On November 18, Gail drafted an inter-office letter for the files. She posted it on the twenty-third.

There is no question this was a rape. Victim was a virgin and hymen was torn in two places. Lab reports show semen, and medicals show contusions and lacerations.

Identification is at issue. Rape was May 8, 1981 and victim gave detailed description to cops but no arrest made. She goes back to Pennsylvania May 9, 1981. When she returns to S.U. in the fall, she spots defendant on street, and he approaches her and says, "Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?" She runs and calls cops. I had a line-up and she ID's wrong guy (who was a dead ringer for defendant and standing right next to him, and who defendant personally requested). Later she tells cops that she thought it could have been either the defendant or the other guy. Defendant's pubic hair was found to be consistent with one found in her pubic combings. There was a partial print on the weapon (knife) found at the scene, but it has insufficient ridge details to make a comparison (I had it sent to FBI for more testing). Lab advises they cannot determine blood type from semen because it is too tainted with her blood. Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.

I returned home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. One day after coming back to Syracuse on Greyhound, there was a letter waiting for me at my dorm.

"Pursuant to your request," it read in part, "this is to advise you that the above-mentioned captioned defendant has been indicted by the grand jury."

I was thrilled. I stood in my single at Haven and shook with it. I called my mother and told her. I was moving forward. The trial seemed imminent. Any day now.

I was in class when Madison entered his plea on December 4, before Justice Walter T. Gorman. On an eight-count-indictment, Madison pled not guilty. A pretrial hearing was scheduled for December 9. Paquette, representing Madison, admitted to one petit larceny conviction "back somewhere." The State didn't know enough to counter him, and Madison's juvenile record could not be considered. When Gorman asked Assistant DA Plochocki, who was representing the State because Gail was in another court, if he wanted to be heard on bail, Plochocki said, "Judge, I don't have the file." So bail was set at $5,000. Mistakenly, through Christmas and New Year's, I joyfully pictured my assailant in jail.

Before I went home for the Christmas holidays, I'd taken an incomplete in Italian 101, a C- in Classics, a B in Tess's survey course-my paper wasn't quite up to snuff-and two A's: one in Wolff's workshop, one in Gallagher's.

I saw Steve Carbonaro. He had given up Don Quixote and taken to keeping a bottle of Chivas Regal in his apartment near Penn. He scoured flea markets for old, threadbare Oriental rugs, wore a satin smoking jacket, smoked a pipe, and wrote sonnets for a new girlfriend whose name he loved-Juliet. Through his window, with the lights turned off in his own apartment, he watched two extroverted lovers who lived in an apartment across the way. I didn't like the taste of scotch and thought the pipe was stupid.

My sister was still a virgin at twenty-two. I spent time wishing she were less pristine. I know she spent time wishing she were less pristine too. But our motivations were different. I wanted her to fall-for that was how it was seen in our household-so I wouldn't be alone. She wanted to fall so that she would have more in common with most of her friends.

We lived unhappily on either side of the word. She was one, I wasn't one. At first my mother had joked about how the rape might put an end to her lectures on virginity, so now she would lecture me on chastity. But something in this didn't work. It would appear odd if my mother emphasized to my sister the old rules but made new ones up for me. I had moved, by being raped, to a category she found unaddressable.

So I did what I did with the hardest issues: I took the fall-back position of the Sebolds-a thorough analysis of the semantics involved. I looked up all the words and versions-virgin, virginity, virginal, chaste, chastity. When the definitions didn't provide me with what I wanted, I manipulated the language and redefined the words. The end result was that I claimed myself still a virgin. I had not lost my virginity, I said, it was taken from me. Therefore, I would decide when and what virginity was. I called what I still had to lose my "real virginity." Like my reasons for not sleeping with Steve or for returning to Syracuse, this seemed airtight to me.

It wasn't. A lot of what I figured out and subverted wasn't airtight in the least, but I couldn't admit to that then. I also created a painful reasoning for why it was better to have been raped as a virgin.

"I think it's better that I was raped as a virgin," I told people. "I don't have any sexual associations with it like other women do. It was pure violence. This way, when I do have normal sex, the difference between sex and violence will be very clear to me."

I wonder now who bought it.

Even with classes and court appearances, I had found time to nurse a crush. His name was Jamie Waller and he was a student in Wolff's workshop. He was older-twenty-six-and friends with another student in our class, Chris Davis. Chris was gay. I thought this marked Jamie-who was straight-as a highly evolved male. If he could be so openly comfortable in the company of a gay man, I reasoned, he might be able to find a rape victim okay.

I managed to do all the things love-struck girls do. I had Lila meet me after class so she could get a look at him. Back at the dorm we discussed how cute he was. Each time I saw him I would detail for her what he was wearing. He was a master of what I called shoddy prep. He wore rag-wool sweaters with egg stains on them, and his Brooks Brothers boxers often peeked out of his wide-wale cords. He lived off campus in an apartment and had a car. He went skiing on the weekends. He had what I wanted-a life apart. I mooned over him in private; in public I pretended I was tough.

I hated the way I looked. I thought I was fat and ugly and weird. But even if he could never find me physically attractive, he still liked a good story and he liked to get drunk. I could tell one and do the other.

Following Wolff's workshop, Chris, Jamie, and I would grab a few drinks, then Jamie would say, "Well, kids, I'm taking off. What are you two doing this weekend?" Chris and I never had good answers. We both felt lame. My weekends consisted of waiting for the grand jury and then what followed. Chris later admitted that his weekends had been committed to going to the gay bars in downtown Syracuse and trying, without success, to find a boyfriend. Chris and I both overate and drank too much coffee while reading good poetry. When we wrote a poem of our own that we didn't despise, we might call each other and read it aloud. We were lonely and hated ourselves. We kept each other laughing, bitterly, and waited for Jamie, fresh and back from a weekend at Stowe or Hunter Mountain, to fill our dismal lives.

There was the night that fall when I told the two of them about the rape. All three of us were drunk. It was after a reading or a workshop and we had gone to a bar on Marshall Street. It was a bar a bit nicer than most of the student bars, which were more like caverns.

I don't remember how it came out. It was in the day or two before the lineup and so it was all I was thinking about. Chris was stunned and the news had the effect of making him drunker. His brother, Ben, had been murdered two years before, though I didn't know this then. It was Jamie whom I cared about. Jamie I imagined myself falling in love with and marrying.

However he responded, it could not have fulfilled the rescue fantasy I had fabricated. Nothing could. There was no rescue. The table was awkward for a second and then Jamie found the answer. He ordered another round of drinks.