Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  By the time I got to high school, the seven to ten miles I ran every day to train for cross-country and track had taken care of whatever extra puppy fat I was carrying. And I had that cobalt Mustang. It didn’t take long before I was finding myself invited to parties, the kind where there were no parents but lots of booze. The kinds of boys I had never dreamed would ever pay attention to me were showing off in front of me, teasing me, flirting, asking for my number.

  The kids who hung out on Prep Hill were at the absolute top of the pecking order. And they wanted me.

  I was completely besotted with my newfound social status and prepared to do anything I had to in order to fit in. I craved attention, and, like many sixteen-year-olds, I wasn’t particularly good at differentiating between the good and the bad kinds of attention. Because I’d spent so much time wrapped up in geeky pursuits like yearbook, I was probably a little naïve, too.

  It was precisely because I’d always been such a good kid that my parents felt okay about giving me a lot of freedom. I’d never gotten into serious trouble. The worst thing I’d ever tried to do was to sneak backstage at an NSYNC concert. By nature, my parents are careful, even to the point of being a little overprotective, and they checked up on me regularly. But until that summer between sophomore and junior years, I was always where I’d told them I’d be—usually practicing dance moves with my friends in their bedrooms, hanging out and listening to music in our backyard, or watching movies in the den. So they had no reason not to trust me.

  Their own history had quite a bit to do with it, too. My dad had been popular in high school. He’d done his share of partying, and he knew how compelling it could be to hang out with the cool kids. My mom, on the other hand, had been a complete nerd, right up until her senior year. She didn’t drink, and she’d never done an illegal drug in her life. She’d gone from ugly duckling to swan in her senior year, but in her heart she still had the practical, sensible attitude of that ugly duckling. So she was completely unprepared for the transformation I went through.

  What surprises me now is how quickly my life changed sophomore year. I got the Mustang in January. At the time, I didn’t drink, but that soon changed. I didn’t smoke pot, either, until the most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen in my life passed me a joint. At the very first unchaperoned house party I attended, two things happened: I got drunk for the first time, and I lost my virginity. I was growing up on overdrive, and I quickly gained a reputation as a party girl.

  During the spring of my sophomore year, I met a cocky, wealthy skateboarder called Seth, who introduced me to his friend Brian. Brian was great-looking and known for his gentleness and for being a good guy. I was smitten. We started seeing each other more often, and Brian became my first real boyfriend.

  That summer, our family received a terrible shock. My beloved grandpa died, suddenly and without warning. We were in the car on our way to see him when we got the call. He was scheduled to leave that morning for a house he’d bought in Oregon, where he could relax and fish his days away, and we were headed over to send him off with a big celebratory brunch. Then my dad’s cell phone rang: “He’s not moving.” In the time it took us to finish the drive to their house, it was official. My grandpa was dead.

  I took it hard. The two of us had always been deeply connected. He had loved to announce loudly in public that I was his favorite granddaughter. Then he’d throw me a wink: We both knew that I was the only female grandkid. Now, Phil Kaplan was not an easy man. He’d grown up in Brooklyn, the son of Austrian Jews who had fled to North America, so poor that when he was a baby, he slept in a dresser drawer. He’d worked hard to pull himself out of poverty and to make a life for himself, and you don’t do that without being smart and tough. So my grandpa didn’t have a lot of patience for weakness or stupidity, or a lot of tact when he was confronting it, but he had a giant soft spot for one person, and that was me. The night he died, I went out with my friends and got drunk.

  Two weeks after his death, it was the Fourth of July. A group of my best girlfriends and I went out to Seth’s dad’s beach house. It was the craziest party I’d ever been to, with lots of pot and alcohol. Brian was there, and he introduced me to a new guy, Jared, a friend of Seth’s. I disliked him immediately. When he looked at me, the hackles rose on the back of my neck.

  The next night, Seth, Brian, and Jared invited me and my girlfriends to come back to the beach house for another party. At first I said no, because Adriana had been grounded and couldn’t go. I didn’t want to stay home, but I’d already told my parents I was staying at Adriana’s, and her mom wouldn’t let me sleep over. I had nowhere else to go.

  Right from the beginning, I had a bad feeling about heading out there. After I’d said I’d go, I got so sick to my stomach that I threw up at work. (I now believe this was God warning me not to go.) But, despite my misgivings, I decided to drive out to the beach house by myself.

  It would prove to be the worst decision I’d ever made.

  I want to be very clear here: There’s absolutely no excuse for sexual misconduct. If I have my way, everyone who reads this book will have a conversation with the young men in their lives to help them to understand the clear boundaries between right and wrong, the power of the bystander, and the importance of clear, sober, enthusiastic consent before any sexual contact takes place.

  That’s what I’d encourage you to tell your sons, and it’s what I’ll tell mine, if I ever have them.

  That’s what I’ll tell my daughters, too, if I ever have them. But I won’t stop there.

  In an ideal world, nobody would have to guarantee our safety, but we don’t live in an ideal world. In fact, sexual assault and abuse happen all the time. Every year in America, there are more than two hundred thousand sexual assaults, which translates roughly to one every two minutes. Of those, 44 percent of victims are—as I was—under the age of eighteen. And these numbers are highly conservative. According to a 2013 report by the National Research Council, there is increasing reason to suspect that cases of rape and sexual assault are dramatically undercounted.

  The only way we will stop rape is if men stop raping. But I believe there are things that women can do to minimize the risks we take. I only wish I’d realized that at sixteen. I should not have gone out to that beach house by myself. Period, end of story. Should I have been able to without worrying that I would be raped? Of course. But it was not safe. I did it because my boyfriend was there and because I thought the other boys there were my friends.

  Obviously, I thought wrong.

  The morning I woke up in my car outside Brian’s house, I took a long shower at Adriana’s, hoping it would clear my head, but I was still sick as a dog when I got out. I couldn’t seem to get my brain straight. The lump on my head had become truly alarming and had grown to the size of an egg, and no amount of Tylenol would make it stop pulsing with pain. I fell into Adriana’s bed and passed out for another three hours. This was no ordinary hangover; I could barely open my eyes, and I couldn’t remember anything. Later, those symptoms would lead me to believe that I might have been drugged. But at the time, I had no idea what was wrong with me.

  When I awoke, Adriana’s mom was there—and she was furious.

  She was almost a second mom to me, and I found myself squirming under her scrutiny. She had a million questions: Why was I there? Why was I sleeping in the middle of the afternoon? What had happened to my head? Even without matted vomit in my hair, I still looked incredibly rough. Adriana’s mom accused me of partying all night and then using her home to get cleaned up before going home. “This isn’t a hotel,” she informed me, in no uncertain terms.

  It was like I’d woken up in a Twilight Zone episode. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and I felt muzzy and confused. Adriana’s mom’s questions were making me panic; I didn’t have any answers for her. The worst part was that Adriana—my best friend, my closest ally, my sister—still didn’t believe that anything had happened to me.

  I got scared that
Adriana’s mom would call my parents, who thought I’d gone to Six Flags, so I convinced Adriana to leave the house with me. Our friend Melaney lived about four houses down, so we went there.

  Melaney opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “Oh my God. What happened to you? What on earth did you do last night?”

  I gave her the same answer I’d given Brian’s mom and Adriana: “I don’t remember.” I told her I’d driven down to Seth’s beach house the night before. I’d had a beer, one hit of weed, and remembered sitting on the couch and talking to Seth when Jared made me a drink. The next thing I remembered was waking up in my car around the corner from Brian’s house. I told her about my bra falling out of my jeans when I went to take a shower, about the blood, and about Jared’s disturbing comment to me on the phone.

  Unlike Adriana, Melaney didn’t try to tell me I was crazy. She didn’t try to convince me that the guys we knew couldn’t have done something so heinous. I could see right away that she’d come to the same conclusion I had: Something had happened, and it hadn’t been good.

  But what she said next surprised me. She said, “Have you prayed?”

  Melaney’s family was extremely religious, and she was, too. But it wasn’t a topic she talked about with her friends, so her question startled me. Adriana wasn’t religious, and neither was I. My mom had been raised as a Christian, in a fairly devout household. Her grandfather was a pastor, but practicing Christianity went out the window when she met my dad, who is Jewish.

  My dad doesn’t go to temple or celebrate any Jewish holiday except Hanukkah, but he does feel Jewish—in no small part because his own grandfather had survived a concentration camp and lived with one of the hateful numbers tattooed on his wrist. Grandpa had hit the roof when he’d found out my dad was dating a woman who wasn’t Jewish and swore he wouldn’t attend the wedding unless my mom agreed to convert. She knew that she’d never be welcome in her husband’s family home unless she did, so she said she would. But after their wedding, she found she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t a regular at church anymore, but her Christianity felt too important to her, too central to her understanding of herself, to throw away.

  My dad’s parents had already fallen in love with my mom, so the conversion issue was dropped. But her Christianity remained deeply private, and my brother and I were raised to think of ourselves as Jewish, though we never learned anything about Judaism or celebrated any holidays except Hanukkah. We were raised with an understanding of God, though, and of the power of prayer. I had been born premature, and my parents always told me that God had heard their prayers and saved their miracle baby’s life. So although I wasn’t raised with any formal religion, I always prayed, and I knew that there was a God.

  Still, Melaney’s comment that afternoon—“Have you prayed?”—startled me. I was struck by how natural and immediate it had been for her to reach for prayer in a moment of crisis. It was a reflex for her. I felt so frightened and unhappy and alone, and for one fleeting moment, I wished for a relationship with God that would bring me comfort.

  But that afternoon, I just shook my head. I hadn’t prayed. It would never have occurred to me, for starters. And I didn’t know how.

  Then the moment passed, and Melaney spoke again. “But you don’t know that anything happened for sure, right?”

  Of course I didn’t. I didn’t know anything! To her credit, Melaney never said—as Adriana had—“No way, those guys wouldn’t do that.” But the hard look on Melaney’s face when she said “Even if they did what you think they did, you can’t prove it” was unforgettable.

  She was right. Hanging in the air was the unspoken understanding that Seth’s dad was extremely wealthy and powerful. These weren’t people to mess with.

  Adriana and Melaney’s reactions were, in essence, the same reactions that I would confront over and over in the years to follow. Adriana’s automatic response was, “No way. These are good guys, guys we know. You just got drunk.” Either the guys hadn’t done anything, or I’d somehow asked for what happened to me by getting so wasted.

  Melaney’s response was even more cynical. She was essentially saying, “Even if you were raped, there’s nothing that can be done about it. The best thing you can do? Brush it under the rug, pretend it didn’t happen.”

  Those first, knee-jerk responses were only the beginning of the betrayals I would suffer at the hands of my friends. They (and many others) would go on to pressure me to drop the case and then testify against me. They were themselves under a tremendous amount of pressure. But it was sad—and telling about the way young women are taught to think about rape—that two teenaged girls responded the way they did. These were my best friends, girls who knew better than anyone that I was reliable, punctual, loyal to a fault. There I was in front of them, disoriented, bleeding, frightened, covered in bruises. Why were they so sure that nothing had happened—and that if it had, nothing could be done?

  It was only a matter of time before my parents discovered my whereabouts. My mom had killer instincts, especially where I was concerned, and she hadn’t bought the Six Flags story at all. She kept calling and pushing me. “Why do you sound so out of it? It’s pretty quiet for an amusement park. How come I don’t hear any roller coasters?” I’d reassured her that we were calling from a bathroom at the park, but she wasn’t buying it. “Where are you, Alisa? I want you to come home. Tell me where you are, and we’ll come pick you up. What’s going on?”

  The pressure was starting to get to me, and my head pounded as if about to explode. I hung up; she called back. I didn’t pick up; she called back again. And again, and again, and again. When it became clear to her that I wasn’t going to pick up, she and my dad got in the car to look for me.

  On their way over to Adriana’s, they passed Melaney’s house and saw my car in the driveway. When I saw their car pull up, I hid in Melaney’s pantry. My parents were knocking at the windows—my dad had climbed the back fence—and ringing the doorbell. Finally, Melaney got worried that her own parents were going to come home to this craziness and she forced me to come out. I was busted. My parents already knew that I’d lied. There was nothing to do but face the music.

  My parents threw me in the backseat of their car, and my dad drove my car home. As soon as we got there, they sat me down at the kitchen table. It was truth-telling time.

  After sixteen years of being the good girl, this should have been the worst moment of my life. But my brain was so occupied by my steadily increasing suspicion that these boys I knew and trusted had done something unimaginably horrible to me, and my growing realization of what it would mean if I had been raped, that my parents’ anger hardly registered. To be honest, it even felt a little bit good to know that I was in trouble. At least the adults were in charge now.

  I told my parents I’d lied to them. We hadn’t gone to Six Flags at all. I’d gone out to spend the night with my boyfriend at his beach house.

  My mom cried, but my dad, his face grim, stayed focused. The next question, I guess, was inevitable: “Have you been having sex?”

  Again, if you’d asked me the week before, I would have told you that having this conversation with my parents—simply hearing my father say the word sex—would be my number-one worst nightmare. But another, fresher, and more terrifying fear was beginning to percolate up through my confusion. If I’d had sex the night before without realizing it, I could be pregnant. I could have an STD. I could have AIDS. If I couldn’t trust those boys not to have had sex with me when I was too drunk or stoned to remember it, I could hardly rely on them to have used protection.

  In one moment, I saw every single one of my dreams go up in smoke. If I was pregnant or sick, there would be no New York, no college, no journalism school, no changing the world. This was real, enormous, something I couldn’t fix.

  I nodded. Yes. I’d been having sex. And no, we hadn’t used protection.

  The very idea that I was sexually active sent a tremendous shock wave through the whole family. My pa
rents didn’t know I had a boyfriend. They’d never heard of Seth or Brian. But they did exactly what I thought they would do: They put me right back in the car and we drove down to the hospital. The doctor gave me anti­biotics in case I’d contracted an STD and the morning-after pill. But everyone was assuming that the sex had been consensual, and I didn’t say different. So the emergency room doctors didn’t give me a proper Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) exam. This would be harmful to my case during the trial.

  The drive home from the hospital was miserable. My parents were furious with me. We were so close that even in an ordinary situation this would have made me feel sad and alone. But I was so scared and confused that their anger felt completely intolerable to me. On the drive home, I had a fantasy of laying my head down in my mother’s lap so she could stroke my hair and tell me that everything was all right. But that would mean telling her what I suspected, and I was nowhere near ready to do that. And I was beginning to suspect that whatever trouble I’d gotten into was bigger than even my mom could fix.

  My dad was on the warpath, angrier than I’d ever seen him. When we got home, he made me give him Brian’s number and the number of the boy I’d lost my virginity to. He called both of them and told them, in no uncertain terms, that they were to keep away from me. He called Seth’s dad, too, and told him that underaged kids had been drinking and having sex under his roof. Then he read me the riot act and took my car keys. I was grounded until further notice.

  I still had no idea what had happened to me.

  I wasn’t spacey anymore, but I was keyed up beyond belief. With my stomach roiling from the adrenaline coursing through my system, I walked into my beloved childhood bedroom. I’d covered the whole closet wall with a collage I’d made of photographs of my friends, along with greeting cards, stickers, and meaningful words and phrases cut from magazines. The project had taken me the better part of a year, and it was still a work in progress.