Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim Read Free Book Online Page B

“Let’s play Monopoly!” I shouted. If they didn’t look interested, I put on a face that indicated I might be about to lose it. “I really, really want to play Monopoly!” Then I sat back, smiling behind my champagne glass, while I watched a bunch of hapless stoners panic and scramble to find a Monopoly board. Why, there was fun to be had here after all!
    The best was when I lost my balloon. It went over the side of the balcony. One big-eyed look from me, and three terrified, hallucinating young men were dispatched on a quest to find a balloon in the dark, in our huge, unlit, overgrown backyard. Mean? Sure. But these crazy bastards were giving drugs to small children. I figured they had it coming.
    And where were my parents during this particular bout of insanity? Upstairs in another part of the house, paying absolutely no attention whatsoever. At one point, their dinner guest, a friend of my dad’s, actually came downstairs to see “what the young people were up to.” He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. So my brother, grinning, gave him a piece of cake. And he ate it. He went back upstairs to watch TV with my father.
    I heard later that he began to hallucinate, and he turned to my father and said, “Holy shit! There was LSD in the cake!” My father blithely denied the whole thing. “Oh, don’t be silly. They wouldn’t really be doing acid! You probably just ate a pot brownie.” Well, if he didn’t believe another grown-up, his own buddy, why ever should I think he would have believed me?
    And people actually still ask me why I didn’t tell anybody anything. Sheesh.

CHAPTER FOUR
    SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE
LAURA: Hard-working folks only smell bad to people who have nothing better to do than stick their noses in the air! Well, whenever you stick your nose in the air with me, Nellie Oleson, it’s going to get punched!
    I t was 1971. Somehow, I’d managed to survive the ’60s. I was nine years old and still being abused by Stefan; his sexual demands had only increased over the past three years. But now I was old enough to actually understand what it was he was asking me to do, and what it meant. If I didn’t like the situation before, I liked it even less now. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do about it, though. There were no public service announcements on the TV advising “what to do if someone hurts you.” There were no brochures. There was no Something About Amelia. Nothing. I was on my own dealing with this.
    As far as the general public was concerned, the entire concept of incest and child molestation simply did not exist. You couldn’t learn about it on an ABC Afterschool Special, because no one was talking about it. Hell, the ABC Afterschool Special series itself wouldn’t be invented for another year. When I was a little girl, teachers were told they were forbidden to call the police about child abuse. “Mandated reporting” didn’t exist until after 1974, when Congress passed something called CAPTA—the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Until then, it was just understood by nice people everywhere that “these sorts of things” only happened very rarely, in poor, backward, rural, or slum families. And if, God forbid, you did manage to accidentally hear about it, your job was to “not interfere.”
    And what if someone did get caught back then? Did he go to jail? Not terribly likely. Jail for child molesters is actually a new concept. Until 1950, the penalty for child rape in California—not “fondling,” not “molestation,” but flat out, unquestioned, forcible rape of a child by an adult—was (drum roll, please) thirty days in the county jail. After all, child rape was only a misdemeanor. The victim was only a child; it wasn’t like raping a real person. But then, in November 1949, Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, was raped and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story was front-page news in the L.A. Times for a week as