"My mom. She never came around. And, for all intents and purposes, I started running the household. I shopped. I paid the bills."
"You paid the bills?"
"I filled out the checks and got my mom to sign them. She could be convinced to write her name. But I did all of that stuff. And I took care of Rachel. I made sure she got to school, and I made sure she ate on time. I helped her with her homework. And all of that was fine for a while. We were young, just kids. We couldn't get into too much trouble, so we made it work."
"I sense a 'but' coming," Jason said.
"A big one. The kind that makes all the difference." Diana paused a moment. She felt something swelling in her chest, something that made it difficult to speak. She took a long drink of her beer.
"Are you okay?" Jason said. "We don't have to go on—"
"I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine. I just haven't talked about this in..."
Never.
She cleared her throat. "Rachel was a pretty girl. A beautiful girl. Much prettier than me, and much prettier than just about any girl in our school or in our town. But it wasn't just her looks that made her special. She had a quality, a sense of life and a vitality about her. An energy just radiated out of her, at least when she was really young, and people responded to it. Especially men.
"It was obvious from a very early age that she was going to be popular with the boys. They started calling her and coming to the house right around the time Dad left, before Rachel was even old enough...before she had even reached puberty. And these weren't boys her age. These were boys who were older, fourteen or fifteen years old."
"Sounds like a recipe for trouble."
"It was. I was young, too, of course. It took me a while to figure out what was really going on, and what these boys really wanted. By the time I did, Rachel had already been raped."
"Oh, God," Jason said, his face turning white. "How old was she?"
"Eleven."
"Oh..." Jason took a long drink of his beer. "I don't know what to say."
"Rachel went to a party. There were older kids there, kids from the high school. She ended up in a room with one of the older boys. He was from one of the rich families in town. Brian Barone. His dad was a vice-president at the ball bearing factory. A whole family of assholes if you ask me. Anyway, Rachel ended up in a room with this kid. Locked in a room with this kid. I found all this out months later, but people who were at the party told me that they heard Rachel calling out, saying, 'No, no, no.' But nobody did anything about it. They let it go. I guess they thought boys will be boys and all of that."
"How did you find this out?"
"People at school started talking about it. I overheard them in the locker room after gym class one day. I heard them saying that Rachel had already lost her virginity. I confronted them. I called them liars. I even punched one of the girls in the face. Sally Bingham. I made her cry. She told the vice-principal, and they gave me a three-day suspension. That didn't matter since I didn't really have parents paying attention to whether I was going to school or not. But I did talk to Rachel about it. I told her the story I'd heard at school, and she broke down and admitted everything to me. She was at the party, and she was in the room with Brian Barone. She said no, but he kept going..."
Diana paused, felt the emotion swelling within her.
"It's okay," Jason said.
Diana stood up. "I have to go to the bathroom."
She took her time, washing her hands thoroughly and splashing cold water over her face. A new, open beer waited for her at the table when she came back.
"I got the feeling you might want that," Jason said.
"I do."
They both drank, and a brief silence hung over the table.
"You know," Jason said, "I don't see any of this as your fault. You were a kid, too. You couldn't control her. Adults can't even control kids all the time."
"But there was something I could control," Diana said.
"What's that?"
"My reaction to what Rachel told me."
Jason cocked his head, a look of caution on his face. "What was your reaction?"
Diana stared at the tabletop, letting her eyes fade out of focus. She didn't intend it, but she realized she was shaking her head slightly back and forth.
"Diana?"
"I called her a whore."
Jason made a quick intake of breath, almost inaudible. He didn't say anything.
"I read her the Riot Act. I told her that Mom was sick, and the family was coming apart, and the last thing any of us needed was for her to go running the family name even further down by sleeping around town at parties where everybody would hear about it."