His room smells like old spice and weed and the window is always open, even when it’s cold. The walls are olive green and there is a cherry red electric guitar in the corner. The bed has flannel sheets that I can’t stand to look at anymore.
We’d been to a party, I was drunk, I passed out in his bed, and when I wake up I am on my back and he is on top of me and kissing is not the right word to describe his teeth on my gums, face, neck, his lips all over me and still I am too afraid too disoriented but I know this is wrong and I remember thinking of all the ethical philosophers—Kant, Mill, Hume, Aristotle—I know they’re on my side so finally I manage to say “Ewan, can we just sleep?” And he says yes and I pass out again. I wake up and now he’s pressed against me and my sweatpants are around my knees and his hand is under my shirt then moves down and down some more and right before he gets to my underwear he whispers: “Emma, are you awake?” I didn’t say anything. I thought, maybe, if he knew for certain that I was unconscious he would stop. He would roll over and it would be done. I wish I’d been right.
It’s been almost nine months and I still have trouble calling what happened sexual assault. Even in the middle of my panic attacks even when my therapist told me I have PTSD I have a voice in my head telling me it doesn’t count, it wasn’t bad enough, he was drunk, it isn’t real. And I can’t get it out of my head that Ewan is a National Ethics Bowl Champion. He is an expert on Kantianism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics—all of it. And I want to know so badly under what ethical theory is it okay for him to do what he did to me. I searched and searched and it’s fucked up but when I came to Tufts I took Intro to Ethics hoping to god that some ancient philosopher had constructed a belief system in which sexual assault is okay because then, then it wouldn’t be real. But I got an A in ethics and now I know this is no grey area.
His Ethics Bowl team is competing in Nationals for the second time this March. I just have to hope, I guess, that as he wins the debate on California’s new affirmative consent law, he hears my voice in the back of his head, begging, “Ewan, can we just sleep?”