The Great Debate of Grade 9

Up until grade 9 started, it had just been my parents I figured weren’t understanding me. Now I was starting to realize that even kids my own age also weren’t. Often times, something made perfect sense coursing through my head, so I was always at a loss for why we were on different pages. It was losing its context when coming out from the cortex and through the speaker box. My brain was going to fast for me to convey everything. I’d see the words forming a sentence, floating around in my brain-scape. I’d try to grasp them, but I’d only be able to get a few before the next sentence came.

Cell phones would bring me extra anxiety. I’d be constantly erasing and rewriting messages, worried even more something might get lost over the phone. I started to wonder if we shouldn’t be using colours to communicate over texts, to indicate intent. I’d try everything, and always find myself in some sort of hot water like a lobster.

There wasn’t much that had interested a weird boy as far as extra curricular activities. Debate club was something that had interested me though. At least until this health class. The teacher announced that we were going to have a class discussion. The best of both worlds for me. Not much written classwork, and I got to debate. We ran through multiple scenarios that involved drugs, sex, and partying.

“One night…” the teacher started. He presented a situation where a girl asked her parents to go to a party. They asked her if alcohol would be around. She said she wasn’t sure. They asked if parents would be around. She said no. She didn’t want to lie to them. Her parents said she wasn’t allowed to go to such a party. But my brain worked differently than other peoples. Not only had I seen this scene from movies and TV countless times, I lived it.

As I expected, she lied to her parents. She told them she was going over to a friend’s house, and they didn’t think anything of it. There daughter never broke the rules. Now in my movie-recording brain, she was headed in two directions. Something would happen at the party, or her parents were going to call up her friend and find out she lied. However, I figured the latter was not the lesson being instilled.

She goes to the party alone where she knows very few people. She doesn’t know the host, has never met the host. She drinks too much, too fast, and after two hours is feeling too drunk from the free booze. She weighs her options, then heads upstairs and passes out in the first bedroom she finds. Later that night after the host shuts down the party, he goes up to his room to bed. She’s there. He rapes her. Next the teacher asked the class who was at fault.

Like the choir I’d been in, in unison the class chimed up, “he was!”. But amid that was a weird Little Jory. Confused brain over-analyzing everything that had said, “Well… She was?” with a confused look on my face. Again, in unison, the choir had shock which quickly swelled into frustration. Amusement crept onto most of the males faces. They’d known the mess a Little Jory had walked into.

One of the girls piped up, me sinking in my desk, knowing I was already screwed, “Oh, so it’s just alright to go around raping people?!”

“Well, no…” I said, “But she should have just gone home, instead of sleeping in an already established random drunk persons bed she’s never met. How does that sound like a good idea?” I asked. Confused. I put that girl on the street, and the man was in a car offering her candy to get in. She said no in my brain reality. I was thinking about all the things that led up to her getting raped. That she had to lie to her parents in the first place. Like I often had to with mine. Or sneak out past a very early bedtime. I reasoned it was really her parents’ fault for the communication errors. Kids were going to be kids, after all. That’s what I kept hearing from parents.

“It’s still his fault for raping her,” the girl said. Sure. But actions had consequences. That was what every adult had been trying to pound into Little Jory’s weird head. We filibustered the class. No other topic of discussion was had. Except that it didn’t end in class, it spilled over into the halls, spread like wildfire.

Most things at the school took a week at max before something new was unfolding. I spent two months just trying to put this fire out. Each day someone of some variety would approach me with a “what if” scenario and me just rolling my eyes, saying that, “Obviously the guys at fault…”. But what they all lacked was the context of the class debate. And perhaps that we were arguing two different topics and not knowing it. Instead in the halls I got, “If she opens her locker, and he pops out and rapes her, who’s at fault?”. Since I had my movie-like brain, I’d often cringe having to play out the non-contextualized scenarios.

“This isn’t my point!” I’d say with my Classic Look of Disdain (CLOD). I was a hopeless romantic. I secretly watched fairy tales still and dreamed about finding ‘the one’. I wanted everyone to find their one, not get raped. I’d try one last time to clear it up, and the rest was helped by damage control of a good friend.

“She had two options when she got drunk. To pass out and assume those risks, or to just phone her parents up and take that punishment instead. She opted not to get in trouble for disobeying her parents. Obviously if had to think about the two options, she had to assume the danger involved. Yet, she passed out in some random drunk host’s bed. I’m not saying she DESERVED to get raped. I’m saying that getting grounded was probably the better option,” I blamed her parents for it. Like I was blaming mine for having moved me to this school.

It took some time to convince everyone that I didn’t think it was alright to go around the halls raping all the girls. I’d even asked one time, why I hadn’t gone around raping all the girls if everyone already assumed it was my thing. So, like most things, it did eventually blow over, but was hardly the epitome of my high school experience. Like a girl in a simple thought experiment, I was slowly losing my innocence.