Pat Richmond

Pat Richmond enters Tully Hart’s story as the best-looking boy on the football team and the date she believes will make her first high-school party unforgettable. His invitation seems to confirm the attention she has long received for her beauty, but the encounter exposes a gulf between the romance Tully imagines and Pat’s disregard for her consent.

Identity and Introduction

Pat is popular enough that his choice of Tully carries social weight: none of the girls from her junior high have been invited, and she thinks of herself as the one he singled out. Their first connection takes shape at a local hamburger hangout, where Pat breaks away from his group of large friends and approaches her. The moment is framed through Tully’s excitement; “Stairway to Heaven” is playing on the jukebox, and the song becomes part of the romantic story she begins to build around him.

Pat asks Tully to join him at a party on Friday and promises to pick her up at ten, teasing her about whether that is past her curfew. For Tully, the invitation is a threshold: it is her first high-school party, and she carefully prepares by showering, shaving, and straightening her hair. The care she gives her appearance reflects the importance she attaches to being chosen, while Pat’s casual teasing casts her as a younger girl whose limits are something to play with.

The Party and Assault

At the party, Pat tells Tully that she is the prettiest girl ever to live in town and that all the boys want her. She answers that he has her, falling into the role of the adored date. Sitting close together on his letterman’s jacket, they drink beer and kiss. Tully reads the kiss as the beginning of a love story: she imagines declarations of love, a shared song, and the two of them recounting how they met.

The scene turns when Pat’s kiss becomes forceful. Tully cannot get her voice to work, and his hands move over her body and undo her bra despite her attempt to stop him. She tells him no and asks him not to continue, but he rapes her. The assault destroys the romantic meaning she had assigned to the evening: what she wanted was love and tenderness, not what Pat did to her.

Afterward, Pat smooths Tully’s hair and asks what is wrong, saying that he thought she wanted it. His response recasts her distress as a misunderstanding rather than acknowledging her refusal. Tully, in disbelief, asks whether he thought she wanted that; Pat frowns and tells her to dance. His insistence on returning to the party’s ordinary social rhythm sharpens the disjunction between his behavior and the violence Tully has just endured.

Immediate Aftermath and Disclosure

Tully dresses slowly and tries to stand; the movement makes her nauseated, and she vomits over her favorite shoes. With her purse clutched to her chest, she makes her painful way back to the road. The night leaves visible traces on her—pine needles in her hair and vomit on her shoes—but she is grateful that no cars pass and she will not have to explain what happened. On the walk home, she replays the evening in fragments: Pat’s smile when he invited her, his gentle first kiss, the way he had spoken as if she mattered, and then the harsh hands and probing touch that followed. The contrast deepens her loneliness rather than resolving the encounter into a story she can comfortably tell herself.

When Kate asks whether she is all right, Tully insists that she is fine, stiffening as Kate comes closer. Then, to her own horror, she begins to cry. Kate does not demand an explanation; she simply hugs her. Tully initially flinches at the unfamiliar contact, but finds she cannot pull away. She clings to Kate, afraid that without this unexpected embrace she will drift away and be lost. The bodily recoil and the need to remain held register how difficult trust has become, and how powerfully a small act of care can interrupt her isolation.

Tully eventually tells Kate what happened. Looking out over the field and taking a steadying breath, she says that Pat raped her. She cannot turn to face Kate, overwhelmed by shame and expecting judgment, but Kate asks quietly whether she is okay. Tully’s disclosure gives the assault its name in the presence of someone who responds with concern rather than blame. It also marks a decisive beginning in their friendship: Kate becomes the person Tully can tell, and the person who stays beside her without requiring her to make the pain easier to hear.

Lasting Significance in Tully’s Story

Pat is significant less for any later presence of his own than for the way the assault becomes part of Tully’s continuing history. Years afterward, she names him among the sources of her anger when she tells Kate that her grandmother has died: she is angry at Cloud, Gran, and God, and the remembered harm remains part of the emotional landscape she carries. Kate’s response is to hold her while she breaks down, echoing the earlier moment when she first received Tully’s disclosure. The recurrence connects the teenage violence to a longer pattern of loss and to the friendship that gives Tully somewhere to bring her grief.

The assault also sits behind Tully’s public identity as a journalist. A documentary eventually lets audiences see beyond the cool, witty professional to a woman who has been disappointed and abandoned; the public response transforms respect into affection and turns her private pain into a widely watched story. Pat is one of the figures associated with that history, though the documentary’s impact rests on the larger pattern of abandonment rather than on him alone. The contrast is consequential: Tully’s story can create public connection, but its origin is an experience she first struggled to name and could disclose only to a trusted friend.

That tension recurs in Tully’s later work on television. When she intervenes in Kate and Marah’s family conflict on air, Kate understands that the program is publicly casting her as a bad mother, and she asks Tully what she is doing. The scene does not equate that intervention with Pat’s assault; it does show how Tully’s willingness to expose painful private experience can cross another person’s boundaries when she believes help is needed. Against the original encounter, where Pat disregards Tully’s refusal, the later conflict makes consent and the limits of speaking for someone else an enduring concern in Tully’s story.

Pat’s significance lies less in any later appearance of his own than in how the assault becomes part of Tully’s continuing history. Years later, when she tells Kate that her grandmother has died, she names Pat among the sources of her anger alongside Cloud, Gran, and God. Kate holds her as she breaks down, echoing the earlier moment when she first received Tully’s disclosure. The recurrence connects teenage violence with later bereavement and with the friendship that gives Tully somewhere to bring her grief.

The assault also belongs to the history behind Tully’s public identity as a journalist. A documentary eventually shows audiences the woman behind the cool, witty professional: someone who has been disappointed and abandoned. The public response transforms respect into affection, turning her private pain into a widely watched story. Pat is one figure associated with that history, although the documentary’s impact rests on a larger pattern of abandonment. Tully’s story can create public connection, but the pain at its heart was first something she struggled to name and could disclose only to a trusted friend.

A later television intervention brings a related boundary into view. When Tully intervenes on air in the conflict between Kate and Marah, Kate realizes that the program is publicly casting her as a bad mother and asks Tully what she is doing. The scene does not equate Tully’s intervention with Pat’s assault; rather, it shows that Tully’s impulse to expose private pain in the name of help can cross another person’s boundaries. Set against the original encounter, in which Pat disregards Tully’s refusal, the later conflict makes the limits of speaking for someone else an enduring concern in her story.