![]() ![]() In Heavy, the scene occurs in 1987, not 1982 in North Jackson, Mississippi, not white suburban Maryland. “Train” rape was part of the culture, according to another victim who came forward to recall what happened on both sides of the closed doors at unsupervised parties in the Reagan-era summers. It was new to plenty of Americans, too, when Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of having committed sexual assault as a teenager, among similar accusations that suggest a hideous pattern: that when he and his friends victimized girls, they did so customarily as a group. The term is new to the worried kid who asks his questions. ![]() During, the two others at the small party wonder about what is happening in the bedroom. After, someone will seek cover there, and when the coast is clear, the same someone will run outside and somehow make it home and tell no one. Across from the closed door is a bathroom. A fifteen-year-old girl, wearing her one-piece bathing suit under her clothes, is tricked into a bedroom with boys who are seventeen and bigger than her. ![]() I’m writing this on the first day of October 2018, and last week millions of us watched the hours of retraumatizing and indignant testimony concerning an episode nearly identical to Heavy’s opening scenario. The tragedy of the formative opening episode in Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, is an American one, never more identifiably so. ![]()
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