phone let us go was because it was obvious how scared she was. He knew she wasn’t going to talk and he knew I had a pretty terrible reputation, so if I tried to cause trouble it would get shut down pretty easily.”
Her next words were bit out and full of so much self-loathing and disgust that I had no problem figuring out why this young woman thought she deserved the worst the world had to offer her. “I did nothing. My best friend, my only real friend, was violated, drugged, taken advantage of at a party I made her go to, and I did nothing to make that right.”
She pulled away from me and started pacing in a tight pattern again. “I bugged her for a few days to report the attack, but she kept shutting me down. I told her she needed to talk to someone, to tell her parents what happened at the very least. She pretended to listen, pretended like everything was okay, but she started to drift away. She wouldn’t take my calls. She wouldn’t look at me in the hallway. She wouldn’t sit next to me in the classes we shared. She acted like I didn’t exist anymore and what was even scarier is she acted like she didn’t exist anymore. She was so withdrawn and remote it was like she wasn’t even there. I knew we had no business being at that party and I had no business leaving her to fend for herself once we were there. I knew it wasn’t her scene. What happened to her was my fault because she wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been so hell-bent on doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do, so I figured the best thing I could do was let her hate me. It was pretty easy to do, since I was busy hating myself. I was miserable and I figured she had to feel a million times worse because after a few weeks I heard a rumor that she was pregnant.”
She put a hand to her chest and bent over at the waist like she was having trouble breathing. She shifted so that her hands were on her knees and she was looking at the floor between her feet.
“I confronted her, asked her about the baby, and when she admitted that she was a couple months along, I told her that she had to tell her parents what had happened. I knew she couldn’t go through a pregnancy alone and she had completely shut me out. She told me she didn’t plan on keeping the baby, that no one was ever going to know what she had been through. She never once said it was my fault, but I knew. I knew, deep down, that it should’ve been me. I should’ve been the one going through what she was going through. I was the one that liked to party. I was the one that liked boys that were no good. I was the one that should be suffering and that should have no future, not her.” She sucked in a wheezing breath and righted herself.
I could see the fact that Avett believed the punishment she had assigned herself for a crime she didn’t commit was justified, that she honestly believed her story started and ended with what happened to her friend and her inability to do anything about it the night it happened and the carnage afterwards. That was a heavy burden for any soul to bear and was definitely too much weight for a young and wild soul to stand up under.