Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  Even my parents’ friends faded away. Many of them simply didn’t know what to say. One woman had the audacity to tell my mother that she didn’t want her own daughter to hang out with me because she felt it would increase her daughter’s chance of getting raped, as if what had happened to me was contagious.

  At the end of the summer, I tried to organize a group of girls to go to the L.A. County Fair. We’d always loved to do that, and I was desperate for some normal teenage fun. I left voice mail messages, but nobody called me back. Beka was the only person who showed up to go with me.

  That night, when we got back from the fair, I took my fingernails to the collage on my wall. Overtaken by a sudden, horrible fury, I clawed and scratched at my friends’ faces and the inspirational phrases I’d so carefully pasted there, until my fingers bled and I finally collapsed in exhaustion on the floor of my room, surrounded by the shredded confetti of my dreams.

  At least I still had Beka.

  Then, early in the fall, she called me, her voice breaking. She told me that an investigator had figured out that she left for the bus stop in the morning after her parents had left for work, and had followed her. She was frightened: for herself, for her parents, for her little sister.

  “Alisa, I can’t keep going like this. I’m so sorry. But until this is over, I don’t think I can see you anymore.”

  It must have been a terribly hard phone call to make, and I respected her for making it. At least she’d had the guts to call. Still, the fact remained that she’d been my last friend. I was truly alone.

  I’ve thought a lot about my friends in the years since that summer and since I heard so many of them testify against me at my trial. I like to think that if the rape had happened to one of them, I would never have testified for the defense. Still, I don’t hold it against them. I would have been terrified by the harassment, too, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t have withdrawn from the friendship. In any case, whether I understood their desertion or not, that summer was impossibly lonely and hard for me.

  My days were spent meeting with detectives and lawyers and members of the district attorney’s office. It felt like I spent most of them listening to my parents and adults in suits yelling about me as if I weren’t there. I was sixteen and barely keeping my head above water, after all. But it was a profoundly disempowering experience to sit in those rooms with all those grown-ups, hearing them talk about me as if I weren’t there.

  A few months before, I had been a normal, healthy, active kid, an athlete surrounded by good friends. That summer, instead of heading off to the beach or the movies, I sat in my room by myself and cried. I’d stay up and watch TV at night, and then I’d sleep for most of the day, fifteen or sixteen hours at a stretch.

  Falling asleep meant dropping into a delicious oblivion, a state of suspended animation where I was safe. Sleeping was the only time I wasn’t acutely aware of being at the center of a humiliating, shameful circus I couldn’t control.

  By contrast, waking up was a hard slap in the face. There would be one glorious moment before I fully regained consciousness and remembered everything that was happening. Then, no matter how deeply I burrowed back under the covers, it would all come back to me in a rush. This wasn’t simply some horrible nightmare I could shake off with a splash of water on my face. It was my life.

  I kept a journal that summer. On August 22, I wrote:

  I still strongly believe that everything happens for a reason, but I’m really trying to figure out the reason for all this. Please let tomorrow be filled with only happiness! Please, God, show the meaning, help me understand? I pray for you to take this pain and confusion away, God. Bless me with peace in my thoughts. Thank you, God!

  Three days later I wrote:

  I am literally breaking down inside. This pain is tearing me apart.…I was reading an article in a magazine today about a rape victim. It really made me think when this is all over, I want to go around talking to teenage girls.…Maybe that’s what this all meant. Maybe God wanted me to help people all along, but not the way I imagined or ever expected.

  Later that week I wrote:

  What would have happened to my family if I had died? It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. They would never have been the same. I wonder what my life holds for me because I’m still on this earth to accomplish something. God kept me here for a reason. He wants me to do something good in my life. I just hope it all makes sense soon.

  The answers I was looking for continued to elude me. As August ended, I got increasingly anxious. I was still having a lot of distressing physical problems in the aftermath of the rape, including spotting, irregular periods, and quite a bit of pain. I spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office as they tried to figure out whether I’d need surgery to correct the damage.

  The thought of going back to school was nightmarish. As painful as the summer’s isolation had been, it was better than suspecting that every single person I passed in the hall or sat next to in algebra would be thinking about me lying on that pool table. Something as ordinary as running an everyday errand for my mother meant exposing myself to whispers behind hands, lewd comments made just quietly enough that they couldn’t be heard by anyone else, hissed insults: “Slut!” “Whore!” “Tramp!” High school is a perfect incubator for cruelty. I didn’t think I’d survive it.

  So my parents consulted with my advocates at the district attorney’s office, and they decided that I would start a different high school in September.

  It wasn’t an ideal situation: I’d imagined graduating with the friends I’d had since kindergarten, not starting over at a completely new and unfamiliar place. But I was coming to realize that those friends were gone, along with the old life I’d taken for granted. I would have to start over.

  Chapter Four

  Chasing Oblivion

  By the time the first day of my junior year rolled around, I had warmed to the idea of a fresh start at a new school. The defense’s harassment of our family was still so intense that the DA’s office thought it would be a good idea for me to start my new school using a different name. I chose Kylie, a name I’d always liked.

  I’m an organization freak by nature, but I’ve never spent more time color-coding my school supplies than I did that year. Every notebook had a corresponding folder and highlighter set. The day before school started, I must have tried on and rejected a hundred outfits. I packed and repacked my bag over and over, checking a list to make sure I’d have everything I’d need. I went so far as to scrub my already immaculate car, both inside and out.

  That night before bed, I prayed to be allowed to have a fresh start. After the first day of school, I wrote:

  I’m all smiles, and will not let tomorrow be any less of a day than today. I will keep my head up, my smile on, and my confidence in place tomorrow. If you want something bad enough, it will always happen.…I just wanted to say thanks to God because he completely answered my prayers last night. Only He knows what my tomorrow brings, but I will pray.

  Those first few weeks, I doubled down on my schoolwork and started to make some new friends. I was still struggling with depression, but getting my bearings at a new place and catching up on new schoolwork provided me with a truly welcome distraction. It seemed that I might actually have a chance at some semblance of a normal life.

  And for about a month, I did.

  Then, one afternoon, I walked into the parking lot to find a man yelling into a megaphone. “Ask Kylie what her real name is,” his voice boomed out over the campus. “Ask her who Alisa Kaplan is. Ask her why she had to change her name. Ask her why she had to change schools.”

  The cat was out of the proverbial bag. News of the rape case spread like wildfire at my new school. Rumors about my promiscuity began anew. I started hearing the whispers in the hallways: “Slut.” “Gold digger.” “Pool cue.” My new friends felt confused and betrayed by the fact that I’d lied to them. How could I have neglected to mention something this huge? And using
a fake name—how creepy was that?

  I couldn’t explain how desperate I’d been to get away from being defined by the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Most of my new friends backed away.

  But I’d learned my lesson over the summer, and there was no way I was going back to being so lonely. This led to me making an important discovery. True friends are rare, but party buddies? They’re everywhere you look. It may not be easy to find someone to listen, to support you, or to hug you while you cry, but you can pretty much always find someone to get wasted with. So that’s what I did.

  That year, my junior year of high school, was when I started drinking for real. I found that if I had a couple of beers in me, I stopped obsessing about what had happened to me. I stopped flinching whenever I saw a pool table or heard the pop of a Snapple bottle opening. If I had enough vodka in me, I didn’t think about what it would be like to confront Seth and Jared and Brian from the stand, or to answer questions about the most intimate details of my brand-new sex life in front of a room full of strangers.

  As my drinking got more and more serious, I came to rely on how effectively booze could blot out every shameful, guilty, frightened feeling I couldn’t get away from any other way. “I don’t want to feel like this, God,” I wrote one night. “I’m not supposed to be the one in all this pain.” I was right: It wasn’t fair. But it wasn’t avoidable, either—except when I was drinking, and then I didn’t feel anything at all.

  I started dating a guy called Mack, who was quite a bit older than I was. My parents disapproved, and my dad was so effectively scary that Mack was very respectful of me. But I didn’t need a boyfriend as much as I needed someone with an ID who could easily get me booze. Mack was more than happy to do that for me, leaving quarts of vodka hidden in the shrubs outside my parents’ house so that I had a ready supply when I needed it.

  Lying to my parents became second nature. It wasn’t all that hard, to be honest. I took shameless advantage of the fact that they were preoccupied to the point of being overwhelmed with the legal proceedings. They spent hours every day on the case—driving me to therapy, talking to our lawyer, filling out all the paperwork required.

  But I was also skating by on my reputation. Because I had always been such a good kid, my parents weren’t primed to catch me being bad. It probably didn’t even occur to them to worry about me sneaking out or smuggling booze into the house. Maybe I seemed a little distant, a little out of sorts, but that was only to be expected, under the circumstances. So all my troubling behavior slipped right under the radar.

  I drank every day, all day. The quantities shock me now. Most of that year, I was drilling a quart of vodka a day. There are pictures of me, taken by my party buddies, of me driving drunk to school, my eyes barely open. There are pictures of us doing shots in the school parking lot at seven o’clock in the morning. Drug dogs patrolled the lockers at our school and would come into the classroom to sniff our backpacks, so I had to find a way around them; halfway through the school year, I could no longer get through the day without a drink. So I’d fill water bottles with straight vodka and hide them in the bushes on the school grounds.

  Some days—the bad days, usually ones when my family was scheduled to meet with the district attorney’s office, or had a deposition, or got news of some new violation of our privacy—I would have only one aim in my sight: to get so drunk that I blacked out. The prodigious energy and laser-like focus I’d once brought to my schoolwork and to making sure my color guard team knew their routines down cold? All of that was now single-mindedly trained on getting enough liquor to stay as messed up as possible. And, like everything else I’d ever set my mind to, I succeeded.

  Lots of kids drank in high school, but I wasn’t having a couple of shots at a party or some beers in the parking lot after a game. My friends were drinking to have fun, to get loose, to relax. But I wasn’t out for fun; I was desperate. I was drinking the way a serious alcoholic drinks, the same way I’d been sleeping: to reach oblivion.

  Every alcoholic and drug addict can tell you that oblivion gets harder and harder to find. In order to catch up with it, you need to keep upping the ante. That was why, in January of my junior year, I asked my friend Claire to help me get some cocaine.

  I’d never done coke, but of course I’d heard of it. Everyone talked about how amazing it was and how great it made you feel, and I really wanted to believe that I could still feel great and amazing. Claire said her friend Ron could get some for me; she’d hook us up. But Ron didn’t sell coke. What he sold was meth.

  A week later, I was sitting in my Mustang in a restaurant parking lot with Ron. I’d brought another friend for moral support, and I could hear her swift intake of breath as he racked out some lines on the case of a CD on the center console of my car.

  Now, I didn’t know much, but I’d seen enough movies to know that coke is supposed to be powdery. This stuff wasn’t powder—it looked like a smashed diamond, with big shards in it.

  I spoke up. “What is that? Is that crack? I thought you had coke.”

  He shook his head and said, “I’m giving you something a thousand times better than coke, trust me. This will do more for you than you could ever imagine.”

  I was so hungrily chasing stupefaction that I didn’t even ask again what it was. It was my friend in the backseat who asked the follow-up question. “Seriously, what is that?”

  He laughed and said, “Are you kidding? You don’t know? It’s meth.”

  At that, my more sensible friend in the backseat shook her head: She was out. Meth was hardcore. Everybody knew how insanely addictive it was and how crazy it made you. She had no intention of turning into one of the tweakers you’d see on the news, with their sunken faces and their messed-up teeth and the sores they picked into their own skin.

  But all I’d heard was the part about meth being a thousand times better than coke, and that was enough to intrigue me. So when Ron rolled up a dollar bill and passed it to me, I leaned over the center console—and blew.

  I’d never done a line before, and I guess I got confused, because instead of sucking it up into my nostrils, I exhaled. Meth went everywhere! Ron got incredibly angry at me. At first, he was trying to clean it up off the floor, but I was clear with him: I was not going to do a line that he’d scraped out of the carpet on the floor of my car. (Little did I know I’d eventually get there.) Still irritated with me, he laid out another line. This time it worked.

  Tears started pouring out of my right eye. I sat bolt upright, in a belated panic. Had Ron poisoned me? I turned to him and started yelling. “It hurts! It hurts! Is it supposed to be burning like this?” It burned so badly, I thought something must be wrong.

  But Ron was laughing at me again.

  “Yeah, that’s normal. Just lay your seat back and be quiet.”

  I did what Ron told me and laid my seat back. The car was quiet as the meth dripped from the back of my nose into my throat. It is the most putrid, disgusting taste you can imagine, and yet it was a taste I would come to crave, to fantasize about, to love more than my family or myself.

  A few minutes later, the drug hit my bloodstream. Ron had been right. This was the feeling I’d been chasing. I’d never felt so alert in my life, so attuned to everything around me. It was as if I’d been given a superpower: I could do anything, conquer anything. That disgusting taste was the gateway to the single best feeling I’d ever had, and I couldn’t wait to taste it again. And again, and again, and again, and again. Before we were out of that parking lot, I was negotiating with Ron for my next line.

  My friend in the backseat was starting to freak out, so we took her home. On the way, I called my friend Claire, the one who’d introduced me to Ron.

  “I think I just fell in love,” I told her.

  Claire then confessed that she’d been doing meth for a couple of months, and we spent the rest of the drive talking about the drug like a couple of lovelorn teenagers. Which, in a way, we were.

  And t
hen I went back to Ron’s apartment and stayed up doing meth with him for the next three days.

  Meth was the ticket I had been looking for out of my misery. Weed and booze, I could see, had been mere child’s play. Meth was even better than sleep.

  Needless to say, it didn’t take me long to discover firsthand that methamphetamine is one of the most addictive substances on earth. Here’s why: Meth dramatically increases the release of a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter, released every time you do something that gives you pleasure or satisfaction. You get a little hit of dopamine every time you move up a level in Candy Crush, for instance, or nibble on a piece of chocolate.

  But doing meth dumps a huge amount of dopamine into your brain—like you’ve eaten the best piece of chocolate in the world, multiplied by a million. As soon as it hits you, you get an intense, euphoric rush, and then you don’t want to eat, or go to sleep, or do anything besides the drug.

  Unfortunately, experiencing that massive dopamine dump over and over has a devastating effect on your brain. The first of those effects is that the receptors in the brain that allow you to feel the rush become less sensitive, so you need more and more of the drug to get the good feeling. That decreasing sensitivity also means that you get less pleasure from everything else.

  Not surprisingly, over the long term, meth use is highly destructive. It aggressively suppresses appetite, so users experience weight loss and often severe malnutrition. Tooth grinding is common, which is why so many addicts get meth mouth: rotten, broken stumps where healthy teeth used to be. Speed bumps are the sores and scars you see on meth users’ arms and legs. Many people have tactile hallucinations, most commonly the feeling that bugs are crawling all over them or under their skin. Scratching to the point of causing self-injury is common, and the meth user’s body can’t mend its own tissues as well as it should, so the sores take longer to heal.