Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  She wasn’t in the mood, but she also wanted him back in her life. Yes, he was condescending and had disappeared without explanation, but it was things like this: his playfulness, his enthusiasm for life, his desire for her.

  He was still her favorite person.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, on Friday morning before her shift, Stayja and Nicole were weeding the short stretch of lawn between their houses. That is, weeding the weed that had resumed growing there, that once upon a time had been planted by Nicole. For months Donna had claimed she smelled pot whenever the wind blew from the direction of Adrienne and Nicole’s house, and she and Stayja both assumed Nicole was smoking again, that it was just a matter of time before Adrienne caught her. When Stayja had brought it up to Nicole, her cousin was insistent that she’d been clean for months.

  They discovered that Donna wasn’t crazy and Nicole wasn’t lying when Stayja noticed that the bush Nicole had grown there two years earlier and destroyed once her mother discovered it had revived itself in full, abundant glory, a veritable marijuana forest right there between the two houses.

  The girls ripped out stalk after stalk and chucked them into a plastic garbage bag as Nicole conspicuously pocketed a small stack of leaves.

  Stayja frowned.

  “It’s for Chet. He’s never done it,” Nicole said happily. She was taking the day off to go to a Carolina Hurricanes game with him. They’d invited Stayja, but she wasn’t a hockey fan and preferred not to lose the money by calling out.

  Stayja’s phone, resting on the ground, lit up with a text from Tyler.

  Emailed u notes on ur essay.

  Stayja grabbed the phone and navigated to her in-box, vaguely aware that her cousin was pretending not to watch her out of her side eye.

  This essay is way more about your mom than it is about you. I think you should make it more about your classes and stuff. What has interested you most about them? Why do you want to go into medicine? Can you handle the workload, the academic rigor of med school—that’s what you’re going to have to prove, coming from community college. I think you have to show that you’re capable of the work required. An emotional story about your mother being sick misses the mark.

  The grammar is also problematic. I don’t have time to fix it all but a few spots: at the end of a sentence, it’s “my mom and me”/“my family and me,” not “my family and I.” You aren’t the subject. Also, you don’t study hard, you study well. Hard isn’t an adverb. And some of these sentences are sentence fragments. You need a subject and a verb to make it a sentence. Also, although this is kind of an archaic rule (and an ironic comment since I literally just violated it), I’d be wary of beginning so many sentences with “and.” Basically you want to be more formal.

  “What’s wrong?” Nicole asked.

  “Nothing,” Stayja said.

  Nicole lunged and snatched Stayja’s phone before she could hide it.

  “Don’t!” Stayja cried, but Nicole was already reading his email.

  “This is bullshit,” she said. “Your essay made me cry.” She tossed the phone back to her.

  “Nicole!” How had she even known she’d written an essay?

  Nicole shrugged. “I snooped. Kill me. I wanted to know what you were doing all the time on your phone. I thought you were texting him about me. But you were writing that essay that made me fucking cry. Ignore that asshole. Send it in.”

  Stayja gazed up at the cloudless sky, too disappointed by Tyler’s reaction to be annoyed at her cousin.

  “You know what you need?” Nicole gripped a handful of weed, made a show of rolling it between her hands, and lunged at Stayja, stuffing the wad of green under her nose and tackling her.

  “Ganja!” Nicole yelled. “Ganja! Ganja!”

  “Stop!” Stayja fought her off, laughing.

  19

  Annie

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24

  Student Mental Health had locations on both campuses, and Loretta’s office happened to be on South, so every Tuesday and Thursday morning I boarded the bus and took the nine-minute ride down Campus Drive, under the Bridge, and up the hill to where the first-years lived.

  Matty’s idea had been for me to write an op-ed about my case, and how the school had handled it—without naming Tyler, of course. I’d drafted it that night, and it was already with the editor of the Opinions page. In the op-ed, I talked about how the decision had left me feeling: deserted. Riding to South Campus, I wondered what Loretta would think when I told her.

  Why did I look out the window at the Bridge? Because I always did—I’d loved the Bridge since before I was a Carter student, since the first image I saw of it in the recruitment packet that arrived at my home. Exploding with color, it affected me the way a Keith Haring or Henri Matisse did, leaving me energized and always a little bit happier. So as the bus looped left, I turned out the window to catch the first sight of the Bridge.

  I blinked. I thought I was hallucinating. But it didn’t fade. It grew bigger, clearer.

  Dazed, I lifted my phone to take a photo, and by the time we’d passed underneath the Bridge, I was struggling to text the blurry shot to Matty, my thumbs trembling.

  So he’d done it to someone else, too. Somewhere out there was another girl or girls who understood what I was feeling. I was shocked but also surprised that I was so shocked; of course, there were more of me. Of course, he’d done it to others and would likely do it to more. Still, the whole experience had felt so isolating that it hadn’t occurred to me I might not be the only one.

  “Hey,” I answered.

  “What the fuck is that!” Matty said.

  “I know,” I said quietly. The handful of students on the bus hadn’t noticed—they were occupied on their phones.

  “You know anything about it?” he asked.

  “What?” I said. “No!”

  “I feel like maybe my article doesn’t work now,” I said.

  “What? Why?” he said, panting. “Sorry, I’m sprinting. I want to get a good shot of the Bridge before they paint over it. You know they’ll do that in three seconds. Hello?”

  “I’m here,” I said as the bus screeched to a stop. “Going into therapy. We can talk about it later.” I wasn’t sure why, but my article now felt silly. Anticlimactic.

  “A LOT HAS happened,” I said as I plopped down on Loretta’s teal couch and adjusted the pillow behind my back.

  I told her everything—my parents surprising me on campus, telling them about the rape, my dad insisting he was going to talk to the dean (but thankfully not having done it yet, as far as I knew). Then I told her about Matty’s idea, about staying up late drafting the op-ed, and now, this morning, about Tyler’s name on the Bridge. When I got to that part, her jaw dropped, as mine had.

  “Wow,” she said. “Wow, wow.”

  “It’ll probably be down by the time I leave here,” I said, echoing Matty. “But the thing is, I don’t really want to publish my op-ed now.”

  She tilted her head.

  “Why is that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you fear that people will think you’re connected to the graffiti somehow?”

  “No,” I said without pause.

  The suggestion was absurd. I would never do something like what this girl had done, whoever she was. Not because it was all that physically challenging. The Bridge was sparsely trafficked, so there wasn’t a safety issue or anything. One needed only a can of spray paint and a step stool or a ladder if you wanted to paint high up. I’d participated when the orchestra had tagged it to advertise our spring concert.

  Whoever she was, she had done it alone—bought the paint, climbed a ladder, wrote those words. She was remarkable to me for her bravery, her boldness, and I ached to know more. What had happened to her? Had the university failed her as well? Something must have occurred to provoke an act of such desperation. I wanted to know her, and I wanted to be more like her.

  My article felt inconsequential, a flimsy attempt at retribution, in
light of this bloodred indictment.

  “I’m not afraid I’ll be linked to it,” I said. I was afraid because I knew I wouldn’t be, and what did that mean?

  ON THE SHUTTLE BACK, I texted Matty.

  Let’s just sit on it till the Bridge thing passes.

  As the bus barreled forward, I checked in, as Loretta had encouraged me to do, with my emotions.

  There was confusion and sadness. Both of those were familiar now.

  There was anxiety. Also no stranger.

  But, newly, there was a hint of relief. Yes, that was there—I felt some relief, the kind you feel at the end of the flu, when you can get out of bed again, when you take your first shower and have your first real meal. He’d been exposed.

  Even after they erased it, my fellow students, the ones who had something to fear, would be wary of him now. Talk of things like this spread. Cloistered as Carter was, compartmentalized into Greek and non-Greek, branching further into enclaves based on how you saw things and how you looked and how much you really wanted to drink on an average Friday night, a common thread pierced through the labels and social stratification: no one wanted to be raped.

  When Matty had pitched the op-ed to me, I’d said that I wished there were some place I could simply warn other girls about Tyler. An online forum or something.

  “The sororities have blacklists,” he said, but I wasn’t in a sorority. “There used to be this forum where you could post it.” He described an anonymous discussion board online that got taken down after people turned nasty and started posting bigoted stuff and threats against Jewish students. “You know. What always happens with those things. At some point, they turn on us Jews.” Matty’s mom was Jewish.

  So I’d accepted that there wasn’t a way for me to warn people about Tyler, but now it had happened. His outing on the Bridge—this was what I’d wanted.

  And yet it wasn’t enough. What about the university’s role? Its confusing decision that left me scratching my head and jumping every time I turned a corner and spotted a flash of blond hair in the distance?

  I really think we should go ahead and run the op-ed, Matty wrote back.

  No, I texted back. Let’s wait.

  We approached the Bridge headed north, and as we passed underneath, I turned. It was still there, the truth, scrawled furiously. I understood her fury. I got it.

  The Carter Chronicle

  Thursday, October 26

  A Serious-Isha Column on Free Speech

  by the Irreverent Rooster

  It’s me, your most irreverent of roosters. In case you’re living on another planet, sh*% has gone down this week, some real sh$&, some serious sh}¥. Namely: someone has been accused of rape—by name—on the Bridge.

  I’m not going to repeat the person’s name here because, believe it or not, I am an adult with a sense of ethics and an ability to draw boundaries. I know. It astonishes even me, frankly.

  But that doesn’t mean I’m above finding the situation utterly fascinating. Because isn’t the whole point of the Bridge free speech? Is that not how it’s described in the glossy brochure that arrived at all of our homes when we were in high school?

  And yet, free speech has its limits. Hate speech, as we know—the Carter Bridge being no stranger to old-school racism or homophobia—isn’t “tolerated”b here. I would imagine that neither is slander.

  But I just asked my friend who’s a 1L at the law school, and he says it’s not slander if it’s true. If he’s correct (Tony, I’m not saying I’m doubting you, but you are just in your first year, dude), maybe there’s not really a justification why this isn’t okay.

  This is the first time in this rooster’s memory that a personal attack has been wielded.

  Listen, obviously it will have disappeared by the time you read this.

  But is this the beginning of a new era? Will more students take to voicing personal grievances against each other on our hallowed monument to free speech, leading to its demise, like YikYak?c

  Reasons I would not be all that disappointed if that happened:

  All implosions are interesting.

  The Bridge is ugly. I said it. It’s ugly.

  No one actually writes anything interesting on it.

  It’s primarily ad space for a cappella groups, and since 90 percent of the student body is in an a cappella group, word of mouth has that covered.

  Maybe they could turn it into an art space. No ads allowed. You can paint, but it has to be beautiful!

  That last item introduced a new idea here at the end of the column. Sorry, my writing 101 prof, Dr. Perez. You taught me better. And this column doesn’t even have a conclusion.

  Here’s a stab at a thesis statement: Might this be the beginning of the end of the Bridge?

  Glossary

  a. SERIOUS-ISH: Just kidding. Nothing I do is serious.

  b. TOLERATED: Hahahahahahahahaha, of course, it is.

  c. YIKYAK: Before the time of some of you young’uns. It was an anonymous online forum that got so nasty it imploded, proving that people at their core, including Carter students, are terrible.

  Guest Op-Ed

  Friday, October 27

  by Gloria Leopold, Professor of English

  The recent instance of defamation on “the Bridge” has incited extensive debate among friends, colleagues, and my students over the question of due process and related notions. The truth is that considerations of equality have been absent from university protocol around sexual assault for some time now.

  I have been teaching at this university for nineteen years. I have witnessed the rise of contemporary identity politics and its resurgence as a different beast. I have grieved the sacrifice of consciousness and community in favor of knee-jerk political correctness and thoughtless individualism in feminism.

  There is a natural tension that emerges when young people coming of age discover their sexual identity. There is collision, conflict, discord. Under Title IX, this learning curve is now treated by universities as male-on-female terrorism, a view that at its heart is, simply, the same old sexism dressed up in the latest style. Under this view, women are passive; men are actors. Women lack the ability to communicate consent by any means other than the most childish, the most direct, while men are assumed capable of reading between the lines of all interaction, virtual PhDs of social behavior. The underlying principle is the infantilization of the female and the elevation of the male to near superpower status.

  Meanwhile, the administration and Title IX office are cast as the knights in shining armor, armed with policies and procedures to protect the impotent female.

  The tale of the woman in peril and the savior who swoops in to save her is all too familiar in the course of human history. And yet somehow it has become the prevailing feminist narrative on American college campuses in 2017.

  The trend is antithetical to intellectualism, to feminism, and to the intellectual foundation of collegiate life. A dynamic that bestows all agency on the male does not further the feminist cause. It diminishes it.

  Comments:

  BB2022: Honestly, I don’t even know what counts as sexual assault on this campus. Did we learn that?

  Bulldog3sixty: It was a skit at orientation. Remember the puppets? Lol

  BB2022: Oh God those puppets lulz whyyyyy

  R.P. 2009: Insightful, but you overlook an important point here: money. The Title IX industrial complex. It’s been ballooning since 2011, when the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) expanded its definition of gender discrimination to include “sexual misconduct,” everything from assault to harassment to a so-called hostile environment. Universities don’t want to be targeted by OCR for investigations because those are expensive to defend against. They also don’t want to be sued. It’s a giant financial mess.

  If I were cynical I’d say that every case is a cost-benefit analysis. It all comes down to money.

  At least now the standard is a bit better than it was under Obama.

/>   SmokingGun69: No one seems to be pointing out the obvious. The Brands have donated far more than any lawsuit will cost to defend.

  FredPreekIII: Not money. The problem is booze. Why can’t we talk about that?

  Guest Op-Ed

  Monday, October 30

  by Annie Stoddard, Second-year

  Yesterday morning I woke up to an email from my best friend.

  “Now?” was all it said.

  You see, prior to the incident on the Bridge last week (read about here if you haven’t—for the record, I had nothing to do with it), I had been planning to write an op-ed on the topic of sexual assault on campus. In fact, I’d already written it and submitted it to the Chronicle.

  But I decided to pull it after learning of what had been written on the Bridge, because I wasn’t sure how what I had to say related to the conversation that would emerge in the wake of the Bridge incident.

  Now I feel differently.

  I have followed the discussion in the pages of the Chronicle over the past week, and I have noted that while it has been a rich discussion (this is Carter, after all), there’s still a voice missing, a voice that I believe needs to be heard.

  Mine.

  The case I brought against my rapist has been almost as traumatic as the rape itself. Contrary to Professor Leopold’s op-ed, I find that people are unwilling to consider that a guy, my rapist, could possibly understand any communication that wasn’t verbal. Talk about infantilizing—that’s some major coddling. Meanwhile, in a self-contradicting decision letter finding that he’d committed “sexual misconduct,” he was essentially given a slap on the wrist. Don’t half side with me, then not bother protecting me.

  Did I tell him to stop? Everyone asks. Did I say no verbally?

  Listen, women. You will get this: It was clear to me what was going to happen, regardless of whether I literally said “no” or “stop.” You don’t plead when it’s clear that pleading isn’t going to work; the whole experience becomes more dehumanizing than it already is.