I can’t tell you her name, and I’m not even comfortable telling you her graduation year, because we took an oath.
“If you see each other in public, you can say hi, but you can never say where you know each other from,” our group leader told us on day one. “Pretend you’re in a class together if anyone asks.”
We were a secret society: the members of a rape survivors support group at Boston University.
Despite that I was the second-youngest member, I was the group’s unofficial mom; my rape had happened the longest time ago, which meant I’d already been processing it for nine years. I knew survivor hacks. Laura – which isn’t her name – didn’t.
She was the youngest. A blonde, Southern freshman who had been raped about 10 days before she found our group. It’s unusual for women to find their way to support groups in the immediate aftermath. She was raw.
Everyone else was somewhere in between. Only two of us had been randomly attacked by strange men. I was kidnapped from my room by a serial rapist when I was a ...
English (US)