Page 55 of Dear Debbie

She blinks at me, her eyes wet.

“I want you to promise me that you will trust me,” I say. “I want you to trust me when I say that I will make absolutely sure those photos of you never get out.”

“But how can you—”

“Trust me, Lexi.”

She hesitates for only a moment, but then she says, “I trust you.”

I see that trust in her eyes. Even though she’s not a little kid anymore, she still believes that I can fix things for her.

I am seized by the sudden almost irrepressible urge to tell her everything. I’ve never told anyone what happened to me. Not my parents, not Cooper, not anyone. I wish I could tell her, even though I know I can’t.

I just wish she knew that I used to be just like her. I was carefree and intelligent, and yes, beautiful, even though I didn’t know it at the time. And then something happened that ruined my life. That’s why I refuse to let anything like that happen to her. Because I love her more than anything, and I want her life to be as good as mine promised to be before I was raped during my second year of college.

43

This is a story I have never told before.

Don’t worry, there won’t be any graphic details. The truth is, I don’t remember much, which is part of why I never went to the police, although there were a lot of reasons I kept it to myself. All I really remember is what happened before and how it all ended. So if it sounds confused or if I can’t account for big blocks of time, that’s why.

It doesn’t mean I’m lying.

I was in the second semester of my second year at MIT and loving it. The first year is pass/fail, so my last semester was the first time I had received any letter grades, and they were good. Okay, I’m being modest—they were great. I got all A’s. And I wasn’t taking, like, intro to bullshit. I was taking challenging computer science classes in which several of my classmates were just barely scraping by.

Like I said, I can’t help but wonder what could have been.

It was my roommate, Selena, who talked me into going to a frat party, although I don’t blame Selena for what happened. I had been to a few fairly tame parties over the last year and a half, but a large percentage of the guys at MIT were in fraternities, so those parties were supposed to be a lot more interesting. To be clear, they weren’t interesting to me, just more interesting in an objective sort of way.

I had big plans to do some coding that night and had even purchased a large bottle of Mountain Dew in anticipation. But then Selena went on this whole rant about how I was never any fun and how I was going to graduate from college a virgin, which would be bad for some reason. I finally agreed to go to the party just to get her to stop talking and also because my wrists were sort of hurting from coding twelve hours straight the day before.

She lent me a dress from her own closet and spent about fifteen minutes going through my hair with a curling iron. She also managed to do my makeup for about ten minutes before I told her to stop. When she had done all that I was allowing her to do, I looked at myself in the full-length mirror in the communal restroom in the hallway and actually thought I looked pretty good. I cleaned up nice.

When I came back into our dorm room, Selena let out a low whistle. “Hey, sexy,” she joked.

“Don’t make me change my mind.”

She frowned at me. “Can you lose the glasses?”

I could not. I was half-blind without them. That was before I discovered the miracle of contact lenses. When I was in college, the idea of sticking my fingers in my eyes was too horrible for words.

We walked over to the Zeta Pi fraternity, which was nearly a thirty-minute hike in the nippy March night. Actually, it wasn’t too bad for me, because I was wearing a pair of flats, a coat, and a hat. Selena, on the other hand, was wearing heels and no coat, which meant she complained bitterly during the entire walk.

It’s funny what I remember about that night. I can still hear Selena’s gripes about the cold echoing in my ears. I think my underwire has frozen to my skin, Debbie.

We finally got to the party at about ten o’clock, and it was well underway. In stark contrast to the frigid night air, the frat house was way, way too hot. It was also strangely humid, and all the work Selena did to make my hair smooth and shiny was immediately undone. I shrugged off my coat and stuffed it in a bedroom referred to as “the coat room” without any confidence that I would ever get it back. There was music playing, and the bass was so loud that it made my head throb.

An hour later, I wanted to leave. Badly. Selena and I had managed to stay together for the first twenty minutes, but then some guy started chatting her up, and she disappeared. Nobody was chatting me up. I was just sitting in a corner, sipping from a cup of Coke, wishing I knew the way home. Too bad neither GPS nor Uber had been invented yet.

That was when he found me.

I’m glad I was wearing my glasses, because I got a good look at his face. He looked like an upperclassman. A junior or a senior. Not that he looked a lot older, but he just had that confidence about him, like he’d been here a while, and he knew what was what.

“You look miserable,” he observed.

I looked up at him. He wasn’t remarkable looking, but he had dark brown hair that curled endearingly at the ends and fell in his eyes. He was cute.

“It’s loud down here,” I admitted. “I’m getting a headache.”