The Boundary: The Price Of Doing Nothing

On the first day of school I arrived to my math class early. It was a habit I had developed in college, I wanted to have first choice of the seats, because where you happen to sit on the first day – had a funny way of becoming your seat for the semester. In the back of the classroom was a mixed girl with long black hair. I could tell she was a freshmen, because no upperclassmen would ever be this exited about a math class. She waved at me, and after we introduced ourselves, she asked me to sit next to her. The only problem was that it was in the back of the classroom, and I was a front of classroom type of guy – I found it easier to fall asleep when I was closer to the boredom. As the rest of the class filed in, I saw a friend of mine, who sat on the other side of her. He was a class below me, a baseball player I had taken a liking to – although widely considered a scoundrel and ne’er-do-well, we would hang out on occasion and I had once used my influence to get him out of trouble. I turned back to the girl who was just happy to be alive, shrugged, and sat down.

We soon became a trio, studying and partying together. She was a wild child, with a temper and an unabashed sexuality that made many people uncomfortable – just the sort of “bad girl” that I become friends with. I decided that she would be my project – that I would help her deal with the somewhat murky waters of college life. One day we were having lunch together, and she seemed very troubled. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that she thought my friend had raped her. That they had been hanging out and drinking, and that he had tried to make a move, and she had said no, and then she passed out, and then she woke up and he was inside of her, and then she passed out again. Unsure what to do, when I saw my friend I subtly asked him how his night went. He told me the same story as she did, that he had hung out with her, that they had gotten drunk together, passed out in the same bed, and he had spent the night there. The only difference was that there was no sex in his version. Not sure who to believe, my good friend or a girl I had just met, I pushed the incident out of my mind.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in her room having a conversation with both her and her roommate. Her roommate, a girl as equally rebellious and beautiful as she, was telling me about this room a floor above theirs that was known as the date rape room. The guys who lived there would get girls drunk, drug them, and then rape them. It was common knowledge amongst their class, but no girl would ever come forward to formally accuse them. Then she told me that last week she had become one of those girls. Next, my friend, re-told the story that she had told me a few weeks ago – and let me know that she had been very bothered about it, and was thinking about going to the Dean’s office.

As I sat in the room of these two freshmen girls who had been on campus for less than two months, both tell me that they had been raped, I was overwhelmed. For the first time it hit me, that my friend was a rapist, that I knew about it, and that I had done nothing.

As soon as I left the girl’s rooms, I went to the cafeteria for lunch. As I was eating my food, I look up to see my former friend sit directly across from me. I wanted to throw up. It was one of the worst feelings I had ever felt. I tried to pretend like nothing was wrong, not wanting to tip my hand that we were going to charge him with sexual assault. I left as quickly as I could, and threw up in the bushes outside.

That weekend, I get a call from a frat brother I had told about the incidents. His voice was shaking as he told me he had been at a party off campus, and everyone had left the house except my former friend and another girl. When someone went back to the house because they forgot something, the girl was in the bathroom, crying uncontrollably, saying that my former friend had raped her.