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.
I have the strangest suspicion she’s stood over Greta Stanhope’s dead body in her mind a couple of times.
“Would you like help?” I say, nodding at her textbook. “I’m really good at math.”
chapter NINE
It’s six a.m. The church bells are ringing. It’s finally Mountain Day.
I open my eyes and try to remember what day it is. Tuesday.
It’s the week following the geometry test, which I did not miss and which Strots got a B on. She’s particularly satisfied with her result. I’m particularly worried about all the internal mail I receive, the good news being that there have only been generic notices in my box since last Thursday.
My roommate and I have not discussed Greta again. But when I see the girl either in the dorm or out on campus, I think of what Strots told me. I look past the expensive wardrobe and the gold bracelets, the vacation plans I overheard down by the river, the rule-the-world attitude. I wonder if Greta’s hiding the kind of fear about being judged that I wear closer to the surface… if all her gloss isn’t like my black clothes and my dyed hair, a suit of deflection.
Maybe I’m a target because I represent everything she hates about herself. Maybe she feels like an outlier because ultimately she can’t keep up financially with the girls she dominates socially, and I am the living, breathing symbol of an outcast.
Maybe she’s still pissed at what I interrupted that night, shortly after we all moved into Tellmer.
Ultimately, her motivations matter less than her actions. And that is why I remain on full alert.
Sitting up, I look out the windows. It’s light already and very clear. Another perfect fall day. I really wish I could spend it in classrooms, and as the prospect of huffing and puffing awaits me, I don’t want to climb anything, even out of bed.
“Why can’t they start this shit at nine,” Strots mutters. “But noooo, we gotta get the kids up at the crack of ass.”
Strots shoves her bare feet into her black shower shoes and scuffs out of the room, towel looped over her shoulder. As she leaves, I eye her legs with envy. They are heavily muscled, extending out from beneath her loose boxer shorts like pistons.
She is going to have no trouble climbing anything. Even Everest.
I really should have tried to get myself out of this elevation-oriented activity. At Ambrose, we’re required to take one physical education class a semester, but I got that waived because of the lithium and the way exertion affects my sodium levels and thus the drug’s intensity.
It’s too late now. I am going to go climb a mountain.
I change quickly before Strots is back from her shower, and I leave ahead of her so she won’t have to deal with the awkwardness of walking out of our room with me. Whenever this happens, we invariably go down the stairs side by side, and make our way together to Wycliffe for food or to whatever classroom building we’re bound for. But it’s out of obligation on her part, and I know that her teammates would rather I get out of the way.