Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 12: Then

I woke up drenched in shame. The bedsheets clung to my skin and a dense pain throbbed between my eyes.

As my brain flickered into consciousness, it retrieved sharp fragments of memory: The thick, white bath towel billowing down onto my body in the tub. The knees of Marcus's jeans pressed into my vomit. The pity in his eyes.

But nothing from before that.

I couldn't understand how I'd forgotten most of the night in the first place. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, even when I was drinking heavily most weekends in college. Besides, I was pretty sure I hadn't indulged in more than a couple of glasses of wine, at most.

Daisy, curled snugly in her bed at the foot of the mirror, gazed at me with concern as if she could sense I'd been wounded.

Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed it back.

The mattress shifted and I cringed. Owen was waking. He scooted up behind me and kissed the back of my neck just below my ear.

"Good morning, Babe," he murmured. His touch was tender but it stung my raw skin.

My voice came out coated in a dirty film. "Morning.

Someone's feeling better, huh?" More bile. I swallowed hard.

Owen sighed contentedly. "Actually, yeah. Much better.

Staying in last night was a good decision." Then he fell silent. I sensed him pull back from my body. He was noticing for the first time the scrapes along my arms, the abrasions on my back.

The question I was dreading came like a brick to the back of my head: "Julie... what happened to you?"

Here is what I wanted to do: 1) Tell Owen everything I could remember and let him comfort me, 2) march over to the Dolans' house and demand that Marcus explain to us what he knew, 3) report the crime, and 4) seek justice, making sure whoever did this to me could never hurt anyone else.

Here is what I did instead: I told Owen that I had blacked out drunk, that I'd tried to walk home in the dark but had tripped and fallen down – "I told you it's dangerous to walk through those woods at night, Babe!" – and that I'd taken a shower at our house, in our own bathroom, before coming to bed.

I was surprised when Owen believed my fabricated story about falling down in the woods. Couldn't he tell there was something terribly wrong? Didn't I look different to him, somehow? In a crevice of my heart that I wasn't proud of, I resented him for not following up with more questions, for not sensing that there was more to the events of last night than what I was sharing with him.

But even more surprising than Owen's willingness to believe me was the ease with which the lie came out of my mouth. I knew I had to provide him with some explanation for why I was covered in scrapes and bruises. And I didn't know what had happened.

One thing was for certain: I didn't want what Marcus had told me to be true. I didn't want any of it to be true. Not waking up in the Dolans' bathtub naked, not finding my soggy, bloodied clothes in their sink, not vomiting wine onto their bathroom floor.

Not whatever happened to me before Marcus found me outside.

I didn't want it to be true for me, and I didn't want it to be true for Owen, either. As soon as it was out there in the world between us, I would never be able to put it back. It would be inescapably, devastatingly true for both of us.

And in a strange way, it felt like by not saying it out loud, I could keep it from becoming real for him. Like I could protect him.

But beneath my anxiety about breaking his heart, I wanted to tell Owen about the night of the party. At least the details I could remember. I wanted to share the most horrible feelings with him that I couldn't even name yet. I wanted to let him comfort me, the way he had at the rest stop on the night we'd met.

My other near-death experience.

In the days that followed the Dolans' party, I attempted to tell Owen what had happened several times.

But every time there was an opening, a break in conversation or a mention of one of the Dolans, I couldn't force my mouth to form the words it wanted to say. Maybe the right words didn't even exist.

Then it was Christmas, and I couldn't tell him on Christmas. That would ruin the holiday forever.

As the new year began, I felt certain that if I told him it would be too late. He'd wonder why I hadn't told him sooner.

Why hadn't I told him sooner? Of course I should have.

I should have woken Owen up that night, sick or not, as soon as Marcus dropped me off at home. I should have let the words pour out of me, like they always used to around Owen.

He would have listened. He would have understood. I knew he would have. But what about now? Would he still understand after all this time?

What if he assumed the wrong thing about why I didn't tell him right away? He might think that I didn't love him enough to confide in him.

And that wasn't it at all.

When it came down to it, I was afraid of how it would be after I told him. I was terrified that once he knew I'd been raped, Owen might not see me as his Juju Bear anymore. He wouldn't mean for it to happen, but over time he might start to look at me differently, like people look at victims of sexual crimes.

I remembered the way peopled had looked at my boarding school classmate, Amanda Lee, the only other person I knew about who'd been raped.

At first, no one believed her that it had even happened. She'd reported it and everything, but the rape kit she'd gotten at the hospital was never tested. Her case had never even gone to trial.

When Amanda found out that she was pregnant and it was impossible to deny some kind of intercourse had occurred, people said well, even if she was raped, she must have been asking for it. She'd had it coming.

It wasn't just kids in the hallways saying that, either. Teachers said it. So did my parents, when they heard about it at a school fundraiser.

Early into the pregnancy, Amanda had miscarried on her way back to the dorm from field hockey practice. She'd stayed at home with her parents for a week to recover. But the kid who'd raped her was in our trigonometry class that year and when she came back to school, he still sat behind her.

Eventually, she'd transferred to a different boarding school and I'd lost track of her. But through my observant teenage eyes, I'd watched her do everything she was supposed to do, and I'd watched everyone – school administrators, the police, the legal system, her parents – let her down.

What if Owen let me down?

With each passing hour, I became more and more desperate. Inevitably, I would have to share this huge, terrible thing with my husband. Keeping it a secret from him would destroy our marriage, and that was the opposite of what I wanted to do. But I couldn't shake the fear that once I told him, he'd never see me the same way again.