R (Contains subject matter not suitable for all viewers)

Just to keep from ruffling any feathers I will give a quick warning. If certain subject matter makes you uncomfortable, skip this. Having said that, I did put the adult content warning on this blog. Anyway....

For the sake of easing through this part of my life, I will clarify a few things. This was concurrent to my parent's divorce, so no one ever really noticed my own little break from normal.

M- At the time he had just turned 16 and gotten his license.
T & K- I believe they were still about 15, so not yet driving, but still several years older than me.

It wasn't really an unusual request. I had gotten a call from T or K inviting me to go to a movie since M had just gotten his license. These were kids from families my mother had known forever. We all grew up in the same church and did many things together, so an invitation to the moving, in that tiny town, wasn't odd. He drove his mom's minivan to pick us up, it was that dodge blue color, the one that looks a bit faded. He had picked the other two up on his way to my house and off we went.
I had begged my mother to allow me a later curfew so I wouldn't look like a baby. She granted me a ten o'clock limit and sent me on my way. I don't remember what movie we went to see and I think we grabbed a snack afterwards and just cruised around for a while. T & K had to be home by like nine or nine thirty, so we dropped them off.
M wanted to cruise around a bit longer and since I had said earlier what time I needed to be home, he left no room for question. We did drive for what seemed like ever and I had a blast being out, on a school night, with a guy, even though he was practically family.
Eventually we ended up in the park. In that tiny town, the sex ed program was abstinence-only and just showed us scare-tactic slides of all the diseases we could get. Nothing more.
When he mentioned sitting in the back, I didn't think anything of it, this was a guy I'd known all my life, someone who was active in the church as was his family. I suppose he had turned up the heater because it became warm enough to make it uncomfortable to keep my coat on.
In retrospect, he knew exactly what he was doing.
A child doesn't understand the warning signs before something terrible like this happens and I happened to be a child who's family life was falling apart.
Time seemed to slow down and I remember watching the green numbers of the clock in the dark as ten arrived... and then passed by.
Depending on which jurisdiction you are in and what time period, what he proceeded to do has a different name. Assault, molestation, rape.
In that town, it was nothing.
When I became withdrawn and my grades dropped, everyone attributed it to the divorce. I knew nothing about shrinks or therapy. There was never anything done about it.
I learned that night, that no one could be trusted. Even other youth at the church that I did tell, older kids who I also had known my whole life, believed that he was capable of it. The rumor was that I wasn't the first. But no one ever suggested talking to an adult and the adults that had to overhear the heated arguments we had in the church halls about it simply ignored us, never asking any questions.

In the span of a couple short years, in one little town, I lived through the horrors of watching a man nearly kill my mother and another rape me and both walked away with not even as much as a reprimand. This is why I loathe that little town. When we needed them most, they simply shut the door.
One can see, by my school records, just when all of this took place. I did have friends when I was young, but for the rest of middle and high school, I avoided making any connections lest they turn out the same way. I became isolated and chronically depressed.