Dear Catherine,
I am writing to inform you of your near-perfect score on your Blake essay for my class. I do not usually email students personally, but since these essays are not returned in person and you merely see the results of your efforts on the online grade reports, I wanted to tell you that this essay really stood out from your peers. I could see the effort you had put into your study of Blake (no easy poet, either, with all the nuances in his work).
I strongly suggest you submit this piece (I have scanned my notes in the attached document—minor revisions, mostly grammatical) to the college’s English Literature Conference, which will occur in May. Deadlines, I believe, are in late February, giving you plenty of time to polish this piece and send it in for consideration. I think your chances are quite good, and the three top papers shared at the conference receive a monetary prize, I might add.
I hope you have a very restful holiday season, and again, well done!
Yours sincerely,
Professor Emily Graham
Catherine stared at the screen for several moments and then reread the message before opening the attachment. Her essay downloaded onto her computer, and she scrolled through it, noting the penciled comments in the margins, the two paragraphs at the end praising her, the oversized A+ on the cover page. Ninety-seven percent. She didn’t think she’d gotten a ninety-seven in anything before, in high school or college.
I can’t go back.
But I want to.
Why the hell do I want to?
Amber and essays and the leaves falling on the quad, late-night fries and groggy early-morning coffees and the library smelling of dust and oil and ink.
She’d lied to her mom. She had liked West Washington University. Loved it, in fact. She remembered hearing about some girl in her biology lecture who had transferred out in October and being baffled, wondering what had happened to make her leave.
But could she actually go back in just a few weeks? Lug her duffel bag into her room and walk to class and study in the library at three in the morning, stifling a yawn because it was the quiet floor and people would kill you for breathing loudly?
But he didn’t kill me.
What had happened to her, exactly? Would more come back to her? Could she handle it? What if it all came back, maybe in the middle of some freshman seminar and she stood up and screamed and had to run out of the lecture hall with two hundred people staring at the crazy girl who was her? What if she couldn’t handle it?
But what if she could? What if this thing that had happened to her…hadn’t? What if her mind was making up nightmares? What if she was blowing this whole thing out of proportion? She’d had too much to drink, passed out, woke up—
blood shower bruises
and she’d been scared, which was normal. Totally normal. So she’d freaked a little and made a big deal and—
Mom Mom pick up Mom
thought something bad had happened. But maybe she was just putting details in to fill the blackness, to make sense of everything. Like when she was seven and somehow convinced herself a monster lived in the downstairs coat closet. She’d made up this whole story about how it hid behind all the stuff they shoved in there and sometimes ate their shoes, which was why she’d lost the left red sneaker of her favorite pair. But of course it had all been in her head, trying to explain away the missing shoe and the creaks the house made at night. She created something that made sense to her, that scared her, yes, but not as much as not knowing.
She grabbed her cell phone off the nightstand. If she had to be alone with her thoughts another second, she was going to lose it.
Amber picked up on the third ring. “Thank God,” she said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Amber?” Catherine asked, relieved. “You’re awake?”
“No.” Amber’s eye roll was almost audible. “This is the Ghost of Christmas Past or whatever. Little Timmy died and I’m here to make you feel really bad about it.”
“Tiny Tim.”
“Oh, fuck off. Where have you even been?”
“I—” Catherine swallowed. “Do you remember the party last week? At Sigma…whatever?”
“I thought it was Delta. Wait, did something really happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. You said you were going to walk back. I…I said I’d come with you but you sort of waved me off and then I was talking to someone….Shit. Cordelia mentioned something as I was leaving, but then she shut up about it and told me to go away. I kept asking, too, and she just told me that nothing happened and then my Uber was there….Did something happen?” Amber asked again.
“I don’t know,” Catherine repeated.
“Well, what the hell do you know?” Amber, impatient, the opposite of ditzy, hating small talk and tact.
“I woke up,” Catherine said, her eyes closed. She could see the laptop’s glow against the back of her eyes, hear the rain against the roof as though it were trying to break through and reach her. “There was a guy—”
“Where?”
“The dorms.”
“Which one? Ours?”
“No. I don’t know which one. Not ours. I…I went outside. I didn’t…Maybe East Johnson, or the one next to it, I forget the name, you know they’re kind of grouped together—”
“Myers,” Amber said. “The one next to Johnson is Myers.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? The fuck, Catherine? Are you hurt? Who was the guy? What—”
“I don’t know!” It burst out of her, and with it, tears. “I don’t know, Amber, okay? I keep remembering stuff, but then I think I’m remembering it wrong. And I couldn’t see the guy, it was dark, but there was—I mean, maybe it was my period, but it hurt so I showered and fuck, you’re not supposed to shower but then Cordelia was there and she called campus police and it was this huge mess and I didn’t want it to be so I just said it was nothing and maybe it was—I don’t fucking know—and now I just want to transfer out because when I think of going back my whole body just freaks out and I can’t do it, Amber, I can’t—”
“Catherine.”
Her name made her suck in a breath, wipe her face. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” A pause. Catherine could almost hear Amber thinking on the other end. She wondered where Amber was, if she was in her room. Was it raining where she was, hours to the east, in Ellensburg?
“I’m guessing that whole after-finals campus cleanup wasn’t actually a thing then.”
“It was,” Catherine said. “But not for me. I just…I couldn’t drive. I just couldn’t.”
“Do you think you were raped?”
The word sliced into her ear, burrowed in her brain like it would never leave. Like she’d forever hear it in Amber’s cadence, in that exact sentence.
“Maybe.”
Pretty sure that’s the opposite of serious.
Amber blew out a breath. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I’m going to tell you, and you can ignore me and do whatever, okay? You have two choices here: report it or move on. Because if you stay in the middle you are going to lose your mind, okay? I say report it. It will suck majorly and maybe nothing will happen to the guy and people will hate you anyway, but at least you get to say what happened. What you remember. Or you do nothing—because I can’t make you report it, no one can, not even fucking Cordelia who I hate as much as anyone—and move on. Or try to. Convince yourself it was something different, something else. Or that it was one night of your life and it doesn’t define you and your life is made of hours and days of other, good things and you’re not going to let some asshole take away the things that come next.”
Amber’s words were a torrent washing over her, and her skin grew cold and goose-bumped in the ensuing silence.
“Amber,” she said slowly, “did�
�”
“Eight minutes. Two years ago. If I live to be eighty, that’s forty-two million, forty-eight thousand minutes. I tried to figure out the fraction, like what percentage that eight minutes was out of all my minutes, and the calculator literally gave me an error message.” A pause. “It wasn’t rape. I was at a gas station that got held up. I wanted to buy a Vitaminwater, trying to figure out what flavor, just standing there and debating between orange-mango and mixed berry like an idiot. I still think about it, seeing what was happening in the reflection of the door first, sort of fogged and blurry, but still clear enough to know what was happening. Have you ever had a gun pointed at you?”
“No.”
“It’s like…” An exhale of breath. “Like the person holding it has already killed you, even without pulling the trigger. Like the dying’s already started. Everything sort of narrows and falls away and there’s just you and this thing that can kill you and you think no as if that would help and you realize how fucking helpless you are. That’s what I remember most about it. The helplessness. Like I could literally not do one thing to change my fate. Thankfully, the guy just wanted money, and the cops came, like, a minute after he left. They tracked him down. But that’s how I know it was only eight minutes, from the time he entered the store to the time he left. I think the actual holdup was, like, three.”
“Three,” Catherine repeated.
“Yeah.”
She pressed the phone to her ear, hard. It was slick with tears. “Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah,” Amber said again. “I don’t tell that story a lot. It’s just…I don’t know. I think I get what it’s like. Sort of. I mean, it’s not the same, I know that. But I know how it feels when something huge and terrible happens and you can’t process it because it doesn’t even seem real, even though it was real and it was the absolute worst thing in the world. Like the world was one thing before and something totally different afterward. And nothing feels safe or even okay anymore. So I get it, how big a deal it is for you to tell me what happened.” A pause. “Or maybe I’m way out of line and you think I’m a total asshole and—”
“No,” Catherine said. “No, you’re not. Because it is like that, like the world isn’t…isn’t…” She struggled for a moment, then went on. “It’s weird. Like, I want to know more but I don’t. I think I won’t be able to handle it if I know more, but at the same time it sucks not knowing.”
“What do you want to do? Don’t think. Tell me.”
“I want for it not to have happened.”
“Nothing behind door number one. Would you care to try door number two?”
Despite herself, Catherine almost smiled. “I want to see you. I want for things to go back to normal.”
“Then don’t leave.”
Ugh, ignore me. Being dramatic. Not transferring.
?
I’m going to go back in Jan. Just freaked out. Being weird. Srry
Okay…
It’s bc you think it’s Fails College, isn’t it?
Haha no
Catherine put down her phone on the bathroom counter and towel-dried her hair. She’d been up until three in the morning thinking it over and had made her decision. Now it was eleven and she was clean and smelled like lavender soap. She’d washed and moisturized her face, tried to cover the bruise on her neck—purple before, now green and yellow—with makeup, brushed her teeth even though she wanted coffee. But that was fine. She’d wait.
Baby steps, she told herself, running a comb through her tangles and forcing herself not to wince. Like texting. Like showering. Like not wanting to die.
She was going to go downstairs and tell her mom she’d made a mistake. She didn’t want to transfer. She’d say whatever she had to in order to undo the worry she’d caused. She’d show her mom the email from her professor. She’d tell her dad about the conference, and he’d be proud and relieved and they could just pretend this whole fiasco hadn’t happened. It was her fault, really, that her parents were freaked out: calling her mom in tears right after, telling her she was so messed up she couldn’t even go back to school; her dad staring into the night, not able to even look her in the eye. She wanted to go back to before, to normalcy and peace and parents she hadn’t terrified out of their wits.
“Idiot,” she told her reflection, tugging hard at her tangles. “Idiot.”
She was going to blow-dry her hair and then bundle up in a warm coat. She was going to walk outside for at least ten minutes and breathe in the smell of the trees she was not trapped inside. She’d force herself to act like it was a week before, and no, she couldn’t make it not have happened, but she could make what had happened an error-message percentage of her life that didn’t completely decimate the rest of it.
You don’t get to win, she told the featureless shadow in her mind, a rage rising up, undoing her despair. I won’t let you.
* * *
—
She spent the day almost exactly as intended. It took nearly an hour on the living room couch with her parents to convince them she was fine, the Christmas tree sitting in the corner, its checkered skirt wrinkled, all the presents gone. She plucked at a throw pillow thread as she spoke, keeping her voice low and thoughtful but kind of vague, as though the idea of transferring had been a whim, and discarded just as quickly. Her father had been pleased about the conference, but her mother kept frowning, as though seeing right through her. Catherine stared back, innocently determined.
I’m fine. FINE.
She went for a walk, her hair fully dry now, her stomach still warm from coffee. It was raining, lightly, but she told herself it didn’t matter. She listened to music on her phone, the earbuds almost vibrating from the volume. But she found herself skipping songs, each one not quite right, too sad or too upbeat, and was every song in existence about love or breakups? All love-lust or aching sadness, like someone had died. She stabbed at the screen of her phone, trying to find something that fit, trying to ignore how cold she was getting, how stupid she felt.
She hadn’t been a virgin. Maybe that was a good thing, better. Less traumatic. She’d been with two guys before, one of them a boyfriend in her senior year of high school. Josh Tyler, a striker on the soccer team. She’d teased him about having two first names. Sweet, but absentminded—he’d crashed his bike into a car not once but twice because he “forgot” about stop signs. But when they kissed, he tasted like mint gum, his breath cold air against her lips, her tongue. She marveled at how he could make her whole body warm. One day second semester, they skipped school and went to his house. His bedroom. She tried to relax, but the room was too bright and quiet and she was hyperaware of the sound of their breathing. No condom, just birth control she’d been on since fourteen when her cramps were so bad she couldn’t walk upright. She thought about that when he pushed himself into her, and then shook her head, trying to feel something other than strange and slightly scared. It was amazing how turned on she got during everything else they’d done, how much she’d wanted more, but now that she had more she found she could have gone without it. He’d finished with a shudder while she’d looked over his shoulder to see a wet spot on the corner of his ceiling. He should look into that, she thought. Fix it with something.
The next time, an hour later, had been just as bad, but the third time, the following weekend, in his car in a darkened parking lot, had been much better. Maybe it was the risk of it, or the lack of light. Something. She’d never known her body to be so fickle.
He went to school in California. She’d looked him up online a couple of times. It hadn’t been a bad breakup, or a real breakup at all. Just a four-month relationship that had fizzled as the weather warmed and life moved on without him.
Then there had been another guy, Daniel, who she’d met at a Halloween party in October. Som
e random house on Progress Street. She had to find his last name on Instagram: Howard. What was with the two first names? They’d both been drunk, fumbling and laughing in an upstairs bedroom, tasting like cold, bad beer, and twice someone banged on the locked door, trying to get in, and they’d shaken with laughter, Daniel whispering, “Quiet, they might hear us,” and she’d yelled, “Occupied!” in a defiantly loud voice, like it was a bathroom stall or something. Fun. Stupid. They’d gone to her dorm after, Amber tactfully sidling out with barely a word, pillow in hand. He’d messaged her a few days later, asking her if she wanted to grab a drink sometime, but she and Amber had made a pact about no real boyfriends until at least second semester, so she’d said thanks but no thanks. That next week she’d found a single red flower (not a rose) outside their dorm room one morning (no note) and Amber had teased her about stalkers (dodged a bullet). But Catherine secretly thought it had been…sort of sweet.
She stopped walking three streets down from her house. It was biting cold, but she kept every muscle still, wanting to feel the ice-air like a punishment. What was wrong with her? She was like the worst stereotype of every college freshman who had ever existed. Blond with big boobs and tight yoga pants. She liked mixed drinks and oversugared coffee and had never gone a week without Starbucks or Panera. She didn’t think she’d ever read a classic novel. She liked flowers and reality shows and skinny jeans and turned down dating because she wanted to have fun and get wasted and chill out and—
You deserved it. Whatever happened to you that night. You deserved it.
“Shut up,” she muttered under her breath.
You were so easy that night, it was almost unfair. He probably looked at you and thought, pathetic—
Monsters Among Us Page 5