People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer.
