I didn’t know I needed a bucket.
Bending down, I pick up my shampoo bottle. Like my mother’s Primo perfume—an almost Giorgio—this is a value brand of some kind, a knockoff of what the other girls have.
As I tilt the fluted plastic container over my palm, a loose rush comes out and the dispenser top falls free to the drain, dancing in the rain to a diminishing beat. I look up at the curtain that I had at some point pulled into place, but as it answers no questions, I go back to staring at my palm. Most of the totally diluted shampoo has run through my fingers, but there is a gloss of it left. I lift my hand to my nose and my heart pounds. There are so many things to tamper a bottle with, and I am terrified it is urine.
I sniff, trying to suss out the nutty, acidic bouquet of pee.
There is none. It’s just water.
I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Don’t give them what they want.
As I hear my roommate’s voice in my head, I think of Greta’s expression out in the hall just now and I’m willing to bet she did this—or maybe ordered one of the Brunettes to do the tampering—in retaliation for my unintended nocturnal interruption of whatever she was doing. Or maybe she just hated me on sight.
I am not using anything that comes out of that bottle.
Instead, I rub my rotgut bar soap on my head, aware that I’m likely to strip even more of the black Clairol color out of my hair. Then I use the stuff on my body, and that’s that. I have no razor to shave with. I never do my armpits or my legs or my privacy, as my mother calls it. I can’t be trusted with razors. Knives. Scissors.
I turn the water off. I pull the plastic curtain back. I remain mentally present for the drying off and the donning of my long-sleeved nightshirt and pj bottoms. I marvel at how, even in the flight from my room, I had the presence of mind to bring the change of clothes.
I promptly become obsessed with when the tampering occurred. During their teeth brushing after dinner, maybe? I’ve noticed that all three of them go to the bathroom with their Colgate and Crest right after the nightly meal. It’s not because they’re worried about their dental health. They have to vomit out whatever they’ve eaten and the dental artifacts are to clean up after the evacuation. They’re not the only ones who do this on my floor.
As I take note of my thoughts, I am relieved. Where my brain is now, in this very non-Tiny-Tim, anti-Dickens, no-turkey-TV-dinner kind of place? If I am to survive here at Ambrose, this is where I must stay, and in a weird twist of fate—or perhaps inevitably, given the principles of chaos theory—I have Greta to thank for the return to the real world.
The threat of her has put me back in my skin, back with everyone else.
As I step out of the stall with my things, I look around. The bank of sinks is across the way and there are trash receptacles between each of the basins. I toss out the shampoo bottle in the nearest one and look toward the exit. Just like downstairs with the mail cubbies, there is an entire wall of cubicles by the door. They’re not marked with our names up here, but rather with our room numbers, an A and a B denoting which roommate’s is which.
I can guess Greta’s spot. Undoubtedly, she took the A—214A.
In a fit of paranoia, I go over to 213B and take my toothbrush in hand. The bristles are dry, and, upon a close inspection of each and every stalked group of them, I find no evidence of toilet scum. After I tuck my Oral-B-ish brush and generic paste into the load I am balancing, I leave the bathroom.
Out in the hall, I measure the brown and gray flecks in the heavy-duty carpet I walk on. And the smudges on the painted walls. And note how uneven the ceiling is because it was plastered in the twenties and has had to be repaired over the last seventy years.
All of what continues to go through my mind is in the world that others inhabit, the one that I have just involuntarily left and, for the moment and courtesy of Greta, returned to. Dr. Warten, my psychiatrist, warned me before he signed off on my attending Ambrose that disruptions in sleep and schedule can create a fermenting ground for the bad side of my brain. He told me to be on the lookout for signs that I’m becoming symptomatic again. Frankly, I was surprised he was okay with my coming here at all. But I think he knows that with a brain like mine, all of life is an experiment with a low likelihood of success. It doesn’t matter where I am, so I might as well get a good education in the process.
This Bic-a-Bic, Tiny Tim thing was just a hiccup. Nothing to get hysterical about.
As I come up to 213, I am aware that Greta’s door is now open again, and in my peripheral vision, I register how she is sitting on her pink and white bed. She is brushing her long, luxurious, properly washed and conditioned blond hair. She is wearing a silky pink and red robe, the halves of which have parted to reveal her shapely legs. Music is playing from a portable stereo that is big as a desk, Boyz II Men.
I don’t have to see her face to know she is looking at me and feeling triumphant over my ruination.
But she is incorrect. I am not cowed by her actions. When it comes to her, my eternal vigilance is going to help keep me where I need to stay. In this regard, I should be grateful.
“Have a good shower, Sal?” she says with a smile.
I meet her right in the eye. “Yes. Thank you.”
chapter FIVE
Two weeks later, I’m in geometry class. Ms. Crenshaw, who also happens to be the RA on the first floor of Tellmer, is at the board. She is like my mother because she is forty, but other than that, they have little in common. For Ms. Crenshaw, there is no wrap-dress-thing going on. No highlighted hair. No makeup. She looks like a tour guide at a zoo, all khaki-colored and sturdy-shoed, her ashy hair in a bowl cut that somehow still manages to look uneven at the ends.
The room we are in is on the ground floor, in the front corner of Palmer Hall, a grand old brick building that looks like something you’d find on the cover of a book about higher education. All of the windows are open and it’s not helping the heat. Summer’s last thermal assault has arrived in this part of New England and it feels like August, the air a suffocating solid that you break sweaty pieces off of as you inhale.
“Come on, you guys,” Ms. Crenshaw says. “I know it’s sweltering in here, but let’s try to pay attention. This is a review for your test on Friday. Who can tell me what the difference between a line and a ray is?”
As I shift my position to try to rouse myself, the capsule desk does not accommodate me in the slightest.
“How about you, Sarah?”
I look up from my book. Ms. Crenshaw is staring over the heads of the twelve other students who have likewise melted into their table-chairs. In my teacher’s unremarkable brown eyes, I see stress kindling, and I have the sense that if she doesn’t get a reply, her head will vibrate and explode like the guy from that movie Scanners.
Her apartment back at Tellmer is directly under Nick Hollis’s, and the instant this mental connection is made, my mind slides into a familiar home base. Like all the others who live where I do, my eyes follow Hot RA around our floor, around the dorm, around campus. Every time I catch sight of him, it’s as if I am in a convertible with the top down and the music turned up loud. It’s a secret, private thrill, and of that, I’m glad.
Ms. Crenshaw, on the other hand, has likely made no one tingle in the course of her life, and it’s not a surprise that she wears no wedding band.