As seen on Medium.
The pulsing of Fetty Wap quickened as I tried to exit the Hudson Terrace Night Club in Manhattan. I had just concluded another successful night of dancing with my girls and dodging any male who tried to lead me astray. I was feet from the exit when another body latched on to mine. When I looked into her eyes I saw terror. She was crying and screaming, but those sounds were deafened by “And I got that soooodaaaaa.” Without any hesitation, I put her arm around me and signaled for my friend to do the same. I pleaded with this girl to calm down, told her that we were going to get her home, and not to worry.
Her body was practically dead weight pulling us to the ground. While guiding her to the bathroom, at least two other men approached us saying “they could take her home.” I now felt the responsibility to rescue this stranger and I didn’t even know her name (because she couldn’t even verbalize it to me). She was not in control of her own body and the men who tried to whisk her away saw this as an opportunity.
I’m not so mad at this girl (whose name I later found out is Katie) for settling into this state, I’m mad at her friends. Her no good, abandoning, piece of sh*t friends. She needed someone and they weren’t there. I had to tell her repeatedly how much her friends sucked for these reasons, but she was unaware of the repercussions of her recklessness. They let her feel threatened by a guy when they knew she was too far gone. They probably thought it was funny to watch her dance with a weirdo at a club, because we all do and make fun of our friends for it later, but anyone could see this wasn’t a joke, because it wasn’t consensual. The saddest part was, by the end of the night, her phone still didn’t have a single missed call or text asking where she was; her ‘friends’ didn’t think twice about her absence.
Katie tried to make a break for it when we got her to the bathroom, running to security guards on opposite sides of the club to tell them we were trying to hurt her (blah, blah, blah). The security guards were kind enough to escort her out for us and force her in to a cab. It took thirty minutes of “you can trust us, it’s ok now’s” to get her into the vehicle (and some slaps to the face; still feeling the burn from those, thanks Katie). Once in the vehicle she kicked and screamed and hit us more. At one stoplight she even tried to escape, but was immediately stopped by gravity when her head met the pavement beside the cab.
I sat in the front seat of the cab trying to make light conversation with the drivers (yes, plural…we had to take multiple cabs to get you home, Katie) saying things like “Do you have any kids? Wouldn’t you hate if this were them? Love your children!” They found this funny, but all jokes aside, I was genuinely concerned. This evening launched me into full-fledged mom-mode from which my conclusion was: I’m never letting my kids out of the house.
Some of you may be thinking “We all get drunk, we’re in college, we’re young, our parents did too, so what?” But she was a nasty combination of drunk and something else. My friends and I concluded this based on her abnormal behavior of attacking us one second, then calling us fairies the next. She may have been drugged or taken something voluntarily, but the reason I decided to see this girl all the way up her front steps at her apartment in Queens, and paid hundreds of dollars in cab fares to get her there, was because I kept thinking of her family and how devastated they’d be if she didn’t get home.
We see posters all over our campuses that read “Just one more drink CAN hurt. Keep your friends from hurting themselves or others,” or “Cut them off before they’ve had too much,” but we never think of it as more than light reading on the bathroom stall. Yet, sexual assault and rape have become such massive epidemics on college campuses worldwide because these cases are often ignored, making statistics increase.
Everyone hears about cases of assault, but never think it could happen to them. That it would never happen at their school, but it does, dozens of times a semester, and it can easily be stopped. Never let your friends out of sight, have your phones on you at all times, and keep an eye out for others. People need to try a little harder to look around and not get carried away in the sounds of freedom and sweat while dancing our hearts out. This is not to say you shouldn’t have a good time, but be cautious, especially women: we have a duty to protect each other.
To Katie, from Pennsylvania, who goes to school at St. Johns in Queens: I hope you see this and know that no matter how many times you cursed at us, screamed in the ears of cab drivers, threw up on the front steps of our apartment, and peed on my coat, that we were happy to help, but that it should be a wakeup call. Oh, and you owe us $150 and a big dry-cleaning bill.