LEWISTON – Lyndsey Kadziauskas knows how drinking can make teens easy prey for sex abuse and rape.

It happened to her. She was 14, a student at Gray-New Gloucester High School in Gray.

Kadziauskas, now 20, was one of several speakers at Healthy Androscoggin’s Youth 2 Youth Road Show at the Lewiston-Auburn College. Students heard a group of their peers from Dover, N.H., talk “the truth” of tobacco and alcohol.

Despite ads that show happy people drinking, “Alcohol has a dangerous side,” Kadziauskas said.

One night when she was a freshman, she got a late-night call inviting her to a party. She knew there would be drinking and that her parents wouldn’t let her go. She snuck out of her bedroom window, was picked up and given a ride to the party.

At the party, the kids were older. She didn’t know them. She felt awkward, but considered herself stuck because she didn’t have a ride home and didn’t want to call her parents.

“So I decided to take a drink I was offered,” she said. After two drinks, she felt woozy, dizzy, “just plain sick.” A boy offered a bedroom where she could lie down. She passed out.

“When I awoke, I was laying on the bed with no shoes, no socks, no pants, no underwear on. I didn’t take my clothes off,” she said. “There was a boy on top of me trying to have sex with me, another one standing behind him watching. I was so scared. I thought it was a dream, I didn’t know what to do. I passed out.”

She woke up later, alone in the room but still naked from the waist down. “I looked at the door and almost everyone at the party was staring at me.”

Feeling uncomfortable “and really dizzy,” she got dressed, not fully comprehending what happened, she said. It was getting late. Two boys asked if she wanted a ride home; otherwise, they warned, she might not get home that night.

Still not wanting to call her parents, “I got in the car with them. Little did I know that the two boys who offered to give me a ride were the two boys who had just assaulted me,” Kadziauskas said.

On the way home, she noticed they weren’t driving the right way. The boys drove behind a marketplace, told her to get out, and “forced me to perform oral sex on them. One held me down so I couldn’t get up and run away.”

They drove her home and left her in the dark, “still drunk and really woozy.”

The next morning, she was sick. She told her parents she needed to go to bed. Friends started calling to see if were she all right, and asking,”What went on last night?”

She found out later the two boys “had been bragging. Everyone knew.”

When she got to school that Monday, “Everyone came up” and asked her about what happened. “I couldn’t take it. I was so overwhelmed,” she said.

She skipped a class, got caught by the school’s resource officer and was taken to the principal’s office. “Something really bad happened to me this weekend,” she told the principal, who sent her to a guidance counselor

There, Kadziauskas said, “I spilled my guts” and was asked what she wanted to do.

“I decided I can’t let these guys get away with what they did to me. What if they do it to somebody else? . . . I ended up going to court. They ended up going to jail,” she said.

Kadziauskas is majoring in nursing at the University of Maine at Augusta. She said she shares her experience to illustrate her advice: “Keep control of your own personal situation by not drinking.”

In the audience were Auburn Middle students Emily Ranucci and Letisha Brooks, both 14. Ranucci said Kadziauskas was “brave” to tell her story, saying “It makes you more aware.” Brooks agreed. It makes you “think before you do something.”

Nearly 130 middle and high school students from Lewiston, Auburn, Poland, Lisbon, Turner and Greene attended. Those students will take what they learned about drugs and alcohol and share the information with others at their schools.