The St. Ambrose School for Girls(67)

As I transfer the Levi’s over to the pile I am making—and note how much I’m titillated by the incredibly sexy denim that has clad his long, strong legs—something slips free from the back pocket of the jeans and falls to the floor.

I immediately turn to pick it up. But I freeze.

At first, I cannot understand what I am looking at.

In contrast to the dark clothes, whatever was in that pocket is pink. And it’s silky. And it’s—

A pair of panties.

I take a sharp step back, like the delicate, feminine flush of lingerie is a hissing snake.

My heart pounds. I breathe in and out. I feel my head swim as if I’m a girlfriend, betrayed.

But then I remember… he has a wife. These are Sandra’s.

I need to calm the hell down. Even as irrational pain lances through the center of my chest, I know that this bucket of cold, foul-smelling reality getting dumped on my stupid fifteen-year-old girl’s head is a good thing. My fantasies have created a double life that is curated for a fulfillment that can never, ever translate.

Nick Hollis is not my boyfriend. He is a married man who is my residential advisor. Instead of feeling two-timed, I need to do what I agreed to do for him and put his clothes in a dryer. And then when my load is finished, I need to leave his where it is, even if his things get the equivalent of a permanent press’s worth of wrinkles from cooling in a jumble inside the machine.

He’s done nothing wrong, and this is none of my business, and I’m way over the line with my feelings.

This rational pep talk lasts about ninety seconds. Almost immediately, I am reassuring myself that he and I still have our special wavelength in spite of his wife. I am still important to him. I am still more significant in his life than all the other girls in the dorm who look at him all the time.

I begin to feel a little better, but I decide to stop being so nosy with his clothes. I reach into the machine, grab an armful, and walk across to the dryers. I do this two more times, and make sure I don’t look at anything. Then I peel the concert shirt off of the machine and toss Nirvana and his boxers across the space, almost making it.

After which, I’m stuck with the jeans that I’ve left draped on the lip of his washer. And the panties.

I can’t leave them on the floor.

Why didn’t I come down here with that French homework? I would have had a pen.

Taking a deep breath, I bend at the waist and, holding my hand out to the very farthest reaches of my arm, I angle my body back as if I am trying to protect my internal organs from a chain saw. My forefinger and thumb are likewise fully extended and tense, tweezers that only happen to have blood circulation and feeling. Or at least the circulation. I cannot feel a thing anywhere on my body—

My hand goes limp and I feel the world spin like I am on a rinse cycle.

The panties have fallen in a random orientation of pink folds created by a handshake between gravity and dumb luck: The back of the waistband just happens to be facing up at me, and there’s a name tag that has been sewn into it, no doubt by a maid’s needle and thread.

Stanhope.

These are Greta’s.





chapter NINETEEN




It’s Monday afternoon now. I’ve finished washing down the third floor, and I’m checking in with the married couple up there, standing on their welcome mat and asking them if there’s anything else I can do. They’re the ones who’ve been coordinating my work, and who will be issuing me a check that I can cash at the student center with my school ID. I’m hoping they tell me I should go wash down the entirety of Wycliffe.

I’m denied that distraction. I’m told I have done a great job. I’m issued an order payable in my name for ninety dollars. I take my check and turn to the main stairs. I dread using them. I don’t want to be on my floor, or even in my room.

I decide to head down the hallway instead of descending the center staircase.

As I pass by Keisha’s room, number 317, I hope that she and Strots are having the best weekend away ever. I hope they ate good food, and learned new things about each other, and planned a future that spans decades. I want them to have a perfect destiny. I want them to be the lovers embracing in the sun on the front lawn of this dorm in the springtime, even though the school will never let them.

I think of that dance in the gym, and how neither of them went. There’s no place for them here on campus and that’s unfair.

At the end of the hall, there’s a fire door with a red glowing EXIT sign above it, and I push through so that I can begin the change in altitude. I pass my own floor’s fire door, and when I get to the first level, I shove its reinforced steel panel open.

As I scoot out the front of the dorm, I feel pursued even though there’s no one behind me, and I’m tense as I hook up with the concrete path that I take at night, the one that brings me around our phone room’s windows and then skirts the back of Wycliffe to lead me toward the river. Before I veer off from the sidewalk, I look around to make sure I’m not being seen, but this is stupid. Even if all the RAs in both dorms were pressed up against their windows, spying on me like I’m a criminal as I step off onto the mowed grass and head for the slim cutout in the trees, what can they do to me? There aren’t any No Trespassing signs posted by the river, and it’s nowhere near close to curfew.

But everything’s changed. Even as the buildings stay in their same alignment on campus, and the trees remain plugged into their same root systems, and the sky is blue and the grass is green, there’s a dirty cast to it all, grime in the corners and in between the floorboards of the whole world.