Her suitcase, which she’s putting in the trunk, is a clear commentary that regardless of her travel schedule being over, she’s hitting the road again.
She’s collateral damage, I think to myself. Although she is not wounded. She is infuriated.
Still, the pair of them are pretty restrained in their discord, no doubt because they’re aware they’re liable to be watched. Both of their faces are bright red, however, and their eyes glow, hers with anger, his with brokenhearted pleading. I have a thought that this is not the beginning of this particular fight, but rather the culmination of something that has been going on for a bit, probably since he returned from the headmaster’s office. I’m willing to bet when things were confined to their apartment, there was more volume, and maybe some shoving. I’m extrapolating this from how they tilt in toward each other, how rageful Sandy’s expression is, how she gets even more flushed as the hushed volley speeds up.
I want to stick my head out my window and tell them to do this elsewhere to protect their privacy. As soon as the word gets out widely that Nick Hollis has been fired for sleeping with a student, this public display of marital conflict will become part of the story, and though none of their words carry, at least not up to my window, dialogue will be dubbed in by novice screenplay writers with soap opera tendencies.
And then something carries through Strots’s open window that hits me in the gut.
Nick raises his voice sharply to talk over his wife. “My father is getting me a goddamn lawyer. I’m not leaving this campus and I’m going to fight this all the way. It’s defamation—”
“Not if they look into Molly Jansen.” Sandy’s voice gets reedy. “How are we here again, Nick? Only one year later. With another fifteen-year-old.”
Abruptly, they fall silent, and as the woman stares at her husband, I consider bolting back to the bathroom and kneeling in front of another toilet. No toothbrush required, Francesca.
Another fifteen-year-old?
His wife is the one who ends the argument. She backs off with a dismissive gesture, as if she’s washing her hands of the whole thing. Slamming shut her rear compartment, she gets behind the wheel of her cockeyed Civic and reverses out in a herky-jerky fashion, as if her anger is being channeled through her foot into the accelerator and the brake. When she can finally tear off, there is only an anemic squeak of tires, the low horsepower of the engine failing to meet what is no doubt a stomping call to action. If she’d been in the Porsche, I bet she would have made a lot of noise and burned a lot of rubber in her wake.
Left by himself, Nick Hollis turns his back on the dorm, and he stands there staring at the brambles and the river for a very long time. Every once in a while, he pulls his hand through his thick, silken hair. I have a thought that he must be getting cold in only that red cashmere sweater, but as the sun begins to set, he doesn’t seem to notice the drop in temperature.
I wonder if he is aware of anything at all—
There is a bang behind me, sharp and insistent, like a gunshot.
I spin so fast that I knock my chair over.
Greta is standing in the open doorway to my room, and for once, she is undone. Her eye makeup is smudged and her face is blotchy.
My one and only thought is that Francesca sold me out to protect herself with this girl who is not really her friend.
“Where is that fucking bitch,” Greta says.
“Strots?”
“Where the fuck is she.”
“I-I don’t know. Why?”
Greta jabs a finger at me. “She’s gone way too far this time. Way too fucking far.”
My heart pounds. “What are you talking about?”
“You tell her I’m going to settle this. She takes from me, I take from her.”
The door slams shut, and I hear Greta take off. For someone who weighs less than I do, her footfalls are those of a fully grown man, and her fury frightens me.
I lunge for the door, thinking I’ll tell her the truth, that it was me who ratted on her and Nick. I did it, not Strots. I found what I found and I made it all happen. And then when she doesn’t believe me, because no one ever does, I’ll race ahead and warn my roommate, who has to be upstairs with Keisha…
As my hand makes contact with the cool brass doorknob, an elemental change overtakes me. I am no longer capable of moving. Confused, I look down at myself.
I expect to find a conversion occurring, my feet now stone and bolted to the floorboards, a tide of concrete-ion once again running up my ankles, over my knees, and throughout my torso, as I become a statue just as I was in front of the CVS.
I have a thought that at least here in my room in Tellmer, I will be protected from both the elements and bird poop.
Except that is not what is happening.
I lift one of my feet. Then the other. I take my hand off the knob and retract out of my forward lean.
I am not a statue of myself, and yet I cannot leave my room. I am frozen, but not inanimate.
When the explanation for my immobility arrives, I am so ashamed that a swirling self-hatred plays the role of my hair from the hallucination I had downtown. Fibers of enmity pour out of my head and coil around my body, encasing me in a mummy wrap of darkness before they go on to swamp my room.
I cannot leave because I’m too weak to stand up to Greta.
For all my background maneuvering, my pink-panty conniving, I am a coward. When it truly counts, as in right now, I cannot stand up and admit to my enemy what I have done and face her wrath. No, I must draft behind my stronger, more robust roommate, setting Strots up for a fall when she has already been falsely accused.
Greta won’t believe her when she tells the girl it wasn’t her. I’ve just taken their conflict and doused it with lighter fluid.
And Keisha is going to be the next person sucked into this.
Yet even though I know this, and even though I want to protect Strots, I can’t move, and I hate myself for everything. For my illness, for my weakness, for my pussying out, once again, when it matters.
I am useless. I am weak. I am useless. I am weakIamuselessIamweakweakweak—
From out of its period of hibernation, my illness saddles up the steed of my recriminations, the spurs of its boots digging into the flanks of my self-flagellation. In a surge of power and grace, it carries me into the abyss once again, the sparking strikes of the iron shoes on those clamoring hooves the only light in the darkness of my version of reality.
Except there is a difference this time.
From out of the conviction that I am an insane coward, something different emerges and then explodes into a blaze of heat. It is an anger that I have never felt before. No, that’s not true. There have been brief flares of this fury over the course of the semester, and like kindling under dry wood, they have finally caught hold, although not just to logs stacked primly in a hearth, but to my entire house.
Fuck Greta Stanhope.
From out of this spinning referendum on my character, I become wrath. I become vengeance. I am torched to the point of a crematorium’s worth of rage. Is it because of what the situation with Greta has shown me about myself? Or is it because I am done going quietly into the bad night of my madness?
Like so much of what has happened at Ambrose, the origins do not matter.
What happens next is what counts.
As I leave my room, I do not bother to have an opinion about where I go. Why should I? I am not in control as I proceed down to the basement and exit out the back door.