I had already been depressed; severe depression was the only healthy response to growing up in my family. But the move was terrible. I couldn’t figure out how to make friends; the high school was a John Hughes movie before there were John Hughes movies. But then a good-looking senior offered to drive me home one day. I was excited—I’d had my eye on him, and in the promise of this ride home I saw the solution to all of my problems: my sadness, my loneliness, my inability to figure out how to go to the parties the other kids were always talking about in the hallways and before class started.

He drove me home, looked around my empty house for a bit, and then suggested we drive to the beach. It was in his car, in the deserted parking lot of that beach, that he tried to rape me, although neither of us would have used that word for it. It was only in college that I heard the term date rape. The way dates between high-school students in the 1970s were understood was the way that dates had been understood since the 1920s. The idea was that anything bad that happened was the girl’s fault. She had agreed to go off in a car with a boy alone; she was taking her chances. Boys would be boys, and it was up to girls to manage their coercive, importuning sexuality. But this was not coercive: This was a very strong kid, an athlete, trying to pin down a girl who weighed 116 pounds and was part of the pre–Title IX generation. We struggled against each other, and then—suddenly—he stopped. He started the car and drove me home in silence.

I told no one. In my mind, it was not an example of male aggression used against a girl to extract sex from her. In my mind, it was an example of how undesirable I was. It was proof that I was not the kind of girl you took to parties, or the kind of girl you wanted to get to know. I was the kind of girl you took to a deserted parking lot and tried to make give you sex. Telling someone would not be revealing what he had done; it would be revealing how deserving I was of that kind of treatment.

My depression quickly escalated to a point where, if I’d been evaluated by a psychiatrist, I would probably have been institutionalized as a danger to myself. I had plans for how I was going to kill myself. I managed to make a few friends, who introduced me to acid, which was no help with the depression. I sat in classes in a blank state, except for English. (“To the girl about whom I will someday say, ‘I knew her when,’” my English teacher wrote in that yearbook, words that stunned me when I first read them, and that I’ve never forgotten.)

But then, at the beginning of the second semester, my fortunes turned, and another boy asked me out. Another drive home, another trip to a beach parking lot—you’d think I would have learned, but from the minute we got in the car, I knew this was different. We bought a bottle of wine and sat in his car drinking it and talking, and by the time he drove me back home, I felt rescued.