by Kiley Roache
She stops abruptly and exhales. “Sorry, I’m getting worked up. The point is talking about how abolishing frats like that will get rid of assault or misogyny, it’s...reductive. And kind of insulting.”
Stephanie glances toward the mirror, which she isn’t supposed to do. I frantically type a question—But if there’s a victim that thinks it will help...?—and Stephanie dutifully asks it.
“Then burn them fucking down.”
Chapter Eleven
Stephanie looks to the window for help, but my brain is short-circuiting.
Lily clears her throat. “You know what? Sorry, but are we done here?”
“Um...” Stephanie turns back to the mirror and so does Lily, and she looks like she’s screaming behind her glassy eyes.
“I just really...” Lily looks around for help, but the room is empty except for the unhelpful Stephanie. “I can’t keep talking about this.”
I stand too quickly, and my chair clatters to the floor behind me. I remember the computer and pull it toward me, typing frantically. I need to know if she’s okay, if he was caught. I need to help her.
But the girl is getting up from her chair and wiping tears from her eyes.
This stupid system is too slow. I drop the MacBook on the steel table, cross the room and push open the heavy door without thinking.
There’s the flutter of a blue dress at the end of the hall before it disappears behind a door marked “Women.”
I practically sprint down the hall, my patent leather flats slapping the floor. A door to my right flies open. It’s Stephanie, headed to get the next interviewee, like nothing happened.
Her eyes grow wide as she looks at me, the door swinging shut behind her. “You aren’t supposed to be out here.”
But I don’t stop.
“Come back!” she yells after me. But I’m already at the bathroom door.
Lily is braced over the sink, looking like she might be sick.
“Hi.”
“Hi?” She turns to take me in, her eyes scanning me, trying to figure out if she knows me.
“My name is Cassie Davis. I was, uh, behind the mirror.”
“Oh.” She stands up. “That’s a little...”
I swallow. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine, I, uh, I knew someone was back there. I just didn’t think it was someone so...” She gestures vaguely, a tissue in her hand.
I nod, although I have no idea what she means. Her eyebrows furrow. “Are you supposed to follow me into the bathroom?”
I step back. “Uh...probably not. I’m not here, like, officially.” I gesture behind me. “I can go if you want.” My fingers brush the doorknob.
“No.” She bites her lip. “Please, I just...need someone. If that’s okay. Not that—It’s just... I’m just—”
My hand drops from the knob. “No need to explain.”
The door swings open behind me. “Observer 2!” Stephanie says.
I step in front of her. “Will you just give us a—”
“No, you can’t.”
I look from her to Lily.
“It’s fine,” she says. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Just give me a second, okay?” I exhale. “Stephanie, can I speak to you in the hall?”
“I guess...”
I step forward, closing the door behind me to give Lily privacy. “Really?” I say through gritted teeth.
Stephanie is even more frazzled than I would have expected. “You’re not supposed to be out here. And you’re definitely not supposed to be talking to subjects outside the interviews.” She emphasizes every other word by waving her clipboard.
“She needs me.”
“It’s against all the rules. If you break the rules, you can’t keep being part of the study.”
“Then I quit,” I say without a pause.
“What? I’m—”
I head back into the room, swinging the door closed before I hear what Stephanie plans to do. I lean against the door so she can’t follow and turn back to Lily.
“I’m sorry,” I say. She just looks through me, so I keep talking. “And I’m sorry about earlier, about this whole thing—that was probably not easy to talk about.”
“You think?” Her voice is sharp.
I look down. I’m never good in situations like this. Alex is always better, with her bits of gritty wisdom, quotes from old songs and beat poetry.
“Are you okay?” I ask, not sure what else to do.
“No.” She licks her lips, wet with tears. “I mean, I am. I mean, I just don’t know.” She laughs manically and sits on the floor.
I reach for the paper towel dispenser and quickly hand her a piece. “So you don’t ruin your dress.”
She nods and takes it, slides it under her butt. I hand her another one, to wipe her face, then sit down beside her.
“He’s in jail now.” She dabs her eyes, looking up to the ceiling, a smudge of watery charcoal liner below her lashes. “My case was still being processed, whatever that means, when a girl walked in on him attacking her roommate. Since there was a witness, the case went pretty quickly.”
For a second there’s just the sound of a leaky faucet and two heartbeats.
She twists the paper towel in her hands. “Doesn’t really make it better, though.” She exhales and looks at me. But there’s nothing to say. “I mean it’s not—I try to not let it ruin my life, because then he’s hurt me twice, you know, and I won’t give him that. But sometimes when I talk about it, I still, you know, I get—” A tear slides down her bright red face. She swipes at it aggressively. “Shit, I’m crying again.”
I take her hands. She exhales, and it sounds jagged. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “You’re okay. Breathe.”
* * *
I can hear Madison Macey screaming through the receiver. I can’t make out everything, but I’ve heard enough snippets—“our investment,” “Cassandra,” “risk everything,” “basic academic procedure”—to get the idea.
Professor Price’s assistant sent me in midway through the call, at which point I was immediately keen to leave, but she gestured for me to wait. So here I sit in the chair in the corner and stare at my hands, trying to make myself as small as possible.
Professor Price gives one-word responses, and no indication of her opinion on the matter: “Yes.” “Sure.” “That’s reasonable.” “I see where you’re coming from.”
She doesn’t look over at me, instead just making brief notes or spinning in her chair and glancing out the big window. I turn back to my hands, studying my bracelet and chipped nail polish.
“All right, I’ll let her know. Thank you.” The phone snaps back into its cradle.
I look up. Professor Price is leaning back in her chair, still looking at the phone.
“Well, you’re in quite a bit of trouble.” She looks at me for the first time since I entered.
“I can expl—”
She waves her hand to silence me. “They’re right. The fact of the matter is you violated the rules of the study and risked the exposure of the entire project.”
“The project is meant to help people like her. She was distressed and I talked to her. How does that risk—”
“The interviews are meant to be held in a vacuum. Talking to subjects outside the interview is a betrayal of their trust.”
“But what happened to her didn’t happen in a vacuum. This isn’t data to her. It’s recounting the worst experience of her life!”
“But your actions almost made her pain in doing so useless. The Stevenson Fund just threatened to cancel the whole project. Then she would have told her story for nothing.”
“But isn’t this study, all this work, meant to help people? How can we put technical requirements ahead of the actual human beings this is su
pposed to be about?”
She sighs. “Professionally, I have to disagree with you. If we bend the rules, create gray areas, then we can’t trust our data or conclusions.” She pauses. “But personally, I understand why you did what you did.”
“I—” I don’t quite know what to say. “Thank you.”
“Don’t.” She purses her lips. “I defended you, but they’re still mad. To them, the personal interaction is the most important part, and they feel that if the interviews become a liability, they should be stopped. I talked them down before you came in, saying I would have major qualms about supporting the project if the entirety of the literature was a eighteen-year-old’s journal, and they agreed to let Stephanie continue the interviews, and you can watch them on video after hours.”
“What? So I can’t ask follow-up questions? I can’t interact with the subjects even from behind the window? That’s ridiculous. Can’t we call them back, ask again—”
“Cassandra, I don’t think you understand. They threatened to pull all the funding. You violated your contract. They could void your scholarship, end the whole study. It’s best for you to tread very carefully from this point on.”
Chapter Twelve
“Wake up, bitch! Wake up!”
I roll over, groggy. Although I usually don’t like to respond to derogatory names, the voice is so loud I don’t really have a choice. It’s coming from down the hall, and probably not directed at me, but still...
I’m reminded of when my little cousins used to say, “Hey, stupid!” and then laugh for ages when I’d turn around.
I sit up. The room is still dark; no light is coming through the windows yet.
“What the fuck?” Leighton says.
I reach for my phone and click the clock button: 4:30 a.m.
Leighton’s lamp clicks, and light pools into the room.
She pushes her sleeping mask up into her disheveled blond hair and looks at me with dazed eyes.
“Pledge! Pledge! Pledge!” The chanting continues down the hall.
“Ugh, oh my God, it’s the goddamn frats rolling people out,” she says.
“Rolling what?”
“C’mon, Morris, let’s gooooo!”
So it’s the football player down the hall. My stomach turns to knots. What if I haven’t been chosen for a frat? My life is so weird now.
“Oh my God, I forgot you didn’t know anyone in a frat here,” Leighton says, sliding out of bed. “When clubs and shit pick you for membership, they sneak into your dorm and wake you up superearly and kind of kidnap you.”
She walks over to our sink, getting herself a glass of water. “If it’s, like, chess club, they’ll come at eight and then just take you to get doughnuts or something, but the band wakes people up at four and then makes them take shots and run naked through campus. I hear the lit clubs make you go to class on acid.”
“What do frats do?”
She shrugs, yawning. “How the hell should I know? Do I look like I have a dick?”
Just then there’s a quiet knock at the door.
“Hello?” I say.
Leighton looks confused but reaches to unlock the door anyway, opening it slowly.
“Um, Cassie?” Marco peeks his head through the door.
“Yeah?”
He lets out a sigh of relief and steps farther into the room so he can actually see me.
“I’m, uh, supposed to roll you out. Put on your shoes and let’s go!” He says the second part a little louder, like he’s remembering how this is supposed to go.
I climb out of bed, looking around until I find my Converses under my desk. Leighton gapes at me, then at him, her properly raised, sorority girl socialite brain short-circuiting.
Marco stands there in the middle of my room, avoiding looking at me, taking in my pink bedding and Christmas lights as I slip on my shoes.
My face warms as I realize I’m wearing only booty shorts with “Warren” across the ass and a thin tank top with nothing underneath.
“Okay.” I look up. “I...also need to put on a bra.”
“Oh, uh, okay. I’ll—” He kind of spins awkwardly in a circle. “I’ll wait outside.”
He disappears into the hall, closing the door behind him.
I quickly root through my drawers for a simple nude bra, slipping it on under my shirt.
“What—what the—what was that?” Leighton stutters.
I readjust my shirt and turn around. “I’ll explain later. See ya!”
As soon as I’m out the door, Marco pushes me forward. “Let’s go!”
And that’s how the weirdest rollout in DTC history happened.
I stay tight on Marco’s heels as he runs down the three flights of stairs to the lobby of my dorm.
When we arrive, Morris is standing there in plaid boxers and flip-flops, along with three more actives I don’t recognize.
“Let’s go, pledge—let’s go!” one of them yells at me.
I pick up the pace but can’t help smiling.
They have us stand on the lawn in front of the dorm.
“Turn around!”
We face the building.
The world goes dark as one of the actives pulls a blindfold over my eyes. He grabs my arms like he’s planning to handcuff me and ties my hands behind my back.
The rope digs into my wrists as they spin me by my shoulders and then start leading me forward.
“Shit!”
I hear the unmistakable sound of someone hitting the ground.
“Get him up,” one of the actives growls.
“Uh, you need to step down here,” the active leading me says.
I step off the curb carefully.
“Someone call Peter and tell him we’re ready,” the same voice, clearly the leader, says.
Ready for what? I know it’s not worth asking. They won’t tell us.
I shiver.
Here’s the thing no one tells you about California, especially drought-ridden California: it’s like a desert, even the parts that aren’t technically deserts. Sure, it reaches a nice seventy degrees every day, and we shouldn’t complain. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get as cold as, say, forty degrees, at, I don’t know, four thirty in the fucking morning. Which, when you’re in shorts and a tank, is pretty damn cold.
Finally I hear a car approaching. The engine still running, it stops in front of us, the smell of burning gasoline mixing with the damp, cool smell of morning before the dawn.
I hear the sound of car doors opening, and then someone picks me up, carries me a few feet and throws me into what can only be the back of a van.
I’m lying on the floor—there doesn’t seem to be seats back here—and I can hear and feel other people already here.
Someone lands next to me with a considerable thud. Has to be Morris. It probably took all four of the actives to lift him.
The doors slam and the car takes off, screaming down the street as AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” blasts louder than I ever thought could be possible.
And let me just say that I’ve been to rock concerts and a number of raves with Alex and thought the volume was totally fine. I am eighteen, not eighty, and I do not complain about loud music.
But this is loud.
Whoever is driving is definitely speeding and likes to take turns hard, causing all of us to shift around, bumping into one another.
“Who else is here?” I don’t know if they hear me, and if they reply I can’t hear them over Brian Johnson’s vocals.
The song ends...and starts again.
Oh my God. Where are they taking us? And exactly how many four-minute intervals away is it?
The third time it’s annoying.
The sixth time I want to claw out my eardrums (but alas, my hands are tied).
The eighth
time I’m singing along to every word.
When we finally stop they’ve played the song easily ten times. The music cuts off and leaves my ears ringing.
I hear the door open and then, “Let’s go, pledge bitches!”
People start to push. I sit up and scooch forward on my butt till my feet are over the edge. I hop out, and my feet crunch on gravel. I sway for a second, then steady myself.
“Hurry the fuck up!”
I walk forward carefully, and someone bumps into my back, almost making me fall.
Actives are yelling at us, helpful guidance ranging from “Turn right and walk straight!” to “Follow the sound of the footsteps of the pledge bitch in front of you.” Oh, and then there’s my favorite: “Don’t fall, you asshole!”
The eternally helpful list of every vulgar insult in the English language continues.
We walk forward onto grass, which becomes progressively thicker, until the grass ends and I’m pretty sure we’re in a forest of some sort. Branches scratch my legs, and I pray I don’t walk into a tree. The ground starts to slant downward.
And then I hear a splashing sound.
Where the hell are we? We easily could’ve driven the thirty-plus minutes to Half Moon Bay, but that’s developed, I doubt there would be much forest. I guess we could be by a lake, but I can’t think of one that’s close enough, at least not in this drought. I mean, except for...
Oh my God. It occurs to me that we might still be on campus. That they may just have driven us in circles for forty minutes, blasting that godforsaken song.
Those insane geniuses.
“In the water!” someone yells.
We walk forward without question. What if they don’t tell us to stop? What if this is some sort of bizarre human sacrifice?
“Stop!” someone yells when I’m up to my knees in icy water. “Turn around.”
I do.
“All right, pledges! In a minute an active will hand you a beer and a key. When I say go, you must shotgun your beer. The last to finish goes for a swim. If you start early or take off your blindfold, you go for a swim. If you talk back, you go for a swim. Getting the picture?”