Are you dreading increasingly shorter days and longer nights?

Do cold, overcast northwest winters bum you out.

You may be suffering from the big dark.

But there is a solution.

I'm Dyer Oxley, telling you to talk to your podcast app about Meet Me Here, KUOW's Arts Podcast,

a weekly dose of events and culture to lighten up your life.

Side effects of Meet Me Here include laughter, curiosity, and inspiration. Find Meet Me

Here on your local KOW app or wherever you get your podcast. From KUOW in Seattle, welcome to

Focus, your home for immersive audio documentaries in the Pacific Northwest.

This season, adults in the room.

When I was a senior in high school, my best friend Ella Hushagen and I heard a rumor.

A popular teacher was abusing a boy at our school. Maybe abusing a boy. Maybe more than one boy. Lots of maybes. Zero proof. We told authorities what we'd heard. When they didn't act, we raised hell. And then our friends, parents, teachers, even a columnist at Seattle's biggest

newspaper called us gossips, rumor mongers, character assassins. Our high school turned on us and

made us pariahs. And those abuse allegations against our teacher, they were never proven.

We graduated high school in 2000, and since then, Ella and I have had the same conversation on a loop.

How did this man, who we saw as manipulative and potentially evil, convinced the rest of our community

to defend him, to celebrate him. One morning during the pandemic, Ella called. I was in my yard,

pruning the roses. We should find out if our teacher really was a predator, Ella said.

If, I thought, why was she even questioning this? Everyone was in denial about him, I replied.

We weren't. Ella, you know we did the right thing. She got quiet. Then she said something that hit me in the gut.

How can we be so sure? For 25 years, I was positive my instincts were right, and I thought Ella felt the same way.

But the past nod at her, and her question ripped a hole in my narrative.

...