My father was growing bald. All my life, his hair had been thick and black, darker than the pieces of charcoal that I’d use in elementary school art class. But as he hunched over his toolbox, I couldn’t seem to look away from the bald spot. It was slightly bigger than a quarter.
He pulled out a screwdriver and stared back at my desk lying on the floor. It was nicer than anything the school had offered. Now its legs stood straight in the air like a dead animal’s.
“You need me to help with anything?” I asked.
Dad said nothing. He began unscrewing a leg from one corner of the desk. When it was out, he chucked it on the floor and unscrewed another one.
He’d driven to the dorm in less than twenty-four hours. Coming from the Midwest, it was a seventeen-hour drive, nonstop. Dad had probably slept in the rental van during his breaks. And when he finally made it to my dorm, Dad had only handed me a box of black garbage bags. Told me to pack up everything as fast as I could. He had nothing to say to me in person—he’d barely even spoken over the phone.
My room was now mostly packed, except for my backpack, my suitcase, and the desk. The black garbage bags were piled in the moving cart. I used that to block the door—I didn’t want one of the other RAs barging in.
Throughout the morning, I kept hearing voices out in the hallway. The walls in the dorm were paper thin. You could hear everything here—freshmen urging each other to take a shot in their rooms or a poor freshman girl awkwardly moaning as some boy jackhammered her. After three years, you got used to the noises. You blocked it all out like the wind.
But I kept hearing my name in every loud conversation or hushed tone, in the laughter as a pair of girls walked by.
I didn’t know if that was better or worse than the text messages. I currently had forty-three of them, unopened, burning on my phone. They came from friends, acquaintances, coworkers, but nearly half of them had come from numbers that I didn’t recognize.It was as if they all smelled blood and came for the carnage.
The texts were straightforward: You’re a fucking bitch, Mary. You deserve worse.
And what could I say to that? I didn’t disagree. It was my own hands that had reached out, my own fists that had flown. The damage that I’d done to her—only a bitch could do it. Even my own father was stunned.
He’d finished dismantling the desk. He left the legs on the floor and laid the desk on top of the moving cart. It looked like it would slip off any second. But Dad was already opening the door, gesturing to my suitcase, backpack, and desk legs.
“You carry those,” he said, wheeling the cart past the door. I scooped up my things and took one last look at the room. For the past two years, I’d lived in a small off-white box with a window and a tiny nook of a closet. I didn’t mind the faulty thermostat and the muggy heat in the winters. Over the summer, I’d kept my things here, even as I’d bounced far away from one sublet to another—a perk of being a resident adviser.
The room hadn’t been glamorous, but it had been home enough for me.
Now it was over.
I followed Dad as he wheeled the cart down the hallway. He wasn’t moving fast enough. I stared straight ahead as we passed by the dorm rooms, then the common area.
There was a group of freshmen sitting around the couches, their laptops and coffees spread out in front of them. Like sheep, they all looked over as soon as the cart squeaked by.
Carly was one of them.
And I felt it again—that burst of white-hot rage in my veins.
Carly smirked, then turned to whisper to a boy sitting next to her. And I saw it, my stomach flipping over.
She was wearing a thick pair of glasses today. Her red hair was piled up into a bun over her head, pulled away from her face. Her lips were swollen. There was a large, black bruise that covered the top of her right cheek, just below her eye.
The bruise shouldn’t have been that dark—it hadn’t been that dark yesterday.
As Dad and I waited for the elevator, we could hear loud laughter from the common room, where Carly and the others sat. My phone was vibrating now—more texts pouring in. The news was spreading throughout campus. I could feel it.
On our way to the front desk, Dad and I passed by more freshmen, all flocking in for lunch. They seemed to rush out of our way. Two freshman boys slipped past us, snickering, their arms raised in surrender, as if I were putting a gun to their heads.
I hated them all. At least now I could be fully honest about it. They were so bright-eyed and ambitious. Every freshman thought they were going to make something of themselves, like working for the UN, running a Fortune 500 company, or writing a futureNew York Times bestseller. Some of them were awfully cocky about it.
I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t worth it. That it wouldn’t happen. That the world didn’t give a shit about most of us.
At the front desk, I handed my work polo and my badge over to Mohamed, the RA who lived two floors above me. He studied economics. I once gave him a joint that I’d confiscated from the women’s bathroom. He once shared some of his Adderall with me during finals week. The two of us got along pretty well.
But as he worked on the computer, Mohamed didn’t say much. He almost acted like I wasn’t there.
“One final thing,” he said. “I need your master key, Mary.”
Mohamed was uneasy, his face taut. He looked at me as if horns had sprung out of my head. In reality, he might have been looking for a bruise or a scar on my face, some sign that I had gotten into a fight with a freshman girl. Yet somehow my face had been spared. Carly had terrible aim.
I felt my cheeks start to burn, that rush as I contemplated running out of the office, away from campus and Mohamed and Carly and everyone else who knew. Everyone who would know.
I fumbled in my backpack. Dug past the laptop and the wires and the wallet. I yanked out the master key to the dorm and chucked it on the desk. Mohamed stared at it.
“Well, that was the last thing,” he said, unsmiling. “You can go.”
The drive back home was slow. Soul-crushing. Dad and I were cramped together in the cargo van that he’d rented. We listened to whatever Dad could find on the radio—usually any station that played classic rock from the seventies and eighties.
We wove past large red oaks and birches. In the third week of October, their leaves were now fiery red and deep orange. They were a staple in Ithaca. Later, we reached miles of flat plains. The roads and highways started to blend together: impatient drivers speeding by, a stranded car, ugly soundproof barriers that flanked the sides of the road, little highway shrines for victims of roadside violence. Or it was more grass, endless stretches of grass. I offered to take over the driving, but Dad shook his head.
“You can barely keep your hands to yourself,” he said dully.
I felt a lump in my throat. I knew Dad was angry, bitter, but I realized there was something else. He didn’t trust me anymore. I hadn’t kept my hands to myself. I hadn’t behaved like he’d known me to be. I was a liability now.
Everyone else I’d left behind—my peers, my professors, my coworkers at the dorm, the boys I’d slept with—what did they now think of me? Was I unhinged to them, frightening? Were they even shocked? Maybe they’d sensed it all along. Maybe that was why few of them ever got close.
And the friends I’d made, the people I’d found throughout college—we’d connected so quickly, like kids in a sandbox. Our past three years together had flown by: crying over finals, only to laugh in hysterics at two in the morning; going out and getting drunk, or staying in and getting high; making out with guys right after puking at a party. We even shared alcohol that I’d confiscated from the freshmen. We’d been through all of it. In college, it was shared mayhem.
But this was a different mess that I’d gotten into. Something darker, more convoluted. I couldn’t justify myself to anyone. Any friends I’d had at school were gone.
Any way you looked at the situation—I looked like a monster.
Around eight, Dad and I stopped for the night in Holiday City. Despite the cheery name, the place was run-down, mostly a cluster of seedy gas stations and motels that served the truck drivers who passed through. Dad booked us a motel room with double beds. We had dinner there, dry hamburgers and stale french fries. Dad watched the news, then fell asleep soon after.
I stayed up in my bed, looking at the new texts on my phone. I’d finally opened all of them, but I hadn’t sent a single reply. I felt like I’d been ripped open.
I was “trash” to people. I was a “fucking bitch” for terrorizing a weak freshman. I needed to “eat shit.” The news had spread—it always did on a college campus.
Next, they would pry for gossip. They would ask Mohamed about my move-out. They would discuss my time at the dorm, my behavior over the fall. Since I was no longer there, the only explanation would come from Carly.
Then they’d go online. They would search for me, deciphering my pictures, my comments, my posts for any hint of what I would do. Of what I was.
I knew this because I had done the same. I had watched other people burn before. Like the sorority girl from last year, who had been photographed making a Hitler salute at a G.I. Joes and Army Hoes party. By the time I saw the photos online, she’d already been suspended and stripped of her Fortune 500 internship. It was a mesmerizing train wreck. There was satisfaction in watching someone else suffer for their sins.
But now I was the one being watched. And if they prodded, I was afraid of what they would find.
I went through my social media—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder. I deactivated everything and scrubbed myself off the Internet. After a cursory search, I no longer appeared online, no posts nor pictures. No one needed to know anything about me.
My reputation might’ve been over at school, but I would protect it everywhere else. After I was done, I turned off my phone. Placed it on the nightstand.
I gulped down a glass of water and my escitalopram and tried to fall asleep. Instead, I kept thinking about the lovely old buildings at school, the first hint of snow coming in the next few weeks, and the smell of coffee as I walked to class with a friend, musing about theses and grad school. Madison and I had talked of backpacking through Europe after graduation. But now I had no reason to go.
When I woke up the next day, my eyes were sticky with dried salt.
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