Page 72 of Saving Barrette

She nods. “Yeah, it was to cheer you up.”

“And I need cheering up because?”

“My attorney called. The DNA results will be in Monday.”

Heat hits my face, my blood pressure rising. I try to remember Terrell’s only advice today that made sense. Somewhere between his lecture on the price of tampons to the frozen fruit debates. What’s going to happen is going to happen. No amount of worrying is going to change the outcome of this. I had to trust that it was out of our hands and in the judge’s.

“I’m fine,” I tell Barrette when she moves to hold my face in her hands.

She searches my eyes. “You don’t look fine.”

Leaning in, I press my lips to hers, the taste of sour sugar on both of ours. I swallow and try to compose my voice before I whisper, “It’s going to be okay.”

She nods. “It will be. And we have pie.”

“I asked him for vanilla ice cream,” Joey snaps, staring at the ice cream container of mint chocolate chip.

I laugh. They have no idea what I went through today. “Mint chocolate chip was on sale. Vanilla wasn’t.”

“That cheap bastard.” She glares at the pie in front of us. “How are we going to have ice cream with our pie now?”

Barrette reaches into the back of the freezer to the ice cream she stashes in there. I only know this because it’s what the three of us do when Terrell’s sleeping and not policing us. “I say we make him eat pie with mint chocolate chip and we have the vanilla I bought last week.”

We eat half the pie before he returns with the Tampax. Joey pushes a plate with pie and one scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream next to it. Do you think he eats it?

Ha. He never admits defeat and despite his distaste for anything minty, he eats the pie with the ice cream.

Joey sighs and puts the plate in the sink. “We’re gonna crack him someday guys.”

I don’t share her optimism on this one.

6 Months later

When you hearthe word rape, what do think of? Sexual assault, right?

What do you see when you think of it? A man forcing a woman to have sex with him, am I right?

It’s not always a man forcing a woman. Sometimes it’s a man forcing another man. Or a woman drugging a man.

Let me tell you about the things you don’t hear. You don’t hear about the after. The “what happens next” part. Sure, there are stories of surviving, and some of them not. There’s strength and truth, and downright heroism in what women, and men, go through, but you rarely, if ever, see the in-between. The messy details that get pushed aside when the verdict is read.

What I learn from the very beginning is that nothing happens right away. Even the warrant for arrest. It’s after Asa and I move off campus and into a house with Joey and Terrell. It happens two days after Roman is suspended by the NCAA, the day before the Fiesta Bowl. He’s not suspended because of the rape charges brought against him, but he’s withdrawn for a year from competition after failing a drug test. Somehow it makes me feel like testing positive for cocaine trumps rape. Because in this case, it does.

My case goes to trial. It’s drawn out and unnecessary.

And then came the messy parts that involve detectives and prosecuting attorneys and a male judge who just so happens to be a huge fan of college football. It’s hard to stomach, and even harder to endure the favoritism and the downright fucking lies his attorney tells the jury to convince them that given his status as an athlete, I targeted him and asked for it.

“It was consensual sex,” Roman’s attorney explains to the jury as he attempts to solidify their case.

“If you think what I looked like after that night was consensual, I’d hate to be your wife,” I tell them.

He has the nerve to push back with “What did you look like?”

“Look at the pictures taken by the sexual assault nurse. I dare you.”

The jury sees the photographs taken that night in the hospital. And for the first time, I did too. Though I hadn’t prepared to see myself so vulnerable and on display for the entire court room, it isn’t me I’m worried about in those moments. It’s Asa. The anguish, the rage, the yelling at the bailiff when he’s escorted out, I hate that he had to hold me through all that and now see it again.

The sexual assault forensic exam I had, the one that humiliated me, came back with three different DNAs. One is, in fact, Roman’s.

---