When working the night shift, the only thing you want to do when you get home is go to bed. I attempted to do so last Thursday evening when I arrived home from work. Below my window I could hear a group of female students talking excitedly. Being that it was a Thursday evening, I almost shouted out the window to the alley below, “Shut your drunk mouth.”

But I didn’t.

I stopped and listened to what these women, were talking about. Once I realized what had happened, I wanted to cry for one of the women in particular.

At first, it had sounded like she was laughing, giggling incoherently, as the intoxicated types tend to do on “thirsty Thursday,” but she wasn’t laughing, she was crying.

Her two friends kept trying to calm her down, to figure out what was wrong, what had ruined her evening.

And then she said, “I told him no, I said no, I said, no, no, no!”

And she didn’t just speak this sentence, she screamed, she sobbed. You could tell that her eyes must have been red, her face soaked and most likely her pride torn.

This woman had been raped.

I didn’t see her face, and I don’t know her name. I just heard her story, from three floors up in my apartment building.

I feel awful for sharing the experience of rape with a total stranger. I feel even worse for not putting on my slippers, throwing on a sweatshirt and running to the alley behind my building and attempting to help this woman.

But that’s just the point, she didn’t want help.

Her friends kept trying to convince her to go to the police, to report what had happen, but she wouldn’t budge.

She kept screaming incoherently that it would make things worse, that her life would become a living hell. Not his.

Had she not suffered enough? To have her body violated? Most likely from a guy she knew.

But the thing that sticks in my mind the most vividly is that she said, “I only had one drink.”

She blamed herself.

The incredibly tragic aspect of this Thursday night tale, is that it isn’t an urban legend, it happens every night in every city and suburb in this country, in this world.

It’s one of those things you ask yourself, “How does it happen over and over again?”

Even the word is abrasive: Rape. It’s something that stays with a person forever, I would imagine the victim and hope the assailant. How can you forget that event? So physical and rough, taking an act, that for most, signifies love. How will this woman and other rape victims be able to open their hearts to men?

They won’t, they can’t because they are scarred for life.

And all for what?

She said no, but you went ahead and stole something from her that you she will never get back – her pride.

-Heather E. Allen is a middler journalism major and a member of The News staff.