Adelaide Piper (33 page)

College was a scary place at times. It was a safe haven for young and privileged criminals, and if you came up against one, it could mess you up for good. “This,” I wrote in a creative nonfiction essay for Professor Dirkas's workshop, “is not something that they tell you in the gold-lined promotional materials or in the admissions office or on those quaint little campus tours in which only the attractive, clean-cut type take part.”

That is why I enjoyed being a dorm counselor. It was like being a bossy big sister to sixteen other women, and I felt as though I had a little role in combating the dark side of campus life. I helped my freshman girls with their English papers and scolded them when their music blared at 3:00 a.m. I offered advice on how to cure their acne and thwart the freshman fifteen that crept up on them unawares.

At least one Saturday night a month, I'd pop popcorn and offer a movie so they might have another alternative to a trip down to fraternity row, which I still considered to be the noose around the place. I even bailed two of my girls out of jail when they were caught singing show tunes on the roof of an old apartment building downtown with some guys in the chorus. I laughed when I entered the jailhouse to learn that the girls had not been drinking. They had just wanted to sing at the highest place in the city, but their show had woken up a little old lady who did not like their rendition of “Oklahoma” or their footsteps plodding overhead.

Once a week I would hold a hall meeting they nicknamed “Piper Pipes,” where I'd bring the girls up to date on campus events and invite them to share whatever was on their minds. I would remind them of ways to stay safe, blending some of my own philosophy and religion into the agenda: go out in groups; don't find yourself alone with someone you don't know well; know that there are consequences to actions; take Dr. Shaw's social justice class.

Two of the girls on my hall were from Tupelo, Mississippi, and they reminded me of Jif, Ruthie, and me our freshman year. They weren't as cultured or polished as the rest of the crew, and they had found themselves on the fringe of the social life and struggling to make the grade on the academic side. I tried to look out for them— invited them to vespers and even on a community service trip that Whit and some of the others were putting together over spring break to help with the cleanup in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

One of the Tupelo girls, Cecelia Honeycutt, reminded me of myself. Cecelia was the only one on the hall who went to Florida on the relief trip and was a tremendous help, but she had a complete wall up when it came to religion, and she could not be persuaded. She struggled with weight gain and social rejection, and when I tried to reach out to her, to even share hints of my faith with her, Cecelia reared back and said, “Don't strap that Bible Belt on me. I came up here to get away from all of that.”

“Simmer down, Honeycutt,” I said with a grin, and I felt as though I were looking into my own fiery and discontented eyes of two years ago. “From now on I'm going to call you Jalapeñocutt. Or Peño for short.”

“Whatever, Adelaide,” she said, and I grinned when I heard her say under her breath, “Bossy dork.”

I never officially laid eyes on Devon Hunt during the rest of my college career, though I assumed he was on and off campus from time to time since his father still served as the provost. Jif said she'd heard he was working for his local congressman in DC, and that really chafed me. A rapist aiding a representative on Capitol Hill. Humph.

Once I thought I saw his figure in the dark, walking with a group down the hill toward town, but I couldn't tell for sure. At this point, I couldn't really picture him in my mind's eye, but I knew that if our paths crossed, I would recognize him. Often I pondered the question Harriet had posed to me over a year ago—about whether I had forgiven him—and I still didn't know how to respond to that. Thankfully, I didn't replay the event in my mind. That part was a blessed side effect of the passing of time and the hope that came from my new faith. It wasn't an escape trick to suppress the pain, like Mama had taught me. It was just that somehow I had been released from the most acute trauma of the rape. But I didn't think I could ever
forgive
him, and I knew I never would
forget.

Though I had received relief, something else continued to haunt me about the rape. The farther I got away from it, the more I wondered why I never reported the crime to campus security. I also wondered why the security guard who picked me up that night and Nurse Eugenia never asked me to do so. It seemed evident that I was not the first one they had seen abused in this way, and yet there was no real acknowledgment of the crime by either of them, and this bugged the heck out of me. I wondered sometimes how many others it had happened to.

A freshman girl in the hall above us had attempted to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol, but her roommate found her in time and rushed her to the hospital. And a fellow classmate of mine, Jane Avery, had successfully hanged herself toward the end of our sophomore year in an off-campus apartment. As with the case of Peter Carpenter and Brother Benton, the administration quickly covered up Jane Avery's suicide and stonewalled giving out information to the press and even her family.

I had known Jane Avery distantly after having taken an American lit class with her our freshman year. She had seemed strong, bright, and self-assured, and I wondered sometimes what had happened to her. Could she have been assaulted too? Or had she wound up in that abortion clinic in Roanoke, care of Nurse Eugenia? No one knew for sure.

Nonetheless, I was curious about it and concerned for the girls on my hall. I would eavesdrop in the bathroom and the hall from time to time—picking up bits of freshman-class tales. How a classmate they knew had been cornered by three freshman pledges in the basement of the frat house until her friends broke a window and pulled her out.

And how another girl had been walking down frat house row late at night when a boy jumped off the porch and grabbed her forcefully by the arm. Luckily, a security guard had come along at just the right moment, and the offender acted as though it had just been a joke.

At the end of my junior year, I began to write candidly about the crime committed against me and the emotional aftermath I had experienced, and I submitted the piece to Professor Dirkas toward the close of my creative nonfiction class. Dirkas was troubled by my story, and he was obligated to show it to the administration. He encouraged me to speak to the dean and explain my experience in hopes that a stronger awareness about this sort of student-to-student crime could be raised and the crimes themselves dealt with in a just manner.

Upon my agreement, he gave the story to Dr. Josephine Atwood, the dean of student life, who knew me from that “pig's head on a stick” remark my freshman year. She called me promptly into her office and, to my disappointment, tried to squelch the matter.

“Miss Piper, the statute of limitations has nearly run out on this so-called crime that you wrote about in this essay. I doubt you would have a case with no evidence, but you may exercise your adjudication right before May if you wish. Otherwise, I strongly encourage you to put the matter behind you.”

Dr. Atwood was the quintessential young administrator trying to mask her age and inexperience. I could see that now that I had a few years of college under my belt. Everything about her was navy-blue professional and toned down so as to dull her youthful appearance, from the light brown lipstick that left a ring on the rim of her coffee cup to the dowdy square heels and travel buff hose. Though the doctorate diploma from the University of Michigan in the brown frame behind her desk read 1982, her dark hair was pulled back tightly in a low, inconspicuous barrette, and she might as well have been menopausal.

The freshman me had been somewhat intimidated by a powerhouse woman like Dr. Atwood making the mock slash across her lips the day Peter was arrested, but the junior me, the one who wasn't on my own anymore, wanted to push.

“I don't wish to exercise the adjudication right, Dr. Atwood. What I want is to bring my experience to your attention so that the administration might understand the kinds of crimes that have been committed here in the past in order to better protect the students who will follow in our footsteps. I'm here on behalf of the freshman girls on my hall and the freshmen to come next year, in hopes that a general awareness might be heightened and a clearer policy might be created to aid victims of campus crimes such as this.”

Wow. Polished. Not the muddled stuff I used to spit out when McSweeney asked me to dissect a Stevens or Frost poem on the spot. Every time he cornered me like this, I'd had difficulty collecting my thoughts, and I always thought of the brilliant conclusions I could have communicated two hours later over supper in the dining hall.

“The policy exists, Miss Piper, and it is quite adequate, I can assure you. You must do your homework before you criticize the system.”

She tucked a pen behind her ear and began to scan a file on her desk.

“Where can a student find out about the policy?”

“In the handbook, of course,” Dr. Atwood said as a strand of her stiff hair loosened and fell lightly across her chin. She quickly tucked it back into place and took a call on the speakerphone from her assistant.

I walked over to the handbook, which was on a coffee table in the office, and flipped through it as Dr. Atwood swallowed a moan of frustration.

When she hung up, I held up the open book and said, “There is nothing specific in the handbook about reporting an assault. The only ‘crime' that is specified in the handbook is the violation of the honor code, which strikes me as ironic—the fact that one can snitch on someone for copying their French homework, but there is no clear outline of procedures for an assault victim or the potential consequences facing a rapist.”

Dr. Atwood looked out the window onto the pristine quad. A vine of wisteria was draped across her thick pane, and the purple buds were beginning to bloom.

She winced after taking a sip of cold coffee and looked back to me.

“Also, I just want to know this: are the campus health-clinic employees and security employees aware of the definition and policy for student-to-student assaults? And if they are, are they encouraged to report the crimes?”

Dr. Atwood took a deep breath. I suspected that she was adept at dodging bullets, and I watched her scan the pile of files on her desk before responding.

“If what happened to you is true, I am sorry, Miss Piper. I have rarely heard of such an incident at an institution like ours. Consider your case extremely rare, because that's exactly what it is. While I find it admirable that you want to help your fellow students, I can assure you that this is
not
a common occurrence at Nathaniel Buxton University.”

I was about to thank her for her time and forget the whole matter. Maybe Dr. Atwood was right
. It would be just like me,
I thought,
to be the only one in the world to have such a freak thing happen to her.

Push on,
I heard that third voice say. The one that Mr. Lewis spoke of in
Mere Christianity
—not the conscience that wants to do right or the lazy side that wants to forget about it all and relax. But the third voice—the one that whispers.

Suddenly it came to me, and I said, “May I conduct a campus survey to find out if anyone else has been sexually assaulted?”

The glare on Dr. Atwood's face assured me I was disrupting her afternoon.

“I don't think that would be a good idea, Miss Piper. Your viewpoint would be subjective, and there is simply no need for a survey since no one else has brought this matter to my attention. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to prepare for a meeting with President Schaeffer.”

I marched over to the library with my disk, sat down at the computer, and put my final touches on a poem for Dr. Dirkas.

Honor Code

You're sent packing

if you fib

at NBU—

I've known

four

convicted

of such crimes

here.

But you can assault,

defile,

maim

a fellow classmate's

heart

and no one

so much as says

“boo.”

I had left the dean's office in a cloud of frustration and defeat, but as the weeks passed, I let it go, thinking,
Well, I tried
. Maybe my role had been to be a flag raiser. One of several voices who would eventually convince Dr. Atwood and the college to strengthen their policy against this brand of campus crime.

It was two weeks before finals and the last summer break before my senior year, and I had to get planning for my future. I was looking forward to spending the summer in Williamstown with Randy. I was going to study for the GRE and hang out with the Pelzers and Shannon. Harriet was going to come down for the month of August after her internship on the set of
The Comedy of Errors
at the Shakespeare in Central Park production.

Also, at Professor Dirkas's encouragement, I wanted to pursue an MFA in poetry, and I would spend a good part of my summer filling out the applications and creating a fresh portfolio to send to the graduate schools in the fall. Randy had sent me the information about the University of South Carolina graduate program, and it actually looked pretty impressive since they'd hired Julia Rodriquez, a Pulitzer prize–winning poet from the Dominican Republic. And Josiah Dirkas said that one of his favorite American poets, Donald Halstead, was taking a three-year stint there as writer-in-residence.

One afternoon when I was lounging on the dorm piazza, I read an anonymous letter to the editor in the student paper about a student's rape experience. The student was a senior, and her offender had graduated a year ago. She had kept the rape a secret for two years, but she suddenly wanted to speak out.