I better figure that the hell out.
chapter TWENTY
It’s the following afternoon, the Tuesday after Columbus Day weekend. It’s three thirty, and I’m walking back to the dorm from chemistry lab alone because I helped my teacher clean up after class was dismissed. Overhead, the sky is gray, November briefly stepping in and relieving October’s sunshine and blue skies for a shift, the cold wind brooming the first of the fallen leaves across the lawn, across the concrete path at my feet, across my boots.
Everyone came back after the mini break, and by this, I mean Greta, of course. The entire dorm could have forgotten the directions to Ambrose or been expelled for whatever reason, and as long as she returned, it would feel like a crowd was once again under Tellmer’s great slate roof. And she was very chatty last night. I gathered from the volume that permeated my closed door that she was holding court right in the hallway itself, sitting against the wall directly outside her room, girls circled round her, a campfire’s worth of captive audience that provided her with a laugh track and theme music to the tune of adulation.
She seemed excited, happy, pleased with where she’d gone and what she’d done. It was the kind of thing that I otherwise would have taken no particular note of, but that I reconsidered in light of what I know. I decided she was chatting it up next to her room so that her voice and the details of her break traveled down to Nick’s apartment, a songbird chirping to its mate.
There wasn’t one mention of Todd, the hometown honey, something that, given the cruelty of her nature, struck me as an underutilized opportunity to stir up some jealousy on Nick’s part. But what do I know.
As I close in on my dorm, I reexamine the timeline I’ve been constructing with all the fastidiousness of a model-ship-maker working on 1:50 scale. I’ve decided that after their affair all started that moonlit night, it intensified with the ride home in the rain, that sliver of privacy in the Porsche opening the door to their physical expression. And then in spite of the trials of Mountain Day, including whatever happened with Francesca and then that touch football play, things must have continued apace. The underwear must have changed hands relatively recently, however. Given the risks of exposure, it’s hard to believe he was just walking around with them in his pocket for a month. I decide Greta gave them to him right before the three-day break, as a reminder of what he’s missing while she is gone and his wife is home.
Or… perhaps were they removed from her teenage body by his passionate hands and retained as a keepsake by him for when she was away for those seventy-two hours? Or was it a case of them having only a brief moment during which they could entwine in the basest of ways, and he forgot to give them back? Does she even know they’re missing, then?
And what if his wife had found them?
Jesus Christ. He was lucky it was me.
You’re the best, Sarah, I hear in my head.
“Fuck you, Nick,” I say under my breath.
Lost in my lingerie reverie, I barely notice all the girls standing around Tellmer’s entrance. They’re dispersed in random groupings on the stone steps and they’re reading the newsletter that would have been put in all our boxes around two p.m. Some of them have book bags at their feet, some have one-strapped loads hanging off a shoulder, all of them are raptly absorbed to such a degree that I wonder what story has broken in the Ambrose Weekly.
One by one, the girls glance up at me. One by one, they do a double take and stare, halting in the course of their reading.
I glance down at myself, wondering if I’ve inadvertently lost my pants and not noticed.
No, I’m fully clothed and nothing is out of place.
As I look back up, I see in the central bank of windows on the second-floor landing a figure in white. No, there are three figures. And the trio are staring down at me, ghostly specters that cause me to lose my stride for a brief beat.
Are they real? I wonder. I’ve been taking my lithium.
Chilled, I refocus on the entrance of the dorm. The congregated girls on the steps are still looking at me, but this changes as my eyes return to them. They fold up the newsletter and scatter in every direction, leaves carried away by a gust of wind.
At the door, I grip the brass pull where the hands of all the girls do, the section on the graceful curve rubbed to a high shine. Putting my shoulder into the draw, I open the way in and stop between the jambs, a photograph framed.
There are girls around the mailboxes, at the base of the stairs, in the phone room. And they’re all reading the newsletter, heads of mostly blond hair tilted downward, the top page pulled back, other pages pulled back, one page left, depending on how far they’ve gotten, how long they’ve been reading. These girls do not look up as I enter, so engrossed are they.
After everything that’s been crowding my mind since Saturday night, I’m eager for a distraction that’s verified and shared by other people. And as I’m incapable of instigating mass hallucinations, and the students around me are real, whatever they’re captivated by is safe for me to get pulled into.
As I step up to my mailbox, eyes begin to rise around me and there’s a collective shuffling of pages of which I am only dimly aware. Reaching out my hand, I take the stapled sheaf of papers out of my designated slot, and expect to see the familiar masthead of—
It’s not the newsletter.
At first, I do not know what it is. I’m confused. My name is at the top: Sarah M. Taylor.
There’s a title above my name, and I read it only once. By the second word, I know what this is, although my confusion is not cleared up.
What is “How I Spent My Summer” by Sarah M. Taylor doing in my mailbox?
I look back at the lineup of boxes, and it’s then that the horror begins to manifest in my gut. Two-thirds, perhaps three-quarters, of the cubes are emptied, and my brain connects what’s in my hand with what everyone in the dorm seems to be reading so intently.
I snatch another set of the pages from a random box. “How I Spent My Summer” by Sarah M. Taylor. And another. “How I Spent My Summer” by Sarah M. Taylor.
They’re all reading about me. They’ve all received in their mailboxes the essay I wrote just over a year ago, the essay that detailed my two suicide attempts, my stays in the mental hospital, my psychiatrist, my drugs, the orderlies—God, the orderlies, who I devoted an entire page and a half to.
My first inclination is to vomit, and I lurch toward the trash bin to do that. But then someone comes in through the dorm door and I realize there’s no time to waste. Frantically, I begin to pull the remaining copies from the boxes that have yet to be emptied. I must save what’s left of my privacy, rescue it, shade it, from the blinding heat and light of all the eyes that are upon me. My shaking hands do not work right, however, and copies of the essay fall to the floor like snow, covering my boots. And still I try to clean out, take back, safeguard—
Somebody captures my arms.
It’s Strots.
She’s just come in. She’s the one who came in.
She is speaking to me, but I cannot hear her. I cannot hear even my pounding heart or my wheezing breath, and then I cannot see my roommate, either. Tears have formed and are falling down my face. The fact that I do not know how the essay was found is secondary to my terror that it has been, and now my secret is exposed in the worst way, not just as words whispered into a cupped ear, but with a bullhorn of my own creation: These girls, none of whom care about me, none of whom like me, have all my facts, my details, my entire timeline.