The St. Ambrose School for Girls(68)

I’m not wiping everything down anymore, trying to clean what’s right in front of me.

After I duck through the break in the foliage, I stop as soon as I am hidden. It’s much colder in here, and I note the change in temperature, as well as the intrusion of the earthy smells that congregate in this place where nature is not clipped and pruned. Looking around, my tension does not leave me. There is no relief to be found in the burbling of the brook or the embrace of the autumnal leaves.

I go down to the bifurcated tree where Strots kissed me, where I used to hide and listen to Greta talk to her friends night after night. Through the V in the trunk, I stare at the rocks that the girls sit and smoke on. I find myself resenting every single filter Greta flicked into the rushing water, and revisit my familiar outrage that she cares nothing about where what she throws out will end up.

So careless. Just a user who doesn’t give a shit about the messes she creates for other people.

Nick Hollis should be very, very careful.

I step out from behind the tree. Walking forward to the congregation of boulders, my heart pounds. I feel as if I have gone across a hostile country’s borders without a passport. As if Greta owns these rocks.

I stand on them. I look at the weathered stone beneath my boots. I try to see in the veins of the mineral deposits the answers to the questions that have kept me up for the last two nights.

Why does she have to ruin everything? This first line of inquiry has driven the most highway miles, even though it cuts out half of the participants in question. It is just easier to focus on Greta. The nuances beyond that take me into a swamp that I would rather not trudge through.

Not that there are many nuances when an underaged student’s panties are found in the back pocket of her residential advisor’s well-washed jeans.

I sit down in exactly the place Greta always parks it. I look up to the sky. The sunlight splicing through the canopy of changing leaves dances upon my face and my shoulders and reminds me of Mountain Day. I am taken back to when we disembarked from the orange buses and stood on the packed dirt of the parking area, listening to Hot RA lay out the rules for the ascent a second time. I remember noting the way the morning sun, razor bright and laser precise, fell upon him, turning him and his Ray-Bans into a religious painting come to life, God blessing the beautiful, youthful man in his role as protector of us.

I want to go back to that moment in time. I want to return exactly there, to that point in the procession of events, when things, in spite of Greta’s tormenting, were so very much easier than they have become.

Over the past two nights, I have worked so hard to sculpt an innocent explanation for it all, slapping together hypotheticals in an attempt to construct a three-dimensional representation of a reality I can live with—and once again, I answer the siren call of that myth-building. Maybe her panties were somehow left inside the washing machine, and just happened to commingle with his clothing. Yeah, but then how did they end up inside a pocket? How could that happen? Okay, fine. Maybe she dropped them on the stairs while taking a load down to the laundry and he picked them up as a Good Samaritan. And because he couldn’t very well walk around with a student’s pink silk underwear in his hand, he stuffed them into his pocket with the intention of giving them back to her—

Bullshit.

And the idea that Greta seduced an innocent married man, plying him with wiles so beguiling that in spite of all his principles, he couldn’t help but give in to them?

That’s also fucking bullshit.

After forty-eight hours of dissatisfying dissection, I’m beginning to get angry with Hot RA’s role in all this. Something as fundamental as a residential advisor not sleeping with a minor under his supervision is like gravity, a law of physics that everyone understands because its purpose and properties are vital to the way the world works.

And just in case there was any gray area as to where that line is for Ambrose, I checked our student handbook. Section IV, paragraph 13 spells out the no, not ever, not in any fashion, at all when it comes to adults fraternizing with students.

So I’m left with the conclusion that Nick Hollis did a very, very bad thing, one that cannot be excused by whatever invitation, however intentional and manipulative in nature, Greta presented to him. He did something utterly against the rules, something that, again, can never be explained away by how hot and sexy Greta can be, or what her desires might have been, or how lonely he was with his wife away.

Oh, and screw the handbook. In the eyes of the law, no matter how many times Greta may have begged him for it, he committed statutory rape. While he was married. And to hell with how often Sandra is on the road, saving the world while she gives herself lung cancer.

The facets of this reality the three of us are in—and yes, I’m now stuck with the pair of them because of those panties—are ugly, and they make a hypocrite out of me. Wasn’t there a sexual component to my own fantasies? A physical connection I dreamed of, I relished, even though he is an adult, I’m a minor, and he’s married?

The difference is that my transgressions with him were in theory, Greta’s in fact.

I think back to that day in the rain, her ditching the Brunettes to hop into the Porsche with him. Had it started back then? And what about on Mountain Day, when the pair of them were up on the summit in the trees? And then when Greta defiantly chose Crenshaw’s team and got pissed when Nick outplayed her?

And what about her and Francesca arguing. Maybe the other girl found out.