The St. Ambrose School for Girls(26)

“They came in a Mercedes.”

“Yeah, and how old was it?”

I don’t know, I think. The logo mounted on that hood like the target sight of a status rifle was enough for me. Then again, I came in a Mercury that’s almost my age.

“Fucking with people’s a good distraction,” Strots says. “It’s a power trip that equalizes her dirty little secret, and she loves the chaos she creates. The suffering. The embarrassment. She feeds off that shit, the sick cunt. Makes me glad that her father’s a lousy businessman.”

My roommate is the Einstein of the interpersonal, I decide.

“That’s fucked up,” I tack on, trying to be as tough as she is.

She points at me with her cigarette. “And don’t think she’s going to get caught. Even if her father doesn’t have the money he used to, he’s still a trustee here and on the fucking admissions committee. She’s the fourth generation of her family to go here, and her uncle’s still got plenty in his trust fund. The school is never going to go after a Stanhope, and anyway, her powers of persuasion should not be underestimated.”

We are quiet together, and then Strots says something that gets my attention.

“You want me to take care of this for you?” she says in a low, level voice.

As my eyes whip up to hers, she isn’t looking at me. She’s focused on the glowing end of that cigarette.

I go back to my mortician delusion. The smudged lipstick.

The dead Greta on the slab.

I have this strange, thrilling sense that Strots is talking about something so much further than going to Hot RA with the harassment.

In case I’m wrong, I point out, “But you just said she’s never going to get in trouble.”

“That’s with the RAs and the deans. There are ways of handling things privately.”

“Like you talking to her?”

One of Strots’s shoulders shrugs. “Something like that.”

My body goes warm and loose, as if my skin is no longer skin but bathwater over my muscles and bones, and I measure Strots’s obvious physical strength. Then I picture Greta’s face black and blue, swollen out of its perfection, that stick-straight nose she inherited from her father busted out of alignment.

I see blood on the back of Strots’s knuckles and a flush on my roommate’s cheeks, I hear heavy breathing and a pounding heart underneath her blue and gold Huskies sweatshirt.

I imagine an underdog who has no bite getting help from a German fucking shepherd.

“You would do that for me?” I ask in a rough voice.

“Yeah. I would.”

“You could get in trouble.”

Strots is still not looking at me, as if this conversation is all off the record provided we don’t make eye contact. But the secret little smile on her face promises retribution, and this goes to my head like alcohol.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” my roommate says. “I’m even safer here than she is.”

“The sports center,” I whisper. As if it is a religious shrine.

“My father’s been generous to the school,” is as far as Strots is willing to go.

I struggle with my composure in this electrified moment where I feel as though we are together in a battle against injustice everywhere. Strots is my knight in shining armor, coming to protect me for no reason other than that I am being treated unfairly. She is altruism on a warhorse, thundering to the rescue of the weak and downtrodden. In her sweatshirt and with her hair pulled back, tapping that cigarette into that plastic Coke bottle, she glows with vengeance.

It feels good to have power. Even if it is only the referred kind.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind,” Strots tells me as she drops her cigarette butt into the swill. “The offer stands.”

As the lit end of her Marlboro hits the liquid, it sizzles like a tiny steak on a tiny grill.

“I haven’t said no,” I say.

“Yeah, you have. But it’s cool.”

My roommate truly is a genius when it comes to people, isn’t she. Because she’s right. As glorious as my wrath feels, it will remain only ever a potential, my roommate’s offer holstered in my back pocket.

I don’t have the stomach for true conflict.

Just as Strots doesn’t seem bothered by it.

I look at her geometry book and clear my throat. “Do you have a test tomorrow, too?”

“We all do. We’re on the same schedule for exams even if we’re not in the same class.”

It seems important to talk about other things, normal things, like you’d wipe down a kitchen counter after you made a sandwich and left mayonnaise smudges on the laminate.

Nice and regular. Nothing to see here.

She did not just offer to beat the shit out of the girl across the hall, and I did not just seriously consider taking her up on the kind invitation.

Strots moves the book back into her lap and pushes her hair out of her face. “I fucking hate geometry.”

I try to follow her lead, but I fail and am unable to concentrate on my own test prep.

My insanity and Greta have a lot in common, I decide. Neither have I volunteered for, and both have a tendency to catch me unawares and kick me way off course.

Rubbing my eyes, I’m disappointed in my lack of courage. I am also grateful Strots has no idea where I go in my head when I get silent. Sitting across from me, she is blissfully oblivious to my struggle, in part because she’s in a struggle of her own with the prospect of the test, her brows down low, her Bic pen tapping against her front teeth. She seems utterly stuck, and I envy the fact that, wherever her mind has gone, it’s not to a hallucination that turns her into a statue that birds poop on.