Read Missoula for Free Online Page A

Huguet’s closest friends from EOU had graduated and moved to Pullman, Washington, a college town. When Huguet visited, she and her friends hit the bars. “I was drinking a lot more than usual that year,” she said. “Drinking and partying. Having a good time. Looking back, I see that I was making some bad decisions. And looking back, now I know why I was making those bad decisions. But at the time, I wasn’t willing to accept the fact that Beau had changed me in that way. I wasn’t willing to give that to him.”
    In January 2011, Huguet moved from Missoula back to La Grande, rented an apartment with a friend of a friend named Natasha, and resumed classes at EOU. “It was good being around her,” Huguet remembered. “We became pretty close, pretty fast. She wasa feminist. A very strong, very independent female.” One evening Huguet surprised herself by confiding to Natasha that she had been raped. “Tasha was like, ‘Oh my God, Allison. You went to the police, right?’ ” Sheepishly, Huguet confessed that she hadn’t. “Tasha was appalled,” Huguet said. “She said she understood why I hadn’t wanted to report it but told me, ‘The police need to know about this guy and what he did to you.’ ”
    Soon thereafter, Natasha got a job at a crisis center for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, a place called Shelter from the Storm. Surprisingly, once she started working with professional counselors and advocates, Natasha’s opinion about the desirability of reporting rapes to the police changed. Her colleagues pointed out that for some victims of sexual assault, engaging with the criminal justice system could traumatize them severely all over again, so the staff at SFTS didn’t necessarily recommend it. Her colleagues definitely urged every victim to get counseling, however. More than half a year had passed since Huguet had been raped, but she still hadn’t sought help from a therapist. She was doing fine, she thought. She had no reason to talk to a shrink.
    Looking back at that period now, Huguet said, “I understand that I just didn’t want to acknowledge what Beau did to me. Because if I did acknowledge it, I would have to deal with it, and it would become real. Your mind is pretty good at blocking out traumatic experiences and preventing you from thinking about them. At least until something comes along to trigger you.”
    —
    IN THE AUTUMN of her final year at EOU, Huguet drove from La Grande to Missoula to spend Thanksgiving with her family. On November 23, 2011, the Wednesday evening before the holiday, she headed downtown with three of her friends to decompress at the Missoula Club, a venerable burger-and-beer joint universally referred to as the Mo Club. The place was packed. Huguet was chatting at the bar with a friend named Carol * when she noticed Beau Donaldson gazingat her from across the room, no more than twenty feet away. “He was standing there laughing,” Huguet recalled, “staring at me.”
    Donaldson had reason to be feeling good. Four days earlier, he and his Griz teammates had played their final regular-season game against their archrivals, the Montana State University Bobcats, an annual contest known as the “Brawl of the Wild.” The Griz had won 36–10, making them co-champions of the Big Sky Conference with a record of nine wins and two losses, sending them to the NCAA Football Champion Series play-offs, which would commence in ten days. And after sitting out the entire 2010 football season with an injured ankle, Donaldson had played well and contributed to the team’s success in 2011.
    Huguet hadn’t seen Donaldson since he’d come over to her mom’s house to apologize, the day after he’d raped her. Fourteen months had passed. The shock of encountering him face-to-face caused Huguet’s chest to constrict. Her friend Carol, who had dated Donaldson for an extended period in high school, was not aware that her ex-boyfriend had raped Huguet. “I