All Is Not Forgotten: The bestselling gripping thriller you’ll never forget. Wendy Walker
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between youth and maturity—the cheekbones had started to protrude more visibly; her nose was becoming more angular. She had freckles and one small dimple on the right side of her mouth. She spoke eloquently, without the usual “um’s” and “uh’s” that teenagers use. And she was very natural in her use of eye contact, which is a skill that must be learned. Some people look too long before breaking away to look elsewhere. Others don’t look long enough. She had it just right, which is something we grown-ups take for granted, as we have all—most of us, anyway—mastered this social acclimation.
Although she had lost her innocence (for lack of a better expression), she was still quite lovely and sweet. She described her thoughts like this. Her tone was flat and she was surprisingly unemotional.
I sat on the edge of my bed and started looking around. There were all these familiar things, things I had picked out or helped decorate. I have rose-colored walls. They’re not pink, because they have too much red in them. That’s what the lady at the decorating store said. I can’t remember the name of the paint color, but it’s basically a blush rose. The bookshelves are bright white and I have all these books on them, though I don’t really like to read much anymore, and not just because of what happened. I stopped reading a lot when I was twelve. I think it’s because I have so much required reading now, being in high school. And they used to have reading contests, which they don’t have in my grade. So most of the books are either for school or they’re really babyish.
I also have a collection of stuffed animals. I still pick one up from every new place I go to. Well, I guess that’s not really true anymore. I didn’t get one in Block Island. I can’t explain why. I know why, but I don’t know how to explain it. If I had to explain it, I would say that I felt like doing things that I used to do felt like a lie, like I was trying to pretend I was someone I wasn’t anymore. Like wearing something blue because you used to like blue and you think you still should like it, but you just don’t now. Does that make sense? I didn’t like doing anything I used to do. I just did them, you know, went through the motions, because I felt like if I didn’t, then everything would just fall apart. Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them all on fire. That’s when I knew I was never going to be all right again.
She went on to explain her decision. It’s shocking to me that people ever make this choice. But I am not a religious person, so for me, the only hope lies with living. Of course, the words “teenager” and “choice” should not be in the same dictionary.
This is where I grow frustrated with the general lack of knowledge about the teenage brain. There is a reason teenagers shouldn’t drink or do drugs or have sex—or drive or vote or go to war. And it’s not because we tell them not to, or even because they’re too “inexperienced” to make good decisions. The teenage brain is not fully developed. It’s hard to imagine this when their bodies seem so mature. I’ve seen sixteen-year-old boys with beards and body hair and buff arm muscles. They look twenty-six. And girls with full breasts and wide hips and enough makeup to work a Vegas trade show. I won’t even get started on the fights I used to have with my daughter about what she tried to leave the house wearing, or with my son, who swears he’s not going to pick up six friends on the way to a football game and try to buy beer with fake ID cards.
In spite of their physical appearances, if you could look inside their brains, you would not find a grown-up within a hundred miles. It is not inexperience that leads them to make bad decisions. They simply don’t have the equipment. Consider Jenny’s thoughts on that night as she sat on her bed:
I closed my eyes and just let the monster in. I pictured him in my mind. He was like a blob of darkness, and I couldn’t really see his shape, because it changed as he moved. But I could see the roughness of his skin, with craters and bumps. I remember feeling him inside my stomach. It was like an explosion of that feeling when you’re really nervous, like right before a track meet, when I’m waiting for the gun, but a million times worse. I just couldn’t take it. I started rubbing my scar. I remember doing it that night. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to scream, but I knew that wouldn’t help. I had done that a lot of times since the rape. I would tell my parents I was going for a run and then I would run, but only until I was far from the house in the field behind the tennis courts at the park. And then I would scream and scream. As soon as I was done, like everything else, running, sleeping, getting drunk or high—as soon as I was done, it would come back. I wanted to peel myself off of me. This had been going on for almost eight months. It was just too long.
Jenny had started taking substances to relieve her anxiety. It had initiated with alcohol and progressed to marijuana and pills. The pills she would get from her friends’ bathrooms—anything she could find. She’d been through all her own Oxycotin, even after the physical pain was gone. Her parents didn’t know, which is surprisingly common. They had noticed the change in her friends and a fairly drastic decline in her grades, but they were “giving her some slack.”
It is unfortunate—no, unforgivable—that the professionals who advocated this treatment for Jenny—or anyone, for that matter—failed to consider the following: that regardless of whether or not factual events are filed in our memories, and even if, at the time of filing to long-term memory, the emotions have been muted by morphine, the physical reaction that is experienced is programmed into our brains. The Benzatral does not erase it. I can explain it as simply as this: If you were to touch a hot stove and burn your hand, but later were made to forget how you got the burn, your body would still have the fear of being burned. Only it would not be activated only by heat, or a red-hot burner on a stove. It would come and go at its leisure, and you would have no idea how to stop it. This is why traditional PTSD therapy involves a process of pulling memories from storage and reliving them in a calm emotional state. Over time, the emotional connection to the factual memory begins to change, to lessen, so that remembering the trauma becomes less emotionally painful—and the emotional pain itself can be reduced But, of course, this is hard work. How much easier to just erase the facts? Like those vibrating belts from the 1950s that claimed to burn off fat without exercise or diet. Trauma cannot be cured by a pill.
Jenny had no memory of her rape, but the terror lived in her body. The physical memory, the emotional response that was now programmed into her, had nothing to attach to—no set of facts to place it in context. And so it roamed freely within her. The only tangible thing that was left from the rape was the scar from the carving.
It is easy to say that she should have sought help. But she is a teenager. And to her teenage brain, eight months was “too long.”
She went to her bathroom, opened the drawer beneath her sink. She took out a razor, a pink disposable. Using the tools from her nail kit, she pried it open until the blades popped out. She set them on the sink counter, then returned to her bed, where she sat. Waiting.
I feel I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let me go back just a bit.
Tom Kramer was in his own kind of hell. The feeling that he had failed to protect his daughter haunted him day and night.
It was completely irrational. We can’t watch our children every second of every day, and bad things happen. That’s reality. As a society, we have gone through various trends of protective parenting. It seems to me that it was the proliferation of information over the Internet that resulted in the last wave. Any abduction, any molestation, any sexual misconduct, pool drowning, sledding accident, bike crash, or choking incident was instantly known by every parent from Maine to New Mexico. It felt as though these incidents were on the rise. There were campaigns and infomercials, new safety products and warning labels. Babies could no longer sleep on their tummies. Kids could no longer walk to school or wait alone at the bus stop. It makes me laugh to think of my mother ever driving me down the street and parking behind other cars to wait with me for the bus. She wasn’t even out of bed when I left for school as a child. But that’s what people do now, isn’t it?
There