Again Page 5

  At the TKE house, being a pledge meant drinking any time one of the older brothers told you to, going to get them a new beer when they demanded one, and doing your best not to pass out in the bathroom you had to clean with a toothbrush the next day.

  I hadn’t thought anything of it when the older brothers walked that girl upstairs. The girl I would only know later as Jeanie Pratt, plaintiff.

  I watched them suspend her wobbling body, guiding her up the wooden staircase.

  “Pledge Chazz, you like?” Brother Randy asked, running his open palm up and down in the air behind her like she was a car he was showing off.

  “Of course,” I nodded. What was there not to like? She was a tight-assed little brunette with tits as big as soccer balls. If she was a car she’d have been a ruby-red vintage Corvette.

  “Come on, then,” he’d said, indicating with his chin the top floor where the bedrooms were.

  I could say my choice of following them up the stairs was when my fate had been sealed, but it had been choosing to be there at all.

  The story I would have told in court, if I’d testified, was that I had followed them, but only because I had to. You didn’t deny a brother’s request. I knew nothing good was about to happen, but I still went anyway because I was weak.

  We walked into Randy’s bedroom and they closed the door. I watched as two of my fellow brothers picked Jeanie up and put her on the bed, as another one of my brothers took her shoes off.

  I stood back and waited.

  She was simply a heap of skin and bones they were moving and bending. Her eyes were rolling back in her head.

  “Is she okay?” I asked, even though it was clear she wasn’t.

  “Nope,” Brother Randy said, “but she will be very soon.” He tickled the bottom of her foot.

  She jerked, her head rising. She tried to focus on him and attempted to roll away, kicked her legs out. A couple of the guys took her arms and held them down. Her body went slack.

  She seemed like she’d been drugged, but toxicology reports later showed only alcohol in her system—a whole shitload of alcohol.

  “What the hell are you doing to her?” the pledge standing next to me asked. That question had been deep in my throat, but hadn’t made it to my tongue, my lips.

  “Exactly what she’s asking for,” Randy said, going for her belt.

  I should have pulled him off her. I should have punched both the brothers holding her down in the nose or the nuts. At the very least I should have taken out my cell and called 911.

  Instead I walked out of the room. Headed down the stairs and out the front door of the party, trying to pretend I hadn’t seen what I’d just seen.

  Tristan knew something was wrong when I got back to our room, but I wouldn’t talk about it. Instead I drank all the alcohol I could find, hoping maybe when I awoke the next morning, for me, as much as for poor Jeanie Pratt, it had been a dream.

  The truth I would have told Kate was a coward’s truth, but it also didn’t make me guilty of what I’d been accused of. I wasn’t an accessory to a sexual assault. I hadn’t been there when it actually happened.

  But I did deserve to bear that cross for leaving. I probably deserved even worse.

  When I finally reached Fulton Hall and took my seat in Political Justice class, I wondered if anyone would ever hear my truth. If I would ever be brave enough to say it out loud. To admit I had known exactly what was going to happen to Jeanie Pratt and, instead of stopping it, I walked away.

  Chapter Eight

  Kate

  Two days later, after my morning class, I tucked myself into a corner of the student center and called my best friend Veronica. Not that I had anything earth shattering to tell her other than people seemingly believed me and I was living the life of a college freshman. Well, the boring parts anyway, but those were the only parts I wanted to live, right?

  A group of girls laughed from across the room. I could tell from the openness in their eyes, the fullness of their voices that they were freshman too. Their vibrant puffy coats hung on their chairs like matador capes. As if they aimed for life to barrel at them. They were teasing it, inviting whatever came their way.

  It was easy to have that outlook when you had other people to lean on, like I’d had Veronica in the city. But here, I didn’t have anyone.

  It was by design. A real friend would get too close. There were only so many lies I could tell, only so much pretending I could do without actually letting someone in. There were also my rules. Sure, there were people here who didn’t drink, like Dawn, but temptations were everywhere, even with people who didn’t appear at first to be temptations, like Carter.

  I clicked into Veronica’s contact on my cell. The photo I’d taken of her toasting me with a glass of wine stared back at me, her black hair as shiny as her dark-as-night eyes. I pushed call as the girls’ laughter shrilled, grew out and into the air around them like something being built.

  Living without drinking and sex was one thing, but would I be able to keeping living without friends?

  I glanced at the time: noon. If I were in the city, Veronica and I would be slipping away from the office to gossip and eat. I kind of wished I was there instead of here, alone.

  “Kate,” she said, when she answered, “Wait, is that still your name there?”

  I glanced at the laughing girls and felt the camaraderie stitching them together through the phone. I still had friends even if they weren’t here.

  I still had Veronica, even if we were living totally different lives now.

  “Yes, only my age has changed,” I whispered, “and of course my hair color.”

  “You’re always changing your hair color.”

  I was. I did. David used to call me his chameleon. I guess I’d always been trying to figure out who I wanted to be.

  “Yeah,” I continued to whisper, “but not to look younger.”

  “I’m pretty sure you were always trying to look younger,” she laughed.

  True, but not this much younger. Not young enough to seem like one of the laughing girls, ready for life to sprint at them instead of having already run them over.

  “I guess, since you’re not on my doorstep yet, people are buying it?”

  Veronica had been there every time I got carded at the bars. She’d seen the way people looked at me when we walked down the street together during our daily lunch hour in our suits, like she belonged there and I was playing dress up.

  “So far,” I said, discounting Dawn. She was the only one who’d even questioned me, but then again why would anyone expect me to be doing what I was doing?

  That only happened in movies, right?

  “What’s it like being back in college?” Veronica asked with what I would describe as a wistful voice.

  She had good memories from her times on campus. She had finished college. Graduated magna cum laude and all sorts of other Greek letters strung together from every school she attended. The pieces of paper proving her intelligence hung on every wall of her office, but she was an accountant for the Franklin Law Group, and she hated it.

  I guess those pieces of paper didn’t make any difference if the place they led you was hell.

  The same hell I’d been in.

  “Good,” I said. Truthfully, it was weird. It was hard to remember to consider my life the way the laughing girls did. I might have rewound my situation, but I couldn’t forget any of the things I knew. “My roommate looks like she sucks the blood from baby bunnies for strength but otherwise…”

  “What does that mean?” she interrupted.

  “She wears black like she needs it to breathe,” I explained. “It’s cool, I can handle her.”

  “Only you would go back to school and get a roommate with mental issues.”

  Maybe, but water did seek its own level. Maybe even more so now that I was only drinking water. I took a long sip from the plastic bottle in my bag, wondering how long I would need to be sober for water to finally have the effect
of that first sip of wine.

  Wondering how many years it took before I wouldn’t wish for numbness anymore.

  “How’s work?” I asked, a little wistful too.

  “How do you think?”

  I didn’t bother responding. I knew what it was like to be trapped, stuck, to know the walls around you were a coffin, or eventually would be. Maybe Dawn was rubbing off on me. Or maybe that’s what happens to everyone as they are about to turn thirty—the threshold where their life isn’t theirs anymore. It belongs instead to the people they sleep with, the people who pay them, and the people they have to pay.

  “So are you studying hard?” she asked. Veronica knew about my real freshman year. How instead of studying books I studied a bottle and any guy around once the bottle was gone. Being back, finally being sober, I realized my first freshman year had never ended.

  That’s what I’d been doing with David, with every sip I took to forget how much I hated where I’d ended up.

  “As hard as I can study day three,” I replied.

  “Studying anything that’s hard?” she asked, I could hear her smirk through the phone.

  “Um, no,” I said, shaking away the Carter, Professor Parker GIF loop still playing in the darkest part of my brain.

  “So you’re seriously doing this as a nun?”

  “I’m closer to sainthood than ever,” I said. Luckily I wasn’t religious and didn’t need to be punished for thoughts and desires.

  “I totally get why,” she said, her breathing slow, pensive, “but if I had the chance to go back I would treat it like a candy store, like a toy store.”

  “That was my problem the first time around. Besides, you’re an accountant. I was an office bitch.”

  The other thing Veronica and I did together was drink. A lot. If I felt like I needed to get sober, she had to wonder what that meant for her.

  “We’re all a bitch to someone. Even the guys, even David,” she said, her voice quieter. She knew what I knew. Your life wasn’t your own anymore after you’d made all your decisions, after you were out on your own.

  “He’s a bitch, period,” I said, pushing the bile in my voice down.

  “He got a new assistant,” she said with a click of her tongue.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Seriously?” she laughed.

  “Hot or dumpy?”

  “I’m not even going to answer.” I could hear her head shake.

  “Well good for him, I’m glad he’s moving on.”

  “I’m sure his wife is, too,” she said. I heard her chair creak. Knew she was sitting back, maybe putting her feet up on the desk. One of her few pleasures in a work day; I knew lunch with me had been another.

  “Sorry I’m not there for salmon rolls today.” I always had lunch with Veronica. David was busy with clients or other partners.

  Our time together was usually after hours, the janitorial crew working outside his locked office door while we did a little cleaning of each other with our skin and tongues. Sometimes we’d do it on top of his desk, but usually I was under it, his hand on the top of my head like he was reminding me I was there for him.

  He’d never cared about my drinking when it was the two of us. Being wasted made for hotter sex. But, when everyone saw who I really was at the company party, or maybe when he saw who I really was through everyone else, that had been it.

  I shoved the thought away.

  “Been brown bagging it,” she said. “I’m saving so much money, I’m thinking of coming to visit.”

  “You should.” My voice rose, loud enough so even the laughing girls noticed.

  “I’ll give you a little more time to get settled first.”

  I knew what she meant. She probably suspected I wouldn’t last a whole semester anyway. As much as she loved me and wanted the best for me, maybe in some ways she hoped I wouldn’t.

  I’d had her and David at my job. But, the job itself, the grind of waking up and being there and the hours and days becoming years, stretching out and cracking like old leather, was suffocating, debilitating—enough to make you emotionless.

  Enough to make you jealous of anyone who had been able to escape, even if that person was your best friend.

  Maybe David had been a distraction and drinking every night just something to do. Most people throw themselves into sex and drugs so they don’t have to feel. I wondered if my reasons were just the opposite.

  When we hung up I took out my newly issued student ID. I’d decided to do a duck face for the picture. It was ridiculous, my lips like I’d been given too much Novocain at the dentist. I glanced at the laughing girls. I was doing my best to look like them, making the choices I thought they would make given the chance to do it again, but I was not like them.

  There was one fundamental difference between us. I knew what a sham life was once you left college. How nothing was ever as good as you pictured it would be.

  Chapter Nine

  Carter

  Heading back to the dorm with Tristan, I couldn’t stop checking my phone. I was probably going to be late.

  I hated being late. It made me feel out of control. If there was one thing I prided myself on after my freshman year, it was being very much in control.

  Ironically, it was the only thing I had control over.

  That need was part of the reason I went to the library every night at seven. Why I woke every morning at six whether I needed to or not. There was a calmness that came from doing everything at the same time every day. You knew exactly what you could expect. It also made it a lot easier not to hope for more.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m not that boring,” Tristan sighed, indicating my phone, his breath dark gray in the cold.

  “You sure?” I joked, knocking him with my elbow.

  The sun was setting and transforming the snow covered campus into an oversaturated watercolor painting, the drifts and buildings reflecting soft oranges and pinks. It was much too beautiful to rush, but sometimes rushing to get to the next thing was the only thing that made sense.

  “I’d ask if you have a date but I think I know the answer,” he joked back, hitting me with his elbow a little harder than I’d jabbed him.

  We were like Laurel and Hardy, except here everyone thought Laurel was a rapist, and Hardy liked guys.

  “Dinner duty at the humane society,” I explained. I needed to be there by five o-clock p.m. if I wanted to eat and then be at the library by seven.

  “There’s the answer,” he replied, shaking his head, his mouth a straight line.

  My sad, compartmentalized life was not funny to him, not something to joke about.

  Tristan had nothing against my volunteering at the humane society, he even helped out sometimes. He just didn’t like what he called my using up all my emotions and time on furry beings instead of human ones.

  “We can’t all have underclassmen throwing themselves at us,” I said, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder and trying to walk faster.

  “We can’t?” I heard a smirk in his voice. He hurried behind me. “I swear you’ve got to pick a better hobby, dude, or at least one that doesn’t have a dinner bell.”

  “You know they need to get fed at five.”

  “Um, yeah,” he paused, “that’s why I said that.”

  We’d had this conversation a lot, but it didn’t stop Tristan from wanting to continue to have it, from me continuing to defend myself.

  Volunteering at the humane society was the only thing from my freshman year I’d kept in my life besides Tristan. It was the one good thing I’d done at this school. There was something about animals. The way every day was a clean slate—the way they needed you and didn’t demand anything other than that you cared for them.

  “You could buy them a whole new facility with your trust fund. Why don’t you do that so we can actually go out for dinner tonight?” Tristan asked, using his very own puppy dog eyes.

  “I could probably buy them twenty facilities.” I had a lot of money, an obs
cene amount. The kind of money that made people hate you. Made you hate yourself.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I didn’t bother responding, because doing this was not about the money. The humane society was the one place in my life that wasn’t.

  My relationship with my parents had been all about money, even before Jeanie. If I could go back to when I was a kid on one of those rare holidays when our staff was with their own families and my mom was forced to make us grilled cheese she burned and my dad pretended to like, I would have.

  Things were so much simpler before I understood they would rather pay to take care of me than actually do it themselves.

  “You could also buy them twenty companions,” he said, because we’d had this conversation so many times.

  I nodded, but I needed them, too. They reminded me I was human—so little did after Jeanie, after everyone saw me as a monster. The cats and dogs at the humane society only saw me as love, as help, as someone they could count on.

  “Speaking of what you should be doing,” he smiled, “how’s Kate?”

  My stomach plunged at hearing her name. “Wow, there’s no beating around the bush with you,” I said, my cheeks burning in the cold.

  “I tend to avoid the bush.” He snickered and made his eyes wide. “Actually, speaking of—”

  “Stop,” I said, holding my hand up, “don’t even go there.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve barely even talked to her, let alone gotten close to whatever you were about to say.”

  “You should probably get moving,” he said. “Isn’t that like step one in male-female mating ritual?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s step seventeen,” I said, our dorm finally in sight.

  “Sounds like you’re doing something wrong.”

  I probably was, but what the hell was I supposed to do? After rejecting me when I’d asked her to be my study partner, I kind of got the hint. My freshman year had at least taught me how to take no for an answer.

  “Hello,” he said, moving his hand in front of my face when I didn’t retort, “earth to Carter.”

  “She made it pretty clear she wants me to leave her alone.”