If the first violation of the boys who assaulted me was the way they made me feel erased, it was exactly this injury that the school repeated, and magnified, when it created its own story of the assault. This time the erasure was committed by men whose power over me was socially conferred rather than physically wielded, by men who—some of them—had never even been in a room with me. They still never have.
But I knew none of this then. The school never said anything to me. They did, however, apparently find reason to enlighten my schoolmates about one thing. Before we all left campus that spring, the vice rector sat down with members of the boys’ varsity lacrosse team and told them that he didn’t want to ask any questions, but if any of them had ever been intimate with Lacy Crawford, he should go to the infirmary right away to get checked out.
I have been told, variously, that this happened on the lacrosse field and in a teacher’s apartment. Where was I, at that moment? Certainly not at the infirmary. I still thought my throat hurt because I was a bad person who had done a terrible thing.
Even once I found out a few months later about the vice rector’s bit of patriarchal counsel to his boys, I did not do the math to arrive at the realization made by a detective investigating the school more than twenty-five years after the fact:
“So the students knew about the herpes before you did.”
Yes, they did.
Back in Lake Forest in early June, Mom took me to see my pediatrician. This doctor was new to the practice, and a woman. I was desperately grateful on both counts. Mom had called to set up the appointment, causing a note to be added to my file before I visited the office: “Child sexually assaulted by two boys last October. Child confessed this to mother last week.” The verb “confessed” is useful, nestled in the pages of this caring clinician—not that she thought I was guilty, but that she anticipated the guilt I was feeling.
There was, by this time, a river of shame inside me. It curved and snaked and fed all manner of dark snapping certainties about who I was and what would happen to me. I considered what had occurred in that room to be my fault, and afterward I had gone and done what I’d done. It was clear what sort of girl I was. And if this conversation proceeded, I would be forced to say so.
Dr. Kerrow asked me to tell her exactly what had happened. She wrote it all down, and my pediatrician’s office saved this report beyond the usual threshold of a patient’s reaching the age of twenty-seven. Every time I read it I remember: Yes, they did tell me, after they had both ejaculated into my mouth, that it was “your turn now.” Yes, they did warn me not to leave before they assaulted me, and said I would get caught if I tried. Yes, Rick did hold me down on top of Taz’s cock. All of that.
Then these details disappear again. For decades I forget them, if forget is the right word for the white blast of nothing the mind deploys like an air bag at the memory’s approach. I have wondered if I’m able to lose these particulars again and again because I know they’re written down, so I don’t have to take care of them—but this is a curious piece of anthropomorphism. In fact, I murdered details by the thousand that spring and summer. I don’t remember, for example, how it felt to greet my mother when I came home. I don’t remember the look on my father’s face. What I do remember is sometimes difficult to categorize—why this bit and not that one?—such as the decorations in our kitchen when I heard my mother speak the boys’ names. I don’t remember who she was talking to. I do remember we had a nature calendar and an old New Yorker cartoon about “Mommy needing to go to seminary now.”
I remember the kindness of Dr. Kerrow, who held my chin delicately in her fingers and said, “Hang on tight, this is going to hurt.” She did what was called a “blind swab”—she couldn’t see far enough down my throat to find anything worth scrubbing with a cotton bud, so she just dug around. “Just bear with me.”
I didn’t tell her about being fingered so she wouldn’t insist on examining me there.
I still had not realized that I had contracted any diseases. Over and over, I’d cataloged what I knew. I still had the textbook from fourth-form health class because I saved all of my books. Herpes was blisters on the penis or vagina, and I did not have that. Gonorrhea and chlamydia gave you discharge. Syphilis was for drug users and nineteenth-century composers. I knew the word chancre. I thought AIDS would have killed me by now. None of it made sense. I just submitted, as I had before, and was grateful to the doctor for saying it would hurt. Because it did.
I gagged and retched. She had the nurse fetch me a cup of water. Results would take about a week, and she would call as soon as she had them. She’d send me for blood work, which was for HIV and syphilis, but I didn’t know this.
Then she turned to me, and there was a new force in her voice. “I am going to have to report this to the State of New Hampshire.”
I pictured the state itself, narrow, stacked like a book on a shelf alongside Vermont. “What?”
“To the police. I am mandated by law to report this assault to the police.”
As I remember it, this was the first time I’d heard the word assault. It did not contain the events I remembered. It seemed
