The St. Ambrose School for Girls(79)

I look back up at him. “That has nothing to do with what Greta has—”

“Doesn’t it?” He puts his hand on the stack of folders. “You’re subject to hallucinations. It is in your medical release.”

I shake my head. “No. I know what happened to me. I know what Greta did to me, to my things.”

“Do you? Are you sure? Or is this all in your mind.”

“I’m not making anything up,” I breathe.

For a moment, I’m stripped naked again, just as I was when I entered my dorm and realized what those girls were reading. I am beyond disarmed. I am dismantled, in pieces here on the far side of Mr. Pasture’s pictures and position of authority. I am a glass shattered and falling onto his carpet.

Because…

The truth is, I am only ninety-nine percent sure about the series of events that have occurred since my first day here, since the moment Greta stuck her hand out to me by our parents’ cars, when my mother declared she and I would be best friends and I knew that that was never going to happen. I am merely ninety-nine percent sure of what was in that shampoo bottle, of how my clothes were ruined, of what I read in that geometry memo, of the motivations of that boy from St. Michael’s.

I’m even using the fact that I am currently in this office, speaking to the dean of students about an attack that was witnessed by easily twenty other girls, as a way of grounding myself in what I think happened yesterday.

Assuming I am actually sitting here. Assuming that this is reality.

With a shaking hand, I reach out and touch the front of his desk. It seems solid. It really does.

“Miss Taylor,” the dean says in a gentler voice. “If you’re not hallucinating, then the only other explanation is that you’re fabricating things to try to save your roommate. Why else have you not told anyone? Why have you not gone to your floor’s residential advisor and made a report of the incidences?”

Because he’s fucking the girl who’s doing it all to me, Mr. Pasture.

The bald truth rides up my throat, but it stays in my mouth. If I can’t be completely sure about the torment, I can’t trust the pink panties. And in this minefield of allegations of misconduct, tossing Nick Hollis’s reputation into the mix is something I can’t do given my mind’s ability to conjure events out of thin air. It’s just not fair to him, in the event my mind made it all up.

I raise my eyes. The dean’s change of affect is pronounced and totally devastating to me. He is no longer hostile because he’s no longer dealing with a student who is being deliberately oppositional. He has softened because he is dealing with a disabled person, someone from whom it would be cruel to expect normal functioning.

Of all the things my illness can take from me, I never expected it would be my credibility.

And certainly not when such a thing matters most.





chapter TWENTY-THREE




I return to Tellmer by myself and have no memory of the trip back. The fact that I am suddenly at the door to Strots’s and my room supports the dean of students’ position that the reliability of my testimony is suspect. Opening the way in, I find my roommate dismantling her bed. She’s lifted the mattress up off its seat of springs.

She looks over at me. “Have you seen my cigarettes?”

That this is the first thing she asks does not offend me. Nothing has changed in her situation as a result of my going off with Mr. Pasture, and I’ll bet she didn’t have any hope in that regard as I was leaving.

“Sorry. I took them.”

As her face registers surprise, I close the door and go over to retrieve the Marlboros and their matching red Bic lighter from my desk.

“I didn’t smoke any,” I say as I hand her things back to her. “I moved them to prove I was smoking.”

The statements, taken at face value, make no sense, but neither of us is in a rush to sort it all out. I sit on my bed. She sits on hers and cracks the window.

“You want to be a smoker now?” she says in a conversational tone, as if we’re waiting in a doctor’s office or perhaps at a beauty parlor, as if she doesn’t care about the answer particularly, but feels the need to make neighborly talk.

“I figured out what Greta was going to tell them, how she was going to spin everything. I figured they would ask about the closed door, so I wanted to have an excuse. I told them I was smoking and that’s why it was closed. Not because we were… doing anything.”

I’m as defeated as she, but for a different reason. In her case, the truth has been used against her. In my case, the truth does not exist.

She looks up from the lit end of her cigarette. The smile that touches her face is sunlight breaking through dark clouds, a welcome slice of golden warmth that does not last.

“You did that?” she says.

“I wanted to help. Any way I could.” I shrug. “But it didn’t matter. They don’t believe me—not about Greta’s pranks or anything else.”

Strots exhales toward the window. “They want to kick me out.”

I close my eyes. I am going to cry. “Greta deserved what she got in the phone room.”

“Not because of that.”

I glance over. “Because Greta told them you hit on her last year?”

“She said I forced myself on her. They called it sexual assault.”