Down below in the parking area, someone pulls in—no, they’re pulling out, their engine sounds fading rather than being cut off sharply.
I look around our room. Then I go over to Strots’s bed. I lift her pillow. Her cigarettes and lighter are right where she keeps them. I have a thought that I should run after her and bring them to her. If there’s ever a situation that calls for nicotine, it’s now, and besides, I want to do something, anything, to ease the burden she’s under.
She says this is not my fault, but I’m very confident that if she hadn’t been paired randomly with me as her roommate, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
Ultimately, I decide to leave her pack of Marlboros and her red Bic where they are for fear of interrupting a private moment between her and Keisha upstairs. As I feel like a sitting duck doing nothing while I wait for whatever administrator is coming for me, I open our door and lean out into the hall. I frown. Greta’s door is open, and I see her moving around in her room. She’s talking to someone, her back toward me, her blond hair swinging loose at waist level, the ends curling up in a pretty fashion. She’s wearing her pink silk robe. When she laughs to whomever she is speaking with, my blood goes cold, and I close Strots’s and my door quickly.
My heart speeds up and my mouth goes dry.
My brain, which is both my best and my worst asset, does a lightning-fast calculation of the entire situation. There are many ways this can go, and none of them are good news for Strots.
There’s a knock on the door. I brace myself and reopen things. There is a man I do not recognize standing out in the hall, and he looks annoyed.
“Sarah?” he says to me. “Sarah Taylor?”
As if this is the front door of my house and he has a delivery for me. Or, given the suit he’s wearing and his pinched, unkind face, an official summons of some sort.
“Yes,” I reply.
“I’m Mr. Anthony Pasture, the dean of students. I need you to come talk to me down at my office. Now.”
Over his left shoulder, I see Greta. She’s twisted around and is staring at both me and the administrator. Her lip is swollen and the red marks around her neck are transitioning to a purply rose. The injuries are not what I focus on. It’s the look in her eyes.
She’s got the same one she had as she came down to the bottom of the stairs and smiled at me yesterday afternoon.
She’s triumphant.
And once again, I want to vomit.
“I just need to change,” I blurt out. “Can I have a minute?”
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
This is spoken in a dire tone, as a warning in case I decide to try to leap out my second-story window and run. I briefly entertain the idea that there’s a gun somewhere under his suit, one that he’ll point at me and pull the trigger of, perhaps even if I do not try to escape his authority. I don’t believe he’ll be the one who tracks me as a fugitive, however. In spite of his official capacity, one that would, I imagine, include some kind of training with regard to students with mental and emotional challenges, he seems not to want to be anywhere near me, as if I’m diseased in a communicable fashion.
After I close my door, I look around frantically as I gather my thoughts, as I try to orient myself… as I attempt to give me a pep talk along the lines of yes, I can tell my story without breaking down to a man who already seems not just unprepared to hear anything from me, but unwilling to get in an enclosed space with me.
And that is when I realize he is blaming me for something. Not for being mentally ill and writing about it, no. Not that. It’s something else.
Oh, God. Where has Greta gone with this?
I focus on the closed door and see her triumphant face through the panels. And suddenly I know what she’s done.
With the same clarity and confidence I’ve had about the pranks the girl has pulled on me, I know exactly what she’s told the dean of students. It explains the way he looked at me. As if I’m contaminated.
A split second later, I follow an impulse that’s born of my brain’s superior ability to connect dots that, in some cases, has taken me into madness and ruin, but, in this instance, allows me to forge a path forward. Literally.
I run over to Strots’s pillow, take her cigarettes and her lighter, and transfer them to the top drawer of my desk.
Then I smooth the clothes that I did not change, put on my jacket, and emerge from my room, secure in the knowledge that the disapproving man in the suit, who is indeed waiting for me outside in the hall, will not be able to tell that the components of my black outfit have not been altered.
“Let’s go,” I tell him. “I’m ready to talk.”
chapter TWENTY-TWO
Mr. Pasture’s office is in the administrative building down on the very edge of campus. It’s the only modern construction inside the iron gates of Ambrose—other than the Strotsberrys’ nascent sports complex—and the two-story structure appears to have been punished for the temerity of having been born in the seventies by its banishment to the fringes. With brick walls and thin, metal-trimmed windows, it’s stylistically unoriginal and unremarkable, even as it hearkens back to a specific era in American architecture.
The steps are concrete and take us beneath an overhang to a set of glass doors onto which the crest of Ambrose has been etched. Inside, I recognize the flooring immediately. It’s the pressed commercial-grade ceramic tiles that I trod over at my schools at home, flecks of various beige extraction forced to marry for life in squares that are cemented into place.
“I’m down this hall.”
These are the first words he’s said to me since we left my room, and his air of disapproval, which seemed to intensify during our promenade, is so pronounced, I wonder if he hates his job in addition to me.
I follow him past fake-wood doors that have black-and-white nameplates on them with titles like Comptroller, Faculty Liaison, and Associate Dean of Students.
So there’s an understudy of him? I think. Bet that’s fun.
Mr. Pasture’s office is at the end of the corridor, just as he’s promised, and its glass entrance is embellished by the Ambrose flag on one side and the American flag on the other. Both standards are hanging off poles set into heavy bases, and they are so large and grandly out of proportion, they make me think of ball gowns. Inside, there’s a little waiting area with a lot of dark blue carpet and walls hung with pictures of students in matching frames. His secretary is behind her desk, typing something. When the phone rings, she answers it in a dead voice.
“Mr. Pasture’s office, dean of students.”
Twisting her chair toward her orderly blotter, she moves a pad closer, wedges the receiver between her shoulder and her ear, and makes mm-hmm sounds as she writes. I’m not sure of her age. She could be forty, she could be sixty. Maybe she’s twenty and the heavy atmosphere here has depressed her to such a degree that she’s lost her will to live.
“In here,” Mr. Pasture informs me.
He opens a fake-wood door with a flourish, as if he’s revealing something he regards with great pride and expects others to as well. It is a corner office, it’s true, but the windows are small and offer a lackluster view through the campus fencing of the sporadic traffic into Greensboro Falls’s meager town center. But perhaps he’s showing off all his framed degrees. There are a lot of diplomas hanging on the fake-wood-paneled walls. Or maybe it’s the objects on his desk that he’s preening over?