Girl Seduced (The Girl Interrupted Trilogy Book #1) Page 4
I later learned that I was experiencing what is referred to as “the shoulder”, or the high. I was bordering on delusional, but completely agreeable with everything that was happening. Somewhere inside of me, my real self was screaming for help, screaming for it to stop. I was intensely focused on what was happening and, as far as I could tell, the actual high lasted for about six hours. I had crossed a line she would never be able to cross back over again.
Chapter Seven
I woke up, light-headed, alone and lying on the floor in a strange room. I looked at the floor and then looked down at my body and realized that I was completely naked. My clothes and other clothes that I didn’t recognize were thrown all around the room along with liquor bottles, crumpled paper and other things I didn’t recognize. The sun was coming in the window, but it was blinding me. I couldn’t tell if the sun was coming up or going down. I had no sense of direction or time, only intense pain all over my body.
“OH MY GOD.” As I looked over my body more closely, I noticed several used condoms on the floor, scratches on my face, a horrible, putrid taste in my mouth and then noticed and focused on the area from my waist and down. There were bruises, blood coming from between my legs, blood on my ass and my entire front and back was hurting so bad I couldn’t move. My legs were bloody and dirty. I tried to get up, but noticed that my left arm was bent backwards and I couldn’t move it. In fact, it was twisted into an unnatural shape and I knew just from looking at it that it was broken.
I started trying to scream “Help”, but could barely whimper in a whisper. Over and over, I kept saying “Help”, but no one came into the room. I looked around the room for a phone. No telephone.
Then, I noticed my bag under the bed. I had no idea how it had gotten there, but I thought about my cell phone and prayed that it would be in the bag if I could get to it. I drug myself with my other arm, crawled, crying in pain, over to the bed and reached for the bag. I had to stop for a moment. I could feel inside my mouth that there was something in my mouth. I spit it out – it was a condom. I vomited.
Laying in the vomit, I closed my eyes and prayed as I felt around in my bag and couldn’t believe that I found my cell phone. “Oh God.” I quickly dialed 911.
“911 – What’s your emergency?”
What’s my emergency. “I…I’m injured and I can’t move.” I could barely talk.
“Maam, what’s wrong – I can barely hear you. Are you alone? Is there anyone there with you?”
I kept whimpering “help”. Over and over. The woman on the phone was getting panicked, from the sound of her voice.
“Honey, don’t hang up.” I could hear her on the radio calling for a police officer.
“Can you talk at all? Are you alone? Is anyone with you?”
I managed to muster enough voice to answer her in broken sentences.
“Alone. Bleeding…hurts…(whimpering)….broken arm…help….”
I heard her on another line calling an ambulance as well as a police dispatch.
“Honey, where are you?” I didn’t even know the address. I started crying. How could I be so stupid??? “”Don’t know….end of Myer’s Street….yellow house…”
The operator stopped as if she immediately knew the house. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a tracker on your cell phone. The police and ambulance are on their way. Can you stay on the line until they arrive?”
“Yes please.” I started to sob. “Scared.” And then I started crying and my voice came back to me.
“ I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how I got here. I…” and there was a knock on the door downstairs. “I hear someone – I think it’s the police.”
“It is, dear. They just radio’d that they are at the residence. Are you upstairs or downstairs?”
“Upstairs. I can see trees out the window….” Before she finished her sentence, the door to the room opened and two EMT’s walked into the room.
“Ms. Stanton?” I immediately became aware that I wasn’t wearing anything. One of them covered me with a lightweight warm towel and called in to another dispatch.
“Thank you…” to the woman on the phone. The EMT took the phone, hung it up and I drifted off.
The two EMT’s were quickly followed by two police officers who started putting up the yellow crime tape all over the room. One was on a phone talking outside the room of the bedroom, but I could hear blips of what he was saying…”she’s naked, bleeding”, “condoms”, “bottles”, “party”, and other such words, as if this was an ordinary occurrence. He walked back into the room and I automatically felt the need to speak. I was very dizzy and very tired.
“Sir…” he looked at me. “I know what this much look like, but I’m not…”
He knelt down next to me. “Don’t worry about anything. What this looks like is something that is all too common in this area. How many were there?” He was obviously talking about the guys.
I started dozing off. The EMT told the officer, “I just gave her a sedative. She may start getting drowsy.”
“Honey, don’t worry. We’ll talk later when you are feeling a little better. We’re going to take you to the hospital to make sure you’re OK and take care of your injuries, OK? You’re safe now.”
I laid my head back and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Eight
I woke up, disoriented and looked around. I was obviously in a hospital bed and had several monitors and IV’s hooked up in my arm. I heard Sabrina speak.
“Jasmine! OH MY GOD. Are you OK? What happened to you last night? Where were you? I’ve been so worried about you…” She started crying and holding her head.
Jasmine continued to think, trying to put the events of the previous day together to figure out how she had ended up injured in a hospital room. School, the Christmas break party, Sabrina and her picking out clothes and doing each other’s hair, being excited and nervous about the party…her stomach started to feel nauseous and wretched.
“Sabrina, I think I’m going to…” she didn’t make it. She threw up all over her bed, herself and the floor. Green, pale and everywhere. Sabrina ran out of the room.
“NURSE!! We NEED a nurse!! Jasmine just threw up all over the place!!”
I lie down in the bed. I continued to think as I wiped my mouth with a towel nearby. I waited, but nurses and orderlies started to race into the room. I was clean before I knew it. They had changed my bedding, given me a quick bed-bath and cleaned the floor in about fifteen minutes. Sabrina was waiting outside the room.
Sabrina came back into the room. I started asking her questions, awake and feeling a bit more oriented. Where were you? I waited for you…why did you leave?” I started to cry. I couldn’t believe that Sabrina would leave me. I kept asking her questions.
“I don’t know exactly what happened last night. Sabrina, what do you know? Where am I?”
“You’re in St. Vincent Memorial in Intensive Care. Apparently, the police are saying…”
“The police? Why are the police involved? Was I attacked? And how did you find out that I was here?”
“Everyone knows you’re in the hospital. The police aren’t sure about what happened and they are sort of waiting to talk to you when you’re feeling better. Do you remember anything about last night?”
I thought more carefully about the night before and tried to put the pieces together. I definitely remembered Jonathan and how he had to leave, but that I had stayed to try to find Sabrina.
“Yes – I stayed. I was trying to find you. I was worried about where you were because you didn’t seem like you were alright. The last I saw you, you were stumbling, mixing up your words and being carried off by two guys I had never seen before. I waited for several hours and decided to go and look for you. I went into the kitchen and there were some people making coffee, and they offered me some. I was very tired, but I couldn’t leave without knowing you were OK, so I drank some coffee and then, my head started spinning a little, but I thought I was just tired.
I wasn’t leaving without you.”
A knock on the door interrupted their conversation. A doctor came in and asked Sabrina to step out.
“Hi, Jasmine. How are you feeling this morning?”
“Very confused and I have a terrible headache. My arm hurts and I’m really sore all over…” She didn’t want to go into detail, but her private parts were hurting terribly.
“Ms. Stanton, I have to ask you some questions before the police come in to question you.”
“The police? They’re here now? Is this really necessary?”
The doctor took out his chart and started reading over reports, like lab results, history, and other pertinent information and acted as though he didn’t hear my last question.
“What do you remember about last night, Jasmine?”
I recalled the night, as I had for Sabrina. I remembered going up the stairs and then, as if hit by a baseball bat in the head, I remembered being in a room - the room full of people – that quickly just became a mesh of naked bodies - and the total confusion that I felt in her head. I remembered waking up this morning, but I wasn’t sure if I had passed out or had been knocked out or just fell asleep.
“So you have no memory of any of who the people were in the room? You had never seen or met them before?”
“NO. What are you asking me? Dr., could you please tell me what happened?”
The doctor sighed. “First, your arm is broken. You have a slight concussion, as if your head hit something abruptly. Apparently, you were either thrown or fell and broke your arm.” He sighed.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to tell you. There was evidence that you had sex with at least seven people. There were seven samples of semen found in your rectum and in your vagina. There are tears in your mouth as well, which suggests that oral sex took place as well. Do you have any memory of any of this?”
Sabrina felt like she was going to throw up. She couldn’t breathe and started to breathe quickly.
“What are you saying? I didn’t have any sex with anybody last night…”
“That’s not all. We drew blood after we gave you the “night after” pill to ensure that you didn’t get pregnant from this experience. There was also methamphetamine in your bloodstream. Do you routinely use drugs, Ms. Stanton? Do you drink or use any other recreational drugs?”
Sabrina started to hyperventilate again and started to cry.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don’t drink at all. I don’t even drink Champaign at New Year’s. And, of course, I don’t smoke or do any drugs. ” She just kept repeating herself over and over. Another knock on the door interrupted and a police officer came into the room along with a plain clothes detective.
“Hello, Ms. Stanton. Dr., is she up for answering questions at this point? Is this a good time?”
Jasmine spoke up. “Yes, this is a very good time. I would be glad to answer any questions you have. My name is Jasmine Stanton. I am a freshman journalism student at the college, on the Dean’s list. What would you like to know?”
The doctor asked them to step outside the hospital room for a moment. The three men stepped outside the door and then the detective stepped back in.
“Ms. Stanton, forgive me for having to ask you sensitive questions when you are obviously distraught. But, the longer we wait, the less evidence we can collect about what happened last night. Can you answer a couple of questions?”
She started to cry. All she could think about was what had happened to her. How she had saved herself for her entire life and how someone had put something into her drink – a coffee – and how at least seven men had raped her. They had robbed her of something she could never get back.
“What? I’m sorry.” She wiped away her tears, as best she could, and tried to sit up.
“Can you please tell me what happened last night? How did you get to this party and do you know anyone that was there?” She thought for a minute. She didn’t want Sabrina or Jonathan to get in trouble, but she wasn’t going to lie, either.
“I have a friend who has been trying for months to convince me to go to a college party. She wanted me to have fun. This is the first party I’ve been to since I got to college. Sabrina – my friend – got lost at the party and I was worried about her so I stayed to find her. A group of people I don’t know offered to help me, but it was late and they offered me some coffee – ambrosia latte to be exact – to help me wake up and then we went upstairs to look for her. The next thing I knew, I was locked in a room and I don’t remember very much except that I was being touched all over, then I started feeling pain, but I couldn’t see much of anything because there was only a candle lit in the room…”
“But you didn’t know who took you into the room? Did they attack or grab you in any way?”
“Well, no. We were going upstairs to look for my friend, Sabrina…”
“At two in the morning? You went alone upstairs in a strange house with several young men that you didn’t know?”
“Yes, but they were helping me find Sabrina…”
“When did you take the meth? With them?”
“I DIDN”T TAKE ANY DRUGS. All I did was drink some coffee in the kitchen with them and some other girls before we went looking for Sabrina…”
“So you’re telling me you had no idea that there was meth in that coffee? That they had given you something other than coffee?”
“My head felt swimmy, but it was two o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted. I thought it was just a sudden rush from the caffeine, but then I started feeling not like myself.”
“When was your first memory of someone touching you?”
“On the staircase. One of the guys put his hand on my back.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know his name.”
The officer looked at me and his left eyebrow raised. “You let a guy you don’t know touch your back?”
I frowned.
“It wasn’t like that. He was just walking with me up the stairs. I thought he was being polite.” But, the more he spoke with her, she knew exactly what it was like. She had been taken advantage of by a bunch of very sly, manipulative and experienced college guys who purposefully gave her a drug that would make her cooperative and probably have no sensible memory of the event.
“Do you go off with people you don’t know often?” The officer’s tone began to sound accusatory.
“Officer….what’s your name? No, I don’t. I don’t go anywhere with anyone I don’t know. Like I told you, this was the first time I had even been to a party. But I was worried about my friend. And they gave me coffee with something in it that I didn’t know about.”
“But do you usually accept drinks or other things from people that you don’t know?”
“Of course not.”
“But you did last night?” He looked down and began writing in his notepad.
“Look. I was gang-raped last night by people I don’t know.” It was the first time she had actually said it. She felt like she was in a Lifetime movie. “THEY are the criminals. You have their blood types, I understand. Do you have fingerprints? There had to be something in the room – have you looked? Shouldn’t you be interviewing people who were at that party to find out who was there after two o’clock in the morning?”
“You were there after two o’clock in the morning.” He shook his head and said, “thank you, Ms. Stanton. I think I have everything for right now. I’ll be back later, OK? If we find out anything, we’ll let you know. I hope you start feeling better.”
“But what are you going to do?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Look, Jasmine. May I call you Jasmine? You were at a party after two in the morning. You willingly drank coffee that was given to you and have no proof that you didn’t know about the meth in the coffee. You invited – ASKED – for their help and they went with you. You walked into the room and you participated in this – incident, for lack of a better, less respectful word.”
“But what about my injuries? Doesn’t that prove assault? It’s OK for them to hurt me and injure me in the ways that I have been violated?”
“But they had your permission. You didn’t fight back. There’s no sign of anything in the room except for your clothes off of your body and no sign of struggle except for an exceptionally erotic party. If I were you, I’m not so sure about how much of this I would want people to know about. I’m sure the boys are doing a great job of that for you.”
He left the room and I felt completely alone. He made it clear that what had happened to me was partly my fault and he almost made it sound like I had asked for it to happen. My body and my head really hurt and I hit the nurse’s button.
She came in and I asked her to speak to the doctor once more. He came in shortly after that. I asked him to explain exactly what my injuries were and when I could expect to leave.
He asked if the police had explained everything to me.
“Yes, I know that I was gang-raped by seven different people. What if I catch something or get pregnant? How am I going to know what all has happened to me?”
He explained that my rectum had been torn and I had several stitches in both my rectum and in my vagina. He explained that my left arm had been broken in two places and would require surgery at a later date, but had been set for the time being. I asked if I could have anything for pain which he quickly ordered.
I started crying again. “I’m in terrible pain. I know I’ve already told you that, but my body is hurting all over. The police say there’s nothing they can do because I was a willing participant. Is that what you think? Because of that drug, which clearly took my thoughts and turned me into someone I don’t even know, does that make me a willing participant? Isn’t there some medical reasoning that would explain how something like this could remove your reasonability? That I did this?”
He shook his head. “At this point, I can give you something to help your pain and it will help you sleep a little more soundly. As far as what happened…they will hopefully get to the bottom of it. We have already taken several blood tests and we’ll continue to follow up with blood tests every six months for a year or two and make sure that you didn’t catch any type of diseases and as far as pregnancy, we have you a medication called the “night after pill”. That’s why you were bleeding a little this morning, like a heavy period. I’m so sorry that this is how the beginning of your college experience turned out.” He was being so kind I wanted to hug him, but at this point, I was weird about touching anyone at all. Especially anyone I don’t know.