by Amy Santana
Exchange Staff

(Names have been changed to protect identities.)

     Sara's heart beat heavily. She wasn't sure what was going on. What she knew was that she and Daniela had had an argument a few hours earlier, and Daniela had decided to go out alone for the first time since they had been at school.  

     When Sara Alesdi responded to a phone call asking that she come and get her roommate at a Northwoods apartment, she had no idea what to expect. Crying hysterically while sporadically sipping on water, the only beverage her friends would now allow her, Sara's roommate admitted that she had been raped as a young girl. Daniela Corintalis sat on the foreign bed with her bloodshot eyes dimming any memory of the eyes that had just a few hours earlier been a bright green.

     "I was raped," she screamed, almost as if no one would believe her. She screamed it again, making this a confession to herself, to convince herself that it had in fact happened. The memory of the events that played out almost eight years before now haunted her mind. As Sara watched in shock while her other friends comforted Daniela, Sara couldn't believe what she was hearing. They had been best friends all through high school, and now in their third year of college Sara was finding out something that Daniela had never told her.

     "I felt an immediate sense of betrayal," said Sara. "I felt guilty feeling that way, but it’s what I felt."

     Daniela confessed that the father of her other best friend in high school, Teresa, whom Daniela had been friends with since day care, had been sexually abusing both of them. "Another shock, that's the only way I can describe it," said Sara. Although I hadn't known Teresa for as long as Daniela did, I had considered her one of my closest friends in high school. I knew about her father abusing her, but I had no idea that Daniela had been too."

     Heavy sobbing filled the foreign two-person room. Sara wanted to talk more about this with Daniela, but wanted to do so without the lingering ears of her chatty friends. She suggested that they return to their trailer. There, Sara told Daniela, she could tell Sara as much or as little as she was ready to.

     Both usually nondrinkers headed back to their room for the night. "I'll never forget the walk back to the trailer," said Sara. "My heart sunk as I saw Daniela stumbling around, not being in control of herself. It was my first time seeing her drunk, and it was her first time being drunk. I kept asking her to let me hold her up, to let me walk with her, but she just kept telling me she was fine. She obviously wasn't."

     In the confinement of their own room, Daniela broke down once again, frequently apologizing for her actions. "I was so ashamed," said Daniela, "but I wanted to talk about it. I was ready." Her body shaking and her breath ragged, Daniela began to re-visit the events of the night.

     "I remember deciding to have one drink, because I figured, I'm only a few months away from being 21, and I've never even had a drink. What's the big deal? One drink turned into two, and, at the same time, I had one of my friends sitting next to me, upset because her father had been sent to jail. I started thinking about my relationship with my own father, and then I thought about Teresa's father. Things I couldn’t even remember started coming back to me. Memories I had never even known I had played out vividly in my mind. I just tried to drink it all away. I wanted to forget everything."

     Sara and Daniela spent the whole night, a Thursday night before early classes, talking about everything. In the morning they were both exhausted, but both good students, went to class anyway. Sara could barely stay awake in class, while the smell of alcohol still seeped out of Daniela's pores.

     "After all this happened, I tried persuading Daniela to go to the counseling center," Sara said, "but it was no use. She said she wasn't ready to talk about it with anyone." The truth is that Daniela may have never talked about it had she not been drinking that night; she might have never even remembered everything.

     "I was afraid that Sara would judge me," said Daniela. "Even though we've been best friends since high school, I wasn't sure if she would understand, and as time went on, I was scared that waiting so long to tell her would make it seem like I didn't trust her."

     The night that Daniela drank for the first time opened a portal into a world of suppressed memories. Now that her secret has been revealed, not only to Sara, but also to herself, Daniela feels a small part of the weight she's been carrying around with her has disappeared. She still hasn’t really come to terms with what happened to her.

     "We both know it's there," said Sara "but we don't bring it up too much.  Daniela will talk about it when she’s ready."