Lacy Crawford - Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

One evening around eleven oclock, a young man called a girl on the phone. This was a few decades ago, and they were students at a boarding school, so he called the pay phone in her dorm from the pay phone in his. Someone answered and pounded up three flights of stairs to knock on the girls door. She was not expecting the call. He was a seniora grade ahead, but a couple of years olderand he was upset. Crying, she thought, but it was hard to tell, because she barely knew him. He said something about his mom, swallowing his words. He wanted the girls help. Please.

She knew the senior because she had helped his friends in math class. Hed joked in the hall to her once that maybe she could help him sometime. It had been a surprise that hed sent his attention her way, and this phone call was a bigger surprise. Something must have happened, she reasoned. Something very bad.

She had no roommate that year and lived across campus from her friends (an unfortunate turn of the school housing lottery). Her parents were a thousand miles west. It will tell you something about her naivete, and maybe her character, that to her the strange specificity of the seniors requestfor her help, and no one elsesis what made his summons feel important, and true.

School rules forbade leaving the dorm at that hour, but she knew, as they all did, how to let the back door close without rattling the latch. She skirted pools of lamplight where campus paths crossed. His room was in shadow. He pulled her up through the window. She landed, in his hands, on a mattress, and she felt and then dismissed surprisebeds could sit beneath windows, of course, there was nothing wrong with that.

His roommate was on the bed too. She didnt know the roommate at all.

Neither of them had shirts on. Neither of them, she saw, as her eyes adjusted, had pants on.

She said, Whats wrong?

They shushed her and gestured toward the wall. Each student dormitory incorporated at least one faculty apartment, where the head of the dorm lived, sometimes with a family. Mr. B.s apartment was right there, they warned. Her voice through the wall would bring him in, blazing.

He would catch her (she realized) after hours in a male dorm with two undressed seniors on a bed.

Suspension. Shame. Her parents shame. (College!)

There was a moment while she waited for the one who had called to tell her how she could help him. He pressed her down. When his roommate did this too, she understood that she could not lift these men and would have to purchase her release a different way.

Four hands on her, she said, Just dont have sex with me.

Instead they took turns laying their hips across her face. Their cocks penetrated her throat past the pharynx and poked the soft back of her esophagus, so she had to concentrate to breathe. The repeated laryngeal spasms in her throatthe gag reflexcaused her throat to narrow and grip their dicks rhythmically.

Someone unbuttoned her jeans and stuck his fingers inside her.

When they were finished, she climbed out the window and walked back to her own dorm, keeping to campus roads this time. There were two security guards who patrolled the grounds in a white Jeep. The kids called them Murph and Sarge, and they saw everything. But they did not see her.

She found the door as shed left it, gently ajar.

After a long shower, she slept.

This happened in the fall of my junior year in high school, when I was, as we saidusing the English termsa fifth former at St. Pauls School in Concord, New Hampshire. I have told this story, or some version of it, dozens of times since then. I have told it to parents and friends and therapists and boyfriends and lawyers and strangers. I have been recorded telling it to detectives. I have written it in fictionalized form, work that took years and went nowhere. I have gone years in new cities not telling it at all.

Its not a remarkable story.

In fact, its ordinary. A sexual assault at a New England boarding school. (A boarding school! I was assaulted in privilege; I have survived in privilege.) What interests me is not what happened. I remember. I have always remembered.

What interests me is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power.

I like to imagine there was a moment, maybe immediately afterward, when my sneakers hit the sandy soil beneath their window and I was free to go, when I might have grabbed the incident by the tail and whipped it around to face me so I could see exactly what was in its eyes.

I had a therapist once, in my early twenties, who suggested that I might describe the event to her and then never tell it again, positing a future in which I would have no use for it, which is a way of saying that the assault would have no use for me. She was talking about moving on. I was still mired in the search for remedy.

A note on terms: it took a very long time to find the right name for what happened to me. I was too stunned to think rape when I pleaded with them not to have sex with me, though rape, in the traditional sense, was precisely what I meant to avoid. I had been raised to believe that by every metric, the most serious thing a girl could do was have a penis in her vagina. Not even Mary the mother of Jesus had done that. Certainly I had not. It had not occurred to me what else these two boys might do.