Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

if it wasn’t rape, then what exactly went on? Which means a person, however kind and concerned for you, hears the term sexual assault and is left either guessing or trying not to guess which part of you was violated and in what ways or what you did or how far it (you) went.

I was fifteen.

Herpes is very unlikely to present that way—that is, in the hypopharyngeal space and nowhere else. To introduce the virus only there would have required an aggressive act,

This stuff happens. It’s infuriating, said Dad, but it does.

I just concluded that there had been nothing wrong with their part of it, which was why they spoke of it so openly.

Matthews went on. “You don’t want to go digging, Jim,” he told my father. They had not previously been on a first-name basis. “Trust me. She’s not a good girl.”

“Well, they have a list of things here that they are prepared to say about you. That is, if you agree to press charges against the boys, they will get you on the stand, and here’s what they’re going to say.” He held up his graph pad and read. “One, Lacy is a drug user. “Two, Lacy is a drug dealer who has sold her Prozac and other drugs to students on campus, endangering them. “Three, Lacy regularly abuses privileges and circumvents rules on campus. “Four, Lacy is a promiscuous girl who has had intercourse with a number of boys on campus, including the accused. “Five, Lacy is not welcome as a student at St. Paul’s School.”

I replayed his words in my head. It’s not what we wanted for our daughter. It seemed to me that all I had ever done was try to give them what they wanted. This, our mutual disappointment, might have given us an opening to talk to one another. But nobody started that conversation, so we never did.

What college looks mildly on the application of a student accused by her prep school of dealing drugs? My parents, meanwhile—creatures of their own time and culture—would have preferred a drug dealer to a whore.

Their lie was meant not to convince, but to compel. That’s how it works. That’s the entire point. Nobody cares about how you get there; details are a waste of time. The story has one end: no matter what, the girl is going to give it up.

failure to report and witness tampering in the investigation of the statutory sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old girl.”

The administration had gone through my medical records. They had revealed private details to my peers. They had failed to report. They had invited their lawyer’s advice on how to silence me, and they had followed it. They had threatened to call me a drug dealer. They had said that unless we told the police nothing had happened, I could not come back.

I talked with my husband about writing about St. Paul’s. It would expose me, I said. It would expose him. It would plant in the world these words (herpes, slut, rape) associated with my name, and these events for our children to discover. Their friends, their communities. Our community. Would it salt the fields? How large was the danger of regret? My husband had been waiting for my question. “Love,” he said, “you want to know what I think?” I did. He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”

That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice. So I’ve written what happened, exactly as I remember. It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys’ room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home.