Alice Sebold - Lucky

"Yes, but I'm afraid. I don't know what to say."

We decided that Steve would stay where he was standing, and I would circle around again in the opposite direction.

I ran into her.

"Lila," I said.

She was not surprised. "I wondered if you'd try to speak to me."

"Why won't you talk to me?"

"We're different, Alice," she said. "I'm sorry if I've hurt you, but I need to move on with my life."

"But we were clones."

"That was just something we said."

"I've never been so close to anyone."

"You have Marc and Steve. Isn't that enough?"

We somehow got from that to wishing each other well at graduation. I told her Steve and I were going over to a nearby restaurant to have mimosas. She could come and join us if she wanted.

"Maybe you'll see me there," she said, then left.

I rushed into the bookshop we'd been standing in front of and bought her a book of Tess's poems, Instructions to the Double. Inside I wrote something that escapes me now. It was sappy and came straight from my heart. It said I would always be there for her, all she had to do was call.

We did run into her at the bar. She was tipsy and had a boy with her whom I knew she had a crush on. She didn't want to sit with us, but stood by our table while she talked about sex. She told me she had been fitted for a diaphragm and that I was right, sex was great. I was audience now, not friend or intimate. She was too busy doing what I was doing-proving to the world that she was fine. I forgot to give her the book. They left.

On our way home, Steve and I passed by another, posher student hangout. I saw Lila sitting inside with her crush and a bunch of people I didn't know. I told Steve to wait, and I rushed inside with the book. The people at the table looked up.

"This is for you," I said, offering it to Lila. "It's a book."

Her friends laughed because the fact that it was a book was obvious.

"Thank you," Lila said.

A waitress arrived to take drink orders. Lila's crush was watching me.

"I wrote something inside," I said.

As her friends ordered drinks, she looked up at me. I thought she pitied me then. "I'll read it later, but thank you. It looks like a good book."

I never saw Lila again.

On the day of graduation, I didn't attend. I couldn't imagine being there, trying to celebrate, seeing Lila and her friends. Marc had a project due. His school wasn't over yet. Steve was at graduation. Mary Alice was there too. I had told my parents I just wanted to get the hell out of Syracuse. They agreed. "The faster, the better," they said.

I packed my remaining possessions in a silver rental car. It was a Chrysler New Yorker; they'd run out of subcompacts. I drove this boat back to Paoli, knowing the car itself would get a laugh out of my parents.

Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.

The night John got punched in the face was sometime in the fall of 1990. I was standing outside De Robertis on First Avenue, waiting for John to come back with the cheap heroin we both snorted. We had a routine. We always said that if he took too long I would come after him, shouting. It was a vague plan, but it kept from our minds the fact that something might happen that we couldn't control. That particular night it was cold out. But those days cloud together. By that time, this was the point of it all. A year before, I had published a piece in The New York Times Magazine, a first-person account of my rape. In it, I beseeched people to talk about rape and to listen to articulate victims when they had a story to tell. I got a lot of mail. I celebrated with four dime bags and a Greek boyfriend who had once been my student. Then Oprah called, having read the article. I went on the show. I was the victim who fought back. There was another one who supposedly hadn't. Like Lila's, Michelle's resistance left no visible scars. But I doubt that Michelle flew back home to snort heroin.

I never made it through graduate school in Houston. I didn't like the city, yes, but to be honest, I wasn't cut out for it. I slept with a decathlete and a woman, I bought pot off a guy behind the 7-Eleven, and I drank with another student who also dropped out-a tall man from Wyoming-and sometimes, while the decathlete held me, or the man from Wyoming sat back and watched, I cried in hysterical trills that no one understood, least of all me. I thought it was Houston. I thought it was living in a hot climate where there were too many bugs and where the women wore too many ruffles and frills.

I moved to New York and lived in a minority low-income housing project on Tenth and C. My roommate, Zulma, was Puerto Rican and had raised her family in the apartment. Now she rented out her extra bedrooms. She liked to drink too.

I hostessed at a place in Midtown called La Fondue and then I landed (by meeting a drunk man in a bar called King Tut's Wawa Hut) a teaching job at Hunter College. I was an adjunct. I didn't have the requisite degrees and only a year of experience (I had been a teaching assistant in Houston), but the hiring committee was desperate, and they recognized some names: Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver. During the interview, I took fifteen minutes to remember the word thesis, as in thesis sentence -the basis of all composition courses. When the chair called and Zulma handed me the phone, I had never been more surprised by what I took then to be the fortuitousness of drinking.

And my students there became the people who kept me alive. I could get lost in their lives. They were immigrants, ethnic minorities, city kids, returning women, full-time workers, former addicts, and single parents. Their stories filled my days, and their troubles in assimilating preoccupied my evening hours. I fit in with them in a way I had never fit in since before the rape. My own story paled when I compared it with theirs. Walking over the bodies of their countrymen to escape Cambodia. Watching a brother be stood against a wall and shot. Raising a handicapped child alone on waitressing tips. And then there were the rapes. The girl who had been adopted for the purpose by her father, who was a priest. The girl who was raped in the apartment of another student, and whom the police didn't believe. The girl who was a militant and tattooed dyke but who broke down in my office when she told me about her gang rape.

They told me their stories, I like to think, because I never questioned them, believed them utterly. They also thought I was a clean slate. I was obviously a middle-class white girl. A college teacher. Nothing had ever happened to me. I was too hungry for comfort to care that it was a one-way relationship. Like a bartender, I listened, and like a bartender, my position kept me at a safe remove. I was the ear, and the tragic stories of my students' lives medicated me. But I began to build up a resistance to them. By the time I wrote the article for The New York Times, I was ready to talk. Some students read it. They were shocked. Then came Oprah. Many more saw me there, holding forth, their English teacher, on her own rape. For the next few weeks I ran into former students on the street. "Wow," they would confide, "I never thought you, I mean, you know." And I did know. Because I was white. Because I grew up in the suburbs. Because without a name attached to my story, it remains fiction, not fact.

I loved heroin. Drinking had drawbacks-namely, the volume needed to reach oblivion-and I didn't like the taste or the history-my mother had done that. Cocaine made me sick. I went into paralytic cramps once on the floor of a club called the Pyramid. Rastas and white girls danced around my curled-up body. I did it a few more times just to double-check. Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips? Who wanted to enhance a mood? My goal was to destroy it.