To make sure her yellow heels were visible, she put on the skinny jeans, even though she hadn’t washed them in a week. She’d bought the heels today because…well…they were on sale. And they were yellow (something that merits notice even if she doesn’t have any yellow tops.)

She double checked the evenness of her eye liner as her foot tapped to Alicia Keyes playing in the other room. She checked the time and threw on a pink, loose-fitting shirt. The phone rang as if on cue, it was her best friend Becca, there to pick her up before they went out to their friends’ party.

The next morning, the sun rose gradually and strong, as did her headache. Her hair tossled, shoes smudged and strewn on different sides of the room, she glanced around and saw a guy from her biology class that she had flirted with once or twice. He snored on the bed next to her as images came flashing out of her dark memory of the night before, and a sickening feeling sank into her stomach that had nothing to do with her hangover. She quickly put on her shoes to walk home, and a felt a tightness rise in her throat. The right heel was broken.

Who is she? She’s your cousin, my sister, your best friend’s roommate, our friend, that girl from next door.

More importantly, what happened? Where did Becca go? Did the girl with the yellow shoes remember consenting to stay? Did she remember consenting to anything? Or did she simply accept without thinking, without even really being there.

Does she know anything more than the newspaper reporters who write later in the week that police are investigating a possible rape? And then she reads in print, “Because they are acquaintances, the case will involve a lot of he said, she said,” according to the police.

The police lieutenant investigating a rape from last weekend told me that police are not going to stop rapes that happen at private residences…there’s just no way to stop them, he said.

And she, like so many other girls who have been abused and violated, is forgotten.