Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  Hey, you shouldn’t wait for the bus in this, she wrote. If you don’t have a ride, come take the car. I’m in the lot now.

  oh thank christ coming, her cousin wrote back immediately.

  I will do better, Stayja thought as she waited. I’ll be a better cousin and friend to Nicole.

  Within seconds Nicole appeared, fuzzy in Stayja’s headlights. As she came closer, Stayja saw that Nicole was holding a plastic bag over her head in which she’d cut slits for eyes. She charged through the wind and rain, cutting diagonally across the lot.

  Between them, halfway down the lot in the next row of cars, a pair of headlights sprang to life. Its beams swiveled back and forth before settling and growing wider, brighter, taking over Stayja’s frame of sight. As the nose of an SUV came into view, she recognized it. Without stopping or slowing, he rolled down his window and began yelling at her, gesturing through the window, shouting words she couldn’t hear.

  Nicole, meanwhile, was advancing as fast as she could, the plastic over her head blocking her peripheral vision. As she stepped into the beams of the SUV, her leopard coat, jeans, and cherished brown boots were bathed in light.

  Stayja called for Nicole to watch out, but the doors were shut, and Nicole couldn’t hear her. She opened her door as the screeching of tires tore through the air. For an instant, his window still down, he was rigid, his profile clear enough for Stayja to watch as his face registered panic and determination. Then the dark pane was rising, and he was peeling out of the lot to the sound of Stayja’s screams.

  Article: Carter Employee Killed in Car Accident on Main Campus

  By News Staff

  December 12, 2017

  At approximately 7:02 p.m. on Monday, December 11, twenty-one-year-old Nicole Rankin, a clerk at the Carter University Book Store hired in August of this year, was killed in the Student Center B lot when she was hit by a vehicle exiting the lot.

  Police have not released any information regarding the death, which is under investigation.

  31

  Annie

  DECEMBER–JANUARY

  Are some people made for destruction? Do they move through the world like hurricanes, sweeping up perfectly good lives and smashing them to pieces?

  We didn’t see it happen, but we heard it. We heard his tires yowl as he braked; we heard his engine revving up; we heard Stayja.

  My instinct was to stay away. Without knowing it had anything to do with Tyler, I was paralyzed. It was, I think, the sensation of having no more room in my body for any more trauma.

  But reluctantly, with Bea in the lead, I went. I followed her following the sound of the screaming, and when I saw the body and registered who it was, I broke.

  We’d only hung out once outside work, but at work she was my friend, irreverent and interesting in a different way than my classmates were. She reminded me a bit of people I’d gone to high school with—she would question authority without pause and could make anything a game. We spent hours rating the hotness of every customer in the bookstore at a given moment.

  Suddenly all I had was room to feel.

  I called 911. Bea watched as Stayja tried to resuscitate her, doing the motions of CPR without stopping, repeating them over and over and over until the ambulance arrived.

  I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how to do CPR. Bea looked pained by her helplessness as well.

  As the minutes passed and I stood there powerless, I had the strange sensation that I was witnessing a person trying to turn back time. Stayja was thrusting her body at a miracle, desperate to reverse the clock. As if my cells were turning inside out, the molecular makeup of my being began to change.

  I’m not saying it “put things in perspective”—that sounds trite and not quite right. I mean that if Tyler Brand had, in forcing his body upon my own, taught me to know in my flesh how heartless human beings can be, standing in the rain next to Nicole’s cousin as she fought to give away her breath to Nicole brought me back into knowing how hard we can love.

  When the EMT arrived and announced what we already knew, Stayja fell back onto her heels, placed her hands over her face, and rocked, choking on her sobs, retching, making sounds I’d never heard a person make. As if she were trying to both hold in the grief and purge it, as if the sadness that had come was both too much and not enough.

  It felt almost sacred, the sound of her pain puncturing the night. The most raw stuff that we’re made of.

  We clean up grief, I know now. Mop it up and stick the dirty bucket in a corner, out of sight. When people ask, we offer polite half smiles and half-truths.

  “It continues to be hard at times,” we say. Or “It comes in waves.”

  But the night I watched Stayja, my first real experience observing human grief, there was nothing tidy about it. It was primal. Guttural.

  I cried as quietly as I could where I stood, for her and for Nicole and because I was alive.

  “DID YOU SEE what they did?” Matty said. “In Wiggins?” He passed his phone to me across the booth. It was the first week back after winter break, and he, Henry, and I were having breakfast at Lloyd’s.

  A photo of the library lobby showed a banner that read “We <3 Our Carter Family.” I scrolled through more photos, these of easels surrounding the banner that held enormous headshots of Carter staff in uniform—dining, maintenance—captioned with facts about them: favorite hobby, favorite vacation destination, favorite book or movie.

  The story of Nicole’s death—inebriated Carter student recklessly kills an employee—had embodied Carter’s evergreen, hot-button issues of alcohol abuse and staff-student relations. Carter had responded with the cringe-worthy display as some sort of effort to seem appreciative of staff. See? We celebrate you! We don’t want you to be killed while at work!

  “Jeez,” I said and handed him his phone back, thinking again of Nicole. I’d been back to work only one afternoon since returning to campus, and it was strange being there without her. I hadn’t realized I’d come to associate work with laughing because of her. There was no one to laugh with now.

  “Did you know Annie’s bad-assery made it on local news?” Henry said to Matty, shoveling cheese grits into his mouth. I’d decided to launch a project at Carter called Each Other’s Backs, a community for people who’d experienced sexual assault. We would support each other through what Loretta called the “secondary and tertiary trauma” of being expected to go back to everything as usual in the wake of rape, to live life as if it hadn’t happened.

  “I do because I pitched the story,” Matty said.

  “You’re like the Oprah of rape,” Henry said cheerfully as Matty sipped his orange juice. We were fully dating now. We’d spent New Year’s together at my parents’ (they loved him) and were planning to try to be in the same city over the summer.

  Matty pitched forward, coughing. “Please never say something like that again while I’m drinking.”

  “I’m proud of you,” Henry said to me.

  “We know,” Matty said. “God, you’ve said it a million times. If you guys get any cuter, I literally can’t be friends with you anymore. It’s actually off-putting. And I don’t mean in a way that I’m jealous of. I mean it’s grating, asocial behavior.”

  “You’re just sad to leave us,” I said. Matty was only back in town to pack up his dorm room. He was going to spend the spring interning in Hong Kong with the Financial Times, and he’d scored a prestigious fellowship to study journalism in Paris in the fall.

  “Leave some for me, please?” Matty said, slapping my hand as I finished off a full half of his blueberry pancake.

  “I’m not the Oprah of rape,” I said, “I just started a thing.” Sometimes it was like Henry and Matty had forgotten. They hadn’t known Nicole. But still, it was strange for me—to be the only one of the three of us who had and therefore the only one who thought about her.

  “Did I tell you guys that before Nicole died, she sent in her cousin’s application for med school?”

&n
bsp; “Huh?” Matty said, flagging the waiter for more coffee. “You can just apply to med school for someone else? Didn’t she have to take the MCAT?”

  “This was a college-to-med-school program. She had me proofread the essay so she could apply for her.”

  “Why didn’t the cousin apply herself?” Henry asked, jabbing his fork into a cube of pineapple.

  “I think she got nervous or something. I don’t know. I just thought it was sweet.”

  “Did she get in?” Matty said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, picturing Stayja over Nicole’s body, giving her breath.

  32

  Bea

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 18

  “I have to take it in January or I get kicked out of my program. I don’t have a choice,” Bea said.

  Bea and Chris faced each other at a small table by the window in a coffee shop off South Campus, two mugs of steaming tea between them. She’d invited him to meet her without telling him the reason. When she told him she wouldn’t be going to nationals, he’d been far more upset than she’d expected. For ten minutes, he’d been peppering her with questions. Why? Why couldn’t she just change it? Why was this even a thing?

  “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “No. You aren’t going to miss nationals.”

  She’d avoided telling him what Tyler had said to her a week earlier, the night of the accident. She wasn’t sure why, except that in light of a young woman’s death, it seemed like a petty thing to whine about.

  But she hadn’t expected this reaction from him, this much resistance.

  “There’s something else going on. This does not add up.”

  “Well, yes. Sort of,” she finally said. And then she told him about the Brands’ funding her program and how they’d felt attacked.

  “So they clamped down, I guess. Maybe they don’t care anymore. But no one else cares enough to reverse it. So here we are.” He listened quietly. When she finished, he still said nothing.

  “Don’t piss off rich people is the lesson, I guess,” she said, trying to smile. In the week since the horrible accident, Bea had felt numbed by it all, unable or unwilling to feel the devastation that she sensed lay under the surface.

  “I don’t accept this,” Chris said. “We’re going to do something about it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Bea said. “It seems decided.”

  AND THEN, THAT night, they came—the feelings.

  She’d agreed to accompany Early to hip-hop dance class at the gym and was tying on her sneakers—the first time she’d worn them since the night of the accident. She saw a flash of yellow and lifted the shoe. Stuck to the bottom of it was a scrap of caution tape.

  “Ready?” Early asked from the door. “Bea?”

  Bea crouched next to her bed, one shoe on and one shoe in her hand, weeping.

  Early came over and put her arms around Bea from behind.

  They stayed like that for a while. Eventually, Bea sat. Early did, too, still behind her, rubbing her back. Bea caught her breath. Her sobbing eased up.

  Dr. Friedman. Tyler. The man she thought was her father. She’d been wrong about them all.

  “Everyone is different than I thought,” she said.

  “I’m not,” Early said. “I’m just as vain and superficial as you always suspected.”

  A small laugh escaped from Bea’s throat.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, it was almost midnight, and they lay in their beds, both quietly on their phones, when Early said, “Have you seen this?”

  “What?” Bea asked. Early had a habit of asking a question like “have you seen this” without showing you what she was referring to or looking at.

  “This petition for you.”

  “What?” Bea quickly climbed out of bed and joined Early on her bunk. Together they read through it:

  Like improv? Like helping out your friends?

  Save our beloved C.U.N.T. from the archaic and oppressive grades policy keeping everyone’s favorite Bea, Bea Powers, from getting to go to nationals with us!

  The petition went on to list one hundred—a hundred!—qualities of Bea’s.

  Don’t like physics? Neither does Bea!

  Do like ice cream? So does Bea!

  The sheer length was astonishing. It went on for pages. It must have taken Chris all afternoon to write.

  “It already has forty-seven signatures,” Early said.

  Bea’s phone buzzed with a text from Chris.

  We’re on it, he wrote.

  Just saw, she responded, then paused, unsure what else to write. She was touched. This must have taken you forever, she finally typed.

  It wasn’t just me. We all worked on it. Everyone sent in ten things about you. Except Bart. He sent in none because he’s a Dick. So Russell wrote twenty.

  Bea grinned.

  Then: Why does my phone capitalize Dick?

  Then: Other people may be rich, but we have what they don’t.

  What’s that? she wrote back. A sense of humor?

  People like us, wrote Chris.

  “I’m sending it to all of my classes on GroupMe,” Early said. “I wish I could sign it twice! Maybe I can.”

  By the time they turned off the light, the petition had over three hundred signatures. Bea stayed awake deep into the night, her eyes open wide in the darkness, feeling full in spite of everything.

  THE NEXT MORNING her final paper was due for Justice, and they’d been directed to hand it in to Dr. Friedman personally. She had not seen or talked to him since he left her the voicemail about the fellowship.

  Waiting for the printer to spit out the pages, she reread its final lines on her screen.

  In sum, no one wants to lose power. People hold lofty principles of justice close to heart, but when those principles come up against their own lifestyle or status, most people aren’t willing to sacrifice so someone else can have a chance. Radical justice, I have learned this semester, isn’t all that radical. Because if the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, even radical justice bends back toward the money.

  She’d changed her topic last minute and written it in a heated frenzy.

  Stapling the pages together, she felt apprehensive and exhilarated about seeing him face to face. Likely, it would be anticlimactic. He’d say something to try to win her over again, and she’d politely respond. Her paper, she felt, said all she needed to say.

  She was putting on her coat to leave when a new email flashed on her screen and caught her eye. At the sight of his name, she gasped. She sat. No, she wasn’t imagining it.

  She hesitated. Did she really want to read whatever he had to say? Was she ready?

  She was.

  Dear Bea,

  I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write.

  I needed time to figure out what to say, what your mother would want me to say.

  When you were born, the plan was for both of us to be involved in your life. Neither of us was interested in marriage (to each other), but we both wanted very much to be your parent.

  Then I got offered a job in Michigan. This was what changed everything.

  If I took it, were we really going to shuttle you back and forth between Boston and Ann Arbor? At first, yes.

  But your mother, as you know, was the daughter of divorced parents, and she felt this would be deeply painful for you—having to say goodbye to a parent every other week or month or year. Missing one of us whenever you were with the other.

  Your childhood, she believed, would be defined by absence and longing in one direction or the other. This would be the case no matter how smothered in love you were. And this, she felt—and convinced me—would as likely as not be more traumatic than the burden of an abstract, faceless absence. That is, of simply never knowing me.

  I am not saying it was her decision. It was a mutual one. We agreed.

  Was this the right decision?

  Do we ever know how to answer that question when it comes to walking away from love
?

  Your mother actually reached out to me before she died. Strange, I know, given that her passing was so sudden, and I’ve often wondered about the timing of her correspondence. She emailed me to say that if anything ever happened to her, I had her blessing to contact you.

  I didn’t reach out, though, because I wasn’t sure it was something you would want. Losing a mother is hard enough. I didn’t want to add to that the fraught emotional load of a father suddenly emerging and announcing he’s known about you all along. (I will say, and I hope you understand, I have not watched you all along. I have not observed your life. This was a selfish decision on my part. If I wasn’t going to be involved, it was going to be a clean break. I wasn’t going to do that to myself.)

  When I heard from you a couple of months ago, I confess that I panicked a bit. My wife knew about you and Phaedra, but only the most basic outline of the story. We hadn’t spoken of you or your mother in over nine years, since before we married. Even your mother’s death three years ago—I’d kept that from her. I didn’t see a reason to bring up something that might be hard for her.

  So I put off telling her I’d heard from you because, well, I was afraid. How it would impact our family, our marriage. I was afraid she’d not allow me to write you back. I was afraid she’d make me choose.

  Fortunately, this fear was unfounded. That is not the person I married. The other afternoon, at my son Roland’s (he’s seven now) robot-a-thon (they build robots), there was a long stretch of time during which we were killing time waiting for the kids to finish their projects. I couldn’t make excuses any longer. In the corner of a hotel ballroom filled with parents, I told her about your note.

  My wife’s name is Zuzia. People call her Zuz (like “zuj”). She is eager to meet you, as am I.

  This letter is a very long way of saying hello, nice to meet you, and I’m sorry. I hope you will forgive the delay in responding.

  We will be celebrating Christmas at our home here in Ann Arbor this year, just the three of us. Do you have holiday plans, and, if not, would you like to join us?