Innocence

by Lucy St. John

Innocence

  College Nights

  Book One

  By

  Lucy St. John

  © Copyright 2014 by Lucy St. John

  Chapter 1

  We became fast friends that freshman year, the five of us did. Everything was so shiny and new. Everything was right there, in front of us. Our whole lives. Our loves. The men who would come into our lives at the leafy paradise that was Old State, amongst the mountains of central Pennsylvania. A fantasy land, really. A place to learn, sure. But a place to experiment. A place to be bold. A place to find ourselves -- and each other. A place to become the women we were meant to be.

  What a journey! What an experience! What a time in all of our lives!

  I won’t bore you with a lot of preliminaries. Suffice it to say that the five female freshman from various parts of Pennsylvania and beyond came together like all coltish freshman women do. We had wobbled out of the nest of home and flown off to the big, wide open and inviting skies of Old State, intent to spread our wings. And how did we find each other? How did we form the friendship -- the fierce alliance – that would become The Five?

  Well, I guess you could say we gravitated toward one another because we were the same. And because we were so different, too.

  The parts of personality that we lacked in ourselves, we found in one another. And that made the five of us strong. It made us smart. It made us bold. It made us confident. So much more so than we could have ever been alone.

  Together, we were more than the sum of our parts. We were The Five. And our classmates, both the college men and the other coeds, came to know and accept us as such.

  To borrow a phrase from the guys, we had each other’s backs. Or at least we thought we did. Until terrible things happened to one of our own, changing everything and each one of us in ways we could never hope to understand in the heat of the moment. Nothing less than our very futures were altered that night. But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? I have a tendency to do that. It’s part of what college is all about. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t going fast enough. You aren’t learning. You aren’t growing.

  And from the very day I stepped foot in my college home in what they called the dorms of East Halls, I was determined to grow.

  Let me introduce myself. My name is Monica Creed. I hail from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I guess you’d call me a Daddy’s Girl. My father was chief of police of our safe, little borough in the western suburbs. I thought he was a god – tall and lanky and always so handsome in his uniform. I loved riding in his unmarked Chevy Blazer, which the borough let him take home at night. This, because Daddy was always on the job, always on the clock. One never knew when tragedy would strike and his handheld radio would squawk with a call. A rape. A murder. An armed robbery. A domestic violence situation. A fatal accident. A drowning. You name it.

  Our town was idyllic, to be sure. A slice of middle- to upper-class American suburbia that seemed a safe haven, especially when your father is chief of police. But bad things happened. Bad things happened everywhere. I learned this lesson from my father, always such a careful man. And he had schooled me on being careful, too. The lessons stretch back as far as I can remember to when I was a little girl. Daddy knew all the dangers that could befall us in the big bad world. He saw the invisible piano that dangles so precariously over all our heads, held there by the thinnest of strings. He sought to protect me from this. He sought to teach me to protect myself. He sought to keep me safe.

  But maybe he made me too cautious? Perhaps, he had sheltered me too well? Because by the time I went off to college, I was busting to break loose. I loved him utterly. I love him still. But I needed to move out from his shadow and shrug off his protective, reassuring arm over my shoulder. I needed to live on my terms. I needed to make my own mistakes and learn life’s hard lessons for myself. We all do.

  That doesn’t make the experience any easier – or less painful. One can only hope to survive it and become the stronger for it. But there is always collateral damage. Someone always gets hurt. Always. And sometimes they don’t recover.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this yet. Hell, I didn’t even know how I would live as an independent woman off at college. I didn’t really know what any of it meant, not really. Not yet. Not even after dad and mom had finished moving the last of my things into my dorm room, back on move-in day.

  His work finished, Daddy stood, forlorn, in that small space, not sure what to do with his hands. Mom sat silently on the twin bed she had just made up for me. She looked so tired. At the time, I thought it was simply sadness. Looking back, seeing her drawn face in my mind’s eye, I guess I should have known she wasn’t well. I’d find out later, though. Another bolt from the blue to rock my world. We never know what’s coming, do we? We can go off to college to try to learn all that we can. But the armor of knowledge has no power to protect us from the unexpected. Life laughs at our plans. And time steals everything, doesn’t it?

  Time is the ultimate thief, to be sure. But it can’t rob me of my memories, so sharp, like photographs, in my mind. There’s my dad, Chief Andrew F. Creed. All his friends called him Drew. Or just Chief.

  I called him Dad. He was my world for seventeen years. Seventeen of the best years of my life. I still believe that. But I had never seen him like this: His head bowed, staring at the floor. His hands fumbling with his keys. He carried the crowded ring of keys of a janitor, and he couldn’t help fumbling with them, though there was nowhere to go. Not yet. Not without saying goodbye to his only daughter.

  But Daddy was at a loss for words. And he didn’t want to show the tears welling in his eyes.

  I stood before him a 17-year-old college student. I would turn eighteen in a few weeks. I was a woman, about to go off on my own. But in his eyes, I was the little girl in her white Confirmation dress. This was the image of me I’m sure he still had. One I believed he would always have of me.

  So how do you show him you’ve changed, grown?

  His little girl was now a coed on a college campus of some 25,000 students and in a college town of nearly 50,000. He had already given me the speeches. He had armed me with cans of mace and a loud whistle for my keychain. He had lectured about how sexual assault is the Number One crime on college campuses, especially here, at isolated, alcohol-drenched and football-crazed Old State. And most especially among freshmen women at their first college kegger.

  I listened to all his statistics, I really did. But all along, I just knew it couldn’t happen to me. I don’t know why, I just did. Perhaps, it was the aura of invincibility and false sense of security that comes from being a police chief’s daughter. I would be proven right in my assumption, as naive as it seems now. But just barely right. And unfortunately, not everyone would be so lucky. Not this year on this campus, when a monster would move among the fine fall foliage that made this place a picture-postcard of everything that is great and good about American colleges.

  The attacks began shortly after the weather turned cold and the colorful leaves fell from the trees and the death of winter beckoned. On those nights, the denuded trees struck skeletal poses as sinister shadows moved across the sprawling campus. And the slightest sound could set a young woman’s pulse to racing. Yet, the biggest of all threats could be the handsome, seemingly smart college man alone with us in a vacant room, when the door is closed, the music is turned up loud and the alcohol-fueled party is raging right downstairs. In those moments, no one can hear you scream.

  Growing up is a dangerous business, all right. Growing up at a huge college, fueled with hormones and alcohol and the heady mindset that comes with one’s first experience with complete and utter freedom, can be most dangerous of all.

  Indeed, it can ruin lives, jus
t as college is meant to mold and mint lives and careers.

  I wouldn’t know just how correct my father was, not for a while yet. But I would come to use everything my dad taught me – all the careful caution and investigator’s instincts he had instilled in me – to fight back against the monsters. In this way, I would become a full partner in The Five. Because we would all fight back, each in our way and according to the special talents and strengths that made us unique. Combined, we became a fierce force for good. A feminist force for a feminist cause – the simple right and dignity for no to mean no. For our bodies to be our own. For our persons to remain free from another’s deranged violence, wounded impotence and misplaced sexual aggression.

  We would call our fight a fight for justice. But really, it was revenge -- and rightfully so. But all this was in the future. At present, on my first day at Old State, I needed to say goodbye to the best man I would ever know in my life. My dad.

  In my new dorm room, my emotion-stricken father shuffled his feet. He drew in air, making a wet sound that was very close to a sob.

  “So, this is it,” he managed in a choked voice. “I’m so proud of you, Mon.”

  He still couldn’t raise his eyes to me, lest he lose it. My mom, exhausted on the bed, was already weeping.

  I stepped toward my father, me in my blue sweats emblazoned with the college football team’s logo.

  “I’m ready, Dad,” I said in a small, gentle voice, reaching for his fiddling hands and stilling the jingling of his keys.

  “You made me ready.”

  Slowly, my father raised his wet eyes. They were red and tired. But they brightened as they looked at me. His quivering lip curled into a smile.

  “Look at you,” he whispered in awe. “Look at my little girl.”

  He dropped those keys with a clatter, squeezed my hand, then swept me up into an oxygen-stealing bear hug, as if trying desperately to hold on.

  I felt his breath as he leaned down and kissed the top of my head, inhaling wetly as if to breathe in my scent. He tried to choke it back, but he wept. In small, little sad sounds, he wept. And then I did, too.

  My mother, sobbing openly now, stood and joined in the family hug. She wrapped one arm around me and one around my dad. But her hold had none of the strength of my father’s.

  We stayed that way for a good while.

  Then, Sonya Kessler, my new roommate and the second member of what would become The Five, burst in, one of her colorful, angry paintings in tow.

  “Oh wow,” Sonya said, seeing the three of us, red-faced and teary-eyed.

  “I didn’t mean to crash your goodbye,” stammered the stunning, raven-haired, ethnic-looking woman, who was already an artist.

  Sonya had an eye for everything. It devoured the world. And then the world was reflected back in her art. I often wondered what she really saw in that first moment in our dorm room, when she encountered me and my little family, about to be changed forever.

  My dad broke his smothering hold on me, and none too soon. He turned his back to the stranger in the room, quickly raising a hand to wipe his eyes. I looked up at my new roommate, and I was blotchy-faced and teary-eyed.

  “Hi,” I muttered.

  My mom was already staring at the canvas in Sonya’s hands. It was a jagged, energetic painting of a line of young men in football helmets and jock straps. Nothing else. Sonya set it carefully against the desk on the empty half of the dorm room – her half – then walked up to me, her hand outstretched and a smile on her beautiful but unconventional face.

  Her face was angular, and her slender nose had a bump in the middle. But make no mistake, Sonya Keller was drop-dead gorgeous. Hers was the kind of unconventional, ever-intriguing beauty that stops both men and women in their tracks. I would learn that she was Russian on both sides. Her parents were first generation Americans. Her grandparents came over from the then-Communist Soviet Union. She grew up in Johnstown, a second-rate, down-on-its-luck steel town best known for its famous floods. I knew of the town because it was about ninety minutes east of Pittsburgh.

  “I guess we’re roommates,” Sonya said as she pumped my hand. “Sonya,” she offered. “You must be Monica. At least that’s what it says on my orientation paperwork.”

  “That’s me,” I said, forcing a smile onto my emotionally wrecked face. “I hope you don’t mind. I kinda staked out my half of the room.” I jerked my head to my already-made bed and the suitcases and boxes stacked beside it.

  Sonya shrugged. “First come, first served,” she said. “My brother is bringing in a loft. I’m gonna get rid of my twin and bunk up high. That way, I’ll have more wall space for my art.”

  I nodded uncertainly.

  “You painted this?” my mother said accusingly, as she walked over to the painting leaning against the desk, eying it sharply.

  “The boys?” Mom said. “They have no pants.”

  Sonya walked over, appraising the work alongside my mom.

  “Yeah,” Sonya enthused. “Isn’t it great? I wanted to strip the crazy culture of football down to its elements. Guys in their helmets and jocks. I got the guys on my high school team to pose for me. We tried it first with them butt-naked,” Sonya went on. “You know, just their little helmets down there, and their big helmets on their heads. But I felt that would be too much for people to take in. So we went with the jockstraps.”

  “Naked?” my mother protested. “The boys were naked, standing right there in front of you?”

  My mother was aghast.

  “Sure,” Sonya said. “I love painting penises. Each one is so different. But it just didn’t work artistically with this piece.”

  “You have naked men pose for you?” my mom went on. “In here? With my daughter to see?”

  “Mom!” I protested.

  “I work in the studio, mostly,” Sonya assured.

  “Mostly?”

  My mom just wouldn’t let it go. By now, even my dad, having recovered his composure, was taking an interest in this controversial panting -- and in my new, free-wheeling, artistic roommate.

  “I assure you, it’s completely natural, Mrs., ah.” Sonya glanced down at her paperwork. “Mrs. Creed. Every artist works with nudes. It’s just part of the development.”

  “My daughter has no interest in developing like that!” Mom scolded.

  “Mother!” I cried again.

  Sonya shifted her big, brown mysterious eyes to me and cracked a sly, knowing smile.

  “I’ll keep her safe, Mrs. Creed,” Sonya said.

  My dad shifted his perplexed gaze from the painting to me, then back again. In that moment, he realized that a risqué painting by a feminist college freshman was the least of his worries. He also recognized that mom was embarrassing me in front of my new roommate.

  “All right, Cynthia,” my dad said, taking my mother by the shoulder. “We best leave these young ladies to get acquainted.”

  My father turned to Sonya. “You won’t need to protect my daughter,” he said in a neutral tone. “I taught her to protect herself. But you two, you look out for each other, okay?”

  He smiled one of his handsome smiles at my new roommate.

  “Yes, sir,” Sonya said, instinctively showing my father the respect that his bearing demanded of almost everyone, even the suspects he arrested.

  “Good,” he said, then nodded at the art.

  “I like your work, Sonya,” he added. “You have a good eye. You see a lot. I should know. I’ve been training my eye to see everything since I first walked the beat.”

  Sonya’s jaw dropped. “You’re a cop!” It wasn’t so much a question as a confirmation. “I should have known! You have this thing about you. This presence. I’d love to try to capture it on canvas. Would you consider sitting for me?”

  My mom looked up at her husband, her face filling with skepticism, even disdain.

  “As long as I can keep my pants on,” Dad joked in that winning way of his.

  Sonya laughed. So did I
.

  “Deal,” she said, holding out her hand. My dad shook it.

  “Alright then,” he said, as my mom shook her head in silence. “How about you walk us out, Mon?”

  My dad, his arm around my mom, held out the other for me. I tucked under his wing one last time. Sonya watched us leave the room where our lives were about to change.

  Little did any of us know then just how much they would change. Then again, no one ever does, do they?

  Chapter 2