Barri Pepe was 15 when she accepted a ride home from three young men she thought she could trust. They drove past her house and took her instead to a parking lot, where one of them raped her.

The next 20 years were a blur of drug use and self-loathing. PCP made Pepe forget her feelings, but it also made her forget her family. Her older daughter began using drugs, too, and Pepe's younger daughter couldn't stand when her mother disappeared into strange apartments for days.

"It scares me when you don't come home," the younger girl, Nichole, then 6, told Pepe.

Ten years after she quit drugs, Pepe, a high school dropout, is a graduate student. Yesterday, Pepe, 46, received a master's degree in social work from Widener University.

"That's freakin' awesome for a dust-head who should be dead," she said at her Prospect Park home last week. "If I can do this, anyone can do this."

Pepe plans to open a halfway house for women struggling with addiction, and she already is eyeing a property in Darby for the location.

John Giugliano, a Widener professor who has worked with Pepe, said he didn't doubt that she'd find a way to get what she wanted.

"She's the type that makes up her mind and goes forward," he said.

Pepe's daughters - Danielle Kline, 26, and Nichole Giorno, 17 - are thrilled for her and glad the long days without their mother are over, at least for a while.

"It's going to be a great stress off my mother's shoulders," said Kline, who designs electrical systems in Philadelphia.

Pepe's older sister, Sandra Stevenson, 57, of Delaware, said she had felt like a second mom to Pepe, trying to steer her straight over the years. Now that Pepe can take care of herself, Stevenson is relieved.

"Now she's not my baby sister anymore," Stevenson said. "Now we're just sisters."

Pepe grew up as one of four children in Ridley and neighboring towns.

Her mother was a waitress, sometimes working two jobs after her first husband died.

The day of the attack, Pepe and a friend were walking home along Chester Pike.

A car full of young men pulled up to them, and they started talking.

Pepe and her friend didn't know the teenagers, but they seemed to have mutual friends. So when the teens offered to take the girls home, Pepe thought she was safe.

The young men dropped off Pepe's friend, but drove past where Pepe lived.

They took her behind a building somewhere in Ridley, she said.

She kicked and screamed and bit them, and honked the horn when she could reach it, she said. The oldest of the three, who was 18, raped her, she said.