The summer I went crazy happened forty years ago
when I was just seventeen, but I've never forgotten.
It started with rape and ended with a promise. In
between I fell in love, broke the law, and made an
irrevocable decision.
The Summer I Went Crazy
by Laura Koerber
Genre: Coming of Age, YA Literary Fiction
The rule for guys like me was that we'd grow up to be like our parents. Our parents put a lot of work and money into making sure we did. I got it all: the expensive private school education, the summers in Europe, the family connections to a congressman and other influential people, an admission to Yale. I was fast tracked for success.
Instead, I became the witness to a rape.
And I fell in love, broke a bunch of laws, made an irrevocable decision, and made a lifetime promise.
**TRIGGER WARNING – While not containing the direct
decription of rape, it does describe dealing with the
aftermath of rape and includes drug and alcohol abuse.
Epilogue: Utah 2019
Her phone is ringing. I’m using the land line because the call is too important for a cell phone. I can’t risk the hassles: static, weak sound, or a dropped call. My voice has to reach across the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains, and all the way to Wisconsin. And it has to reach across nearly forty years and who knows what changes and pain as well. She never got married. Does that mean anything? Girls who went to Saint Anne’s were brought up to get married.
Just like the boys who went to St. Andrew’s were supposed to grow up to be captains of business or leaders of the people— like my old buddy, Clint, now known as Congressman Welch. Claire, Clint, and I had been private school kids, brought up with the belief that we were entitled to turn our expensive educations into prestigious positions in society.
Well, Clint had done that by winning his dad’s seat in Congress. I didn’t know anything about Claire except she’d never married, and she still lived in Camden. Right there in Clint’s district.
She must be scared.
Ring, ring, ring. Is she standing by the phone, afraid to answer?
I’d phoned her once before, but it was a long, long time ago, a painful conversation between strangers that I still remember with humiliation. I’m expecting this call to be painful too. Ring, ring.
Maybe she isn’t home. Or maybe she’s letting her message machine take the calls. That seems likely, come to think of it. She’s probably been getting harassing calls. Christ, harassing calls! At least mine isn’t one of those. Please answer. Please. Ring, ring.
She isn’t answering. Well, I can understand that. So I need to say something to her message machine, something that will remind her without scaring her. Maybe just tell her my name and hope—
“Hello?” Suddenly her voice. Tentative, as she’d been the last time. I’m so startled that I gibber incoherently, “Claire? Claire? It’s Benny. I’m Benny?”
Silence. I can hear her breathing. “Claire?” I try again, afraid that she might hang up. “Do you remember me? Benny from high school. I made a promise to you?”
She starts to cry.
Chapter One: The Party, June, 1983
The rule was that Camden girls were all dogs. That’s what all the St. Andrew’s guys said. It wasn’t true; some, maybe even most, were pretty, but the guys joked about what dogs they were anyway. Camden girls went to public school, so they had to be dogs.
We were all real studs, of course. Healthy in body and mind: athletic, scholarly, regular attendees at church, destined to be lawyers or CEOs or Congressmen. Or maybe doctors but not family practice. Some high paying specialty. We were going to pick up wives along the way from the stock available at an Ivy League college or a country club or something like that. And our wives would be pretty. At least for the first couple of years.
We were going grow up to be our parents. That was another rule.
So I kind of wondered why I was checking myself out so carefully in the mirror. My hair was combed, I had no obvious zits, and I’d applied deodorant. I looked like a prep school kid. I liked looking like a prep school kid because I was a prep school kid, but something was bugging me.
I wasn’t very tall. Maybe that was it.
Clint banged on my bedroom door, two thumps, like a code. He didn’t say anything. I grabbed my monogrammed leather jacket, a gift from my big sister. Her idea of macho, I think, intended to make me more impressive to the female gender. I slapped my butt to make one last wallet check. As long as I had my wallet, nothing could go too badly wrong.
Clint was sashaying down the hall like he lived in my house. Well, he’d been my best friend forever, and we were always running in and out of each other’s houses. I could tell by his loping, lopsided stride that he was drunk already. Him first, me behind, we galloped down the stairs.
On the way to the door, we passed the archway to the main living room, the big room at the front of the house. Neither of my parents was in there which meant they were down the hall in the den or the TV room. I leaned around the door and hollered, “Hey, I’m off!” From the depths of the house, my mom shouted back, “Have fun!” Clint and I were on our way to a party. Not a party with anyone I would know. Someone had invited Clint, and Clint had invited the rest of us.
By “us” I mean me, Marty, and Rob. They were waiting in Clint’s car, having started the party off up in Clint’s room at his house with some hard liquor. I clambered into the nearly vestigial back seat, bumped shoulders with Rob, and got a nose full of his aftershave. Clint stomped on the gas, and we launched ourselves upon the world with a roar from the engine of his bright red Mustang.
I watched the big houses of our neighborhood flash by and morph into the brick store fronts of downtown Camden. The streets were wet and smeared with the colors of the streetlights and neon. Clint charged the yellow traffic lights and bullied his way through the bar crowd traffic. Once he got past downtown, he rammed the gas pedal down and we roared through a neighborhood of little white cottages, acres of them—student housing for the state university. I knew a grad of our school who lived somewhere out there in Outer Slobovia. He said he wanted to be a veterinarian, but really he just didn’t get very good grades at our school, so he had to go to a state U. We passed knots of students standing at the corners or walking around. Marty hollered out the window at them just to be obnoxious. One group responded with peace signs, and I saw a hand raised with a joint.
“Hey, they have some pot,” Marty yelled over the radio.
“What?” Clint yelled back.
“Those townies were going to give us some pot.”
“Plenty where we’re headed.”
We flew down the long slant to the river, accelerated across the bridge, and shot up the hill on the other side into the alien world of rural Wisconsin. Dairy farms. Or some other kinds of farms. Farms anyway. I was from Camden, but I didn’t know anything about farms except the obvious: They were spaced at regular intervals; each had a very, very bright light attached to the barn; and they were fenced. Because of cows, I assumed.
We hurtled through the darkness. Clint always drove like a fighter pilot, swooping and swerving. He got very relaxed and fluid when drunk, and I actually was not afraid he’d kill us. I just rolled around with the turns, first me leaning into Rob, then Rob leaning into me. Then Clint braked abruptly, aimed the car between fence posts, and we bounced up a dirt road to a yard packed with cars parked every which way around a shabby farm house.
I could tell right away that most of the kids were not from our school because the pickup trucks and cars looked like they belonged to somebody's mom or dad. Clint braked with a flourish, and the red Mustang came to a quivering halt, exhaling steam into the cool night air. We all disentangled ourselves and climbed out.
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Laura is an artist who lives on an island with her husband and her two dogs. She has always entertained herself by telling herself stories. As a child, she used to like going to bed because she could lie awake under the covers and run movies in her head. Later, as an adult, she enjoyed long distance driving for the opportunity to spend hours writing novels in her imagination.
Now Laura divides her retirement time between dog rescue, care for disabled people, political activism, and yes, she still tells herself stories while she is driving. Her first book, The Dog Thief and Other Stories, written under the pen name of Jill Kearney, was listed by Kirkus Review as one of the One Hundred Best Indy Books of 2015. She's also the author of I Once Was Lost, But Now I'm Found, Limbo, The Eclipse Dancer, and Wild Hare. She has a story contribution in the book Rescue Smiles, too.
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