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.
No, I know when it started. I just hate to contaminate a moment I had with him… with everything that is Greta.
But if I’m really being honest, I think things started back on the third night I was in the dorm, when I woke up without a reason and went to the bathroom and heard my residential advisor arguing with his wife on the phone.
After which I emerged to find my residential advisor leaving his quarters with his car keys in his hand.
I recall his eyes bouncing around, focusing on the hall behind me. I had ascribed the distraction to him battling his emotions after a rough call with Sandra, but no, that hadn’t been it. Greta had come out of her room at the prescribed time and he hadn’t been sure how to handle it.
With the clarity of a memory revisited in another light, I see Greta fully dressed in her doorway, clear as if she were standing before me.
And then there had been that curling iron left on in the bathroom.
It had been planned. The two of them had arranged to meet up and go for a drive in the moonlight—but his wife had called unexpectedly, and then I had been another monkey wrench in the works with my appearance in the hallway. He’d had to leave by himself because they both knew I was awake and my room faced the parking lot. It was too much risk, and they’d had no means by which to make an on-the-fly adjustment to their meetup.
So, yes, I believe they started things almost immediately. Maybe not with the actual sex. Maybe that had taken time to enter the picture. But the tracks had been laid for that horizontal destination right from the beginning.
As I ponder how any married man could think of this dorm as a dating pool, the dance in the gymnasium comes back to me. I remember Nick searching the crowd as we were talking, and his eyes seeming to focus on something specific. Had it been Greta? Had that comment about New York not being as good as it seemed been about the girl?
My head’s ability to extrapolate endlessly is well suited to precisely this kind of persistent recasting of recollection. I’ve been looking under every single rock to probe the truth, and the result is the mental equivalent of finding pink panties all over my dorm, my hall, my classrooms, my meals, and my interactions with people. It’s exactly the kind of egg hunt I do not need to go on.
I wish I had someone to talk to about this. I wish there was somewhere to go. But as I sit on Greta’s rock and hate her to my core, I’m unwilling to end Nick Hollis’s marriage and his entire professional life on the basis of a pair of underwear in his laundry, no matter what their presence in that pocket so strongly suggests.
And I’m crushed as I reaffirm my conclusion that I will not act upon my constructive knowledge of the affair. Crushed and saddened.
After battling with my hallucinations for so many years, you’d think I’d be used to reality shifting and changing in front of my very eyes, yet I find that all my training in this regard helps me not one iota: My residential advisor is not who I thought he was, and there’s no going back from this realization. No changing it, either.
And I miss the fantasies I had of him sure as if I’ve broken up with a real person.
With a nasty edge, I find myself hoping that in this go-around of Greta’s game, she’ll lose and lose hard. I can’t imagine Nick Hollis leaving his wife for a student. But maybe Greta’s just trying to pull another Strots, this time with higher stakes. Not a lesbian, but a married man.
He needs to be really, really careful.
I sit for a while longer on the rocks. Then I get to my feet and wander back in the direction of the dorms. As I emerge from the river path, I look to the parking lot behind Tellmer. The pale blue Porsche is gone, and I wonder how he can be around his wife. How he can put on a suit and go out to dinner with her and his father and pretend that he doesn’t know a damn thing about the pink panties of a fifteen-year-old.
I go around to the front of the dorm, because Ms. Crenshaw’s car is also missing, and I don’t want to get trapped by an ill-timed confluence of our schedules.
Girls are beginning to arrive back after the long weekend, cars pulling up on the lane out front, students disembarking with their travel bags, parents taking a stretch before hitting the road once again.
I’m looking forward to seeing Strots, although I will not be talking about anything related to the color pink or intimate apparel of any variety. Although my roommate has kept the secret of my illness very well in hand, I cannot tell her about what I found down in the laundry and what I know about Greta and our residential advisor.
It’s not to protect the guilty, although that’s the end result, and I hate that I’m complicit in their whatever-it-is. I just don’t want to let anybody in on the secret world I created in my head between me and Nick Hollis, and I know I can’t tell the story without that coming out. It was all so truly pathetic on my end, and I should be relieved that my crush is over, even though the mourning hurts.
Ascending Tellmer’s center staircase, because I know the coast is clear, I go to my room. The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel has been on the floor under my bed since Saturday night.
Taking it out, I remove the plain index card I was using as a bookmark from its pages. I’m three-quarters of the way through the story, but I’m not going to finish it. Not now. Not ten years from now. Not ever. With sorrow, I leaf back through what I have read and feel as though I’m looking at photographs of a couple that has since split up, the romance, once so promising, now over as if it had never been.
I return the book to its owner by leaving it propped up against the Tellmer second-floor residential advisor’s door.
I don’t leave a note because I don’t want any contact between us ever again, but there’s a pattern to be broken. When he comes to me to ask what I thought of the book, and he will, how am I going to look him in the face and pretend all is well, I’m just busy with schoolwork?