The St. Ambrose School for Girls(91)

As my hand makes contact with the cool brass doorknob, an elemental change overtakes me. I am no longer capable of moving. Confused, I look down at myself.

I expect to find a conversion occurring, my feet now stone and bolted to the floorboards, a tide of concrete-ion once again running up my ankles, over my knees, and throughout my torso, as I become a statue just as I was in front of the CVS.

I have a thought that at least here in my room in Tellmer, I will be protected from both the elements and bird poop.

Except that is not what is happening.

I lift one of my feet. Then the other. I take my hand off the knob and retract out of my forward lean.

I am not a statue of myself, and yet I cannot leave my room. I am frozen, but not inanimate.

When the explanation for my immobility arrives, I am so ashamed that a swirling self-hatred plays the role of my hair from the hallucination I had downtown. Fibers of enmity pour out of my head and coil around my body, encasing me in a mummy wrap of darkness before they go on to swamp my room.

I cannot leave because I’m too weak to stand up to Greta.

For all my background maneuvering, my pink-panty conniving, I am a coward. When it truly counts, as in right now, I cannot stand up and admit to my enemy what I have done and face her wrath. No, I must draft behind my stronger, more robust roommate, setting Strots up for a fall when she has already been falsely accused.

Greta won’t believe her when she tells the girl it wasn’t her. I’ve just taken their conflict and doused it with lighter fluid.

And Keisha is going to be the next person sucked into this.

Yet even though I know this, and even though I want to protect Strots, I can’t move, and I hate myself for everything. For my illness, for my weakness, for my pussying out, once again, when it matters.

I am useless. I am weak. I am useless. I am weakIamuselessIamweakweakweak—

From out of its period of hibernation, my illness saddles up the steed of my recriminations, the spurs of its boots digging into the flanks of my self-flagellation. In a surge of power and grace, it carries me into the abyss once again, the sparking strikes of the iron shoes on those clamoring hooves the only light in the darkness of my version of reality.

Except there is a difference this time.

From out of the conviction that I am an insane coward, something different emerges and then explodes into a blaze of heat. It is an anger that I have never felt before. No, that’s not true. There have been brief flares of this fury over the course of the semester, and like kindling under dry wood, they have finally caught hold, although not just to logs stacked primly in a hearth, but to my entire house.

Fuck Greta Stanhope.

From out of this spinning referendum on my character, I become wrath. I become vengeance. I am torched to the point of a crematorium’s worth of rage. Is it because of what the situation with Greta has shown me about myself? Or is it because I am done going quietly into the bad night of my madness?

Like so much of what has happened at Ambrose, the origins do not matter.

What happens next is what counts.

As I leave my room, I do not bother to have an opinion about where I go. Why should I? I am not in control as I proceed down to the basement and exit out the back door.

The last thought that I am conscious of is the dim notation that Nick Hollis is no longer standing in the parking area.

The last thing I am aware of seeing is the tightly sealed windows on both sides of his car.

The last sound I hear is the final step my right boot takes before I leave the asphalt and walk off onto the damp, cold grass.

And then I have no memory of anything.





chapter TWENTY-SEVEN




Someone is shouting.

I open my eyes. I am groggy and disoriented, and I cannot ascertain what I am looking at as I am confronted by an expanse of white. Did I pass out and end up at an emergency room? Did I get taken to a mental hospital in Boston? Did I die and this is—

It is the ceiling. Over my bed in my dorm room.

Light is streaming through the bank of windows, creating shadows in the folds of the blankets that cover me. Morning? It must be.

As I sit up slowly, I put my hand to my face. My temples are pounding and my head feels as though it weighs as much as my entire body. Moving with care, because I worry that my skull is in danger of rolling off my shoulders and getting lost under my mattress, I look to Strots’s bed, expecting her to be asleep.

She is not. Her side of the room is empty.

And who is shouting? What time is it—

Something lands in my lap, damp and heavy, and I squeak. It is the towel that evidently had been wrapped around my hair, which is also damp and heavy. I must have taken a shower before putting myself to bed. I do not remember doing either… the soaping and rinsing or the stretching out and resting.

Who is yelling? The words are muted, distilled through some kind of distance. At first I think they are coming from outside in the hall, maybe down by the staircase. But no. Their origin is below me.

I stand up and lean into the window. Down in the parking lot, a dark-haired man in a groundskeeper uniform the color of an ivy bed is motioning toward the river with his sweat-wrinkled cap. He is speaking to a policeman who is dressed in a blue uniform and is sporting a badge, a gun, and cuffs, all of which are holstered.

The cop is nodding and making calm-down motions with his palms, like he is patting the asphalt they are both standing on. The three cars owned by our RAs are where they always are. No other people are around.