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.
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.