Digital Extras

BURRILLVILLE -- Jan. 14, 2003

The click-click of the handcuffs echoed in the courtroom as they clamped around the teenager's wrists.

The girl who had once been his friend turned to her mother and whispered, "How many years is he going to be gone?"

Four years, her mother replied.

"That's not enough," Laura said.

Laura's mother likes to fix things, make them right. She couldn't fix what had happened to her daughter, but she had dreamed of the moment when the handcuffs would snap shut.

Then people would finally believe Laura, she had thought. Then, her family could begin the journey back to normal.

But the moment didn't measure up at all. Not by a long shot.

* * * * * *

December 2001

Laura's parents had rules about boys. She couldn't go to a boy's house unless his parents were home. She couldn't be in a car alone with a boy unless they knew him.

They knew Nicholas Plante.

Everybody knows Nick, many in the Burrillville High School community say.

Handsome and charming, he was a popular senior from a well-known family. He was a gifted artist who sculpted and painted -- dragons were a big theme -- and even created chess sets of glass and ceramic.

Nick and Laura, a sophomore, had become friends the year before, when he was dating a friend of hers. They had many friends in common and shared an interest in art. Nick dated several of Laura's friends.

When Nick offered her a ride home from school on Dec. 5, Laura said sure.

On the way to Laura's, Nick said he wanted to make a quick stop at his house so she could help him carry some of his art projects inside. It never occurred to Laura to ask if his mother was home because they would only be there for a minute.

They took his stuff into the house, and he said he'd drive her home after he used the bathroom. Laura asked about one of his earlier art projects. Nick said he had hung it in his room.

She went to take a look.

Laura had been in the Plantes' house before, but never in Nick's basement bedroom.

When Nick came downstairs, they started talking about Laura's breakup with her boyfriend two days earlier. Nick had told her the boy was cheating on her, so she had ended the relationship. She was upset, and felt comfortable confiding in Nick.

She thought he "was just being a friend" when he hugged her.

Then he pulled her down on his bed. When she tried to get up, he "bear-hugged" her and pulled her back down.

He started to kiss her neck.

She said she didn't want to have sex. She said she didn't want to do anything with him -- she didn't like him "like that."

"And he was like, 'Well, I'll have to rape you then,' " she later told a grand jury.

She thought maybe she could talk him out of it. You have a girlfriend, she protested.

"I was saying no and I was like -- I was pushing him -- I was trying to push him and I kept scratching his arms and stuff," she testified.

When it was over, Laura wrapped herself in the sheets on Nick's bed and cried. He threw her underwear and jeans to her and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I knew you were vulnerable," she told the grand jury.

"He's like, 'Just forget it, it was -- it was just a dream.' "

He said it wasn't rape. She didn't know what to think.

Then he drove her home.

* * * * * *

Arriving home from work that day, Laura's mother stepped into the living room to find Laura on the tan sofa, wrapped in a blanket. Huddled with her knees to her chest and her arms around her shins, she sat listlessly, half dozing, half mindlessly watching TV.

Laura looked really, really tired. Her mother could tell she had been crying.

And then she said, "Hi, mommy."

Oh, something's wrong here, her mother thought.

But like many mothers of 15-year-olds, she didn't want to pry. That might make it worse.

She'll tell me when she's ready, Laura's mother thought. She always does.

Laura was a zombie for the rest of the day, definitely not her typical bubbly self, her mother remembers.

But she did mention that Nick had driven her home from school. Knowing Laura had broken up with her boyfriend because Nick had told her he was cheating, Laura's mother asked if Nick was interested in her.

Laura spat out: "He's a pig, and he doesn't even know what love is. He's disgusting."

That's an odd way to describe the friend who just drove her home, her mother remembers thinking.

* * * * * *

Laura's mother was replaying those words in her mind the next morning after the high school social worker called and said Laura needed her.

Laura had gone to bed early the night before. She had dressed quickly that morning and slipped out of the house before her mother even saw her. Her mother figured she'd learn what was wrong that afternoon.

But the social worker called her at work about 10:30.

"Is she all right?" her mother asked.

The social worker didn't really answer, Laura's mother recalls. She said something vague about an assault and then told her, "I think you need to come in."

Laura's mother connected the pieces as she drove. By the time she got to the high school, she had a pretty good idea what had happened.

Laura had told a few friends that morning. Then she went to see the school social worker, a woman she knew fairly well. The social worker wasn't in.

As Laura stood crying outside her office, a friend saw her in tears. He walked her to the school nurse's office.

After 30 years as a nurse, Marilyn Kelley knows a fresh bruise when she sees one. Right away, she noticed a big one on the back of Laura's upper arm. It looked like someone had grabbed her.

Why don't you lie down for a little while, Kelley suggested. After giving Laura a few minutes alone, she went back to talk with her.

Laura told the nurse Nick Plante had raped her -- words she hadn't been able to say until that morning.

"I couldn't separate the rapist from the friend," Laura would say later.

As Laura's mother learned the details, red blotches emerged on her face and she began to shake.

Oh my gosh, she thought. There's no way to fix this.

* * * * * *

At Hasbro Children's Hospital that afternoon, Dr. Amy P. Goldberg paused while examining Laura. Deliberately making eye contact, she asked: Were any objects used?

Would a piercing count as an object? Laura asked.

Goldberg asked what she meant.

Nick wore a piercing in his penis, Laura said.

Goldberg would later testify that a silver-colored metal piercing with sharp arrows on both ends, introduced as evidence at Nick's trial, could have caused the cuts she found on Laura.

Laura's mother remembers the doctor turning to her in the examining room.

"And she says, 'This is just the beginning.' And I remember saying, 'Oh, I know.' "

But she didn't know. "There were no words to tell me."

* * * * * *

Laura and her mother had asked the school nurse to call Laura's father at the state prison, where he works as a correctional officer, and tell him to meet them at the hospital. They had worried about how he would react if he found out at school and then saw Nick.

"When I learned what happened, they weren't very nice, my thoughts," her father says. "They were the same as any father of a little girl would have."

* * * * * *

Burrillville police Detective Wayne M. Richardson also got a call from Marilyn Kelley that afternoon. He went to the school and took her statement. Then he called the hospital and spoke with Laura's parents.

Late that evening, Laura and her parents came to the police station and filed a complaint.

Richardson arrested Nick the next morning, Dec. 7. Nick, who was 17, was arraigned in Family Court in Providence, then taken to the state Training School.

Four days later, in separate interviews, two Burrillville High School students told Richardson that Nick had raped them in November.

Laura and the other two young women, an 18-year-old senior and a 16-year-old sophomore, testified separately before a grand jury during February school break.

Each told the grand jury that Nick had given her a ride home or to work after school, but stopped at his house first. Each said Nick had raped her in his bedroom, despite her protest that she didn't want to have sex with him. Each spoke of Nick's penis piercing.

The grand jury indicted Nick on seven felony counts of sexual assault, four of them involving Laura.

By then, Nick had been waived out of Family Court to face charges as an adult. He spent the rest of his senior year at home on strict bail conditions, unable to attend school and allowed to leave the house only for religious, medical or court-related reasons.

* * * * * *

Winter 2002

Laura used to love school.

She loved going to basketball, hockey, and football games. She loved the dances and spirit week activities. She made the honor roll every quarter, and she felt as if she were friends with everybody.

But those days were over now.

Many students believed Nick couldn't have raped anyone. The boy they knew wasn't capable of such a crime. And they told Laura so.

You wanted it, they told her. You liked it.

Laura stayed at home, crying on the couch. People said she cried too much.

She tried to stay involved in activities. People said she couldn't have been raped if she was playing soccer and attending basketball games.

After a while, Laura stopped caring what people thought about her. She also stopped caring about schoolwork, and fell behind.

The dozens of honor roll certificates her mother used to tuck away were replaced by a stack of counseling receipts.

Thoughts of the rape consumed the family.

Day after day, Laura would come home from school, curl up in a ball on the sofa and sob.

She was afraid to be alone, so her father would leave work early, using his vacation and sick time so he could be home after school.

She would wake up in the middle of the night, sobbing, and her mother would get up and go lie down next to her, comforting her until she could sleep.

"Sobbing. Sobbing for hours," her father says. "People don't see that part of it."

* * * * * *

Richard Trogisch, the principal of Burrillville High School, has never seen a school community so polarized in his 20 years as an administrator.

When he heard about students harassing Laura, he spoke to them immediately.

"You can't do this," he would say. "You're hurting Laura. You don't know what the facts are. I don't know the facts. Please stop."

Sometimes Nick's friends protested, saying they hadn't said anything directly to her face.

"Then they got into the point where 'she deserves this,' blah, blah, blah," Trogisch says. "And I said, 'We're not going there. You are not allowed to harass this girl. It's up to the judicial system to decide."

Kelley, the school nurse, says she talked frequently with Laura and the other two young women who had accused Nick. Laura also spoke openly with other students.

"She didn't keep it a secret because she wanted to educate other girls, to protect them, too," Kelley says. "But, you see, it was a hard thing because when your family is right up there in town -- you couldn't say 'Boo' about this young man."

Kelley thinks many in the school community, and beyond, need to be educated about what rape victims go through. They'll have flashbacks. They'll have guilt. They may have trouble sleeping. They become hypervigilant. They may question their own sexuality. Some just give up. Some move away from their hometown.

And they'll wonder if they led the attacker to do this.

"No," Kelley says. "If you said no, no means no."

People need to know, she says, about what victims experience "so they don't have this skewed belief that it's the girl's fault."

* * * * * *

Laura's family began to feel like they had a disease.

The way her father sees it, people don't want to think this kind of thing actually happens. So if they avoid it, they can tell themselves it will never happen to them.

Laura's family had moved to Burrillville -- "a nice bedroom community," her father thought -- in 1994 and worked to settle in.

Her parents encouraged Laura and her two brothers to get to know people and to be part of the community. They played sports, and their father coached football. Their mother attended games and talked with other parents.

Now, on bad days, they would shop for groceries in a neighboring town just so they wouldn't have to run into people they knew, or overhear comments in the local IGA about "that Laura girl."

We just haven't been here long enough, her parents say. What would have been enough? they wonder.

Many residents say you're considered a newcomer unless you were born here. Like the Plante family, whose roots in Burrillville run deep.

At least two of Nick's great-grandparents were born here and died here when Nick was a child. His maternal grandfather, born and raised in Burrillville, owned an auto dealership in town for 34 years. Generations of local families bought their cars from him. Nick's paternal grandparents raised six children who grew up spending summers at the family camp on Pascoag Reservoir.

Nick counts many cousins as his closest friends. Some members of his extended family have also been his teachers and coaches.

Laura began to beg her parents to move away from Burrillville, a place she had grown to hate.

* * * * * *

Spring and summer 2002

Sometimes it was difficult to tell which twists and turns in their lives were connected to the rape and which weren't.

But no one had ever shattered bottles outside their home before.

It went on for weeks -- always at night, in the dark. Laura's family awoke day after day to find jagged pieces of glass in their driveway.

They took turns cleaning up, and Laura's mother remembers her younger son's offhanded comment one day: "I cleaned up the glass out of the driveway."

Like it was just another chore.

They remember the first time the glass-breakers were "brave" enough to drive by in the daylight.

Laura was in her bedroom, her mother at the kitchen sink and her father in the side yard.

They heard the glass smash and a car driving away.

And they each rushed toward the noise -- Laura to her window, her mother to the front door and her father toward the road. Each thought maybe they'd be the one to find out who it was.

Laura's father, already outside, got the best view.

He recognized the car. He looked into the eyes of the teenage boys, and he knew those faces.

He memorized the license plate. And then he ran a check on it, to be sure.

That was the last time glass shattered in their driveway.

When her father recounts the story months later, Laura and her mother are incredulous.

"Why didn't you tell me who it was?" Laura demands.

"It doesn't matter," he replies. They didn't need to know.

* * * * * *

Laura's parents came to realize that the daughter they had known was gone.

"I actually mourned for her like she was dead," her mother says. "And then learned to accept the new Laura."

But she always hoped the "old Laura" would come back.

The old Laura had so many dreams and plans -- the possibilities seemed endless.

She thought about being a teacher, doing art, maybe becoming an art teacher, getting married, being a foster mom, having "tons of kids" and a big house.

"And a big wedding," her mother remembers with a sigh.

Now Laura had lost sight of her future. She no longer had a clue what the world held for her.

The old Laura was "blindly trusting," her father remembers, and a loyal friend who would stick up for you no matter what.

But no one does that for her any more. So why should she do it for them?

* * * * * *

Fall 2002

School began before Labor Day, and Laura recalls that students were excited about going back.

They weren't really talking much about Nick Plante's approaching trial. But Laura couldn't concentrate on schoolwork.

It seemed to her mother that she was saving her energy "and getting ready for the fight." Laura began to panic and have anxiety attacks. About a week before the trial, she stopped going to school.

"I didn't want her to crack right before, and that's what it felt like was happening," her mother says.

The family focused inward. It's just their style, her parents say.

"You circle the wagons and you pull back into the center of the family group," Laura's father explains. "And you rely on each other."

* * * * * *

The first day of the trial, Oct. 2, charges against Nick were dismissed in the cases of the other two young women. Court records do not indicate why, and Deputy Atty. Gen. Gerald J. Coyne declined to give a reason.

Burrillville Police Lt. Kevin S. San Antonio said he thinks the charges were dropped because the young women didn't want to go through a trial.

Nick still faced the four charges in Laura's case: three counts of first-degree and one of second-degree sexual assault.

On that first day, Laura's mother was the only one in the family there for the proceedings. Her father couldn't be there because he was a potential witness. Her parents had decided that the trial was something her brothers didn't need to experience. And Laura waited in the office the attorney general maintains in the courthouse.

When Laura's mother walked into the courtroom, it was packed. The only seat she could get was in the back, where it was difficult to see.

Who are all these people? she thought.

Then she realized they were Nick's supporters, including friends from school.

"So the next day, we came back and we brought some family and we got there early," her mother says. "We didn't want to sit in the back row."

* * * * * *

After a five-day trial, the jury convicted Nick on all four charges.

"A lot of his own words did it," juror Anthony Rufo, a Central Falls auto mechanic, recalled in an interview. "Just the way he looked at us when he would give out a statement. He would look up like he was trying to recall and put something together quick. That's what caught him."

Rufo said the jury weighed all the evidence. That included the clothes Laura had worn, which she described exactly and which Nick described in conflicting ways. It also included the doctor's description of the abrasions on Laura and the penis piercings that he remembers were passed among the jurors.

"They looked like they could cause some pretty nasty scratches," Rufo said.

Under questioning by the prosecutor, Nick got "tripped up over his own words," Rufo said. "He changed a few of the statements a few times. He would say one thing, and then when he got cross-examined, it changed."

Laura's testimony at the trial remained consistent, Rufo said.

"And once we found out all the facts and got the statements from the witnesses and put them all together, this girl did actually get sexually assaulted. . . . From what we heard in those last two days, we didn't think it was consensual."

* * * * * *

"The symbol of justice for me was guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty," Laura says.

Now people would believe Nick had raped her, her family thought.

"Now you can go to school," her mother told her.

Laura went back the next day. But it was worse than ever.

Girls who had been her friends said Nick had never raped them, so he couldn't have raped her.

They and others she didn't even know called her names behind her back and to her face.

Slut. Bitch. Whore.

They told Laura she had ruined the best year of Nick's life -- his senior year in high school.

Laura's parents stopped by the school that morning after going out for breakfast together.

"The whole school was in an uproar," her mother says. "You could feel it."

Not all the adults in the school were sympathetic to Laura, but most were, says Kelley, the school nurse.

"We tried to hold her up as much as possible," Kelley says. "Just what she had to deal with -- the harassment and the bullying -- it was brutal."

Laura didn't make it through the next day of school. And she didn't go back.

She started sleeping a lot. Her mother would come home on her lunch breaks to try to wake her but sometimes even after a full day's work, she'd come home to find Laura still hadn't gotten out of bed.

A doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Once her parents realized she wasn't going back to school, the school sent a tutor to work with Laura at home.

Laura couldn't shake the feeling that she was always being noticed, talked about, judged. Whenever people looked at her, she felt they were thinking, There's the girl who was raped.

And now, Laura's younger brother became a target at school.

Boys on his basketball team stepped just around the corner, out of his sight.

"Bitch!" they screamed.

"Your sister's a slut!"

* * * * * *

Right after the trial, Nick's parents started knocking on doors. They visited local businesses. They went to the high school. They called friends and acquaintances.

Kevin and Janice Plante were asking for a public display of support, and that's what they got -- 119 people wrote letters to Superior Court Judge Edward C. Clifton extolling Nick's character and praising his family.

Thirteen writers asked the judge to grant Nick a new trial, a motion Clifton denied on Oct. 25; dozens asked for leniency in sentencing.

About half of the writers specifically said they thought Nick was not guilty or there was not enough evidence to convict him.

In the 10 years she has known him, his friend Marissa Rodzen wrote, "he has always been very responsible, and respectful. There is no doubt in my mind that he is innocent. He has never been in trouble with the law before this."

An aunt, Beth Plante, wrote: "Nick does not have a violent bone in his body. My understanding of rape is that it is a crime of violence and control over another person. Why then were there no signs of violence?"

Some writers insisted that what had happened in Nick's room that day was consensual sex. Some offered opinions on how Laura had behaved, had not behaved, or should have behaved.

"If the town's people or high school students were to pass judgment on this case, than surely Nicholas Plante would be found innocent," wrote Donna Scotland of Harrisville. ". . . If the old saying, 'you can't rape the willing' held any truth, perhaps this trial would never have been."

An aunt and uncle of Nick's who said their daughter had been raped as a teen questioned the verdict and asked the judge for "maximum leniency and mercy."

"We know what our daughter suffered," they wrote. "Remarkably the plaintiff seemed absent of the symptoms associated with a rape. To us, this is a case of remorse following underage mutually consensual sex with someone other than one's boyfriend."

Reading the letters months later, Laura and her parents are stunned to see names of people her mother used to sit with at soccer games and acquaintances who in recent days had asked how the family was doing. But while making mental notes of those they won't talk about this with anymore, they are also shocked by how many of the letter-writers are strangers to them.

"I don't even know his aunts and uncles," Laura says. "How would anybody know anything about me?"

Her father reads aloud from a letter by Timothy P. Marcoux of Chepachet:

"Nick is not a cold-blooded killer; he has not beaten anyone or robbed anyone. I find it really hard to believe that he is the monster that he would have to be to get the verdict that he did."

His voice rising, Laura's father draws each word out for emphasis as he lets his anger out.

"They don't even see this as a crime," he says. "They don't see this as a crime. First of all, he did rob somebody of something. He robbed somebody of something that nobody, no money can take care of . . .

"He robbed somebody of who they were, who they were going to become."

* * * * * *

Jan. 14, 2003

Close to 40 people filled the small courtroom for Nick's sentencing. His parents and older sister sat in the front row, separated from Laura and her parents by one other observer.

Some of Laura's relatives who had traveled two hours that morning sat in the second row, along with four or five young men who were friends of Nick's. A half-dozen teary-eyed young women were there on Nick's behalf, prepared to testify, if the judge would let them. They planned to say they had seen Laura at school functions and playing soccer.

With her back to the courtroom and prosecutor Denise Choquette by her side, Laura faced Judge Clifton.

She said she had chosen excerpts from her journal to speak for her, and read them to the court.

"Everything in my mind is jumbled," she read. "I'm walking around this cold, empty place with a blindfold on looking for a needle in a haystack. It's like I'm a walking dead girl. I think of the times I loved myself, better yet, liked myself."

Choquette requested a 25-year sentence, with 15 years to serve.

"This is a young girl who at 15 was sexually assaulted by someone she considered to be her friend, someone she trusted," Choquette said. "She went to his house and was raped. There's no other word for it, your honor."

Nick's lawyer, former Burrillville town solicitor Oleg Nikolyszyn, asked the judge to impose a long sentence of community service for an "event" that he said was "without brutality, without violence, without drugs."

Just because the jury believed Laura, that didn't make the verdict "sacred," Nikolyszyn said.

Clifton rejected several attempts by Nikolyszyn to present evidence or witnesses that the lawyer said would show Laura had not become "a shell" of her former self. At one point, prosecutor Choquette objected to the lawyer's comments as "a character assassination."

Nikolyszyn then asserted that Burrillville students who know both Nick and Laura well are privy to knowledge the court does not have.

"Were any of them present on Dec. 5, 2001, in the basement of Nicholas Plante?" Clifton said. "So what difference does it make if the popularity contest at Burrillville High School says one person wins out?"

* * * * * *

Nick stood to address the court.

"I can never admit to something I didn't do," he said. "And although the jury found me guilty, I still say I did not do this, although I will accept any punishment that you do decide to give me."

He said he was sorry his friends and family "had to go through this."

"Whatever I have to do to get through this, I will," he said. "I will go on with my life."

Audible sobs came from his friends, who sat sniffling and catching their breath.

The judge spoke of a community "splintered" over whether a crime had been committed.

"Undoubtedly, this is the worst nightmare for the parents of Laura . . . and Nicholas Plante," Clifton said.

He told Nick he hoped the sentence would send a message "not only to you but to the Nicholas Plantes of the world" that sexual assault will not be tolerated.

"You continue to maintain that the act was a consensual act," he said. ". . . I cannot glean any true expression of remorse . . .

"You said: 'I didn't do anything wrong.' 'I feel bad about the situation we put everybody in.' 'I've never had trouble finding girls who like me.' "

Clifton sentenced Nick to 10 years for each of the three counts of first-degree sexual assault, with six years suspended on each, and five years on the one count of second-degree sexual assault, with three years suspended, all to be served concurrently.

As his friends sobbed and wiped their tear-streaked faces, the handcuffs closed around Nick's wrists. He turned and mouthed the words "I love you" to his family.

Then he was taken to the Adult Correctional Institutions to serve four years.

* * * * * *

Laura's mother had dreamed of the handcuffs. Her father's symbol of justice was a moment he wanted to witness but knew he couldn't. He had written long ago to inform his supervisors that he could not and did not want to have any contact with Nick at the ACI.

He would have loved to be there when the handcuffs came off and the door to the prison cell slammed behind Nick.

"It's a very eerie sound," he says. "It's steel slamming against steel. It's a very distinctive sound, and it gives a whole reality to it. There's no more denial now."

Winter 2003

Laura's parents thought she would never go back to high school.

She'd finish the work, they thought. She'd go to college, they thought.

But the social challenges at Burrillville High School were just too much.

Laura just wants to be normal, but she doesn't really know what that is.

"It's hard to explain," she says. "I don't even really think. You know how people think and there's a certain level that a person feels on, thinks on? And I'm just not there. I'm kind of just empty."

She has considered transferring schools, but she scratches one local school after another off her list. Hate e-mail has streamed in from Nick's friends and supporters.

It seems they're everywhere.

Ponaganset. Smithfield. North Smithfield.

* * * * * *

Laura and her family no longer think about the rape every second. That change came gradually, her mother says. Over time, it became every single minute, then every single hour, then every single day.

Her father's thoughts center on failure.

"In a certain sense, I failed to protect my family in the way a father should," he says. "I wasn't there to protect her."

Her mother thinks about preparation, haunted that maybe she could have done more.

She thinks of the time they talked about Laura and her friends looking for streams and ponds where they could swim.

She remembers saying, Make sure you're not alone. Make sure there are other girls around.

She remembers telling Laura, Just because the boys are being nice to you doesn't mean they're your friends.

She remembers thinking that her daughter "wasn't getting it."

"It's sad, because I used to say, 'You're too trusting,' " Laura's mother says. "And it's hard because I feel like those words came back -- in a bad way."

* * * * * *

By February, Laura was meeting her tutor at the school, after school hours. It was a way to get her up and dressed and out of the house, her mother explains.

Her parents were convinced Laura couldn't just stay home, but they didn't want to push her, either.

"We were talking about that for weeks, and then finally we just said, 'Something's got to be done,' " her father says. "She needs to be forced to get up and go -- to do something."

Laura says she was "just unmotivated."

"So I was just like, 'Mom, you have to decide for me.' "

In early March, her mother arranged a meeting with school administrators and teachers.

Before Laura knew it, the meeting was over and those around her had decided she'd start back at school the next day -- the week of her 17th birthday.

"Mom, I gotta go buy new clothes," Laura said.

That first morning back, she changed outfits over and over.

Get out the door, her mother thought as Laura fretted about what to wear. Please, go to school.

* * * * * *

In some ways, Burrillville High School is a different place than it was a year ago.

A six-week-long "healthy relationships" class was begun in direct response to the charges brought against Nick. About 70 students signed up.

Sometimes kids will be fooling around in school and one will say something about rape. Then, they'll look at Laura and apologize, she says.

But in other ways, it's the same place Laura fled after the trial.

Some students still cast nasty looks her way and walk around the corner and say, "Skank!"

Nick's friends tell her she ruined his life. They blame her for taking him away from them.

The difference is Laura's reaction. She still retreats to the sofa at home, in tears -- but not as much. And she thinks she understands what motivates Nick's friends.

"They can't handle the fact that someone they knew, someone so close, could do something wrong, so I'm just the easiest person to hate," she says. "They're not going to hate themselves. They're not going to hate him. So they might as well hate me."

She knows, too, that no girl wants to think this could have happened to her -- particularly not the girls who had spent time alone with Nick.

"So it's just easier to think that I'm lying," she says.

* * * * * *

Principal Trogisch didn't think twice when two girls asked him if they could paint a dragon mural on the stage in the school cafeteria. They were outstanding art students, and he's always encouraging students to do what they do well.

The girls worked four days on the mural, and when it was done, it was beautiful, Trogisch says. The greens, reds, and yellows were bright. The face jumped right out at you.

First thing the next morning, a janitor met Trogisch as he walked in.

The girls had apparently come back after school, at night, and put one finishing touch on their artwork: a dedication to Nick Plante.

Trogisch had the janitor paint over that immediately, before any students came into the building.

Later, he called the girls into his office.

"They started going into this whole thing about Nick, and I said it's not important. He was judged by a jury of his peers to be found guilty. We are not going to put any kind of a memorial in terms of a criminal in this building." He gave them two choices: Paint over the mural yourselves or I'll have someone do it for you.

They wouldn't do it. So the janitor did.

It hadn't occurred to Trogisch that dragons had been a theme in Nick's artwork.

"I didn't even think of the symbol -- of what it symbolized -- until they wrote that thing on it," he says. "I said, Oh you've got to be kidding me."

No one in their right mind would let that dragon stay.

"It's a no-brainer for me," he says. "It's like having a statue of Stalin in the courtyard or some other infamous character in history. He has not brought any kind of pride or positive recognition to this school."

* * * * * *

April 2003

Laura's busy now. So busy that she says she doesn't have time alone at home to think about the rape.

She's hanging out with friends after school.

She's applying to a program at CCRI that would allow her to spend her senior year on campus and earn both high school and college credits next year. If she gets in, it's her ticket out of Burrillville High School.

She has an after-school job.

Neither Laura nor her parents had thought life would be this good again.

"The decision to get back to school was the springboard," her father says.

It's like someone in the family had an illness, her parents say. But the whole family is on the road to recovery now.

"Is it all the same? No," her father says. "Will it all be the same? Nope. But will it be close? Yep."

Laura knows it, too, says her mother after a recent conversation.

"She said, 'I'm getting better, aren't I, mom?' "

* * * * * *

She has dreams for the future again -- less detailed, but dreams nonetheless.

"I just want to have a career, get married, be a mom and live in a house," she says. "That's it. It's simple, but I like it."

She's interested in law, but being a lawyer takes a lot of work.

Maybe an investigator, because of Detective Richardson, her mother suggests.

Richardson has become like a second dad to Laura, her family says. And Marilyn Kelley and the school social worker are like her moms at school.

"That's OK," Laura's mother says. "I like that we share her. . . . It's like we're a group. I trust them. They're like practically all the ones I trust that's not family."

"I don't trust anyone," Laura says.

* * * * * *

May 2003

Laura has retreated to the sofa again.

She's fuming. She's angry with people at school, injustice, absolutely everything.

One hot evening in late April, she drove with two girlfriends to the Lincoln Mall -- a popular place for Burrillville teenagers to hang out.

She let her guard down and left her beloved red Pontiac Sunfire in the lot with the windows down. It was that hot.

When they came back after eating at Papa Gino's with some other friends, the back seat was drenched with milk. Puddled on the floor, the cloth seats, the seat back.

Laura heard that some Burrillville students, friends of Nick's, had been in a nearby Stop & Shop that evening. All they bought was milk.

She filed a police report, but nothing has come of it. Her car still smells -- "like vomit."

Plus, one of Nick's friends has been following her lately. The girl calls Laura a slut, asks if she wants to fight, tells her she didn't get raped and she ruined Nick's life.

Then the girl got "wicked pissed" when Laura confronted her.

"I was like, 'What the heck is your name?' " Laura says. "I was like, 'You don't mean anything to me. You mean this much.' "

And Laura holds her thumb and forefinger a hair's width apart.

What's it going to take for them to leave her alone, she wonders aloud.

You'd have to leave, says her mother, who is just as frustrated as Laura is.

But Laura -- the girl who was begging to move a year ago -- doesn't like that answer.

Why not?

"Because they don't win," she says. "It doesn't work like that. I don't have to fight any more fights. I won. I'm done."

* * * * * *

June 2003

Just a few days left, and she's done with Burrillville High School. Laura's going to CCRI next year for the high school-college program. She has already registered for classes, including a law and evidence class.

She has one goal that the old Laura didn't have.

"I'm going to write a book," she says, with an air of defiance.

But that's a lot of work.

For now, she wants to have fun -- "a schoolgirl summer," her father says.

What her parents want for Laura is that she will be strong and able to confront everything that comes her way.

They hope she will find the kind of loving relationship that they have.

Most of all, they want her to be able to take care of herself.

Reporter Kate Bramson can be reached by e-mail at kbramson@projo.com.