At the core of Ani’s emotional evolution, or lack of it, is the impact of the gangrape the night she goes to the party soon after starting at Bradley. Ani is raped when she is 14 by boys she knows, from her school, who never face accountability. She is a virgin when she is raped. Thus, the violation is also her initiation into sex. It is Ani who is ostracized, herd-defined as a slut, shamed into accepting humiliation, the victim of vicious rumors. She will not join Mr. Larson in identifying the boys or pressing charges because she has a need for acceptance by the very boys who attacked her. She tells no one except Mr. Larson for years, and later, opening up to her fiancé leads nowhere. The only counseling she seeks is the medical advice at a Planned Parenthood clinic where she goes to secure morning-after medication.

The determination, first by the boys involved and then later by her own fiancé, is that the rape is somehow not rape or requires air quotes. The boys were partying too hard. More darkly, Ani’s participation was at some level voluntary because she had a classically voluptuous figure, because she came to the party alone, because she was willing to drink beer in “small, sickening waves” (71), and because she sent out the wrong message, playing flirty in classes as a strategy for securing the attention of the clique she burned so deeply to join.