A Girl's Life Online (19 page)

The officers reassured me meeting wouldn't take long or be difficult. I only wish they had been right. Before we even got started with the questions we ran into trouble. Neither of the officers was at all familiar with the Internet. It took half an hour for me to explain it to them.

When we finally got to the questions, I had a lot of trouble understanding their relevance to the investigation. They kept asking me: “Are your parents mad at you because of the incident?”

“I don't think mad describes it correctly,” I told them. “Of course they were angry with Mark but not me. Their feelings toward me could be better described as disappointment. I was their daughter who had always been so responsible. Now I had violated their trust. They were not mad. They were heartbroken.”

Mostly the police wanted to understand the exact sequence of the events that night. I hated talking about it. It was late in the day. I was tired to begin with, but this process made me feel exhausted, and I just wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. But the questioning went on for hours. It was a strange scene. Me answering all these questions. The officers trying to figure out how to respond to me. They gave me jelly beans and a fake police badge and chatted to make the time go by quicker, but time really doesn't go fast in a police station. When the questions stopped, my grandmother and I had to wait for them to type up the interview so that we could verify the report.

At about 10:45, the report was done and we read it. I signed it, verifying that it was the truth to the best of my knowledge. Later my mother signed it as my legal guardian. This was yet another strange thing, to my mind. She wasn't there during any of the interview. She wasn't involved in my relationship with Mark, and she wasn't there in that hotel room. How could she guarantee that I had told the truth to the best of my knowledge?

Everything fades with time. A few weeks passed and even though I was still filled with regret and confusion, I began to accept that everyone thought they knew what had happened to me in Texas. I even began to accept that I could not do much of anything about their opinions of me.

Through all of this, I tried to continue with the life of a kid, pretending that I was somehow in a normal situation. That spring my singing group went on a tour of Washington, D.C. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial, and musical groups from every state were invited to come and perform on the monument's steps. In addition to that performance, we also sang at a veteran's hospital and outside the White House. I went as part of the group, and I have no doubt that a lot of people wondered if I was going to meet up with Mark somewhere along the way.

I hoped that my mother would be able to attend these performances, considering it would be one of the last times I would sing with the choir. But as always, business was a conflict, and she was not able to make it. So I was alone, in more ways than one, among twenty kids, all dressed in red sweaters, black shorts, and black tights. Everyone stood in rows according to height, and we must have seemed like generic kids—carefree, happy.

I felt very removed from all of the other kids at the event. I wasn't anything like the girl next to me, even though I had my hair done the same way and wore the same clothes. I had broken off with Mark, but he was still dominating my thoughts.

I missed Mark. And if this crisis had been about anything else, I would have turned to him for support, as I had in the past. I missed hearing his voice late at night. I missed the notes on the Internet. He would have made me laugh. He would be the one making me feel loved. And I was convinced that since I still thought about him in the same way he must also be feeling the same. It didn't matter much that he had openly lied about his age or name, I just wanted Mark back. I wanted to feel again the way he had made me feel when we were close.

Ashley was the only one who didn't abandon me completely. She was there the day when Karen approached me at lunchtime. Karen didn't look happy, and I knew there was something wrong when she asked to speak with me outside the lunchroom. Like the time she had told me about her brother's leukemia, she suggested that we go to the bathroom. It was the only private place left for two girls who had once shared so much during sleep-overs and long late-night phone calls.

Karen didn't waste any time. “I have to be honest with you, Katie,” she said. “I don't consider you a close friend anymore.” I knew it was true. I had lost my old best friend months ago. But just as it was painful for me to hear my mother blame me for things, it was painful to hear Karen tell the truth about us.

I asked her why she felt this way, because I needed an explanation. She told me that I hadn't been there for her for months, or for her brother's illness. She was right. I hadn't offered her much support at all, but she had also pulled away from me, and she had asked me not to talk to her about Rob. She said she felt bad about telling me this now, but she had to do this for herself. She needed to clear the air. She was dealing with a life-and-death situation in her family.

I couldn't argue with her, and I didn't want to. But it was hard to let go of the idea, the hope, that Karen and I could be friends again. I was confused and frustrated. I was so upset that I went to the school nurse and said I was sick and had to leave school.

My grandmother picked me up that day. I didn't know what to say to her, and she didn't know what to say to me to make me feel better.

As soon I got home I called my mom at work. She didn't have to tell me that I had let Karen down. I knew that. What I didn't know was that Karen's brother was really in danger. His wasn't ordinary leukemia, my mom said, it was a more serious type, and his chances for survival were not good at all. This came as a complete surprise. In the fall I had been told that Rob was doing well, and because the doctors had caught the leukemia early he was going to survive. No one even mentioned that this disease could be terminal, and I thought that because he was in remission he would be okay.

Back in the bathroom at school, Karen had berated me for not asking her about her brother's condition. I should have done more to cheer her up, she said, brought her cupcakes and balloons every so often. But I couldn't have understood her suffering because she had never told me the truth.

At the time, I blamed all of this on her, and my feelings of outrage about the situation were a distraction from my own personal crisis. I felt that it was extremely selfish for Karen to dump this on me now. And as horrible as it may seem, I also thought my problem was worse than hers. It would take me a long time to accept that Karen was right and to realize that I should have been a better friend.

After I finished talking to my mom, I went up to my room and began eating Godiva chocolate Easter eggs. I think I ate ten of them while I tried several times to call Karen. Her mom told me Karen wasn't home, even though I could hear her in the background. Eventually I got her on the phone. I told her I wanted to be friends. I understood her feelings, but we had been so close, it seemed we should be able to be friends again. Karen said no, we were through as friends.

I took some solace in my friendship with Ashley, but this relationship was under pressure, too, from her parents. One Saturday they called and asked if they might come over to speak with my mother and David. They all sat downstairs in the family room, and as I walked by, on my way out to swimming practice, I could feel the tension.

Like other swim team parents, they didn't feel comfortable having me around their daughter, even though Ashley and I had been close for a long time. They told my parents that I wasn't a good influence on her, but because we were so close and I was Ashley's friend they would let Ashley decide how she wanted to handle it. For now, she would be my friend. That was her decision, but her parents were not happy with me at all.

I didn't understand why they couldn't accept that people make mistakes, especially teenagers. Didn't they understand that I wasn't entirely responsible for what happened? Mark had played a huge role, but everyone ignored that fact. I thought that we all deserved second chances in life. But I had made such a big mistake, done something so shameful, that no one seemed able to forgive me.

I lost more friends on the swim team as all the parents began to agree that I was a dangerous influence. My sister Carrie, who was on my swim team, too, was also ostracized, and so were my parents. And through it all, Mark was free out in California. Now, when I thought of him, I sometimes pictured him talking to another girl over the Internet and trying to get her into bed.

W
ith summer, I got a break from school, but not from New Canaan. Before it had always seemed like no one even noticed me, but now it seemed like everyone in town was either gossiping about me, looking at me strangely, or judging me silently. Of course, I'll never know how much of this was really happening and how much I was imagining because of my shame. But I heard enough to be sure I was widely known as either The Girl Who Got Molested or New Canaan's Lolita.

Everyone was a little too interested in my sexual attitudes and behavior. I guess this is something every girl learns to deal with, eventually. Adults are intrigued and frightened by young female bodies. We're supposed to be attractive. The media make us into some kind of powerful ideal. But this power is also evil. We're bad if we think about sex or act sexual. Good girls never ever do that.

My parents could see how much I was suffering. This didn't mean we actually talked about it. Counseling—which my family made sure to tell me was a pretty narcissistic exercise—was supposed to take care of my need for talking. Outside of the psychologist's office I was to make the best of things, get on with life.

Still, my mother and David wanted to help, so they decided I should spend four weeks at a summer camp in the Florida Keys. It was going to be the first trip that I took by myself since the Texas incident. It showed me that they had begun to trust me again. They drove me to JFK early on a Sunday morning to say good-bye to me. I hugged them and promised to call as soon as I arrived in Miami.

At camp I became a certified scuba diver and was able to go diving at Looe Key, one of the very few coral reefs in U.S. territory, almost every day. Being around people my age who didn't know what had happened to me was therapeutic. For those four weeks I felt like myself again, and I went home feeling relaxed and maybe even happy.

When I got home from Florida my parents seemed to be more themselves, too. But we all knew that the investigation was continuing, and, in fact, things were not settled. David insisted I still had to continue counseling with Psychologist Number Two. I was very immature, in his eyes, and I had some big lessons to learn.

I couldn't have disagreed more. Hadn't Mark, my family, Karen, even the whole town of New Canaan been teaching me harsh lessons for a long time now?

I never did understand therapy, but I went because my mother and David insisted. And so, in addition to being a slut and a victim, I became a mental patient. The psychologist offered absolutely no direction to any of our conversations. I would talk for about twenty minutes straight and then she would say, “Yes, and how do you
feel
about that?”

Since I was forced into treatment, I resented the whole idea. I wasn't sent to therapy for me. Well, in part my mother was worried about me, but she was mainly trying to please all the other swim team parents. This is how it went: If Katie's in therapy, then she's obviously getting help and therefore the Tarbox family can stay in the swimming group.

I complained about the counseling every day. My mother listened, in part because she felt the same way about the therapist. We were both having a difficult time relating to Psychologist Number Two. Eventually she and David had a dispute about whether I had to continue counseling. Since my mother wears the pants, I didn't have to continue.