Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  “May I help you?” he said to Bea as she approached.

  “She’s my roommate,” Early said.

  He turned back to Early. “The clerk at the campus store called to report someone had come in using a stolen student ID. Kid tried to buy cigarettes with your card. Thought she couldn’t see the photo when he swiped it but didn’t realize your photo appears on the monitor when you run it.” He shook his head like this was the apex of idiocy. “We apprehended him just a couple miles away.” The other cop was tapping busily on a tablet. A loose cluster of girls from Bea’s dorm had assembled at the far end of the hall and were openly gawking. Early was listening so earnestly that Bea had to look away. The girls at the end of the hallway tittered.

  “Have you ever been the victim of a crime?” the male cop asked her.

  “No,” Early said gravely.

  He pulled a card out of his back pocket. “Here’s my card if anything comes to mind you’d like to discuss,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  As the officers exited the dorm, the three girls who had been conspicuously observing the scene hurried over—Bea didn’t know their names. She hadn’t yet met any of them. Their worried expressions belied an unmistakable glee in their eyes.

  “What happened?” one asked hopefully.

  “She lost her wallet,” Bea said, annoyed, opening the door and gesturing for Early to go in first.

  Inside the room, Early started unloading to Bea. “There are never any open bike slots in the main campus docks,” she said, speaking with urgency. “So I was docking the bike in the row behind the computer science building—I didn’t even know one was there until today—and I’d just gotten it clipped in. I was late to calc so I was hurrying up that hill right there between the science buildings and the woods, you know those?” Bea nodded even though she didn’t. “And this kid stepped out, like, a teenager. He told me to give him my wallet. I almost told him that I don’t have a wallet, just a phone case with my student ID in it, but then I realized that was super dumb and just handed him my whole phone in the case.”

  She stopped.

  “Then what happened?” Bea said.

  “He ran away! He didn’t even look to see what was in it. He just said ‘thanks’ and ran away.”

  “He thanked you?” Bea asked, astonished.

  “I thought that was kind of funny, too.” Early spoke rapidly and was almost grinning. “I went to one of those blue phones? I know. I actually used one of those. I called. And campus police sent a car to pick me up and bring me back here.”

  “How’d you get your phone back?” Bea asked.

  Early frowned.

  “The policeman brought it to me,” she said. “Shouldn’t it go into evidence or something?”

  Bea shrugged. “You’d think,” she said. “Maybe this is trivial enough that they don’t care.” Realizing the comment had perhaps been insensitive, Bea asked, “Were you scared?”

  “Um, yeah. I still have goose bumps.” Early held up her arm.

  A moment passed.

  “Are you going to press charges?” Bea asked.

  “What? They already arrested him,” Early said, seeming to notice Bea’s expression for the first time since Bea had arrived. “Why do you seem weird?”

  “What do you mean?” Bea said.

  “You’re acting weird,” Early said.

  Bea tried to sound casual as she said, “I bet you could stop them from prosecuting that kid if you wanted.”

  “Why would I do that?” Early said, an edge seeping into her voice. Bea didn’t respond, just let her gaze drift behind Early, to the window.

  “Bea, I’m going to cooperate with the police. That kid mugged me.”

  “But you don’t know what his life is like. I don’t know, I’m just saying there may be a way you can keep it from happening. We could talk to Dr. Friedman.”

  Early moaned. “Dr. Friedman, what would he do, what would he think? You have this guy on this pedestal!” She hesitated, then added, almost whispering, “My brother says he dates his students.”

  “What?” Bea tried to hide her distress at hearing this. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. “No way.”

  “It’s common knowledge,” Early said in a tone that Bea could tell was meant to be nasty. “Isn’t that gross?” Bea didn’t answer. “He’s so old. And he has a wife.”

  “I mean, I don’t know. It’s not like assault or harassment if it’s consensual,” Bea heard herself saying.

  “Um, it’s cheating.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not. You don’t know what his understanding is with his wife.”

  Early glared at her. “Bea, he’s a professor. He’s like forty-five. We’re eighteen. He has authority.”

  “I’m nineteen,” Bea said.

  Early’s expression softened into something resembling pity.

  “Right,” she said.

  15

  Stayja

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

  “Since when did Victoria’s Secret get so PG?” Nicole said. The two of them were at the mall, spending the morning before their shifts searching for lingerie because Nicole wanted to buy some “skanky shit” to wear for Chet.

  “Since when do you wear stripper clothes?” Stayja asked.

  “Since I get a bigger paycheck than you do,” Nicole snapped back, rubbing it in Stayja’s face for the umpteenth time that she’d been promoted. It had been a serendipitous accident as far as Stayja understood—some kid had come to the QuikMart and tried to use a stolen ID. All Nicole had done was call and report him, which rendered her noble or especially capable in Frank’s eyes. He’d promptly transferred her over to the bookstore, where she now made fifty cents more per hour than her cousin.

  “What exactly are you looking for, if this is too conservative?” Stayja asked.

  “I’m keeping an open mind. I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Nicole led them back into the main corridor of the mall.

  “What’s the occasion?” Stayja asked, smirking.

  “We said ‘I love you,’” Nicole said.

  Stayja snorted.

  Nicole swatted her arm. Her face crumbled, then hardened. “We’re in love! Like it or not.”

  “How do you know?” Stayja asked.

  “Because you just know.”

  “That’s called oxytocin. It floods your brain when you have sex with someone and confuses you and makes you think you’re in love.”

  “Why don’t I fall in love with everyone I fuck, then?” Nicole said.

  “That’s what I’m asking,” Stayja said. “What makes this time different?”

  They entered Dillard’s and walked to the escalator. Intimate apparel was on the second floor.

  “I don’t fucking know! Like, I want him to be happy more than I want me to be happy and shit.” They rode for a moment in silence. “And I want to, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Make myself better for him. Like, be, you know.”

  “What?”

  Nicole rolled her eyes.

  “You want to be what?” Stayja said.

  “Honest and shit. Responsible.”

  Stayja didn’t say anything. She was too stunned.

  “What about you?” Nicole asked. “How’s it going with that guy?”

  “Fine,” Stayja said, trying to leave out the question mark in her voice. Tyler had, two days earlier, gotten the decision in his case. It hadn’t turned out well. He was now on academic probation and had been found guilty of sexual misconduct, which had devastated him—he’d told her it basically meant he wouldn’t be able to get into law school.

  As they approached the racks of undergarments, Stayja shrank away from Nicole, who marched directly up to the saleslady behind the counter.

  “Where’s your kinkiest stuff?” she asked.

  “This way,” the woman said without batting an eye.

  Stayja hung back, fingering a satin nightgown and thinking about love.

  For wee
ks now, she and Tyler had met up nightly. She’d shut down the café, drive Nicole home, then come back to campus to hang out with him. That girl bringing the rape case against him had destroyed him. He was anxious, terrified, not eating. They’d sit on his couch, and he’d lie in her lap while they watched shows or just talked. His parents were furious and giving him the silent treatment. Most of his friends, he’d told her, didn’t know about the case, because he was too embarrassed to tell them. He felt alone, abandoned.

  “What would I do without you, Stayja?” he said one night, wrapping his arms around her waist and squeezing as if he could physically stop her from leaving.

  Often she returned home after midnight or one. She’d sleep until nine or ten, then clean the house or knock out errands before heading into her shift at two.

  These evenings were becoming her favorite hours of every day. She felt needed, and not for the kinds of things she was accustomed to giving others: her money, rides home, her sense of responsibility. These demands from Nicole and even her mother tapped her out and left her tangled in guilt and resentment and languor.

  Tyler wanted only her affection and attention, and these she was willing to give him in spades. In his presence she felt as if she had a bottomless well of care to draw from as long as he stayed close, and she could caress his hair and reassure him it would be okay. She felt full driving home on these nights, and she knew what it meant.

  “Hey!” Nicole hollered, standing under the Fitting Rooms sign. “Are you coming?”

  Stayja waited outside the fitting room door while, on the other side, Nicole yammered about running into the student whose card had been stolen. You’d think she saved the girl’s life, Stayja thought.

  “. . . and so I gave her a free Godiva bar. I was like, I know because I’m the one who turned in the guy who took your stuff . . . you deserve this.”

  “Nicole, for the millionth time, you can’t give away shit you’re supposed to be selling,” Stayja said.

  “Oh, please. It was just Annie and me there. Annie doesn’t care.”

  “Who?” Stayja asked, her stomach rolling.

  “Annie. She’s, like, a normal one.”

  Surely it was a coincidence.

  “Well,” Stayja said, “if you’re not more careful this Annie is going to report you to Frank and you’re going to be out of work. Again.”

  “Annie has other shit going on, dude. You have no idea. She was raped recently. By this guy who totally got off the hook.”

  “That sucks,” Stayja said, her stomach now pitching like a boat in a storm. She pressed her arms into it and was relieved her cousin couldn’t see her face.

  When Tyler had told Stayja about the sexual assault allegation, it wasn’t that Stayja assumed the girl was lying. She just believed him that there was a fair amount of gray to the situation. She’d seen him hammered, and she knew how drunk those Carter girls got. The girl may not have wanted whatever happened between them, but, ultimately, this Annie had surely had chances to bow out, opportunities she hadn’t taken.

  “Yeah, it does,” Nicole said.

  A long pause stretched out between them.

  “What’s taking so long?” Stayja finally asked. When Nicole didn’t answer, she said, “Nicole! It can’t be this hard to decide if you want to buy a thong or not.” She leaned down to look under the stall. Nicole was standing still, her feet planted. So she was doing something on her phone.

  “What’s your boyfriend’s name again?” Nicole asked from the other side of the door.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Stayja said.

  “What’s his name?”

  When Stayja didn’t respond right away, the door flew open. Nicole clutched a black teddy to her chest, the right strap dangling off her shoulder. She held her phone in her other hand.

  “I don’t think you should keep seeing him,” Nicole said, suddenly very serious. “I don’t think he’s a good guy.”

  “Oh please,” Stayja said. “Get dressed.”

  “He’s a rapist.”

  “She told you that, I know. But I heard a different version.”

  Nicole’s mouth dropped open.

  “God, I would have thought of all people that you would be feminist about this,” she said.

  Stayja was quiet, debating whether to even try to explain to her cousin what she was thinking, which was that the male body was its own unruly beast. It was biological. A matter of science. Guys couldn’t even control when they got erections; that was how not in control they were, with all that testosterone surging through them. So if all the girl had said was yes—yes to kissing, to clothes off—and then suddenly her position became no? She couldn’t be shocked when the male body—any male body—had trouble switching lanes.

  “I think it was a misunderstanding,” Stayja said. “It sounds like she waited really late to change her mind or something. I’m not saying she’s a liar.”

  Nicole yelped in horror.

  “Fuck that!” she squealed. Stayja was relieved they were the only ones in the fitting room. “I don’t care if he’s inside me, if I tell him to get out, he better get the fuck out.”

  “Are you done? Or can you finish up?” Stayja said, checking her phone out of habit, for anything—the time and to see if he’d texted.

  “I’m serious. You have to break up with him,” Nicole said.

  “Oh?” Stayja asked, her voice rising. “Is Chet the married traffic lawyer the kind of upstanding citizen you would prefer for me?”

  “At least Chet isn’t a rapist,” Nicole said.

  “You know what? You can take the fucking bus home,” Stayja said, storming out of the dressing room.

  AS STAYJA WAS pulling into the driveway, she was only beginning to feel guilty for leaving Nicole at the mall (though Chet, the apparent love of her life, could pick her up if she didn’t want to take the bus) when she spotted LA crossing the lawn between their houses, headed toward hers. He saw her at the same time and held up a letter in front of his face so that his eyes were hidden. It was a regular-sized envelope, white.

  She parked and climbed out of the car.

  “Look what accidentally came to my house instead of yours,” he said, handing her a piece of mail.

  It wasn’t uncommon for them to get each other’s mail. Many decades earlier, LA’s property and Stayja’s had been on the same lot, so they nearly shared an address: 319A and 319B.

  She glanced at the return address and swallowed. The Internal Revenue Service.

  “Maybe you got a big refund or something,” he said.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. Whatever it was, she was sure it wasn’t that. Correspondence from the government was never good.

  She slid her thumb through the upper edge and unfolded the sheet of paper inside.

  It was a bill. For $6,292, due by October 30th.

  “Motherfucker,” Stayja said, folding it back up.

  “What is it? Let me see,” LA said.

  “No,” she said, climbing back into her car.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “Can I come?”

  She ignored him as she pulled the door shut and started the engine.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Stayja sat across from an adviser at H&R Block, distracted by the coral lipstick smeared across the woman’s left front tooth as she half heard the worst possible news—that there was no basis on which to dispute the bill. Stayja was sure it had been a mistake, but according to this woman, when Stayja had started working at Carter, she’d taken too many allowances on her W-4. The woman had pulled out a sample form, pointing to “W-4” at the top of it as if Stayja were an idiot.

  “See? W-4. You filled out one of these. And you should have put a ‘one’ here at the bottom,” the woman said, “but you probably put a ‘three’ or something.”

  “It says to put one for yourself, another one if you are single, and another if you file as head of household. That’s three.”

  “I know that’s what it says,” the woman said, �
��but that’s not actually what you should have done.” The woman’s tone was politely superior, as if what she was telling Stayja were common sense and not arcane, bureaucratic nonsense. “Think of it this way,” she continued. “You haven’t paid any taxes. And even though your income is minimal, sweetie, everyone has to pay taxes.”

  “You’re saying I’m not poor enough because my disabled mother is not as expensive as five children?” Stayja said, her voice louder. The woman looked over at a couple sitting in a nearby cubicle and gave them an apologetic half grin. Stayja shoved her paystub across the woman’s desk and pointed again at the deducted sums. “Again, please explain to me how you can say I paid zero taxes if in just one week I paid forty dollars in taxes?” she asked.

  “That’s not tax. It’s Social Security and Medicare.”

  “Since when is that not taxes?”

  “Ma’am, please keep your voice down. We have other customers in the facility.”

  “I am not trying to cause a scene,” Stayja said. “I am just trying to understand what is going on. I added up the numbers just like they told me to. That number there plus that number there. And now you’re telling me that the numbers don’t actually mean what this sheet says they mean and, as a result, I have to pay the government six thousand dollars I don’t have.”

  The woman sighed. “You didn’t actually do everything correctly. You haven’t filed your taxes in five years. That’s why you have this bill. You owe penalties and fees. And your, you know, taxes.”

  “Why now?” Stayja asked. “If it’s been five years.”

  The woman shook her head slowly.

  “The government’s slow to catch these things sometimes.”

  “Did I tell you I’m in school?” Stayja said. “I’m a student. I must qualify for some kind of credit.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “What school?”

  “Wake Community College. Nursing program.”

  “At least half-time?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Two classes or more per semester.”

  Stayja shut her eyes. “No.”

  When she opened them, the woman was shaking her head slowly, pity in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.