We lived in a little two-story on Iowa City's north side. Its shingles were yellow and red roof tin. Blinking, I made my way down the path from the car and set my suitcase inside the screen door. It was an almost cruelly nice day. I sat on the back porch in the sunshine, overlooking the yard. I pressed my toes into the mangy lawn.

I pulled up my cuffs and saw my knees and shins were black and blue and raw. I felt sick, sad, listless, like I'd been lobotomized. It was hard to believe what had happened, what was happening.

I received an email from my dad, subject line: "Concert."

"We were sorry to hear from Tom that you drank so heavily last night at the concert," he wrote. "Tom was really worried about you, and Brian was scared for your health and safety. I hope you made it home OK. Brian is a nice guy and put up with it, but you could very well lose him over this kind of stuff. I know I'm the kettle calling the pot black, but you need to really take care with alcohol."

The other thing about my dad's alcoholism is he never acknowledged it. No matter how bad the night before — sheriff's calls, a DUI, things screamed so mean they'd be singed on your brain forever — the next morning he'd be downstairs, showered and smiling. He'd pour your orange juice. He'd drive you to school. He would apologize for nothing because he acted like there was nothing to apologize for. The last line of his email, naming himself the pot, confusing that idiom, was probably the closest he'd ever come to admitting he had a problem with alcohol to me.

Though logically I knew that comparing our two actions was unfair, total bullshit, the accusation he was making, coming from him especially, stoked my fear — the fear all children of alcoholics have, I think — of becoming like him, and the shame I felt for the night before. His words tossed oil onto my smoldering self-loathing and I shook with groggy sobs in the late morning sun.

A neighbor's cat, Tuna, traipsed over. She was a tortoiseshell calico with yellow eyes who had adopted half the homes on our block. She flopped on her back. I stopped sobbing and scratched her until she popped back up and away. The squirrels cackled from the trees.

I wrote him back, explaining we believed I'd been drugged. To that he quickly replied: "I'm glad you are home safe. Enough said."

Upstairs I undressed. I cringed at my dusty jeans, the bra lines on my dehydrated skin. I had not been sexually assaulted, I knew, and knew this was something to be grateful for. I'd been at the show with two men. Whoever had drugged me had made a mistake in thinking I was alone. I pictured again and again the moment it must have happened — Brian gone to the bathroom, my brother pushing ahead into the crowd, that last sip of sparkling wine in my hand. I tried to remember who, if anyone, had been around me, but there'd been so many, so many hats and sunglasses on the hats, and the forest had been dark and loud. I showered and cried.

Standing dripping in my wooden-floored bedroom, I googled "roofies" on my phone. The first results were from Urban Dictionary. The Wikipedia page for Flunitrazepam was long and technical; a multicolored three-dimensional model of its molecule rotated, as if on display.

In the months that followed I'd come to understand it's unlikely I was actually "roofied." Two studies have found that less than 1% of patients who reported being drugged actually had Rohypnol (brand-name Flunitrazepam) in their systems. The drug, a member of the Benzodiazepine family developed in the '70s to treat insomnia, enhances GABA at the GABAA receptors, causing sedation, muscle relaxation — and, crucial to its outsized reputation as the go-to date-rape drug and its starring role in '90s PSAs and

covers — retrograde amnesia. While Rohypnol dissolves easily and is consumed without detection, its manufacturer produces a version in a thick shell and with a blue dye to discourage surreptitious use. While it's illegal in this country, it still gets here.

But whoever drugged me might have used another, more easily obtained Benzo, like Valium, Librium, Xanax, or Ativan, all of which combined with the alcohol will knock someone out. Or he — I'm assuming, perhaps unfairly, that it was a man — may have used Gamma-hydroxybutyrate or GHB, a naturally occurring nervous system depressant, which dissolves easily, has no taste or smell, and, like Rohypnol, takes effect quickly, within 15 minutes to a half hour. Its effects last three to six hours and intensify with alcohol, interfering with blood circulation, motor coordination, balance and speech, inducing heavy sleep, leaving in its wake dizziness, tremors, delusions, amnesia, shakes that can last for up to two weeks. Both Benzos and GHB, if taken in significant enough amounts, can result in coma or death. Or he may have used ketamine, which comes on fast. It causes delusions, loss of motor control, out-of-body experiences, altered perception, memory loss, a loss of sense of self. Or he may have used a "Z-Drug" like Ambien (Zolpidem) or zopiclone. It may have been an over-the-counter cough suppressant or Benadryl or even Visine, yes

, which contains tetrahydrozoline, and when ingested, lowers your heart rate, causing potential irritability, drowsiness, sweating, blurred vision, nausea and vomiting, coma. But really, just about any drug can be used to "roofie" someone, especially when combined with alcohol. (A lot of drug-facilitated sexual assaults are committed with the aid of alcohol alone.) I have my theories, but I don't know what the stranger slipped me.

The data about who gets drugged and by whom and by what is poor. This is in part because many who are drugged don't approach authorities, maybe because they've ingested illegal things and/or alcohol knowingly prior to being assaulted, or they're underage, or just scared or ashamed.

I dressed to teach, considering but quickly dismissing the idea that I should go to the hospital instead. My reasoning, if I was capable of reasoning that emotional, foggy morning, was that someone else drugging me wasn't a big deal the way that being raped was a big deal. Besides, I was now two-thirds of a continent away from the scene of the crime. But also I think I had been worried that a test would come back negative, and therefore no one would believe me. Now I know that a test coming back negative wouldn't have been definitive proof that I

drugged. That the sheer variety of substances that can be used to temporarily incapacitate someone, not to mention how quickly some of those substances move through a system, means that false negatives are not uncommon.

Perhaps the biggest reason I thought I was somehow immune to being drugged was that I didn't fit my own stereotype of who that happens to. I wasn't some naive teen with a big red cup. I'd been that girl; I'd done those years. I thought back to all dark living rooms, all the rank kitchens, all the crowded dorm rooms and patios and sweaty dance floors. I thought back to all the bowls of cloudy pink punch, the rounds of shots, the mixed drinks someone I didn't know bought me, all the vulnerable situations I'd been in, here and abroad. To be honest, I never watched my drink intently, not really, but I'd made it, somehow. Now, not only did I feel too old to be drugged by a stranger, whoever had drugged me had evidently done so while I was standing

. I'd never set it down. There'd been witnesses everywhere. It's possible one of them even saw.

I gave my brother a call as I drove across the river to teach. I'd texted him as soon as we'd landed in O'Hare to change planes that morning, telling him we thought I'd been drugged. He hadn't responded. Tom and I have little experience talking to each other about personal things. To call him to talk further about what happened to me was not something I wanted to do, but I needed someone in my family to believe me.

"I don't remember anything," I said, "from about that moment when the show started, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on an airplane."

"You were really messed up," he said, flatly. "You like couldn't walk." I understood why he would be skeptical of me, given how I'd acted, given how we'd been raised to resent belligerent drunks.

"Exactly," I said, realizing my tone was persuasive. "And we had like three, four drinks, plus a sandwich in the course of the whole day? It doesn't make sense I'd be that fucked up, you know that." And he conceded that.

What he finally asked was: "Wait, so this means you missed Skrillex?"

I hung up. I taught, an automaton, and went home and curled up in bed and slept for a long time.

That evening, my mom called and left a message saying she'd seen on the news that a few girls had been sexually assaulted during the festival. She didn't mention me, or ask how I was, or say she was sorry that someone had done this to me.

I looked up the story. Three separate sexual assaults — with a suspicion that drugs were involved — were being investigated. "Each of the victims had been drinking, but investigators have conducted toxicology examinations to determine if anything else was in their systems such as drugs that may be connected to the sexual assaults," one report read. I don't know what came of these complaints.