Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  Tucker stepped around them so she could stand at Ella’s shoulder and watch as she turned the pages of the binder. There were printouts from her campus email showing that she’d emailed a draft of the paper to a friend asking for feedback a month before she emailed it to Lindy, also asking for feedback. Then there were photographs of bruises on her chest and ribs, but never on her face. Tucker saw dates spanning two months and descriptions of what had happened. She bent down and put her fingers on one page so that Ella couldn’t turn it. There was a picture of a bruise on Alisa’s ribs as dark as the one she’d received being thrown into the wall outside of the gym. It had a sharp edge to it and Tucker winced as she recognized the edge of Lindy’s coffee table in its dark shape.

  She sat down hard on the side of her bed and put her head in her hands to try to fend off the sick feeling overtaking her.

  “Do I go to the police or the campus security?” Alisa asked.

  “Let’s start with the Dean of Students,” Ella said. “She’ll know what to do.”

  “I’ll call over tomorrow morning,” Tucker offered. She had to do something.

  She lifted her head and looked at Alisa’s stricken face. Around the sickness in her gut she felt a boiling anger and the first stirring of the strength that had been gone since Halloween. It was so much harder to feel that way about herself, but seeing it in someone else turned all the fear she’d had for Lindy into rage.

  * * *

  Tucker set the binder on the desk in front of Dean Chilvers and watched as she flipped through the pages. The muscles at the sides of her jaw clenched and she looked like she wanted to spit.

  When she’d gone through it, she stood up suddenly, grabbed the back of her chair and dragged it around the desk. She sat down in it again on the same side of the desk as Alisa, Tucker and Ella.

  She said, “This is very damning, Ms. Foss. And I want to say both as a dean and as a person that I am so sorry this happened to you.”

  “Thanks,” Alisa said in a small voice.

  “I also apologize that you didn’t feel safe to come forward with this information,” she said.

  “What happens next?” Tucker asked.

  “I’ll call the police,” she said. “Ms. Heaton will be banned from campus and we’ll have to inform the grant donors that the presentation they funded was not authored by her.”

  Speaking directly to Alisa, she continued: “I hope you’ll consider talking to one of our counselors. I imagine this has been very hard for you. When you’ve had more time to recover, if it’s all right I’d like to have a conversation about what we, as a school, could have done better.”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice.

  She reached out as if she was going to touch Alisa but rested her hand on the edge of her desk instead. “Thank you for sharing this,” she said.

  Tucker felt like she had a question she wanted to ask, but she didn’t know what it was. She and Ella sat in chairs to either side of Alisa as she told the dean more of her story. She’d gotten used to the idea of leaving school and going to Minneapolis, but now she was back in a fight she could win. The dean looked genuinely upset by everything Alisa was saying and Tucker would bet there’d be more than a few committee meetings coming out of this.

  * * *

  Tucker spent most of that week with Alisa, talking about what had happened to her and eventually sharing some of the details of her own assault. She thought she’d never want to speak about it again, but Alisa understood what it was like to have someone you loved turn on you so thoroughly and bafflingly.

  “I thought she must be some kind of mentally screwed up,” Alisa said. “I couldn’t settle on a diagnosis but it has to be one of those deep sorts of disorders that a person can have without knowing they have it. I think in her heart she really wants to be a good person and that’s what made us love her.”

  “I hope someone figures it out, but it sure as hell isn’t going to be me,” Tucker said.

  She was starting to feel like her old self again, or perhaps some new and improved self, now that the threat of Lindy was gone from campus. Spring semester looked like it would be fun with Ella around, and the cousins, plus Alisa back in The Table crew. She thought she’d take courses for a Communication Studies major or something in Journalism or New Media.

  “Come with me to Professor Callander’s brunch tomorrow,” Alisa said suddenly while they were sitting at the table in the Union with Cal, Tesh and Summer.

  “What?” Tucker asked.

  “She used to have these brunches all the time last year, but then her partner got sick over the summer. She’s doing better so brunch is on this month. It’s Saturday at her house. You should come.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Alisa met her eyes with a soft but unavoidable look. “Trust me,” she said. “She’s what kept me here after all that stuff, you know. I didn’t tell her what happened, but she knew I was struggling and she just, you know, checked on me and gave me other stuff to think about. Besides, Tesh and Cal are going, aren’t you?”

  “Yep,” Tesh said.

  “Sure.” Cal’s tone hinted that this was the first time he’d heard of it, but he was game.

  “And we’ll invite Ella,” Alisa said.

  “It’ll be like a practice party for the Valentine’s bash,” Cal added.

  “Oh no, you’re not doing that again.” Summer looked at him with a combination of genuine and mock alarm.

  “Absolutely, when else do I get to bust out all my pink decorations?”

  “I nearly came down with diabetes just looking at your house, it was such a sappy eyesore.”

  “Oh please.”

  “Are you coming to the brunch tomorrow?” Alisa asked Summer. “I think we need two cars.”

  “Hell no, I can live without seeing Vivien this semester.”

  “So I shouldn’t invite her to the Valentine’s event?” Cal asked.

  “Not if you want to see me there,” Summer said. She got up from the table and sauntered out of the Union.

  Watching Summer go, Tucker saw two students veer sharply away from her, pause and stare in the direction of The Table. She recognized them as two of the three girls she’d heard trash talking in the line at the start of the year: Skinny Face and Round Face. The one she’d dubbed Mean Face wasn’t there.

  Now that she’d thought about it, she hadn’t seen her at all this semester. Looking through the student yearbooks, she’d identified all three of them to Dean Chilvers. Mean Face must have been the one who leaked the information from admissions. Had she decided to leave the school after losing her work-study job or been asked to leave?

  The two remaining girls put their heads together talking and then turned and hurried out of the Union. They weren’t going to become allies any time soon, but at least they were no longer a threat.

  “I’ve got ten dollars on Summer hooking up with someone by the time of the party,” Tesh said and Tucker brought her attention back to The Table.

  “Yeah, no way she shows up alone,” Cal agreed. He looked at Tucker. “What about you? You going to bring anyone?”

  She shook her head at him, but his question did call up an answer inside her. After a minute of consideration, she said, “Maybe I’ll see if Nico wants to drive up.”

  “For real?” Tesh asked.

  “Are you sweet on Nico?” that came from Cal.

  Tucker shrugged. “Yo’s easy to talk to, that’s all.”

  “Oh, so it’s ‘yo’ now and not ‘per’ you two have been texting,” Cal said.

  “A little.” Tucker didn’t add that they’d been talking on the phone some too. Nico gave Tucker yos number during the Thanksgiving break, but Tucker hadn’t really used it until she was back at school in January. Something about Nico being a friend of Ella’s and close, but not too close, to the school, made it easy for Tucker to talk to yo about all her fears and frustration with school, about Lindy, about the options in life she had and didn’t have. In a way E
lla was too close and Tucker didn’t want to scare her as she worked through her own stuff.

  “Invite yo on up,” Cal said. “I’ll try to keep folks from doing the guess-the-gender game this time.”

  “That’s a thing?” Alisa asked. “Why? What gender is Nico?”

  “You’ll see,” Cal told her.

  Tucker grinned at him. She was looking forward to seeing Nico again. Something about being in the presence of someone who wasn’t being one thing or another made Tucker feel like she had more choices in the world, and she really liked that feeling.

  * * *

  Professor Callander’s house was four miles from the university. Alisa picked Tucker up, but Cal said he and Tesh would come in his car because Alisa’s little two-door coupe was too small.

  “She used to do this every month?” Tucker asked while they drove.

  “Last year she hosted it every other month and then Professor Greenhill from the community college hosted on the off months. I think they had a few last fall at Greenhill’s, but I didn’t go. It’s for anyone in Women’s & Gender Studies and also sometimes folks in English or Philosophy who seem cool.”

  The house sat on a big plot of land, about an acre as far as Tucker could tell, with the back half of it thickly wooded. The long driveway was full of cars and there were more along the road where Alisa pulled over to park. As they got out of the car, two midsized, shaggy black-and-white dogs ran up with their tails wagging. On their heels came a fuzzy, white mini-poodle.

  “Hey, Mr. Bennet,” Alisa said and picked him up. He licked her chin as she carried him up to the house.

  The house had an open floor plan and from inside the front door Tucker could see the whole living room, dining room, sunroom and part of the kitchen. There were about thirty people in the house, including a few other professors from Freytag, a variety of middle-aged women not from Freytag, and about fifteen students. The spread on the dining room table looked very potluck style: none of the dishes matched and their contents were haphazard.

  Alisa put down Mr. Bennet and took Tucker through the dining room and into the kitchen. Everyone was in conversation, though Professor Callander looked up from the people she was talking to long enough to wave to them as they passed into the dining room. She stood in the living room next to a thin woman in an armchair with a half-inch growth of new hair sticking out all over her head.

  “Get food,” Alisa said. “The good stuff goes fast.”

  She led Tucker around the table pointing out the dishes that would be best. Tucker got a pop from a bin filled with ice and cans that was resting on the island between the kitchen and dining room, and looked around for a place to stand that wasn’t too close to a group of people locked in intense discussion. She and Alisa ended up in the sunroom, their drinks balanced on the deep window ledges, eating the quiche and fruit salad and pastries they’d snagged.

  The front door opened again and Tesh fell into the room, Cal on her heels. She scanned the guests and headed straight for Tucker and Alisa.

  “You will not believe,” she said as she reached them. Her light cheeks were flushed red and she was trying to catch her breath. Behind her, Cal shook his head.

  Tucker offered her the pop can and she took a quick sip while Cal started the story.

  “You know how Tesh’s place is just down the street from Lindy’s…”

  “Oh no,” Alisa said.

  “Oh yeah,” Cal responded.

  Tesh handed the can back to Tucker with a nod of thanks. “I came out a little early to sit on the step, you know, the sun,” she said. “And there was this big car in front of her place with a U-Haul trailer, and this yelling from the back. Lindy comes around the side and this man is dragging her by the arm and they’re both yelling. And this man, he’s older and he’s saying ‘How could you do this to me?’ and Lindy is shouting ‘She’s lying! She’s lying!’ and the man says ‘They have photos, they have proof, why couldn’t you be a normal person?’”

  “That’s so mean,” Alisa said.

  “I know, and he says worse and Lindy is crying but also yelling. That’s her father and she’s yelling about how it’s all his fault and he doesn’t understand. Then a woman comes out, short and kind of heavy in the middle, I think probably her mother, and she says something I couldn’t hear, but they stop yelling. The woman puts Lindy in the backseat of the car and she just sits there for a few minutes and watches them bring boxes and put them in the trailer.

  “Then Lindy gets out, while they’re in the house, and gets a box out of the back and throws it into the street so it breaks open and spills out books and papers and she starts kicking them farther into the street so papers are flying everywhere. She picks up a book and tears out the pages and flings them.

  “The mother comes out and puts her arm on Lindy’s shoulder and hugs her and Lindy’s crying, her shoulders are shaking so hard. The mother puts Lindy back into the backseat of the car and she slumps against the seat and the door and tucks her head down like she’s going to sleep.”

  Tesh paused and Cal said, “And then I drove up and Tesh got in and told me to drive like the wind, before Lindy or her parents saw us.”

  “That’s pretty messed up,” Tucker said. She couldn’t imagine Lindy tearing up books; her reverence for them was one of the aspects that had drawn Tucker to her in the first place.

  “You never met her parents?” Cal asked.

  “No, they live in like Kansas or something and she said they don’t like to travel. I guess they’re taking her home.”

  “I hope not,” Alisa said. “She needs help.”

  “After what she did to you?” Cal asked.

  “It’s better knowing she’s screwed up in the head somehow,” Alisa told him. “At first, I thought it was my fault and then I just hated her and I was so afraid, and I still thought maybe it was something about me.”

  Tucker put her arm around Alisa’s shoulders. “It wasn’t.”

  “I knew that rationally, but listening to you and hearing this, and just putting it all together—realizing she had to be messed up to do those things—that makes it totally real that it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t even her. She’s just sick somehow.”

  “I can’t let her off that easy,” Tucker said. “Sick or not, she never should have…If I never see her again, that’s fine by me.”

  “Same here,” Alisa said. “But it’s not like I want bad things to happen to her.”

  “You’re a saint,” Tesh told Alisa. “What do you think it is with her?”

  Tucker shook her head. “I’ve talked about her enough, you all can speculate when I’m not around.”

  “Is the quiche good?” Cal asked in a doggedly upbeat tone.

  “Fantastic. Go get some before it’s all demolished.”

  Cal and Tesh went toward the food. Tucker and Alisa returned their attention to their plates and for a few minutes ate in heavy silence. As much as Tucker wanted to never think about Lindy again, that was all she could think about right now. Tesh’s story burned in her mind and part of her reveled in the idea of Lindy suffering with her parents, while another part argued that even Lindy didn’t deserve that.

  The pro-suffering part was winning. She hoped it was a long and miserable drive back to Kansas and that Lindy got a crap job that gave her lots of time to think about what she’d done.

  She looked around, trying to get her mind off the topic and saw Vivien step out from the living room into the sunroom doorway and then stop in her tracks. Her face froze and she glanced around quickly. Probably wondering if she could run for it, Tucker thought. Then she set her shoulders and came the rest of the way into the room.

  “You must think I’m awful,” she said quietly.

  “Why?” Alisa asked.

  “I believed everything Lindy said about both of you.” The words came out haltingly and she couldn’t look up at either of them.

  Tucker felt a quick wave of vertigo and fear that she’d never be able to escape people try
ing to talk to her about Lindy. And she knew how easy it was to fall for Lindy’s stories.

  “It’s over now,” she said.

  Vivien looked up at her, met her eyes for a half-second and looked away again. “She told me you guys were splitting up,” she said. “Back in early October.”

  “Oh hell, that explains the ‘take a break’ bullshit,” Tucker said. She waved a hand. “You know what, I don’t care. Don’t tell me. It’s over and done and I don’t want to think about it.”

  “But I—”

  “Did all of this get you to change your fucked-up politics?” Tucker asked.

  “What fucked-up politics?”

  “The part where you think trans women are men, did that come from Lindy too?”

  “Uh, no, that comes from seeing all the incredible violence women are subject to all over the world.” Vivien straightened up and glared at Tucker. “Have you ever seen a twelve-year-old girl who was sold into sexual slavery? Take a look at that and tell me how important it is to fight about what transgender person gets to use the women’s rooms at Freytag.”

  “What you’re really saying is you don’t care if the university puts Ella in danger by telling her she’s supposed to use the men’s room because some other women are in danger too?” Tucker asked.

  “I just think we’re wasting resources on those kinds of issues when there are women being brutalized all over the world.”

  “No you don’t,” Alisa said. “You’re just squeaved out by it all and you think this justifies your discomfort. If Tucker’s inspired to help her trans sisters, you don’t get to tell her how to do feminism.”

  “Who’s telling whom how to do feminism?” The question came from Professor Callander who’d come up behind Vivien in the wide doorway. They all turned to look at her. Her face seemed rounder than when Tucker saw her last semester, but maybe that was because of the smile on it.