Blue Shade

                                         

                                         Blue Shade

                                                               By John Rogan

Frogs gurgled in a chorus. The night watch men traveling in a circle along the concrete path around the park had just passed. They drove a busted looking golf-cart with an orange light they could direct at people who were in the park past dark.  Vicki had passed the big sign saying the park closes at dusk without really looking at it. The crickets, large insects that never froze, beetles, and cicadas droned through the shadows, making the draping, cloaked trees seem active somehow in their motionless sentience. Bowing willows, Southern magnolias, and snaky thick Oak trees stood like black icebergs, the shadows of their branches crossing with the other interconnected, branching shadows, making layer after layer of impenetrable darkness. Against their darkened vibrance, like the trees were holding their breath but never exhaled, was the black and purple nighttime sky reflecting the lights of New Orleans, so only three or 4 stars were visible, a kind of shifting palette from dark black to light purple characterized the sky when Vicki really looked at it. The weak twinkle of the few stars, and the sliding splotches of purple into black, reminded Vicki of looking up into an oil slick on the pavement, rather than looking down into it.

The underwater-like humidity was becoming cool with no sun running through it. Vicki had slept all day. She woke up at 4 am, watched some Episodes of Seinfeld, she really liked Elaine, until weak, blue, dawn light began to spread on her window sill and she felt immensely tired.  Vicki fell into a deep long sleep, since she seemed to have trouble falling asleep at night. The New Orleans Summer heat still lingered in September and it was hard to go outside and move for long without becoming totally drenched in sweat during the day. So, with the air conditioning clicking coolly and constant the sunlight and the dorms receded into Bienvenue Street. She saw her old house, as she walked easily across the front lawn, her mom digging in the garden bed “Hi Vicki.” Vicki slept hard for hours, the daytime heat building as her room filled with cool layer after layer of air conditioning. Vicki stepped into the room where her parents watched television. It was small it held one chair for her Dad and a longer couch that her mother usually reclined on. The television was on but the noise was distant and distracted. Vicki looked at her father, but she did not see his face. Her mother rose and said: “Well I don’t believe in long goodbyes.” and so rising from the couch she hugged Vicki. Vicki did not step from the room, but her Mom and her Dad were gone and she was in the bathroom in the other part of the house, peeing into the toilet, as she thought about how that would be the last time she saw them for a while.

Vicki woke up with drool all over her bed and her neck was stiff from sleeping in a strange position, her body felt weighted. She tried to examine the dream as she still felt sleepy and heavy, but upon realizing where she was, her dorm room at Antioch University in New Orleans, the details and images of the dream quickly began to escape from her memory, so she was left to sort through the uneasy emotions that had charged the dream into its off-putting vividness. She really, really had to pee, but her body still felt languid and her thoughts shifted from a woken introspection of her present reality to a somnolent return to the slipping images of her now obfuscated dreams, so she did not want to get out of her bed. She realized she was hungry, she looked to her drawn shades and saw what she guessed was late afternoon sunlight simmering at the edges. She pictured kids crowding into lines at the cafeteria, and swinging her feet onto the cold, tile floor, the lethargy began to slowly lift from her limbs. She rose to her feet and quickly scampered over to the bathroom throwing herself onto the toilet seat as the pressure in her bladder released, she exhaled, thought of where she was and asked herself silently “Where Am I?”

Since the semester had started she had been sitting by herself after going thought the line at the Dining Hall. Today it felt like the ground was shaking or her head was vibrating and when she tried to make it still, she got a headache, and then she realized nothing was actually shaking, she was just lost. She had walked down a long hallway into a sign that read Fire Exit Only Alarm Will Sound then sighed and turned back. She kept getting lost. It seemed whenever she walked over 50 feet without consulting a map she looked around and recognized nothing. Her mind racing back into a frenzy to find something familiar. The cafeteria was the second left after the vending machines not the 3^rd. She came to the hallway leading into the Dining Hall and watched the strong sunlight setting weaker and weaker on the wild green plants curling out of the low humidity outside. The whole place seemed tropical compared to the dry crust of Wellesley, Dana Hall and Bienvenue Street. The hallway had windows that stretched from the floor then up high over Vicki’s head, she guessed ten, twelve feet. Before she stepped into the dining hall a neatly-dressed man asked: Hi Miss, could I interest you in getting a jump on your financial future. It all starts with good credit”. Vicki looked at the harried smile on his face then silently, slowly peered down over his suit and down to his dress shoes that were black, but reflected mostly white shine. She got the same feeling when the old guy at the post office in Wellesley asked if she had boyfriend yet, speaking a little too close, and staring for just a little too long, like he was excited about her - something that involved Vicki, but only in a way he could make some vague but creepy profit from her. She silently shuddered him off by fixing her eyebrows down. She barreled a cold stare at him. Confrontational animation came into her body as she stepped closer. Her arms went to her side and she stepped very close almost two inches from his chest, so he backed up, unsure what to say to the silent girl who was not saying anything to him, but seemed to hate him passionately. Vicki was quite tall for a girl her age and had grown even more so into her overly-mature and pleasingly amplified body. He nervously quipped “great rates.” Vicki’s mouth curled into a smile as white little drips of sweat broke out on his fore-head and she looked down at her breasts, the beginnings of her cleavage, and her just visible pink bra. Vicki then looked up from herself, like she was silently saying “oops.” Leaving him speechless, she glided into the Dining Hall invigorated from this victorious interaction after her day of slumber.

The Dining Hall was full of Kids as Vicki had predicted. There weren’t many open tables, she realized fatally. The Dining Hall had about 900 kids in it presently, mostly on-campus freshman and sophomores. The carpeting was thin and patterned throughout the room in a maroon and weak green color. The walls were a wood stain, deep brown but almost yellow. The floor to ceiling windows made up one whole wall that looked out onto the darkening campus.  Vicki found herself at the back of the line and made her way through the steaming masses of food, thanking the food-service worker with a hair-net and a blue uniform. Vicki really did mean to thank them. It looked terrible behind that counter, she could not even imagine being stuck back there.

Coming out of the line, she was holding her tray. Her brain started to vibrate and it felt like things were moving, but coming out of it and hearing individual conversations from kids, specific little words, someone laughing. She felt like they were looking at her. She was holding her tray and there was nowhere to put it down, people must notice how desperate she looked. Vicki began to turn red. When a table of boys laughed about something the Assistant coach had said after practice she was almost positive it was about the way she was awkwardly standing there holding her tray, not knowing anyone. She kept saying to herself “Vick, just calm down.” But it was getting faster and faster, but nothing was happening, and it seemed to be suffocating her down somewhere, unbearable any further, she changed directions and felt her stomach tighten into panic, then she went back the way she just walked looking for an empty table, but there were none. It was like it just kept building, some external pressure, like the rain storms here, the air getting wetter and wetter until you could not breathe then like a clap the air became water, deluging, Vicki noticed a face, and put her tray on the table and out of the storm finally, ducking under an awning, relief, the raindrops plopping harmlessly on the cover overhead. It was over. She sat down like she had been chased there.

Vicki peered around the room to make sure. She was not sure what she was making sure of, but she had to make sure. Alex, this absolutely beautiful blond girl Vicki had noticed in her introductory Literature course a couple days ago was the familiar face that caused Vicki to decide frantically and finally on this table. The contrast between Vicki and Alex is probably what intrigued them most about one another. Vicki was attractive in a dark-haired, light -skinned way, while Alex was attractive in a light-haired but dark-skinned skin way. They found each other curious. Alex had long tan legs, and blond and black hair that seemed to layer and ratio into a beautiful combination, the light blonde strands off-set by the contrasting dark strands gave her hair a natural and spontaneous elegance. Her  effervescent personality emanated out through her vivacious and compassionate smile, so Alex intoning in her sweet Memphis lilt, always seemed to be coming from somewhere sunny with a huge blue sky and long endless fields where animals grazed. “Hey! You’re in my intro to Literature class. Do you have the book for tonight’s reading?” Vicki had skipped class that day and Alex had not realized this. Vicki replied “ya.” Vicki had not been to the bookstore or gotten any of her books for her classes like most other kids had done. “Oh, they’re ordering more for the bookstore. They did not have it when I went.” Vicki watched Alex’s mouth move and what she said, but none of it registered, Vicki thought about coming upon her Dad late at night and saying good night to him, barely lifting his face from his newspaper, the reading light and its shade giving off a soft yellow light, and easily saying, but with no effort in relaying that Vicki was the most important thing in the world to him.

     “Good night, honey.”

     “Good night, Dad.”

      “Vicki, Vicki” the whole clamor of the Dining hall came rushing back in like the tight note of tinnitus ceasing, so all sounds and voices came back suddenly amplified. Vicki looked sick. Alex asked again, “So what do you think of Professor Holton.” Alex nervously asked one more time, wondering quietly if this girl had any sort of learning disabilities. Vicki looked over her shoulder again after thinking about her Dad, to make sure. And looking back at Alex, Vicki saw saw the pained expression in her face. Unsure of how she got so removed from the physical table she was sitting at, Vicki watched Alex and her friends returning, suddenly there and asking her to take part in something. Vicki was jolted by their sudden appearance, although they had just been politely sitting in front of Vicki the whole time. Vicki had to concentrate and compose herself. Alex and the other girls read the terrified emotions on Vicki’s face and they started to get scared. They could not understand why such an obviously friendly question was causing such problems for Vicki. Stumbling into a nervous answer she twisted her hair, then pulled on her ear, then put her hair behind her ear. Vicki mostly said a long “Ummmm” interspersed with questions she asked the girls, but already knew the answer to. So she cut the questions off, almost like talking to herself. “Ummmmm..Is he the one, no..Ummmm. it’s not a girl, no….ummmm….English…..Like a heavy guy…oh no, that’s Mr aaaa, whatever…..Ummmmmm..I don’t think I know him.” Vicki sealed the conclusion in mirthful smile and looked up. Alex and the three girls she sat with were silent, polite but puzzled. Alex followed up: “were you in class today?” Twirling her hair and looking around the Dining Hall, really trying to not make eye contact, Vicki replied: “Uhhh, no. I was feeling kind of off.” Then an idea hit her, so she dived in talking very quickly: “This place is so wet and sticky. Its very pretty, but it’s just wet and hot and I don’t know anyone.”

“Where are you from?” Alex asked.

“Massachusetts.” Vicki replied “Like just West of Boston.”

“Oh, cool.” Alex said and the other girls nodded in silent agreement.

Vicki realized they were trying to become her friend. And they were not asking her questions to like make fun of her like at Dana Hall.  In an instant this joy shot through her, confident now, with a peaceful happiness spreading over her mind, she spilled out the ramblings of her brain. Cyclical thoughts that had been spinning round and round, bouncing off the walls of her air-conditioned dorm. “It’s just I hated things back home, but you don’t realize how natural you are in that place, and everything seems new here, which is exciting, but it’s also like scary, like all the time, and as the time moves forward I feel like less of my old self, and I keep getting lost whenever I walk anywhere, and when I try to figure out who I am, like who I am becoming, as time moves forward, I’m like, oh my god, I have no idea what to do, but I know that’s what I have to do in order to become a new self in this new place, but everything is so new. I can’t figure stuff out. So, I keep getting upset and I’m not sure why.”

Alex and her three friends sat there processing it all and did not say anything for a while because they thought Vicki would continue, but she was done. Vicki was munching on her food and looking around the dining hall to avoid eye contact. Vicki turned her head back just as Alex was sure that Vicki was done. Alex was about to reply, Vicki shot forward: “I really just miss my parents.” The absence like jamming her finger in a door, revealing and expressing it now, the numb wore-off and the pain surged up skyward. Vicki was violently crying. Putting her hair behind her ears the tears just came down. She had been here a week and was terrified the whole time. She wanted to go back somewhere and just talk to her Mom about clothes. She felt very alone. Vicki had entered into some next stage of her life without realizing all the changes that would occur. The changes had been too fast. Everything was gone. Vicki felt like some sort of system or all-encompassing wave would carry her away from everything that was comfortable and everyone that loved her. She was powerless and pitiful against this strong current. Vicki pictured her mother alone somewhere. Vicki pictured her Dad trying to hold back tears because she was not around anymore. She saw her mother put the groceries on the kitchen table and ask if Vicki could grab the rest out of the backseat. Her mind was exhausted from going upstream. Vicki looked up unable to control the tears. She was going to just leave the table with her tray and most of her dinner still on it.

Alex reached across the table and touched Vicki’s arm which she first jumped at, Alex pulled back for one second. But Vicki nodded and they both understood this meant touching her would be okay. Taking Vicki’s hand Alex said: “Oh sweetie. You are very far away from home. Me and Sue and Emily and Lynn are all sick as dogs, we all come from outside Memphis, and all we’ve been doing…” She looked to the other girls astonished at her self-reflection, Alex continued essentially laughing at herself  as she said it: “Is talking about home and Memphis.” The other girls smiled, and laughed in a subdued way. Vicki’s tears had affected them and they did not laugh at her. They missed their parents too.

                                                            ***

                                                            ***

Everything went still, as soon as Alex put her hand on Vicki’s. The whole complex of lonely, dark shadows twisting throughout her thoughts seemed to brighten and Vicki was astonished they had even been there in the first place. Vicki didn’t really like to touch other people or hug. Her family had never really hugged or kissed one another. When she found someone coming into hug her, she smelt their body odor, the perfume, deodorant, or the cologne meant to mask the body odor, and it was too much, too close. Vicki always thought of all the internal organs being thrust up against her body and this instinctually made her recoil. Especially hugging someone of the same height, Vicki could not get over the fact that they were mashing their genitals together. It was gross. She could not help but feel that other guys liked to hug her so they could feel her boobs on their chest. But whenever she held back from a hug everyone thought she was being weird and she grew self-conscious, because hugging and embracing seemed to be the underlying sexual mode of expression running through the current of formal social relations. But it was not about sex, they told her, but Vicki had realized, especially as her body had developed, that everything was about sex: money, class, the truth, day-to-day human interactions - it all meant nothing if you never had access to physical beauty, and Vicki felt like people, even some women strangely, were out copping feels, and taking advantage when Vicki had not agreed to anything. Sex was something she understood and longed for the passionate release and the power, but being co-opted into hugs at the beginning and end of every social gathering was proving to be more taxing than she had realized. There was something weird there and it just made Vicki nervous. She felt groped instead of hugged.

But this was way different. A religious tranquility settled over Vicki, probably the more so for her aversion to human contact. She seldom hugged or embraced people outside of pounding away at a boy until she got an orgasm. So, this unwanted human contact, just Alex holding her hand, became so wanted, essential, like some sort of remedy that not only made Vicki feel immediately better, but clarified her muddled thoughts, making it so she could progress smoothly into the previously horrifying future. Vicki stopped crying and shaking and went into an almost stilled awe as Alex’s friendly Southern Lilt reassured her “My Mama said when she was in the army..” But the words were meaningless, sure they probably were comprised together to send a message of assurance, devoid of any body language, but Vicki was watching all the safety-inducing gestures and elegant movements moving in front of her gracefully coming together into a glowing aura of kindness like a television on mute. Vicki looked up into Alex’s healthy face, sweet smile, with a whitish blond strand of hair draping down over one eye. Alex pulled her hand back briefly. Vicki looked down at her lone hand then up at Alex waving her head side to side, so Vicki could see the layered density of her sun infused hair. Alex pulled the strand up and to the back of her dirty blond outline, her neck thin and tanned. She continued speaking as she took a black elastic from her wrist and all in one motion wrapped the elastic around twice with her hand, re-securing the ponytail neatly. And bringing her hands both back together and resting them effortlessly, no recoil, no nervous sweat, onto Vicki’s hand until Vicki heard: “Okay.” This was the only word Vicki had actually listened to, and it more signified that Alex’s nurturing speech was over. Vicki had felt like an opera singer up on a stage, the spotlight on her, the dark audience beyond unable to be seen. Just her and Alex together in the light. The girls began gathering their things. They had somewhere to go Vicki was picking up, so she focused and listened.

Alex and Sue and Emily and Lynn said : “We have to go to our floor meeting  to go over the rules with our RA.  But after I think we are going over to the Palms if you wanna come.” The Palms was one of the off-campus bars that would basically have no business whatsoever if they did not allow the student rich population of their surrounding neighborhood into their establishment to be served, so they posted bouncers at the door to check ID’s and make sure no high school kids got in. if you were over 18 you could come in and party.

“That’d be great.” Vicki said

“Bye Vicki.” They said in a chorus, one by one, giving her half little hugs while they stood and she remained seated. They didn’t say so, but the overall message was stay strong. And Vicki really liked how they touched, like they knew, so they were transferring it through feeling instead of useless words. She didn’t mind them touching her at all, she forgot they were touching her. They were just similar people in similar circumstances communicating through the proper sensual channels. Where words and understanding failed to breach the puzzle the best insight were this silly little embraces, but these embraces took on immense importance, all at once conquering all the negative expressions of language Vicki had been on the receiving end of since she could remember.  The girls walked away beaming that they had made another friend, this one from Massachusetts. They did not think Vicki was odd, everything was new and odd to them. None of them had ever met anyone from Massachusetts before.

            They told Vicki to meet them at 8 on the bench in front of Campion Hall. They waited, but they never saw Vicki, and no one had gotten her cell phone number, so they waited some more, but let down and feeling bad they realized she was probably not coming. They hoped she was not off somewhere crying by herself. A raucous group of Freshman boys passed them, heading in the direction of The Palms. “We’ll get her to come out this weekend.” Alex reasoned before they decided to depart and follow the group of boys.

             She did not want the loud voices of other people to shatter the peace Alex and her friends had laid over her. At 8 she walked across the street to Audubon Park. She waited on the sidewalk until she saw the golf cart with the searchlight pass in its rotation. The light receded onto the other side, so she stepped into the dark interior. She saw algae cover the swampy coves of water in its black, reflective shine. She looked up at Spanish moss draping down from the thick tree trunks, she swatted a huge mosquito off her face. She looked at her hand and it had blood on it. She wiped the blood on her pants hoping it was all hers and not somebody the mosquito had bit before her. She sat down on a wooden bench. The wood was chipped and weathered, but it had been painted over so many times it was almost a wood-paint composite material. Vicki thought the bench was a light green when she saw the carving by her hand “Sam And Tara forever” with a heart around it. It was carved really deep. Sam must have spent a long time carving it, Vicki imagined, maybe after Tara broke up with him, maybe they carved it together. Vicki wondered where Sam and Tara were now, together, apart, and looking up from the swampy earth she watched the soft purple shade to black in the sky. She thought for a second she saw a shooting star, but it was an airplane way up, probably going to Europe, Vicki thought. And although her dinner with Alex and her floormates had given Vicki confidence, along with an optimism about how things may turn out Okay for her in this new place. Her eye caught the softly floating twinkle against the purple shifting into black. She thought of someone flipping open a book in the plane up there so high in the sky. The passenger thinking about all that awaited them in Europe. With her all the way down here looking up at them. The torturing thought cycled back around. Everything and Everybody was always moving.

                                                                       ***

            It was Friday. Vicki had been at Antioch a week. She started taking the thick, plastic, dinnerware cups from the dining hall. Once she had one she thought of the cup sitting all by itself in her room, so she would steal another one and put it next to the one already in her room. The new cup had to be exactly opposite the other cup. She would spend close to an hour moving the cup from one spot to the next. Then she would start thinking about the 2 cups sitting there by themselves, so she would steal two more and make a square. Vicki would set it up symmetrically, so 2 cups would be reflecting the other 2 cups, like a mirror. She had 8 cups now, four reflecting four, perfectly aligned, still.

            Vicki woke up and saw the eight cups, and she saw how beautifully perfect they looked, but then she wished she would see her Dad for breakfast, but upon fully waking up she realized she was in New Orleans and she had no idea where he was. She figured it was Friday morning back home too, so he must be going to work. When she pictured her Dad alone in a big clog of  rush-hour traffic her stomach hurt. She thought of her Mom scolding her in some gossip to one of her friends, “You know Vicki never really fit into the family. It’s better she’s off doing her own thing.” She walked out into the common area and looked up at a local News station meteorologist giving the forecast. On the colored Map Vicki tried to see where Bienvenue street was. But it kept slipping behind the weatherman’s shoulder closest to the edge of the screen. Then the map shifted and Massachusetts was not on the screen. She saw Cuba very clearly. She ducked into a bathroom. Vicki pulled her hair back, retched over the toilet, stress burning through the lining of her stomach and throat. She threw up some yellowish stomach acid since she hadn’t eaten yet today.

She walked into the dining hall and sat down. She felt weak and tired from hunger, but she had no appetite. Vicki noticed a stack of the plastic thick dinnerware cups sitting lonely and unguarded by the soda machine. She looked around at all the other kids eating breakfast and realized none of them even knew she was here. Her mind kept wanting to be back to somewhere safe, revolving back and back with such a force that when the unfocused energy did not find that safety it seemed to boil up into panic in Vicki’s mind, haunting thoughts, linking and jumping into the next grave set of possibilities, making her unsure of her surroundings, so she began looking around making sure she was safe, like walking in a dark alley. Anxiety creeped into her restless stomach. The light skin on her face began to break out in a strip running from the bottom of her ear, across her cheeks, and ending in an inflamed cropping of clogged pores, bursting painfully red by her chin. She was used to the acne on her forehead and nose that seemed manageable, but since her parents had driven off these aching pimples began to flush, swell, scab and scar as she tried to pop them or scrub the skin with soap.

Vicki touched the pimples on her face, even though she knew she was not supposed to do that. It would just make it worse. But she wanted to feel the pain, like some low bacteria crawling in her face causing an uneasy ache below the skin. She wanted to call her mom, but her mom would just cut the conversation short and go tell her to make some friends.

Almost without thought, like she was physically pushed out of her seat. She went for the plastic dinner-ware cups, looking to see if anyone noticed, but not looking around so much as to look suspicious. No one was looking, so she figured she would grab the all she needed, after ten cups she realized this was going to be difficult to conceal. She made her way for the dining hall door holding the ten cups piled high like she was holding one cup of coffee. She passed other people looking at her as she emerged out of the dining hall and into the hallway with the floor to ceiling windows. She did not really want to see outside, so she stayed focus forward. Vicki dumped the 10 cups onto her bed. She saw the 8 lying perfect on the floor and immediately, all thoughts falling away, began to assemble another set of 8 cups like its reflection, directly next to it. After an hour and 55 minutes the 16 cups sat beautifully aligned on the floor, Vicki steeped back awed by their perfection. She decided to go for a walk. She felt a little restless, she’d been inside since waking up, so she figured it would be good to get out and burn off some energy. Maybe make her hungry. She put her shoes on, went down the elevator, past the kids always smoking on the bench in front of her dorm and down the street, heading for the big levees where she knew the Mississppi was. She walked down Freret Street, a street that was the divider between Antioch and the more prestigious and larger Kavane University. The road held all sorts of moving microcosms that would only be a reality on a college campus. Local workers cutting grass, a girl crying outside the pharmacy, a group of boys, still drunk form the night before or drunk again from this morning were heading off to get some food in a pack. A dark black man was blowing cut grass off the sidewalk with a loud blower, he stopped, nodded and smiled at Vicki. She waved a thank you.

She continued down Freret Street between the two large colleges. She kept going forward a couple more blocks past Frat houses and large, old houses that were weather-beaten, falling apart and divided into rooms where students lived with wild, unkempt lawns out front. Ahead of her she could hear the Mississippi River. She saw the levee rise like a small hill. She went through an intersection and up the snake-like swell of grass that rose up behind the restaurants, stoplights, and cars. Her legs dug into the incline, and the layer of clouds that had made the landscape seem unspectacular seemed to part, letting in some sun. Vicki reached the top of the Levee and felt the wind bristling over the top. She looked over the top, and it was like a bay, but moving forward. Thick, strong, choppy and grim its water like reflective stone coursing undeterred Southward. She saw the big freight ship up the river, and  mechanical cranes dotted the shore for offloading freight. Small fishing vessels stocked with their haul of crawfish puttered beneath the sky and the gargantuan tuffs of cloud being held in the height-less fathoms of blue. She sat down, crossing her legs beneath her, on the top of the levee and breathed in the breeze. She could only hear the wind whipping against her ear, no voices. She sat there for 20 minutes. She started to get hungry and she realized, along with throwing up that she had not eaten today.

            She thought of her mom saying “I don’t understand why you have to be so difficult all the time.” A lot of times on Saturday afternoons her Dad would take her to the movies, but she had no idea what she was going to do all weekend. She did not know anyone, and the social void of the weekend stretched before her like a blank nightmare. She uncrossed her legs, stood and wiped grass off her butt. Vicki headed back to the school, thinking of the unguarded stack of plastic dinnerware cups in the dining hall. She walked down the street she thought she had previously walked down. She figured she would look for Alex or any of the girls who had sat with her. Vicki thought how she should make some sort of present for Alex. She had really gotten her though a tough spot the other day by just talking to Vicki.  Alex had invited her out with her friends Vicki remembered with an anxious enthusiasm.

            Images of the Virgin Mary began to obsess Vicki since she had first seen a painting of Mary in a hallway where one of her classes had been. Antioch was a Catholic affiliated school, but had more of a liberal arts atmosphere than anything claustrophobically dogmatic. She grew increasingly unsure if she was walking back in the right direction. The ever-moving panic began to creep in. She looked up and saw the beige Stucco walls of a Catholic chapel.  She slid covertly into the small, run-down chapel. Vicki’s family was Jewish, but her parents only went to Temple for high-holidays to see people they knew. Vicki never had a Bat Mitzvah and religion was always far off. She became drawn to the contemplative resiliency of Mary, draped in blue, clutching rosary beads, looking forlornly for her son, a victim of cruel, immoral bureaucracy and ignorant bullying.   Vicki took a stack of laminated cards with prayers on the back and pictures of Mary in different paintings and poses. She did not like the ones of Jesus or Joseph, she did not like their beards. She looked over the sepulchral chapel, its darkened, cool interior only occupied by one other man praying meditatively to himslef. She saw the line of candles up by the altar. Her steps were spaced smoothly and quietly towards the front of the church.   Brass Organs, stained woodwork, white-gray marble and a dying Jesus loomed creating a penetrating awe in its aesthetics as she stepped forward. She dropped 37 cents from her pocket into the collection box by the altar and carefully lit one of the small candles, watching the flame transfer from the long wooden match to a small ball of light on the wick, until the flame filled, and started melting the wax. She made her way back down the aisle, her head held down, even her walking shoes making slight squeaking footsteps in the quiet. She felt another-worldly calm against the omnipresent stillness. A kind of sanctuary in its oppressive silence. She opened the thick wooden door to the chapel and felt the unrelenting sun, distant traffic noises and windy, humid air blast her back into where she was. She continued in the direction she thought Antioch was, the settled shadows cool pews, quiet marble, and flickering candles of the chapel flashing peacefully through her thoughts.

            She started to wonder why she had gotten those two extra cups when all she needed was 8. She thought of the 16 cups perfectly still together and the two odd ones on her bed. The two odd ones made her stomach hurt again. Would her Dad start going to see movies by himself or just sit home on Saturdays. Maybe he was glad Vicki was gone, so he could have his Saturday afternoons back. She walked down one street in the direction she thought she had come, but she entered into a neighborhood she did not recognize, so she had to go into a convenience store to ask directions to Antioch. The clerk had a gold tooth and responded to her question by saying: “You have beautiful eyes.” Folding into a threatened feeling of awkward fear, she kindly said “Thank You”, looking at the floor, “Ya, you go down to Jefferson Ave, 3 blocks from here then follow that about five or six blocks.”

“Thank you.” Vicki said politely but curtly. Her eyes still looking at the dirty tiles on the convenience store floor. The man asked:

“Do you want a lift there. I get off in an hour. Do you have a boyfriend?” The clerk had an ageless haggardness to him, but Vicki knew he was way older than her. She could not figure out what race he was.

            “No, thank you.” She intoned like an android, slow, emotionless. She heard the bell cling on her way out and she forgot what direction the clerk had said after fending off his creepy questions. Which way and how many to Jefferson? She walked in another direction until she was in another neighborhood she did not recognize. She went into a grocery store and asked an old woman at the cash register who told her she was close: “Antiawch, yeess you only 2 blocks away.” The pale heavy-set woman behind the cash register took the glasses off her thick neck and placed them on the bridge of her nose then turned to the large window and pointed: “if you just keep heading that way. No more than two blocks.”

Vicki got back onto campus just as the heat was beginning to climb into the afternoon. She was tired, dehydrated, and angry that such a simple thing as walking could become such an arduous, confusing task.

She wondered what her mother would make for dinner that night. She always made something special on Fridays, maybe since she was gone they would stop doing that. And not just the special meals like jalapeno mac and cheese would be gone for this Friday, but it would not come back the next Friday or the one after that or the one after that or the one after that stretching into an anonymous ether, where she knew no one, and no one knew her, like a ghost, like dying. It was gone and it would never come back. Vicki was trying to grasp something, but it just kept slipping, and when she felt lost, and unable to get a bearing on her new environment chaos seemed to ripple at the edges of her psyche. The constant unsteadiness created a lack of comfort, a grinding stress, so when she looked at the unfamiliar settings reflected by the sun in a slightly different light than the way the sun shone on things in Massachusetts. She wanted to go home. But everyone from home was at College, like her. She knew it would be bad if she went home. People did not do that in Wellesley, but she just wanted to go hang around Bienvenue street. Her Dilemma worked its way into a dead-end. She had no control.

A worker in the cafeteria saw Vicki methodically count out 14 plastic dinnerware cups, stack them in a pile, and head for the door. Again like she was casually carrying a towering cup of coffee. The worker got to the door and yelled “Hey!” to Vicki as she walked away through the hall of floor to ceiling windows. Vicki tuned and looked to her tower of cups realizing this was probably the issue. The worker said: “you can’t take all those cups.” Incredulous, holding his hands at his side, more puzzled than sincerely angry. Vicki turned and said flatly “Sir, I am sorry if this upsets you. Or if I am in some way devaluing who you are as a person, relating to your occupation I mean. I highly appreciate all the services the Dining hall offers, but I’m very sorry. I need all these.” Just as she finished speaking she turned 180 degrees and continued down the hallway of floor to ceiling windows. She passed around a corner and out of view of the dining hall employee who just stood there, his mouth open but speechless. He walked back into the Dining Hall shaking his head.

                                                            ***

            Vicki woke up Saturday afternoon unable to remember going to bed. She had felt at 2 am early Saturday morning like she was fully awake. She had walked outside her dorm, Biever Hall, and kids were drunkenly congregating on the bench outside, smoking cigarettes. Their slurred, loud, yelling and tangent-filled discourses were interspersed by over-emphasized, concealed then deflected feelings of angst, sadness, and joy. The heated angst kicked into a running fervor of jokes and conversations echoing off the dorms on the quad. Vicki sidled over to the affecting revelry. She just wanted to be close to people. She was not sure how to communicate, but if she could just be close, maybe. Vicki just stood on the edge and said nothing. She stood there for close to two minutes, until one boy, who was joking with another girl, lit a cigarette, looked at Vicki, made eye-contact, then looked away. The girl, already smoking, then looked at Vicki like she was trying not to be looking. Immediately a self-conscious paranoia jumped into her body with a halting presence. Unfocused hatred and anger came suddenly sprouting upward so that her face cringed. Vicki exhaled, exasperated by the constant dead-ends and the persecution when she tried to find an open way. The boy and the girl were talking, so she could not hear - she figured it was about her. She was wearing her pajamas. Vicki had forgotten that she had not taken a shower since her parents left. Vicki felt singled-out and unwelcome. The kids in the circle thought she was pretty, a little grungy, but pretty. They were waiting for her to say her name, introduce herself, but she just stood there. She looked kind of lost.

            Just as Vicki was physically pulling back. A boy named Jack Allen noticed her falling back and found her odd presence compelling. She had a dirty, baggy pink sweatshirt on that Vicki’s Mom had given her to wear: “for the Air-conditioning”, her mother had said, but she had not taken it off since her parents had left.  Vicki retreated up the ten steps that led to a landing of aggregate stone and concrete in front of the dorm entrance. She thought about going back inside, but was unsure. The kids on the smoking bench 20 feet away were able to see her dip under the fluorescent lights on the landing with mosquitoes and moths smacking into them. The night humming like the white outdoor light, just oppositely black, humid and alive with people messily trailing in from various bars. The light casted a circle of pale fluorescence that illuminated the grass, green and vital, then blurred color and outlines outside the circle, making color fade from grey to indistinguishable black. At the edge of the concentric halo of white, the shadows elongated and clumped. Dark masses where Vicki had to remember there was a tree or bush there in the daylight, now stood hooded black and immovable, with some insect clicking and humming from within the thick, leafy darkness. The twenty story dorm rooms stood on 3 sides of the quad, most of their windows black, except for the odd light left on or a set of decorative Christmas lights twinkling in a student’s room. The Antioch campus stretched away on the fourth side. It was cool since it was so late. She could not sleep. The humid night seemed to be waking her up even more. A sweating moisture stood in the air, making her sweatshirt uncomfortable and itchy. A vaporous curtain hung beyond the lighted circle, visible like an ultrafine mist of white just below the surface of the air. She moved onto the other side, down the landing, and down the ten steps on the other side. There was no bench on the other side, but there was also no people. She looked out into the quad, breathed in the humid air, the lack of fitting-in, feeling alone, and having no place to belong. ‘What was she gonna do?’ Vicki sighed and thought.

            Jack Allen had noticed as Vicki passed over the landing to the dorm. The white fluorescent light humming against the buzzing nighttime humidity, but he did not notice the night like Vicki was looking out into it. All he saw was Vicki’s black hair, ratty and long, trailing down her back against the soft, pink sweatshirt. Her hair was greasy, but since Jack had a buzzing high going - he lost count after eight or nine beers - the hair looked like it shimmered and shined in a dark elegance he only caught a momentary glimpse of. But trying to refocus his attention on the group he had gone out to the bars with, he realized that momentary glimpse was something he could not get over. The girl he had liked and been flirting with all night was now making out with his friend directly next to him on the bench, so Jack got up and went over to Vicki. She stood there staring out, consuming what she was looking at as if it was as vital as oxygen.

            “Hi,” Jack said and Vicki continued looking up, tracing the corners of one of the 20 story dorms up into the night, the lights of New Orleans reflecting off the city’s pavement, so the sky was painted with projections that looked like purple bruises on a person’s skin. Vicki thought someone said something to her, like a voice in a dream she woke up, and saw Jack standing there. She did not hear what he had said originally, if it was anything more than a Hi, so she took on the awkward guilt like she had been caught doing something. Looking down to the ground, swinging her arm across her chest. and interlocking it with the other arm held straight down along her side, she suddenly looked up and said, with her mouth hanging open after she said it: “What?”

            Starting fresh Jack lead in: “Hi my name is Jack. Do you live in Biever?” Like she was being interrupted out of something fully engaging, her eyes turned wide, shocked, and then controlling the panic she fixated her stare on Jack, looking from his shoes up to his face. This kind of strange detachment, like he was not even there held a curious authority for Jack. Who was this girl? Vicki wiped off her palm, worrying that it would be sweaty and stuck out her hand: “Hi my name is Victoria Heller.” Jack Nodded and lightly shook the thin, pale hand. Putting her hand back to her side, she was unsure what would happen next, so she swung her arm around back, grabbing the arm still straight along down the side, using the arm now to arch her lower back – “Stop slouching” her mother had said. This self-conscious, auto-reaction had the unintended effect of amplifying the size of Vicki’s breasts which were bra-less, and seemed to heave sensually upward to Jack, swelling larger, and snuggly creating pressure, as her chest squeezed then stretched the fibers of her light pink sweatshirt. Vicki’s dark, black hair hung down over her shoulders onto the light pink of her sweatshirt, now reflected in the humming vivacity of the white outdoor fluorescent light, with the restless black shadows stretching infinitely beyond its safe circle.

            “Cool. I live on the fourth floor. I’m from Kansas City. Missouri. It’s not in Kansas” he laughed. 

“Wow, Kansa City.”, her Northeast accent growling out into the sweet Southern night. She sounded just like her mother she thought despairingly. Giving it another shot, she made sure to elongate the syllables. “I am from Massachusetts. I live on the Eleventh floor.” She said slowly, proudly slipping into a smile. The tension, or whatever was going on seemed to be settling, and Jack felt relief. He almost nervously laughed, but caught himself, and instead smiled and exhaled.

            “Woa, Cool, Boston and the Red Sox.” He nodded. “Isn’t the Eleventh floor like private suites or whatever?”

            “Ya, I was really scared to live with a stranger. I know it’s weird.”

            “No, No” Jack jumped in to reassure. I’m going to have to change roommates. I am an English major who needs to read a lot and he is a music major who needs to practice a lot. So, after a week I can tell it’s not going to work out.” He said lightheartedly, but his roommates constant strumming on his bass guitar was why he went out and got so drunk tonight. It was really wearing on him.

            “Oh No!” Vicki exclaimed, commiserating. “That’s what I was afraid of.” Jack shook his head and rolled his eyes. Vicki laughed and trailed into her response:

“Ya, ya I’m from like 20 minutes West of Boston, crappy little town called Wellesley.”

“Nice.” He coolly said, “I saw you over there.” Jack nodded in the direction of the bench.

“Ya, I couldn’t really sleep. So, I just came down and I realized I don’t know anybody.” She laughed, leaning forward, playfully embarrassed, but really relieved to be out of her head - the thoughts spinning around easily now to Jack. She thought he was handsome and he was clearly very nice. “I think…” She looked back to the boy and girl who had made eye-contact with her then looked away. She noticed they were making out with each other. “Nevermind.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively and shook her head back and forth. Her hair messily waved in the air, making Jack feel a sense of urgency rise in himself.

“I have some beers up in my dorm. If you want to come up.”

“Oh, I don’t usually drink. I am going to try to go out with my Friend Alex tomorrow night, but I’ve just been staying in. A lot to adjust to with Orientation.”

“Ya, definitely. I could personally not wait for this week to be over. If you can’t tell I’ve had a few to re-lieve the pre-ssure.” He emphasized the second syllables in relieve and pressure, comically stretching them out. “Oh, you know Alex?” he continued.

“Ya, she’s my friend.”

“Like blonde. I think she’s from Memphis or Mississippi.”

“Right. I think she said Memphis. But ya that’s the one.”

“Oh cool, Ya Memphis. She’s cool.” Jack replied, not sure of what to talk about next.

“Ya.” Vicki said resolutely. She began looking Jack over again focusing on his nice, white sneakers, his beige khaki shorts, the thin, blue and black plaid, button-down shirt with a collar. He wore a white T-shirt underneath. Then up to his hair, messy in the front with a patch of dried, but wet-looking hair gel. As Vicki stared at Jack his mind began wondering to the bong in his room, and the little bowl-pack of weed sitting next to it. Growing nervous, drunk and tired as Vicki scanned him over, he excused himself: “I’m gonna head up to sleep. It was awesome meeting you Victoria from Massachusetts. I’ll talk to Alex and we should go do something tomorrow night. No more staying in by yourself, huh. You are way to pretty.” Adding the last part boldly, but smoothly.

Vicki was embarrassed into stillness and a great optimistic energy began to rise in her, naturally straightening her posture and lifting her chin upwards. Jack still stood there waiting to see how she would respond. It was beginning to look like she would not, so Jack began to head for the landing and the entrance to the dorm, but as soon as Vicki anticipated his movement away - a pressing matter seemed to erupt out of the humid air between them and she could not just let him walk away.

“Aww, thanks Jack. You’re sweet.” This time intentionally intoning her natural voice and accent, so he knew she meant it. Jack smiled, sleepily and added turning:

“Goodnight Victoria!” he said over his shoulder. As he climbed the steps onto the aggregate concrete landing. She yelled:

“Goodnight Jack!” Her accent honky and sharp, like her mother’s. Vicki winced at the sound of her voice, but put it at the back of her mind and pushed forward. “And by the way you can call me Vicki if you’d like!”

The white light was right over Jack, so there was a small shadow under him and several of his features, making him look strangely altered, filmy and distant, although he was more illuminated than anything else she could see.

In a deep voice he called over: “Goodnight Vicki.” Then disappeared into the door for Biever Hall. The drunken crowd from the smoking bench was dwindling, but the few left inhaling and exhaling stopped to look at Vicki yelling. She did not realize she was being so loud until it was silent again. She had a maniacal smile on her face that seemed to fill some sort of energy in her cheeks that rose, bunched and had the flitting unsteadiness of her stomach when she was nervous. But this was confidence, attraction and lust shooting through her blood up to her brain, pulsing and throbbing into future potentials. A boyfriend maybe. She stole into Biever Hall not wanting to look at anything else, but be alone and think about Jack. She pulled her sweatshirt over her finger and hit the button for the elevator.

Vicki always thought the buttons were dirty or the metal was too hard. She felt dirty when she touched them and the hard metal feeling made her upset, like the button pushed back at her when she pushed it in, and sent thoughts cycling around and around. She thought of the button crushing the little bones in her finger, the hard metal immovable, behind the plastic button, crushing, like the claustrophobic reality that seemed to be getting tighter and tighter, with less room for her own personal freedom to create a peaceful state of mind. Reality suffocated her, as it pushed back, and when she hit the elevator buttons, and they pushed back she saw all the pressure come crushing in - paralyzing her - burying her in confusion. While at the same time the crushing metal on her finger violently revealed how she could not control what existed, and what did exist was uncompromisingly there, and she did not belong to it. She would get angry and wanted to destroy whatever made it so she did not belong. The anger feeding off the stress jumped from one wronged situation from her past to the next. Face after face calling her weird through the years. Vicki just wanted to think of Jack, so when the elevator arrived, and the doors slowly slid open she walked in.  She slipped her sleeve over her finger then hit the button for the eleventh floor.

She came out of the elevator and went down the carpeted hallway to her room. She needed to go the bathroom, but she thought of the dirty tiles crooked and broken on this floor’s shared bathroom. She decided to pee in the Big Gatorade bottle in her room. She still went into the bathroom, not looking at the odd, slightly misaligned tiles. She opened the paper towel dispenser then took a full role out. She carried the large brown cylinder role of paper towels back to her dorm. It would be better there. The Gatorade bottle felt hot. She moved it back into the corner. The urine smell did not bother her as she screwed the wide-mouth cap back on, since it was hers it was not bad. Her attitude to the urine smell was so axiomatic it required no further exploration. The 32 plastic dinnerware cups looked beautiful, 16 reflecting 16. She got into bed and ate a Drake’s coffee cake and put the empty wrapper by the side of her bed. She began to visualize Jack and going out with him some time on a romantic date. Vicki had the date visualized step by step in her head.  Jack and chivalry swirled in a 3-D world sometime in Vicki’s future. Jack handed her some flowers and said you look lovely tonight. She fell asleep, awash in broken, aqueous scenes of Jack opening a car door for her, like waves rushing in. Jack whispered her name quietly to her, with fear rushing out to relief - to not be alone anymore. His presence was somewhere above the somersaulting tide. Jack’s cool Midwestern twang assuring her above the unceasing tumult, as wave after wave continued to fall and crash.

When Vicki woke up there were coffee cake crumbs in her sheets. She looked to her digital clock and could not believe it was 12:37. She remembered it was Saturday. The Sun was out and the air conditioning clanged cool through the vents. She was really horny, like a hot, intangible urgency burning between her hips, so she reclined onto her bed and fingered herself until she came.

                                                ***

            Vicki stacked the laminated cards together. At 4 pm she went to the Dining Hall. She sat down and ate 3 bowls of cereal quickly. She reclined in her chair and began waiting for Alex. By 5 she had not seen Alex, so she went outside the Dining Hall to the quad to see if she was hanging out there. She found her returning from eating tacos off-campus with some boys who had a car.

“Hey!” Alex shouted when She saw Vicki walking toward her, Alex recognized her, but forgot her name.

“Hey Alex! I just wanted to give you these.” Alex looked down at the neat stack of five cards. Vicki had around 20 more strewn about her dorm room. Alex flipped through the stack and saw the Virgin Mary draped in soft blue with her heart on fire as Mary pointed to the heart then held one hand in front like she was blessing the air. Another card had Mary on a cloud, holding lilies, a halo of light around her head, as she looked down, Vicki had assumed, on us all down here struggling on earth. Another had Mary looking up to the sky, cloaked in blue and clutching a child to her chest. On another card, Mary directly looked out from the card, her soft gaze meeting the gaze of the person examining the card with a border of pink roses. The last card had Mary clutching her hands together, a halo around her head, again shrouded in soft blue, looking up to clouds and angels.

Alex flipped through the cards and said: “Oh Wow! Are these for me?”

“Ya, I was just having a tough day the other day in the Dining Hall when you and Lynn and I forget the other girls’ names.”

“It was Sue and….Emily.” Alex stated trying to remember.

“It’s just been tough since….” Vicki’s voice cracked and to be honest she could not think of when it had not been tough. This last week just seemed particularly cruel, lonely and jarring. She did not understand why things had to be this way. Everybody moving, with her left somewhere - cut off again. It was late afternoon and it was incredibly hot; Vicki was sweating from just walking from the dining hall. She hated the humidity and all the bugs. She really just wanted to go home and watch an old movie with her Mom and Dad like they did on Saturday nights. She thought of the calming room with the big television back home, the cream walls, thick carpet, the long couch and the easy chair, with black and white scenes glowing off the walls, then her Dad making some joke, “Like that would really happen.”

“Dad!” She was telling her Dad to be quiet at the end of Casablanca. It was the good part and he always got bored and started joking and talking during the romantic scenes. Ingrid Bergman looked up into Humphrey Bogarts face as he clutched her arms, passion like a heart beating.

“Hey, Hey…it’s okay sweetie. Alex brought Vicki in for a hug. Vicki choked in some air, her breath vibrating and heaving, before settling into a slowing tremble, as Alex hugged her and gently patted her back, until Vicki’s body shook less, calmed, then still in the Peace that Alex gave.

“I’m Methodist.” Alex said coming out of the hug and looking down at the cards. Vicki had no idea what a Methodist was. Looking up, Alex kept her hand on Vicki’s shoulder. She brushed Vicki’s black, greasy hair behind the shoulder of the dirty pink sweatshirt then slid her arm down into Vicki’s hands. Alex brought her other arm together and both her hands were holding Vicki’s as they continued to speak. “My God, you don’t dye your hair at all? If you don’t mind me asking. I wish I could get mine this beautiful dark color.” Vicki smiled through the tears that had already fallen, drying now, she took her hand away to dry her face in the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Then she put her hands back with Alex’s. The red panic of hysteria, without a home, was flushing out of her face back to belonging here with Alex. Moored to something, Vicki felt stable, like a person again. The uncontrollable details slipping and sliding around the edges of her thoughts seemed to soften and slow.

“Thanks. That’s a really nice thing to say. Ya I’ve never dyed it. Vicki held her ratty hair in her hand, realizing now that it was terribly dirty. “I really like yours, such an amazing color of blonde” Vicki thoughtfully said holding strands of Alex’s hair between her thumb and her forefinger. “Oh, I’m not Catholic either. I just like the pictures. I really identify with what Mary had to go through. How awful it must have been. Can you imagine?”  Vicki said still feeling the warm, bristly texture of Alex’s lion colored hair. They both stood, opposite one another,  one hand in the other’s, with their other arm up, and playing with the hair they thought was oppositely beautiful to their own.

“My Dad would kill me if he found me with these.” Alex muttered down to the ground. Vicki grew uncomfortable as Alex got uncomfortable looking at the cards. Vicki got the sense she did not like the present. Alex saw Vicki’s face slipping back into the hysterical fear and she jumped in: “Thank You, so much Vicki. Ya, My Dad would go crazy if he doesn’t think we are loving Jesus the right way.” Alex laughed, putting the cards in her back pocket and bringing her hand back together into Vicki’s hands. Vicki laughed too, somewhat relieved. But Alex was secretly ashamed she was dishonoring her father, who she loved, by mocking him to this strange girl from Massachusetts. Alex did not know how to react to receiving religious cards as a present. The idea of a gift was nice, but kind of strange and unnecessary, so she momentarily grew resentful at Vicki for laughing, although Alex had made the joke.

She did not even really know Vicki compared to other people she had been partying with all week. Alex hazily remembered sitting with Vicki in the Dining Hall. It was the most important event of the week for Vicki. Now that this girl was giving Alex presents, and she was very pretty, Alex wanted to go out with Vicki, spend some time together and really get to know her. Alex wanted to find out what was the source of this beautiful, dark-haired, slighly odd, intense but bright persona. What made her tick? Alex was interested in other people like that. She wanted to be familiar with what Vicki thought was natural, if nothing else to get out of her own head and forget about Memphis and how much she missed home this weekend. Alex looked up at the light-skinned, and overly-sensitive charge of human energy she was holding hands with. She felt Vicki’s warm energy, vibrating off her like waves. Alex felt instinctually that there was very little space for calm in between the waves. They seemed to come very fast for Vicki. Alex imagined she could feel Vicki’s pulse, but she realized she was imagining it coming strong and constant through this girl’s hands. There was this undeterred energy radiating off of Vicki, wherever she went. It instinctually drew people’s attention, and made them curious about Vicki. She had experienced this energy often. The energy was correlated from a distance with intelligence or a natural competency, and as soon as Vicki did something that did not fit into what the curious individuals thought was intelligent or natural: the blowback could be harsh.  She usually scared people, with her outwardly aloof presentation offset by an inner, deeply thoughtful detachment, so the terms weird or strange arose, and Vicki, realizing she was upsetting people withdrew, then in her absence the idea would subtly, but definitely be presented that something was unnatural about her, and so vaguely, but surely, people reasoned, something inevitably horrible would befall that girl someday.

“Me and Sue were going to head over to the Palms then maybe over to Friars then we’ll find some party for later, hopefully a Kavane party. It’s Saturday after all. Meet me at the bench in front of Biever around 8, ok.” Vicki nodded. “You’ll be there right” Vicki nodded again, a smile creeping below her mouth, excitement bursting into where she now saw a place for herself. Vicki would be there, her mind wondered to the dirty, crooked tiles in her dorm’s shower, but she would be there - no matter what. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

“great. Thanks for the present. And I know this week has been tough. You gotta blow off some steam!” Alex laughed and Vicki laughed triumphantly with her, “And that’s just what we’re going to do tonight.”

                                                            ***

Vicki sat on the bench at 8, looking for Alex. She had shampooed and conditioned. She wore sandals into the shower and stood under the flow of water, careful to stay away from the crooked tiles. They were misaligned, there was dark areas of mold where it should have been white. Vicki imagined they put too much mortar adhesive on underneath, and she imagined some worker pushing the tile in, having the mortar smush out, as the tile set imperfectly, crooked, and the worker just said fuck it. People did not care. They allowed the slightest overseen mistake to cause so much despair. Assumptions, ignorance and their resulting actions ran their destructive course with no one held responsible, except for Vicki if she got upset about the misunderstanding, or even worse, criticized. She always got upset unnecessarily, people had told her, but there seemed to be some double standard where her own actions were strange or weird, while other people she considered mean, superficial and conniving were treated as normal, or even praised. When she cried out against this injustice it seemed to solidify the assumptions and stereotypes of being off, strange and overly-excitable. People had always told her to relax, calm down, but they never experienced how she was treated, and no one understood, or they seemed to not care enough to understand. 

She had just had to let the tiles be, crooked, misaligned and wrong, if she objected, people would just tell her to get over it. But it was the same idea. The same idea, as to what let people mistreat her so poorly. They did not comprehend in the moment they were making a mistake. They had not taken time to understand her. She was very nice, but weird, weird, weird kept coming up. Her teeth gritted into anger, as she stepped out of the shower. She looked back into the wet stall and saw the grime, the tiles bent and ugly, but she was the one who was bad because she thought the tiles were ugly. She would never escape how people viewed her. The tiles were the way things were. It was Vicki’s job to like those things that were so wrong, and she could not.

A boy offered her a cigarette and she said no thanks. She was wearing a nice skirt she had bought with her mother at a store on Newbury Street in Boston. The skirt came down about 4 inches above her knee, not too low, not too high, as her mother had said. She shaved her legs, but absolutely refused to do it in her dorm’s shared bathroom, so there was hair and shaving cream on the other side of her dorm, where her roommate would sleep, if she had one. The top of the skirt was a light blue, just below her breasts it turned into an aqua blue. The skirt was form-fitting, and Vicki’s form, now free from the big pink sweatshirt was more advanced and adult than many of her peers, just as it had been in High School.

Another boy offered her a cigarette and she said no thanks. Where was Alex? She moved her boobs into her bra, making sure there was a little cleavage, but not too much – Her mother’s prudent voice intoned again.  She wore black ballet flats she had bought at a store her Mother had taken her to at the Cambridge side galleria. She was comfortable wearing these, they looked good, she really wanted to show these Southerners some fashion, before she got some reputation for being strange and inept like back home. The ballet flats were formal, but not to formal as to come-off snobby, and she knew she could walk long distances in them somewhat comfortably. She was getting more and more nervous. It was only 8:02, but what if Alex did not show? Vicki reasoned she would just give up. But if Alex did not show up there would be a sense of relief, since she was incredibly anxious about what would happen tonight - where would they go, and if Alex did not show, if Vicki did not have to put herself out there to have experiences with other people, then she knew exactly what would be happening tonight. She wanted to experience things and people, and get out of her own head for a while, with the rapid thoughts coming one after another. She wanted to consider someone else and somewhere else besides what was going on inside her, and to do this she had to lose some control which she hated. She closed her eyes and tried to calm down. She swept strands of her dark brown hair behind her ear. She wore her hair down for the first time since being at Antioch. Her hair hung down over her shoulders and trailed down to her upper back. Vicki’s hair was so Brown many people considered it black, but Vicki usually corrected them saying it was dark brown. Vicki cut it so when her hair straggled down over her shoulders it usually terminated just above the slight cleavage she was showing. Although it would only be a week since she’d been here she felt bigger, fatter and heavier. Her hips seemed to squeeze out of the aqua blue lower-half of her skirt, her stomach was flat, The lanky slightness of her early years still clung thinly to her frame. while her breasts seemed to be similarly constrained in the upper sky blue color of her skirt. She was afraid the humidity was making the dress stick to her tighter than usual. Vicki kept looking to see if other people could see her nipples. She adjusted the Givenchy wallet in her underwear, so no one could see it from the outside. Another boy stopped and offered her a cigarette.

“I don’t want a fucking cigarette!”

“Sorry.” The boy said quietly sitting down and lighting up his own cigarette.

“No, I’m sorry.” Vicki said. The boy shrugged his shoulders and exhaled smoke.

“Where are you from.” The boy asked. Vicki was about to answer when she saw Alex. She stood up and approached Alex saying “Sorry I have to go.” Over her shoulder to the boy again. She was always apologizing- Sorry this - Sorry that - she cringed to herself.

“Holy Shit!” Alex exclaimed. “Holy f-ing, shit! You’re like a model, or a movie star.” Vicki smiled and turned red. It was really nice of Alex to say that, and she seemed to have some sort of amazed shock associated with seeing Vicki all dressed up. The positive attention made Vicki feel very confident.

“Oh my God. I cannot go out with you!” Vicki’s stomach sank into nausea, until she realized the next moment that Alex was only joking. “I need to do my hair, or like get a new dress. Oh my Goood.” Alex said one last time, drawing out the long vowel o in her southern accent that Vicki realized was somewhat similar to her mother’s Northeastern accent it, just instead of Gawd, high-pitched and nasally like her mother and herself, it was more like Goahd – the o sound unsharpened, but still some razor tone seeped through her accent held high in the air, emphasized before the sharp d. Alex thought she looked ugly next to Vicki and this was an unusual feeling for Alex. Alex imagined the rest of the night and saw with horror as guys asked her who her dark, beautiful and alluring friend was, before passing her by, because she looked plain and unspectacular. Alex got control of her jealousy and practically reasoned they could be a powerful team. Alex knew Southern boys and they liked tradition, sure they would stray and go for something exotic like Vicki, especially since the long-standing pressure of their families was now absent, so they were free to make their own mistakes, but Alex provided the stability a man looked for in a woman. Alex recalled her interactions with Vicki, and remembered Vicki had this odd air to her, like she was out of place. Alex knew that most things with boys was confidence, and Vicki seemed to not have any. She looked at Vicki in her beautiful skirt and realized the girl was slightly hunched, and she blew her bangs off her face, like she was uncomfortable having her beautiful hair down. Alex did not feel so threatened and jealous once she realized Vicki was nervously bouncing her foot up and down on the bench as she was showering her with comments. There seemed to be an uncertain fear, just below everyone of Vicki’s thank you’s. Alex decide she was going to help her out and educate her on how to get some boys. Growing excited, Alex saw them as some unstoppable team.

“Vick! You ready?! Is it okay if I call you Vick?”

“Sure.” Vicki shrugged her shoulders, really not caring at all. Then she straightened her back and stood up from the smoking bench. Alex appraised her tall, upright figure, and sighed.

“Jesus Fucking Christ you look beautiful.”

“You keep saying that, but you are like this blonde bombshell, with this Southern debutant thing going on, just a total babe.” Vicki said comfortably. The compliments had gave Vicki a confidence, and after she spoke the words she could not believe she said them. “I didn’t mean anything bad.”

“Thanks Vic.” Alex said actually relieved. She was unsure if she still looked good after Vicki rattled her usual poise. It all came rushing back. Alex always navigated complex social situations, giving herself to those who appreciated her, and staying away from those who would use her for their own gain. Alex was young and relatively inexperienced in life, but she had been through a lot, being one of the prettiest girls in her lonely little suburb outside of Memphis.

“Vicki. I love you. You are so cute. We are going to get you a man or men. This is freshman year after all.” Vicki laughed, embarrassed, not sure what to say, but softly smiling she quietly added to Alex:

“I’d like that.” Alex smiled back at her and without communicating they both knew tonight was going to be fun. They trusted each other and they were going into the future together. Vicki felt lucky. She began to think how great it was to be going out with friends, especially to a place she belonged. She looked forward to even just a small moment where she had an unimpeachable right to be there, and so not be isolated, powerless and gossiped over.

“Vick…Vicki!” Vicki looked to Alex.

“Sorry.” Vicki responded. “Just daydreaming.”

“No worries. Lynn and Sue are over at Friars, wanna head there?”

“Let’s go!” Vicki said in a quiet enthusiasm.

“I’m telling them I’m showing up with a model.” Alex said texting. Vicki smiled and looked down to the ground. They were walking off-campus. The sun was already down, and the set sun was giving off its last dying oranges up into the clouds. The sky was a darkening purple, as shadows began to appear, then pool outwards, coloring their presence, as they walked, with varying shades of diminishing light, as they moved through, then out of, then back into the refracted, fading, yellow-orange sunlight. Dusky darkness grew, took root, then dominated everywhere around them, as night fell black. The streetlights flickered on, but Vicki could not recall any comparable moment in her life, as bright as the one she was presently walking through.

                                                                        ***

Friars was packed with kids. They had an outdoor patio with wooden chairs and tables. What was Known as Frat Row was one block away in the direction of Kavane.  Alex and Vicki stood in the line out front. Alex was texting Lynn and Sue, letting them know she was here with Vicki. Vicki was really nervous and kept asking Alex questions. Vicki had never been in a bar before. She had been in restaurants that had bars in them, but she always just followed her parents to the dining area. This was like a real party bar, and Vicki looked up ahead of the line, apprehensively, as the music and voices coming out of the open windows got louder, as the line inched forward. Friars was more of an open patio, with a building attached, as opposed to a building. Vicki thought how everyone would be freezing all the time, if this structure stood in Boston. “Are we allowed in.” “I’m only 19.” “What kind of kids are there.” “Are there like older men.” “What if the cops come.” It was the same cheap Stucco color as the little chapel, and Vicki thought as Alex did not answer her repeated questions that it could have once been a somber little chapel, but now it was filled with intoxication, lust and loud voices yelling over loud music.

“Don’t worry. The owners pay off the cops, so they can make money. The only time cops come is when the owners don’t pay, and if the cops do come they just harass a couple frat boys. They always leave the girls alone.” Alex said this to Vicki like she was reading items off a menu.

“Wow. That’s crazy.” Vicki said. Her eyebrows rose in shock as she thought of all these shady back-hand deals. She saw dark alleys, groups of goony cops, and some bar owner who knew how things worked, but hated them anyways saying, “good evening fellas”, and handing them an envelope. One really could never be sure. What was truly going on was buried deep beneath the surface. Vicki was very intrigued by this hidden corruption. “How do they pay off the cops? Like do they give them actual money or let them have free beers? Where does the owner leave the money?  Does he put it in like a bank account, or leave it in a trash can at Audubon park? I assume they use cash so there’s no paper trail. But what if the cops say they never got the cash? It’s not like there’s a receipt. They could just keep asking and asking for more cash until the bar goes out of business.” Vicki was essentially talking to herself with the faint idea that Alex was listening. “Wow. This really is crazy.”

“Just show them your college ID or your driver’s license. Do you have those? They just want to make sure you are not a high school kid. I’m not sure how they do it, exactly. But the important part is we can get in.” Alex flashed a smile, as she flicked her Antioch University ID in the air towards Vicki.

“Should I show them both?” Vicki asked sorting through her small wallet.

“No, either or.” Alex shrugged. “Oh, nice wallet.” Alex complimented Vicki. “Is that Givenchy? I love their stuff. Do you have a purse?” Alex looked to Vicki’s hands and arms and could not see where this wallet had materialized from, she did not remember Vicki carrying any type of handbag and her skirt was beautifully tight, and so pocketless.

“Thanks!” Vicki replied. It was a tan-colored Givenchy Pandora Zip Wallet Vicki’s mother had given her as a birthday present last year. “Oh, I usually just put it in my underwear. In my crotch, you know between your butt and your vagina, so no one can see, ya know, so my dress looks good.” Vicki said like she was letting Alex in on one of her fashion secrets. She pulled her sky blue and aqua blue skirt down tight, smoothing any wrinkles or creases she saw, as she looked down.

“In your crotch! All night!” Alex started laughing into the air. Vicki nervously laughed, but she got the familiar dread inducing feeling of being laughed at, instead of laughing along. She stared at Alex intently as she cackled into the air. Her mouth closed tight, not smiling, and she started to watch Alex more closely. Alex stopped laughing in the face of Vicki’s indignant consternation, then acted like she had to check her phone although it was just the screen with the time on it.

“Oh, Vick. I have to tell Lynn  and Sue that one.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing. It just doesn’t bother you down there all night?”

“No.” Vicki said flatly. “It sometimes feels actually kind of nice.”

“Bahahha” Alex folded over, unable to help herself from laughing. “So, you just, what, like go into the bathroom, and put it there.” Alex asked still laughing. Alex was actually curious the way Vicki was about the cops.”

“Or I just slip it in.” Vicki said slightly, she realized that she had transgressed some rule and she didn’t really want to talk anymore. Alex exploded with laughter. Anything else she said would just get laughed at. She started to hunch her back and look around. Vicki hated being laughed at, and Alex did not realize that Vicki did not see it as a joke. This was how things started, Vicki knew, first little jokes concealed the resentment for Vicki’s strange quirks, until action had to be taken, and so for the good of the wider, more-normalized community, Vicki had to be harassed, until she either wised-up and started acting normal, or she could continue to act like her natural-self, but with no friends. Vicki hoped this would not replay as it had so many times, but Alex’s cavalier attitude towards mocking Vicki, showed an aggressive, competitive side to Alex’s personality. Vicki was aware from experience that these personality types were always the kind of people who humiliated her into isolation. Why? She had no idea. It was something about not being willing to compete, Vicki just wanted to be equitable friends, but she was always too open, and just too uncomfortable to be considered as an equal. So, like the side of Alex that was viciously revealing itself, she was always cruelly caught off-guard. Her innate compassion seemed to be viewed as some sort of weakness that through passive suggestion, would be used to let her know that she had not reached the same level as others. Vicki did not have everything as together as the other individual, in this sudden case, Alex. It usually revealed some bottomless insecurity within the individual trying to make Vicki into the inferior. If the individual went around singling out those who were inferior it gave off the impression that this individual had it all together, and so is superior, or at least not on Vicki’s lowly level, since they had the insight to root out those who were not in the same upper-class or top league as themselves. Vicki had found through experience this was a superficial, bullying tactic undertaken by someone who was very unsure if they belonged in this upper-class. Vicki would be the perfect foil to prove they belonged there. It was cruelly efficient and Vicki knew too well that it successfully worked. So, she grew quiet and decided to watch what Alex did, rather than listen to what she said.

“Isn’t it cold when you put it back in?” Alex jokingly asked. Vicki snarled

“no.”

Alex’s eyebrows rose like she was saying “Woa” or like “Can you believe this” Vicki did not think it was funny. Maybe she was not as savvy as Alex, but it was just a slight difference. It was nothing to humiliate someone over, Vicki thought bitterly. The tension between them rose as Alex stopped laughing, and she realized Vicki was annoyed. Vicki was getting so angry she wanted to cry, but she was not going to. People like Alex never realized they were not the only people who did these things to Vicki. It was like a movie that Vicki had seen the re-runs for over and over and over. It got boring, then the re-runs got so boring and consistently persistent from one individual and one environment to the next that she actually sought some escape from having this narrative replayed around her physical presence so repetitiously often. Alex thought it was just a funny joke, and if Vicki was just a little better-natured about it, the joke did not have to turn into this ugly thing that Vicki was making it out to be. I mean the girl was stashing her $350 designer wallet in her underwear.

“You could get piss on it. You like fart down there.” Alex said trying to get Vicki to think it was funny. But Vicki was shaken and withdrawing. Isolation, the only sure barrier between her and the never-ending negative narrative.

The bouncer held up his fingers like he was holding an invisible card up to Alex and Vicki who had become distracted from what was going on in the line. Alex handed over her Antioch University ID. The bouncer handed it back. Snapping out of her thoughts Vicki handed her Antioch University ID to the bouncer then added: “How do you guys give cops money? Straight cash right?” Vicki said looking over the open-air façade of the short building, with the patio and all the kids having conversations. The bouncer scowled: “What!?” he said almost yelling.

“Vick, oh my god, Vick!” Alex returned from walking into Friars, hooked her index finger and pulled Vicki by her top into the bar, saying to the bouncer: “She’s with me.” The bouncer shook his head. Vicki reacted over-defensively, as she did not understand what she was doing wrong, singled out again, she said indignantly, her mouth hanging open, “what!?”, as she was pulled into the bar by Alex.

                                                            ***

Alex realized she had made Vicki feel unwelcome. She knew girls like Vicki would just shut down if they felt threatened. There was something in Vicki’s past, Alex thought, that gave her this forlorn and dispirited uneasiness, along with this creeping intelligence where she was always gaging whether someone could be trusted or not. Alex had been like this when she had thought that her whole life would be like it was in her suburb outside Memphis. Alex shut down herself, back home, always angering someone for looking the way she did, or not acting how she should look, so Alex withdrew. Alex’s father got a restraining order against their mailman one Summer. The mailman kept leaving love notes for Alex, then flowers. Alex remembered how her father wanted to kill the mailman, but also partially blamed Alex’s developing body, “Stop dressing like Sofia Lauren and you won’t attract creeps like this.” Alex did not know who Sofia Lauren was, probably some old model or movie star that her father beat-off to. That Summer her father made her stay inside, no more sunning out in the yard. Alex’s skin got so pale people began to ask her if she was sick.

This was a fresh start, though. College. And she tried to relay this to Vicki.

“Vick.” She stopped Vicki after they got through the bouncer and were about to head to the bar to try and get the bartender’s attention. “You can be whoever you want here.” Vicki looked up at Alex, puzzled by her sincerity. “I didn’t mean to make fun of the way you store your wallet. It’s a beautiful wallet. What I’m trying to say is…. Your’re new here, it’s a fresh start, you can literally make up a whole new personality. Be yourself and own it.” ‘Own it’ was one of those phrases Alex’s Dad used all the time. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I’ve never put my wallet down there. I usually put it somewhere in my bra.” Alex closed her eyes like she was getting mad at herself for not expressing herself clearly. Vicki stood like an open audience, listening. “Just be yourself, and be confident in being yourself, because you are awesome.” Vicki’s face went from the confused frown she usually wore to cracked a smile. “Thanks”, Vicki sad visibly relieved. Vicki’s smile while it highlighted and complimented the features of her face seemed rigid, somewhat unnatural, like Vicki was forcing it ono her face. Alex thought that people who smiled like Vicki, usually spent a lot of time frowning, and she immediately had an immense amount of pity for her.

Alex put her arm around Vicki and gently pushed her forward as they stepped into the drunken chaos of the barroom. Alex knew you had to be loud and pretty to thrive in this environment. “Which one of you Frat boys wants to buy the first round of shots for me and my girl Vicki!” Vicki eyes opened-wide and she turned to Alex shocked at the extravagance of her outburst. Alex coyly smiled back  at Vicki.  Within 10 seconds boys were bringing shot glasses over to Vicki and Alex. Vicki was relieved, and she was really laughing hard now, as three or four shot glasses were held out for her. Vicki flattened her sky and aqua blue skirt, making sure there were no wrinkles. She nodded to a boy holding a shot of tequila and a lime. She took the shot he was holding, held it in her hand and he handed her the lime. He was kind of dark Italian-looking, a little short, maybe he was Spanish, there was a lot of Spanish down here, Vicki thought. The boy held one finger up in the air. He asked Vicki to extend her hand. Vicki looked back to Alex to see if she should extend your hand. Alex was bobbing her head yes, excited for Vicki. The boy put a small pile of salt on the back of Vicki’s hand. He then took the salt-shaker and put salt on the back of his own hand. He was instructing this all through quick, exaggerated motions, because the music and all the kids talking was so loud. The roar in the barroom made all speech dissipate disjointededly into the din of loud conversations, people trying to yell over one another, as well as yelling over the music. Everyone was trying to be heard, but no one could hear. They could see Vicki and her Aqua blue and Sky blue designer skirt. So, the boy, through body-language got Vicki squared up, ready: shot, lime, salt. Vicki stood there bashfully smiling. He looked at her like “you ready.” Vicki was not sure if she was, but she clinked the shot glass with his, lifted it into the air, and choked on what she thought was a small amount of liquid in the glass. It was like turpentine, she imagined, or some awful chemical. She had drank sips of wine before, but this was like a toxic fireball in her mouth. She panicked, as she held the alcohol in her cheeks, and let little gulps down her stomach. She felt like she was going to throw up. Her eyes were watering. She was waving her hand in the air. The boy was already sucking on his lime. Vicki swallowed the last of the horrible acidic poison. She felt like it could bubble up, and she would projectile vomit in front of everyone crowded around. She bit into the lime quickly, and immediately she felt less queasy, although her stomach was upset, she did not feel like she would throw up, if she just kept sucking on the lime.

The boy pointed to her hand and Vicki confusedly licked the salt off the back of her hand, like the boy was motioning her to. It tasted good. The salt made her stomach feel less upset. She put the lime back into her mouth, and walked over to Alex who was now standing with Lynn and Sue.

“Woo, Vick!” Alex was chanting up into the air, as she took Vicki’s empty shot glass and put it onto the bar with hers. Lynn and Sue came forward to hug Vicki at Alex’s urging. Vicki smiled at them showing the green lime-slice like a mouth guard.

The server brought over four beers in tall foamy glasses. Sue handed one to Vicki, “Abita, good stuff.” Sue crouched and yelled into Vicki’s ear. Vicki could not hear her, and nodded an ok, then mouthed thank you.

Alex knew how to talk loud enough to be heard in a bar, so she asked Vicki: “Vic, what should we toast to?” Vicki thought about what Alex had said after getting through the bouncer and she said:

“To new beginnings!” No one heard what she said, so Vicki had to lean in and yell it twice more before she was understood. Alex said:

             “That a girl! To new beginnings ladies.Wooo!” They clinked their beers together. Vicki took one sip, because she still felt queasy from the shot of tequila. Alex drained two-thirds of her beer then loudly burped. Lynn, Sue and Vicki all laughed. They were having a good time.

                                                            ***

Her stomach went from a painful kind of cramp to an ease. Like it was floating. She saw the yellowish-light in the bar elongate, then shorten - unfocused, then focus again. Vicki began running her hands over the tan stucco walls. She felt the rough, coarse texture. Boys kept giving her shots, and they stopped tasting so bad. She kind of felt like a ghost in her own body. Like she was experiencing things, but not really. She felt supremely powerful. She went up to a group of boys and tried to say a joke, but she could not remember anything when she walked up to them, so she just stood there, as they tried to engage her in conversation. She just nodded, then she took one of the beers out of the boys’ hands and began drinking it.

Vicki saw the hardwood bar countertop like a dark brown horizon. She sat in a wooden chair on the patio and talked to no one, until a boy holding a glass of wine asked her where she was from. She told the boy something, but she could not remember what. She knocked over an umbrella, and it was apparently attached to a table, so the table fell over very loudly. She looked at the wood trellis that hung over the patio and the English Ivy trailing wildly over her head. She went up behind a boy wearing baggy shorts, so the whole of his butt was exposed in his Ralph Lauren boxers. Vicki saw the boy and his stupid underwear, and before she realized it, she had pulled down the boys pants along with his underwear from behind. The boy came up to Vicki afterwards to ask what that was about. Vicki felt threatened so she spit in his face. Alex came over and asked if everything was ok. Another boy handed Vicki a shot and Alex tried to take it out of her hand. Vicki began wrestling with Alex, until they spilled the shot onto the floor. Vicki had to pee really bad.

It was like all the things that had been grinding her down into the ground were on the defensive now. Everyone and everything would feel how she felt, scared. She kicked open the door to the bathroom and told the girl who was patiently waiting to use it next to “move.” She spilt a beer on the countertop, and the bartender pointed at her and said she was cut off. Everyone looked at Vicki. Vicki saw them look, but felt nothing. She saw herself on top, like Cleopatra or Joan of Arc, a powerful warrior, beating the people who had previously trivialized her amazing existence into their rightful place. All she felt was a score-settling rage at the bartender for singling her out. She took the empty Abita glass and threw it at the bartender. There was a bunch of people grabbing her arm. She broke away, and fell over some patio furniture. Then she slipped on a wooden wall, and fell into a bed of flowers. She thought the flowers smelled amazing and she could not figure out what kind they were. Someone was pulling at her ankles. “Don’t let her lose her wallet. It’s in her underwear.”

“Fuck you, Alex.” But she was saying this to a pissed off man wearing a black shirt that said Security in white letters. He tried to grab her and she put her hand into his nose and pushed. She was walking in the bed of flowers, until she hit her head on the trellis of Englsih Ivy and fell down flatly into the bed. The pissed-off man tried to touch her legs to get her out of the raised garden bed that acted as a barrier between the patio and the sidewalk. She felt his hands and began slapping at them. Alex was beyond yelling “Vick!” somewhere. But Vicki was up again and the pissed-off man in the black shirt and the white Security letters was getting really angry and commanded her to come down. Vicki began uprooting the beautiful flowers and throwing them at the Security guard. Everyone on the patio started cheering. Vicki paced the raised garden bed triumphantly, tossing rooted bunches of flowers, like she was Miss America on a float. She imagined the whole scene, an adoring crowd. She even began to say “Thank you, Thank you.” Now the bouncer was on the sidewalk telling her to get down. Vicki was covered in dirt, and her skirt had slipped up to her hips, so everyone could see her underwear and the strange bulge of a wallet in them. Kids started to come over and crowd around. She realized she was trapped by the bouncer and the Security guy, so she jumped over the guy with Security shirt. And onto the unsuspecting heads of all the kids crowded around on the patio to watch the show. She thought it would be like crowd surfing, but she landed on one kid who hysterically tried to get her off of him, so Vicki was just about to fall head first onto the concrete patio, before the guy with black t-shirt and the white Security letters caught her head right before she hit the ground. She was being pushed and pulled to the exit. Her hair was getting pulled. She bit whoever’s skin was holding her. She heard a yell and lots of swearing, before she ran for the other side of the patio and leaped up onto the raised garden bed, then stepped gracefully down onto the sidewalk and ran, as her hip hit a parked car, deflecting her sideways, before she fell down on her back in the street. She was trying to get up, but it took so much effort. Every time she tried to rise she groaned, so she stopped. “Call the cops!” Alex was lifting Vicki off the road. “We have to go now! We have to go now!” Alex was carrying Vicki’s ballet flats.

“Everyone is just a bunch of pussies. They wouldn’t last two seconds of what I’ve been through.”

“Ok, Ok.” Alex was agreeing. Jack Allen appeared

“Jack!” Vicki yelled going over to hug him.

“We should take her home, but its only 10.” Vicki tripped over some roots to a tree, fell onto the ground, then got back up quickly saying: “All these fucking trees down here, fucking roots shoot up out of the ground.” When Jack looked at her quizzically she got right up in his face like she was actually challenging him to a fight: “Do you think I’m weird?” Jack put his hands in his air like no way.  They crossed over into Kavane and headed for The Palms. Alex tried to hold Vicki up so she did not seem so drunk,as they passed through the scrutiny of the bouncers. When they got into The Palms Sue gave Vicki a weird look and Vicki got in her face and asked: “What’s your problem Sue! Think I’m weird?” Vicki spit onto the floor and asked the bartender for a beer. He handed her the beer and nicely asked her: “Could you please not spit on the floor.”

“Fuck You.” Vicki responded trying her best to chug the beer. Her stomach. while usually upset. felt amazing right now. She felt like it was bottomless and she could keep pouring drink after drink into it. She was hungry. She realized she was really hungry and wanted some French fries, but she could not find any, so she kept drinking beers and downing the shots that were handed to her. Vicki was pulling Sue’s hair, then pushing it away. She was calling someone a bitch. She was telling someone “because you’re so fucking great, right, everything you do and think. Right. I have to do that to or there’s something wrong with me.” She really liked the bass in this song. This song was the apex of beauty in her life. She had destroyed all her enemies and now she danced on their dead bodies. Her elbow hit some girl and she started crying. Her boyfriend pushed Vicki. Vicki jumped towards the boy and began tearing at his face with her nails. He had to keep walking backwards. He held out his arm to protect his face, as he yelled, “ you fucking crazy bitch.” The boy disappeared. This song was amazing ,she slipped on some beer on the floor and fell into a group of kids. She laughed, as she twirled and fell. She saw all the unloving boyfriends and  jealous girls, who laughed at her throughout the years, powerless.

“Vick.Vick. Get up. Pull your skirt down.” Alex pulled Vicki off the floor

“What! Did you mock me because of all the things you told people about my wallet?”

“What? No, I didn’t tell anyone. Everyone can see it!”

“Whatever, Fuck you. No one gives me respect, so I don’t give out any. Fuck you.” She was saying fuck you to a lot of people. More than she could remember the faces of. More guys with the black t-shirts and white letters that said Security began to crowd around her. She was trying to dance. The music was really good. A Justin Timberlake song came on and she told everyone to get out her way.

I’m bring Sexy back. Them other boys don’t know how to act
I think you're special, what's behind your back?
So turn around and I'll pick up the slack.

            Vicki loved this song. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was the Security guys, so she spit at them and turned laughing.

Alex tried to talk to Vicki, but Vicki kept yelling back defensively, not really making any sense, just fighting back against whatever Alex was trying to say. “Shut up this is the best part”:

I’m bringing Sexy back
Them other fuckers don’t know how to act
Come let me make up for the things you lack

Right then, two big guys grabbed her by the arms and started moving her to the exit. “What’s your fucking problem?” She put her elbow up sharply and it hit one of the Security guys in the face. They started to pick up speed. The Security guys banged her roughly and clumsily through and out the front door. She was biting in the air like a rabid dog when they let go of her, and she immediately tried to return and come the way she had just been dragged, but there was a wall of big men shaking their head no. “Let me in. My friends are still in there.” Vicki started to cry. “my friends are in there. She charged the wall of Security guys and was immediately held safe. A Security guard holding each one of her shoulders and arms, so she could not hit them. She started screaming: “Help!”, and people inside the bar were looking out at the commotion. She called the security guard Niggers although only one of the five guarding the door from Vicki was black. “I’ll have the cops down here busting up you niggers.” She was pacing back and forth, puffing her chest, yelling for her friends, and calling the Security guards “filthy perverts” saying “I will have cops down here so fast and they always believe pretty white girls like me.” Vicki charged the wall again, but this time she tripped and stumbled before she got to them, so she fell into the Security guards and banged her forehead very hard on one of their knees. Alex came out with Jack and Lynn and Sue.

“We gotta get her out of here.” Vicki had a nebulous image of a dark sidewalk. Then she was in a white kitchen with people playing beer-pong. Everything in the kitchen was made of wood and there was a thick layer of white paint over all the cabinets. There was a naked light bulb illuminating the room.

Vicki felt sweat all over her body. She was very hot and she lifted her brownish-black hair up above her shoulders. Her skirt was wrinkled, dirt stains were smeared all over the front and back of the previously pristine aqua and sky blue fabric. Her skirt seemed to be on sideways, so that Vicki’s lower half was exposed, and her underwear kept slipping down. She started to hunch as she watched the boys playing beer pong. They told her she was at the Pike House on Frat Row. She threw up onto the checkered tiles of the floor. The pile of liquid vomit was a vivid unnatural brown in the white kitchen light, as acidic liquid kept splashing out of her mouth in little spurts. She felt much better. She didn’t know where the boys went, so she started chugging the shallow cups of beer set up in a triangle. She began to feel supreme again. “Fuck!” A boy said, looking at her and the puke. Vicki guzzled another red Solo cup of beer.

“You gave her a Xanax!” Alex was yelling at Jack.

“I thought it would calm her down. And she said she wanted it.”

“She’s fucking wasted. She’ll say anything.”

Vicki took her wallet out of her underwear, almost pulling her underwear completely off in the process, and pulling her underwear back up, she threw her wallet at Alex, then laughed. Vicki was trying to pull her skirt over her head “it’s really hot in here.” Alex kept trying to pull it down. Vicki started singing the slow, sultry song of a burlesque show: “Da, Na, Na, Na, Na”, smiling fiendishly, slowly singing out the Da’s and the Na’s not even a discernible song anymore. She kept trying to pull her skirt over her head. Alex finally gave up and let Vicki take her skirt off.  Alex tried to collect her expensive, black ballet flats as Vicki kicked them off.

“Fine Vicki! Have it your way! Have it your way! I don’t care anymore.” Alex walked away frustrated. Telling herself she did not care about Vicki, but then seconds later, she was wondering if Vicki was okay. Alex felt responsible for her. Alex brought her out. 

“Is this the chick who puked in the kitchen?” Vicki kicked, not the kid who said it, but the kid who had just, completely unaware, walked into the room.  She hit him in a wind-up soccer kick directly into his balls.

            “Get that fucking bitch out of here.” Vicki walked into a screen door. She could not figure out how to get through it, so she ripped the screen and stepped through.  She realized she was outside. The night air felt cool and refreshing at first, but then cold, like she was getting sick, so she stepped back in through the mangled screen. She took an empty glass and threw it up against the white-painted walls. Some girl was calling her “A bitch”, and she was pulling some girls shoulder strap on her tank-top, then slapping her in the face. “What the fuck is wrong with that girl!” A pretty red-haired girl said folding into tears. Vicki started to pee through her underwear and onto the floor.

            “Alex I don’t care. You gotta get her out of here.” Alex was trying to reason with Vicki. Vicki saw Alex’s beautiful lips, her cute little red tongue, and Vicki really wanted to chew something like gum or food. Vicki thrusted her face forward, and kissed Alex on the lips, then stuck her tongue in her mouth like she was trying to bring Alex’s tongue out.

            “Vicki!! Get off me!” Alex pushed Vicki back. “Jesus Fuckin Christ, Vicki.”

All the boys were cheering, so Vicki went back in for a second try, feeding off the positive attention. Alex pushed her back again. “You taste like throw-up.” All the boys laughed. Vicki turned and attacked the only boy not laughing or paying attention, he had a room in the house, but him and  a friend had taken mushrooms earlier in the night, and the kitchen, with Vicki in it, looked like a Kaleidoscope to him. “What are you laughing at?” She hissed to the boy with huge pupils. She jumped forward to attack him, and him, seeing something completely different, retreated into the hallway, where Vicki, who was sprinting after him, ran into an open closet door. She realized she hit her forehead hard, so she slumped onto the wall on the other side of the hallway then slid down to the floor and started to cry. “Everybody sucks.” Vicki said to someone picking her up off the floor. She dipped her long black hair in the pool of urine then whipped it over her head at a bunch of boys yelling, running and hiding behind things. She tried to do it a second time, but she slipped and fell over into the yellow puddle. She finally got all her clothes off. Vicki was bruised, dirty, sweaty, covered in her own urine and vomit, while marching around the house completely naked. She swung her bra and the sky and aqua blue dress over her head singing: “Da, Na, Na, Na Da, Na, Na.” She found a cabinet full of coffee mugs and began throwing them at the boys she had sprayed with urine.

            “Crazy Bitch.” One of the coffee cups hit their large screen television then a couple boys got up and started to try and stop Vicki. She hit one kid with a coffee cup. It deflected off his forearm and bounced, shattering off the ceiling. Alex brought a white bath robe.

            “Hey That’s mine.” Someone yelled

            “Shut up.” Alex yelled back.

            “Let go of me.” Vicki said.

            “No.” Alex said. Alex had the robe wrapped round Vicki like a straight-jacket.

            “Let me go.” Vicki said again. Vicki began to wildly contort under the robe.

            “Vicki!” Alex yelled. But Alex was falling over, trying to keep the robe on Vicki’s gyrating, naked body. Vicki took her forehead and head-butted Alex right in her nose, so bright crimson blood began to pour out, and Alex began to cry, as she let go of the robe. Vicki was still fighting against being in the robe although Alex had let go, so Viki swung wildly until she lost her balance, and falling sideways, her shoulder crashed through a kitchen window, shattering the glass and causing a deep cut on her skin that began to bleed profusely. Her blood was thinner because of the alcohol, and she watched it drip into a pool on the floor. She bent down and put her finger in the pool then her finger into her mouth. “Oooah!!” shot up like a chorus form the group of boys that was watching Vicki, and trying to get her out of their house.

            “We have fucking blood all over us. And Vicki won’t keep her clothes on. I don’t know where her skirt it is. If we go back on campus and get caught for underage drinking we could get expelled.” Alex said wiping tears off her eyes, her voice modified like she had a bad cold. There were tissues she had to keep replacing in each nostril. There was a pile of bloody folded tissues in front of her.

            “She’s bleeding like a fucking stuck pig. If we have to bring her to the hospital. We’re fucked.” They tried to get Vicki to hold still, so they could look at the cut on her shoulder, but she just elbowed and pushed, smattering blood everywhere.

            “Alex who is this chick.”

            “She told me she was from Massachusetts.” Jack said blankly. Jack handed her another Xanax. Alex started yelling at Jack again. The boys by the t.v. were smoking a blunt and they called the naked, bleeding girl over, “It will mellow her out!” Like she was some ultra-cautious, nocturnal animal approaching a trash can, she took the blunt they were smoking and slightly puffed on it. The boys were watching the blood drip onto the floor in horror. Vicki exhaled. It was the first time she ever smoked, and sucking on the dirty, moist end had felt good to her mouth. She realized, after she exhaled, she had been sucking for a long time, and a giant cloud came out of her mouth and lungs, and she coughed down into the floor, blood dripping from her shoulder and collecting in a reflective- filmy-red pool.

            “She’s gonna need an ambulance. Fuck”

            She turned to look who was talking about her negatively. All the experiences she had been through crushed together into an aggressive, feverish drive to push back, for violence, so they could see - what she suffered through in the lonely hallways of her mind. She wanted to affect others and transmit to them how negative all her experiences had been. She began to get hot, so she lifted her blackish-brown hair over her head - soaked in urine and blood. Being the constant object of charged hatred, like a weight on her, and the pressure, pushed onto her so hard, so that it had to be released onto the closest person, like a constant, chaotic energy spilling out of her. She saw the whole world like some antagonist, an oppressive body-less energy set up to destroy her wherever she went. She always had to fight. She felt violence and conflict had to become a part of her, as people continued drawing their negative assumptions out of her natural identity. If she did not fight she would be crushed and destroyed, so she had to try and destroy things first. It was overwhelming, so she made things overwhelming for other people. Yellow spots blipped in front of her vision.

            “Do you want to sit down. you don’t look so good. Let us look at that cut. Bandage it up.” The boys: drunk, stoned and now with an incredible story to tell everyone started to feel bad for Vicki. She was obviously hurting somewhere beneath, deep down, in order to act this way, and while no one said this, everyone thought it.

            “I think we should call an ambulance.” Alex was upset and yelling somewhere in another room. The boys laid out a plastic trash bag on the couch and got her to sit down. She was dizzy and weak from the alcohol, the Xanax,  the weed, an empty stomach, loss of blood, and dehydration. She did not fight them, because the weed mixing with all her weakness now upset her stomach, and slouching forward on the couch, holding her brownish-black hair in a ball above her head, she bent forward, vomited, then fell forward off the couch. The boys tried to get her up, but she was completely unconscious.

            “Alex, your girls out.”

            “What!” Alex screamed. She walked into the room and saw the pool of blood, vomit and Vicki crumpled on the floor naked.

            “Ok We have to take her to a hospital. Either someone drives or I have to call an ambulance.”

            “There is no way an ambulance is coming to this address over a girl who drank too much.” Jack piped up behind Alex.

            “So what the fuck are we gonna do Jack? Let the girl die here.”

            “Fuckin Christ. Alright we’re going to carry her out. And once we’re outside like a block away.”

            “I’m calling now.” Alex said determined. Phone out and up to her ear.

            “If you say anything about Pike House. I swear. Tell them your on Kavane, maybe Antioch won’t hear about it then” They carried Vicki out of Pike House. Her dead weight made Alex upset, like she was actually dead. They carried her across the street, scanning for cops or campus security, and placed her next to the sidewalk, just over the Antioch- Kavane line, but in Kavane. Jack volunteered to wait with Alex, as the rest of the boys ran across the street back to their house.

            “Could you please hurry.” Alex hung up the phone and looked gravely at Jack, “They are on their way.” They both looked down at Vicki, wrapped in a white bathrobe with a big bloodstain on it. They could see she was breathing. She looked so peaceful, after causing so much turbulence. Jack did not say anything. Alex exhaled through her mouth. She dabbed her aching nose with tissues that were covered in dried blood, “We are going to get in so much trouble for this.” Jack was starting to wonder if he had to stay for when the ambulance came, and they started taking down names. Jack looked at the girl quietly unconscious on the ground before them, like a sleeping baby. And like he was talking to himself, he added:

            “It was like a hurricane.” Alex nodded, as she removed a blood-soaked Kleenex from her right nostril. She blew her nose, so different shades of blood came out. Then she stuck a clean tissue into her right nostril again.

            “What a fucking night.” She honked through the Kleenex.

                                                            ***

                                                           

            That Monday Jack, Alex and Vicki had to appear at an Administrative hearing in the Student Affairs Office. It was held in a small conference-style room with large windows that looked out onto the green grass and the old Gothic buildings of the campus. Dr. Stark, the Director of Student Affairs, lead the proceedings, while one other Counselor from Student Affairs sat in as a witness.  Jack, Alex, and Vicki were charged with violating the Student Code of Conduct - a long booklet they had signed, before being able to move into their dorms in Biever Hall.

            There was always a rush of these at the start of every semester, particularly amongst freshmen, and Dr. Stark, while he felt the proceedings were crucial and necessary to maintaining a safe atmosphere at the University, hated doing them.

            “Any student called to an administrative hearing has a right to give testimony or present evidence to defend themselves. So I will ask now, before we proceed: Jonathon Allen would you like to testify on your behalf or present any evidence concerning the charges this hearing has been called to address?”

            “Me and Alex.”

“You cannot speak on behalf of another student.” Dr. Stark interrupted Jack.

“We..” Dr. Stark narrowed his eyebrows at Jack. “I just did not want Vicki to get hurt.” Jack said frankly.

“And that is all?” Dr. Stark questioned Jack.

“Yes.” Jack Stoically replied.

“Very Well. Your testimony has been recorded.” Dr. Stark nodded to the other Student Affairs counselor in the room. “Alexandra Corbell, would you like to testify or present evidence on your behalf in relation to the charges this hearing has been called to address?”

“I just wanted to make sure Vicki was Ok.” Alex said in a melancholic flatness.

“And that is all?” Dr. Stark questioned Alex. She quietly nodded yes. “Could you please reply in the affirmative or the negative, Ms. Corbell.

“Yes. That is all.” Alex finished.

“Very Good. Your testimony has been recorded.” Dr. Stark said. “And Victoria Heller would you like to testify or present evidence on your behalf in relation to the charges this hearing has been called to address?”

“I plead the fifth.” Vicki said, not really taking the proceedings seriously. She felt that it was unfair she was being put on trial for drinking too much, and tapping into this deflection of personal responsibility she added. “Many people urged and then aided in my alcohol consumption on Saturday Night.” Dr. Stark put his hand up to his forehead.

“Ms. Heller. Are you invoking your 5^th amendment Constitutional right to not incriminate yourself or are you testifying that others made you consume alcohol underage. You are 18 years old. The drinking age is 21 I remind you.”

“I don’t usually drink. A lot of people at this school made it so I had to.” Vicki felt victimized again, but of course she was at fault. She grew angry and rolled her eyes at the unfairness of living a life where she was always the one taking all the blame. “Friars and The Palms are illegally serving underage people, and that is not my fault. My opinion is that the attitude and environment of this place made it very easy for me to drink to the point where I hurt myself and others. I take responsibility for my own actions, but it did feel like alcohol and drugs were being pushed on me throughout the night.”

“Could you comment on the types of drugs you feel were, in your words, pushed on you.”

“Someone gave me a pill, well actually two pills. I don’t know what kind. Like a prescription pill.” Jack squirmed in his seat, and then he thought that he looked guilty, so he tried to show no reaction.

“Do you know the name of this individual who gave you these pills.” Jack’s heart started beating fast.

“I can’t remember.” Vicki quickly said. Dr. Stark waited for her to continue. Vicki stayed silent, although she wanted to go off on a big rant against everyone who had kept urging her to go out and party, and now she was being blamed for it. Vicki did not remember most of Saturday night. Her memory of the night was fragmentary, but after they left Friars it became an impenetrable black spot she could not reconcile with other people’s accounts of her own actions, besides the bumps, bruises, cuts, aches and scrapes, along with the stinging pain in her throat from when they had pumped her stomach at the hospital. These marks of physical pain seemed to be the only evidence to Vicki that people were telling the truth when she was told she was acting violent and physically attacking people on Saturday night.

“Is that all you have to say.” Dr. Stark asked Vicki. She felt if she went off on her rant she would open herself up to further unflattering questions.

“Yes that is all I have to say.” Vicki said choicely.

“Very Well. Your Testimony has been recorded.” Dr. Stark nodded to the other Student affairs counselor then continued. “This hearing is being called to decide how to properly address a breach in The Student Code of Conduct. The following incidents which were reported to Antioch University Security offices at 1:22 am from The University Medical Center. Sunday morning September the 10^th 2007 include the following charges: Underage consumption of Alcohol on School grounds, Underage intoxication on school grounds, assault on an individual, in this case individuals. The University is still conducting an investigation into the property damage charges brought by the owners of The Friars Bar and Restaurant and The Palms. Antioch University Campus Security and Kavane University Campus Security along with the New Orleans Police Department are also investigating claims of Five assaults: Two against Security personnel at Friars and The Palms, one from a student at Kavane University, and two from Students at Antioch University. While the conclusions of these investigations are still unresolved, Faculty, including myself, are deeply disturbed by some of the testimony we have received from the New Orleans Police Department concerning the assaults.” Dr. Stark stopped and pulled over a small pile of forms and began reading from them: “I am reading from the assault and battery report filed by the New Orleans Police Department concerning the assault of a Kavane University Student. And I quote: ‘The individual identified as Victoria Heller scratched the victim in the eye so that medical attention was needed. Ms. Heller referred to the victim, as a ‘stuck-up cunt’, and when the victim asked Ms. Heller why she was calling her this. The individual identified as Victoria Heller began grabbing the victim’s hair and attempted to scratch the victim’s eyes. The individual identified as Victoria Heller then jumped on top of the victim, as the victim fell backwards to protect herself. The victim is currently undergoing treatment at the Ochsner Baptist Medical center for damage to their retina and for pain associated with neck-strain. The victim credits the intervention of those around her with being the only reason she was not more grievously injured.’ End-quote.” Dr. Stark seemed emphasize the “end-quote” sadly.

            “This Administrative hearing conducted by The Office of Student Affairs in keeping with the rules and regulations set forth in The Student Code of Conduct Handbook has decided  to place Victoria Heller on Disciplinary Probation for the remainder of the 2007 Fall Term, until the results of the investigation being conducted by Kavane University Security, Antioch University Security and the New Orleans Police Department can be thoroughly reviewed. Another disciplinary hearing at the end of the Fall 2007 term will be held on the date of December the 10^th, 2007 in order to review the results of the pending investigations and to suggest whether further disciplinary measures are needed against the student Victoria Heller. The Antioch University Faculty along with the faculty of Kavane University are deeply concerned about the effect these violent acts will have on the student community. I am personally deeply troubled by the accusations. Only in the absence of conclusive evidence and taking into account the first-offender status of the student, Victoria Heller, The Office of Student Affairs is refraining from enacting more severe punishments, including suspension or dismissal. The hearing on December 10^th for Victoria Heller will explore the possibility, once finalized and conclusive evidence is available, if any further disciplinary measures should be enacted against Victoria Heller. The conditions of Victoria Heller’s Disciplinary probation state that she not be involved in any breaches of the Student Conduct Handbook during the probationary period, as well as successfully completing Antioch University’s Drug and Alcohol Awareness Program. Failure to follow either of these conditions will result in immediate suspension, and subsequent proceedings will be undertaken by The Office of Student Affairs to review any need for further disciplinary action, including dismissal from the University.”

            “Students Jonathon Allen and Alexandra Corbell, still pending the results of the on-going investigations, will be eligible for the Antioch University’s Drug and Alcohol Amnesty Policy, upon the completion of Antioch University’s Drug and Alcohol Awareness Program by the end of the Fall Term of 2007. Another hearing conducted by Student Affairs will be held on the date of December the 10^th , 2007 to review the results of the on-going investigations and decide whether any further disciplinary measures should be enacted against Students Jonathan Allen and Alexandra Corbell. If the investigations indicate no wrong-doing on the part of Jonathon Allen or Alexandra Corbell, and if they complete the Drug and Alcohol Awareness Program. Students Alexandra Corbell and Jonathon Allen will be eligible for Drug and Alcohol Amnesty which is granted to students, who in order to share ethical responsibility with the wider community, and in the interest of safety for our students - will be granted Disciplinary Amnesty, in this case, for reporting an instance of excessive alcohol or drug intoxication.”

            “Any appeals to these decisions can be made by submitting an Appeals Submission Form to The Office of Student Affairs within the next five days. I draw this hearing to a close unless there are any more questions or comments from you.” Dr. Stark looked to his students, he had gotten into education because he wanted to help kids. He got no joy in playing judge. He understood this process was very scary for them and he wanted them to be able to talk with him. This was not punitive it was to make sure they were safe. He communicated this all through the gentle way he had said, “from you.” Then looked up at his students.

            Alex was trying not to cry. Jack just wanted to get out of the room. And Vicki was thinking about finding out every name of every person who worked at Friars and The Palms and possibly suing them for damage to her reputation. They all shook their heads no in response to Dr. Stark. He said: “Very Well. I hear by call this hearing to a close, and if any of you need to talk me or a counselor at any time, concerning this, or any other matter, my door is always open.” Jack rushed out of the room to avoid talking or having to look at Alex. Alex went quickly for the door, and then speed down the hallway outside of the conference room. She hurried over to Biever Hall to tell Lynn and Sue about the outcome.

Vicki sat still in her chair as she watched her friends leave. She did not get up as Dr. Stark was leaving. She tried to remember what had happened Saturday, but she could not, and with her hand massaging her still painful headache she began to cry. She really wanted to talk to her Mom and Dad, but they had been in Maine all weekend, and were not supposed to return until the end of the week. She could not find out the number, so she agreed to talk to Dr. Stark. “Yes, we have had trouble contacting your parents. As soon as we get in touch with them I will let you know immediately.” Dr. Stark assured. He invited her into his office where she kept crying, “I did not mean to drink. I thought getting drunk would help me fit-in, and I just miss my parents and my home. I can’t get my parents number they are on vacation somewhere. I can’t remember anything from that night. People always pick on me and single me out everywhere I go.” She said distorting into whimpering drivel. Dr. Stark kept handing her tissues, patiently listening, and consoling. “Many kids get very homesick the first time they leave home. It is completely understandable to be stressed or upset.” Vicki had to blow her nose and make an effort to inhale. She choked in oxygen, as her body and brain still wanted to let everything out. Vicki excused herself, because she was crying so uncontrollably. The sadness just kept coming. It was like a claustrophobic crushing feeling, the more she grew the less acceptable her personality was, and things were moving in closer and closer to apply pressure, so she would not be herself anymore. She could not be anyone else, she thought, outraged. There was no escape from herself.  She never fit-in. Dr. Stark had a lot of pity for Vicki, but these reports from The New Orleans Police Department were bad. Dr. Stark tried to imagine the pitiful figure in front of him committing all these heinously violent acts, but could not. The only thing suggesting she had actually taken place in the acts she was accused of, were the cuts and bruises all over her hands, arms, and face. She needed eighteen stitches and a tetanus shot for the cut on her shoulder. Her whole arm ached when she moved it.

After Vicki left, Dr. Stark realized she had used the last of his tissues. He thought of how many students had been in his various offices, throughout his career, crying in utter despair. Dr. Stark had little to do that afternoon, and asked himself with a numbing sadness where all those kids went, crying, horror-stricken and overwhelmed, year after year.

                                                                        ***

            Vicki walked down St. Charles Ave. She felt better if she skipped the cracks on the straight white-reflecting sun sidewalk. Each contraction joint line in the concrete sidewalk was set five feet apart, and she could rhythmically skip them unless a crack from a weed sprouting though snaked into her path, or a bulging tree root made the sidewalk rise up, cracked, like a speedbump, and then she would have to plan and adjust her footing.  Hurricane Katrina had ravaged New Orleans two years before. Antioch and Kavane were in Uptown, where most land rested on high ground, so Vicki did not notice any signs of the flood around Antioch. Antioch, during the Hurricane was evacuated, but only sustained minor wind damage. Parts of the city that were at lower elevations were completely inundated. Many of the parts that were flooded were neighborhoods with lower rent, so people with not a lot of money were driven out of the neighborhoods. While the delicate, upscale homes of Uptown, stayed for the most part dry. Two years later many neighborhoods were still abandoned. The former residents were scattered all over the country, trying to make do by living with family, until they could go back home.

Vicki walked through Midtown and saw the marks on the walls. Ghostly lines that spoke of a more desperate time. When the water kept getting higher and higher. Vicki walked past a convenience store that was gutted. The storefront had burned-off into a charcoal, a black cave-like opening, where burned, soaking wet, rotten wood, dangled, fell and decayed. Vicki stood out front of the store. She imagined the wind and then the rain falling and falling. She pictured the store owner’s worried face, as he looked out the now shattered store front window. Maybe, he had not been nice to the people in the neighborhood, overcharging them, being rude to customers, or maybe he had been a welcome member of the community. Maybe, he was known for helping out anyone when they were in need. Maybe, he had a warm smile and when you spoke with him you felt like you and him were the only people on the Earth. Maybe, the owner was an older woman, everyone loved like their neighborhood Grandma, or maybe, she was mean and yelled at people, throwing them their change. Whoever they were they had to be here when the first rock was thrown. When people began running in and out, grabbing whatever they could. The owner must have gotten to the point, after calling the police for help and getting no response, and then trying to scare the looters away, only to be physically threatened, perhaps beaten, for being in the way of their own property being stolen. They must have realized that the situation was out of their control. The business they had built, through long, lonely hours of hard-work was being carried away. No matter how wrong, or how unfair - the thing they loved was being destroyed. They must have gotten a call from the fire department months later, or seen the flames start that night. It was the electrical wiring or someone had intentionally lit the fire, but the store was destroyed, fire damage. Vicki thought of where the owner was, staying in their sister’s basement in Houston, or staying in their Brother’s garage in Atlanta. And here she was looking at something that someone had cared about so much, and now it was destroyed.

She leaned forward and calked her head sideways to look inside. It smelt like she could get sick from the smell coming out. She saw shelves toppled over on top of one another like messy dominoes, sludgy puddles on the floor, the stone steps still intact, but there was no door. The wood was splintered and rotting around the doorway and she imagined the door-frame being forced off. There was no barrier or Caution tape. Black wood was ripped away upward and torn above the doorway. The entrance was open, crooked and mangled, probably four to five feet above the absent door frame, creating the crumpled, crevice-like appearance to the grim opening in the facade of the store; the black cinders of flaking wood were disintegrating and destroyed from when the flames came searing up and out the front door. She stood in the doorway and looked up to the shredded wires on the ceiling. The ceiling panels and the tic-tac-toe frame that held them in place were melted. Little sections of the frame stood unconnected above. Wiring above the panels was burnt into messy, unconnected, seared bunches that looked like angry, stiffened, dead snakes. She could make out beneath the dirt, mud and silt, covered forms of shelving, a smashed ATM, and the bare, lonely front counter. The inside smelt rotten and moldy, a scent so strong it was like a disturbing Sulphur-like wall, so Vicki did not go in. She got the sense that things fell from the ceiling often. In the back corner of the small convenience store was a spot of sunlight on the thick layer of mud, where the fire, singeing everything black upwards, had burnt a hole through the ceiling. Seeing the spot on the floor made Vicki turn her head to the neighborhood behind her, then up to the sky above, and she noticed it was a nice day, so she kept walking.

She continued down St. Charles Ave. The tracks for the street cars were there, but the old trollies were not running, they had been damaged by water and were being rebuilt and repaired. She turned down a street called Jackson Avenue. She saw houses with FEMA trailers out front. Big masses of rotten smelling trash, with soppy, wet debris, destroyed and piled randomly, taken from a nearby house where the interior was destroyed. She walked past the abandoned houses. She tried not to look at the people in front of their weathered, battered homes, as they grimly sat on their stoops and porches, surveying their destroyed neighborhood.

Vicki remembered their RA had warned them not to go into certain neighborhoods downtown after dark. Vicki was not sure where she was, she believed she was in Midtown, but things were darker, scarier and evidence of the desperation caused by flooding waters was more apparent. She did not want to cross the busy Claiborne Avenue, so she turned around and headed back down Jackson Avenue towards the river. Her RA was a big overweight, effeminate, black guy who had lived in New Orleans all his life. He was a gospel singer, and Vicki and everyone else on her floor could hear his vibrato gusto when he sang and practiced for his church choir. He told them how the crime-rate had risen by %230. The police were all busy dealing with emergencies from Katrina, so people and gangs were settling old scores in the absence of a stable, safe community. She was getting close to the river, and  she could see a big, grassy levee swelling up a couple blocks up. Vicki kept walking and she came across a gigantic parking lot with a few clean-looking cars towards the front, and a big blocky building that said in huge, clear, blue letters: WAL- MART.

Her legs were tired. Vicki’s parents were still away in Maine. Antioch University was getting frustrated that they could not reach Vicki’s parents. Vicki gave administrators the numbers of her aunts and uncles. They left messages for them, asking if they have contact with Mr. or Mrs. Heller, if they could please contact Antioch University concerning their daughter Vicki. She went down the clean, bright aisles of Wal-Mart, amazed at the sheer number of stuff anyone could buy. She made sure to skip the lines in the nice white tiles. Slowly pivoting and rearranging her feet away from the stress of stepping on a line when she had to change direction. Vicki felt if she did not skip the lines in the tiles something bad would happen. She was not sure what exactly, but something bad and vague that would synthesize the hatred and evil in the world with the relentless, violent anger she felt, as everything naturally came together to launch some horrific nightmare into reality.

She got to the bikes. The bikes were stacked with a metal shelf-rack-like structure, so the bikes could be piled two high, and not take up a ton of space in the store. She saw a light-blue bike she liked, so she took it down off the second rack, and with her arm and body still soar from her night out, she winced, as she painfully lifted the bike out of the rack and then down onto the clean white tiles. She heard the tires click forward with the gears, as Vicki wheeled the bike to the front of the store. She calmly walked towards the exit.  Vicki continued skipping lines in the tiles to avoid the anxious uncertainties. She then, luckily, got to a rubbery gray area of the floor she could smoothly walk over until she got to the exit. The bike clicking pleasantly, as she rolled it forward. A slight girl, who Vicki thought could be Indian, stood by the exit asking to see people’s receipts. Vicki walked past the girl on the other side of the exit. The girl quietly asked for her receipt. Vicki pretended not to hear her and emerged outside. She looked up into the sky and saw an ocean blue, the sunlit crest of clouds like waves curling, foaming and collapsing. It was late afternoon and the sun was still high and hot, but slowly waning. She looked back into the store and thought the slight Indian girl looked sad, and broken, hunched as she spoke into a radio. Vicki realized the slight girl was probably calling Store Security, so she got on her bike and pedaled as fast as she could back to Jackson Avenue then down St. Charles to Antioch, so she could get some dinner. Her long walk, followed by a long bike ride, had effectively calmed her down, or at least taken her mind off everything for a while, and now she was hungry.

                                                ***

            It was a Tuesday night in October and Vicki could not sleep. She went out of her dorm, down the hall and into the elevator. She was on the eleventh floor. She put on her gloves to hit the buttons. Vicki thought of the cold, inhumane, metallic feeling crushing her bare fingers, all the people crushing her, and how she had to be constantly fighting them. She kept the thick rubber gloves she had stolen from the building’s custodial closet in her back pocket for turning door handles and hitting buttons. Touching metallic objects made her feel like she could not control things in a scary way. She wanted to go outside, but Alex had been spending a lot of time with Jack lately, and they had spoken only briefly, since the Administrative hearing. Two weeks after the hearing Alex saw Vicki in the cafeteria, and said a friendly, but awkward: “Hi Vicki, how are you?” To show there were no hard feelings. Alex was mad at Vicki, but as time passed Alex felt more bad for Vicki than angry at her. There had to be something going on with Vicki in order for her to act that way.  Alex had gotten in a colossal amount of trouble, as a result of the hearing. She had been able to explain to her Dad that it was this crazy girl from Massachusetts’s fault, and that she had only been there to help. She qualified for Disciplinary Amnesty and she felt more and more confident, as her grades stayed high and she felt welcomed into the Antioch social and academic community. Alex talked her Dad down from pulling her out, continuing to justifiably shift blame on to Vicki. When Alex said Hi Vicki had replied: “Good, doing fine. How are you doing.” Vicki could sense the hostility still in Alex. That night to Vicki was a black-out, but Alex remembered almost all of it. Her sinuses still got sore and swollen around her nose from Vicki’s drunken head-butt. Alex became flustered, trying to put down the horrific images from that night, but was unable to. Alex wanted to stay away from Vicki, but she did not want there to be any ill-will or anger. “Good” Alex quickly said, and then moving like she was needed somewhere she added “See you around.” Alex’s heart raced as she walked away. Vicki scared her after that night, and Alex was not willing to take the risk on someone as unpredictable and so detached from the well-being of the people around her. Sue was one of the Antioch students filing an assault report. Sue had shown Alex the big patches of hair Vicki had ripped out, “This is Freshman year and that Psycho has turned me into some toddler’s mangled Barbie.” Sue had stammered out before slipping into tears in front of her mirror, as Alex tried to style her hair, so the patches of pulled hair were not so obvious. Alex would not have any more contact with Vicki outside of curt hellos. Jack never spoke to Vicki again, averting his eyes when she passed.

Vicki stood in the elevator and thought how Alex, Jack and Sue had been her friends, and now they hated her. It was her fault, but she had just been reacting to the ever-shifting chaos of her life, and falling into a muddled confusion she began to think that since the world was evil, and she posessed a particular intuition that made her extrasensory observatory skills soak up the despair hanging over everything, like the vaporous humidity in New Orleans. The fact that she soaked up this hatred and turned it into her own malevolent force disturbed her. She was responsible for her own actions, but her environment had formed her into who she was, while her environment, constantly exuding pressure and forcing her to conform to its malignant social-norms and appearance-based values had forced herself into creation. A deranged by-product of a sick society. She was not sure what the society or environment exactly was, but she could identify its manifestations in the pristine appearance of false-altruism in the clean, routine halls of Antioch, and in the augmented, unfavorable gossip that spurned the suspicious, untrusting attitude directed at her physical form wherever she went. A mode of thought oppressed onto her that she was powerless to change, so powerless to change herself. The only answer seemed to be to violently destroy everything. To finally relieve this agonizing pressure. Get it off herself, and so be free to be the kind person she had always wanted to be, but people kept singling her out, making her fight, and there was never any peace in her life, as they dragged her down to their degenerate level. Vicki pictured some amazing potency, as everyone reacted, all the students lined up on St. Charles Avenue, as they watched Antioch burn to the ground. Vicki could not control what Alex and Jack and Sue thought of her, She could not control the uncompassionate, superficial values of her environment. She had no control over how she felt which made her feel powerless, lost and then angry, like she was being denied something everyone else was guaranteed to have. She had no control over the confusion and resulting anger, like reality was constantly catching her off-guard, so blind-sided she gave an unprepared, emotionally frayed over-reaction, as her anxiety grew in the disorientation, and she, desperate for some control, began asserting herself, as she disastrously and blindly lashed out into the real world; smashing into delicately built social relations; not knowing she was hurting a lot of people who cared about her.

 Thinking all this made her tired and hopeless. The anger at being so constantly out of place and mistreated was building into a blinding fury that seemed to violently vibrate at the forefront of her thoughts. When all the thoughts came so fast her stomach hurt, and all she could do to release it was hit something, or break something, deface, destroy, steal, or any sort of action that would weaken and dismantle the system of ordered pressure, giving her a momentary relief, as she felt her own actions successfully disrupting the organized world and its attempt to crush an otherwise kind person, like she had always been. Reality corrupted her into a progressively more terrible person. She could not stop the deterioration. The powerlessness and anger began, so she created her own order, without any of the risky and anxiety-inducing push back of stealing things or creating destruction. The fact that Jack And Alex hated her so much that they would not speak to her made Vicki want to cry. It was not her fault, but it was, like some horrible unseen and unfair trap; The responsibility of the wider community, as Dr. Stark had said, like an invisible ghost no one else saw, but it kept telling Vicki to do terrible things.

She put on her rubber gloves and hit the button for floor number 8. Disorder like chaos. At floor number 8 she got out and walked down the stairs to the bottom floor, 1. Reaching the bottom floor she took the elevator up to floor 2. She got off and climbed the stairs until she reached floor 4. The numbers unfolding calmly. On the 4th floor she put on her gloves and hit the button. She took the elevator up to 8. She watched the numbers tick up, 6, 7 then peace spread over her as she waited expectantly and the 8 appeared. The door opened and she got off. She made sure this was the 8^th floor by checking the big number next to the elevator door. Then back down the stairs to 1, up the elevator to 2, stairs to 4, the numbers smoothly unfolding, as she put her gloves on to hit the button for 8, and as 8 appeared and the doors opened, the steady, stable emotions in line with completion and control were felt. Vicki exhaled peacefully, she felt something bad was being breathed out.

She repeated this routine 24 times in the next 3 hours. The last time she arrived at floor 8 she wearily looked to make sure it was the 8^th floor and feeling calmer she took the stairs up to her room on the eleventh floor. She tried not to think of the jagged, uneven number 11, just the calmly reflective, unfolding numbers 2, 4 then 8.

                                                                        ***

Vicki was underwater. Her dark hair floated above her shoulders. The long brownish-black strands drifted slowly in the deep water. Her long thin neck was bare, as her slight lower chin was exposed. The drifting strands moved slowly under all the water pressure - floating around Vicki’s eyebrows and upwards. She took her arms from her side and clutched her temples and looked down. The water was so deep it was almost impenetrably dark; a deep, shadowed blue with weak sunlight refracted and filtering down faintly, barely discernible, from the choppy surface high above. Her eyes were closed as she held her hands by her temples, like she was clutching her forehead together. Vicki’s face looked up. She thought of something, and just as she was about to look forwards, she peered below again, averting her eyes downwards. The dense, bruised, blue shadows clouding and contouring around the outlines of Vicki’s face, her bare shoulders, her white neck, and her full, laden eyelashes, like long, dark lines at the corners of her closed eyes - blacker than the heavy blue curtain she was held within. Suddenly she looked up from below, stared straight ahead, her hands coming off her temples, with her arms still up, as she screamed, high-pitched, but so deep underwater a suffocated gurgle of bubbles was all that desperately escaped her gaping, frightened mouth and the racing horror being transmitted through her now open eyes.

                                                                        ***

Night turned into Day, as she kept reconfiguring her waking life. Vicki liked staying up into the cool, quiet night until 4 a.m., and then sleeping in the soothing hum of the air-conditioning during the day. By October mid-terms her teachers were requesting to speak with her parents regarding her grades and attendance. Vicki was barely attending her classes. On the rare occasion she went to class, mainly out of sheer boredom, she would usually get a look of surprise from the professor like ‘who are you?’ Her teachers usually asked the students to take out their textbooks, and Vicki had none. She had been given a reading list at the start of the semester, but never got around to going to the bookstore. Her Biology teacher had made some comment about her not having her textbook and her lack of attendance. Vicki had rolled her eyes and barely even-remembered his smug, condescending tone, since she had tuned him out by the end of his sentence. She had looked out the classroom window, onto the mid-afternoon campus, and wondered if sunlight was beamed through windows or if it fell through. The Biology professor made some smart, jab-like joke again about bringing the textbook to the class, as not being “optional”. But Vicki did not even hear it. People seemed to be laughing at her. The Professor kept prodding and looking at her, asking her random Biology questions, he knew she did not know. So, she pulled her tank-top down, pushed her breasts up, and aimed them at the professor, who upon looking, now saw Vicki’s full, white breasts, as they busted out of her pink Bra. The pink bra was from high-school and was too small. When the professor looked at Vicki he got a cool satisfaction that he was instantly guilty of getting, so he stopped looking and prodding, and Vicki mirthfully grimaced until the end of class, bent forward over her desk.

Her parents called her on her cell phone after the school had been trying to contact them for three weeks. Vicki told her father: “They told me I could drink alcohol at this party, and then the same people who said it was okay for me to drink got me in trouble for it. Their names are Alex and Jack. They drink a ton themselves, so they are total hypocrites. They also hate Jews and people from the Northeast.” It was not her fault and her father and mother agreed. Vicki left out a lot of the details.

“People are being anti-Semitic?” Her father asked.

            “Well, not out-right, but there is a lot of low-level bullying and harassment going on.” Vicki said.

“Don’t worry, Honey. I’ll take care of this Mr. Stark person who keeps leaving us these messages. We spoke about how people would hate you for being who you are, and this is sadly one of those circumstances. Stark is a German name, I think. My father had to deal with it a lot.”

“Being bullied for being who you are? Like getting called weird all the time?” Vicki asked confused, like this experience of hers had occurred to someone else before her.

“What? No for being a Jew. I had my reservations about you going down South. Just stay strong honey. Here’s your mother.”

“Hi Vicki!! How’s school going?”

“It’s all right. I guess, her voice started to shake and crack.” I guess I just miss home. I’m very lonely.” She began crying hard, unable to say anything else.

“Oh Vicki,” her mother responded to her emotional instability by being oppositely in-control, positive, and calm in contrast to Vicki’s wildly careening emotions that, as Mrs. Heller felt, always led Vicki to a dead-end of immature confusion. “You’ve always been so difficult. It’s natural. It’s your first time away from home. And all this stuff about people and the school not being fair to you down there, me and your father can sort out. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“I might get kicked out of Antioch. The New Orleans Police Department may press charges against me and the school.” Vicki said. She heard her mother speaking to her father then her father got back on the phone.

“The police are going to kick you out of school. What did you do? You said you just went out for some drinks with friends.” Her father asked.

“Did you get the letter they sent you? They said they were calling you.” Vicki responded

“My phone was not getting service. I think they sent the letter to the P.O. box that I only use for distributors. I have to go down to St. Lucia to meet with some clients next week, so I can give this Mr.. Stark a call and tell him to stop being so hard on you. Are you crying?”

“No.” Vicki said wiping her eyes.

“Ok. I’ll put your mother on.”

“Mom, did you get the letter or the phone calls from Dr. Stark?” Vicki asked.

“Who?”

“Dr. Stark. I may get asked to leave the University.”

“Who’s asking you to leave the University? The Police? Because you’re Jewish.? Your Father and I think you are doing wonderful there. Your father does not get service up at the Maine house, most people know to call the land-line. What does this Dr. Stark want?”

“To talk to you about kicking me out of Antioch.”

“Why!? They should feel lucky to have someone as bright as you willing to live all the way in the swamp down there. You’re father says it’s because you’re Jewish. Or some Southerner got you in trouble for drinking. It’s college, for goodness sake. Your father is going to straighten out this Dr. Stark fellow. And don’t get upset over nothing, Vicki.”

“It’s not nothing Mom.”

“Vicki just calm down. Don’t get overly excited.”

“You’re right. I’m overreacting, as usual.” Vicki wiped her face dry, and still wondering why no one ever took her seriously she asked: “Could you send some money. I need some new dresses. And a new wallet. I lost my Givenchy one.”

“Vicki you lost your Givenchy Wallet! That was present from your Aunt Helen.” Her mother exploded, irritated.” I always said you would lose your head if it was not screwed on tight enough.” Vicki rolled her eyes. Her mother got off the phone and said something to her father. “Your father will put some money in your account, and I got some dresses in your size and I can go get you a new wallet from Givenchy. Have you gained weight at all?  That usually happens.” Vicki looked cynically down to her body, seeing only flub and fat and said

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Ok, So I will get the same sizes. I’ll put some leggings in..”

“I need a purse. To carry my wallet. I was carrying my wallet wrong before I guess.”

“OOOhh, Ms. Adult Vicki. Needs a purse. Ok I will find a matching purse to go with your Wallet. I remember you like Givenchy or Valentino or Gucci. Something along those lines.”

“Ya and remember I like blue, if it’s not weird-looking.”

“Ok. Not weird-looking. We both have such good taste. I remember when when we would go shopping. I strangely know exactly what color blue you think is ‘weird-looking.’ And don’t worry about your little tiff with this teacher. Your Father will work it out. Don’t be upset. You always get upset over nothing.”

“Well this is not nothing as I’ve said, but Whatever. Thank you for complimenting my fashion sense.” Vicki knew that was the biggest compliment her mother could give. Finally receiving validation from her mother, even if it was through the circuitous, materialistic routes of Vicki’s good fashion sense, which Vicki agreed was indeed a true statement, but having her mother say it, instead of the constant never-good-enough aspersions - made Vicki easily smile, before she said goodbye.

She did not want to go back to the next Biology class where the professor was like some petulant, wanna-be-bully, who after years of being terrorized by Jocks felt like he was supremely and abusively in control. She stopped into the textbook store and got a Biology textbook, just so she could show him, although she ideally planned to never see him again. She picked up the big expensive Biology textbook, $489.00. Vicki knew she could just use her parents credit card, and she had well over that amount in cash. She walked down the aisles, and saw a sign: Please Leave Your Back-Pack At The Front Counter. The aisles of textbooks went deep into the store, and since it was mid-semester, there were few employees and no students. An overweight black woman standing behind the cash register at the front of the store was telling her son or daughter to stop calling her while she was at work.

Vicki slipped the Biology textbook into her backpack. She walked to the front of the store and gave a friendly wave to the tired-looking black woman on her cell-phone. She emerged out of the bookstore and onto the quad outside where kids were sitting on the grass, playing frisbee, waiting for their next classes to start. She could not believe how easy it had been to steal the very expensive textbook. There were no clouds in the sky. Vicki had to put her hand up to her eyebrows. Her thin fingers extended over her eyes to shield them, so she could clearly see, as her eyes adjusted from a dim unfocus. She looked at the clean Biology book in her backpack and felt an invigorating potency in relation to her environment, where before she had felt like some object of cruel persecution. She looked up and saw the sun beaming down, and she decided that sunlight just fell and fell and fell. It was a subjective viewpoint to think the sun beamed just for her, Vicki thought, it beamed for everyone – over six billion people as the world spun, and everyone believed the sunlight was beaming at them. Kids began to put away their frisbees, collect their books, put away their food and head for class. Vicki watched the big patch of grass clear, as kids headed to the large, stone buildings on three sides. The low-lying bookstore and cafeteria stood behind her. The slate and deeply slanted roofs of the Gothic buildings stood imposing and medieval. The lustrous sheen of granite-gray, with goblins carved into the stone, below the slate overhangs - combined with the sudden lack of other students - made it feel like Vicki was in another time, like with Knights and Kings, and looking into her back-pack at the Biology textbook she thought of herself as some up and coming Princes, who was a nobody now, but through her sharp intelligence and merciless cunning would rise to be Queen one day. Princes, Kings and other maidens would bow to her. She looked up at the sun, and she thought how people back in Medieval times must have thought the sun was beaming just for them, and picking up her back-pack she headed for the calm-clutter of her dorm-room.

She thought of the sunlight falling and falling for thousands of years, as people lived and died and the days rotated in then out. Daylight was not a personal experience she thought, coldly, but with a detached superiority that made her feel like she had some insight, like a comfortable, warm life was not meant just for her, but she had to pry those nice things from reality to have them. To possess would mean to be in control. She had to possess as much as she could.  If out-of-touch Biology professors kept wanting her to pay attention to their grossly over-charged textbooks they were forcing impoverished college students to purchase, so that would be her life. The Professor would control her through her own willingness and weakness. Vicki could take control, by choosing what she wanted to possess. She chose to watch the sunshine fall  - a larger phenomenon she had to put herself in the path of, so she could be part of everything the sun fell on. But as an entity set above, more calculating and vicious than normal, plain people. She detested what she viewed as boring, basic individuals - giving off low energy, who had been treated as benignly by others, as their dull personalities and thoughts. They unquestionably sucked off the norms and traditions placed in front of them. Too stupid to think independently or critically, they just reacted to what they saw. These dull masses - cozily living in the majority - did not receive the charged and confusing reactions Vicki had drawn out of people, by acting as her energetically thoughtful-self, throughout her whole life. She would become an aggressive entity within all these sun-streaked movements and appearances; taking what she needed; circumventing people’s authoritative needs for her own; not being a sucker; killing before she was killed. The sunlight ceaselessly illuminated, warmed, and tanned her pale skin. Vicki skipped the lines on the white, sun-bathed sidewalk, as she walked back to her dorm.

                                                            ***

Vicki woke up. It was 1:17 a.m. She had worn a Black Valentino Lace Inset Cape Dress with her black velvet wrap sandals to the cafeteria. The dress and the sandals had been a present from her mother, last year, when she had returned from a trip to London. She felt she looked terrible in the dress. She had left the cafeteria after quickly eating and changed into a Red Michael Cors dress. She then strolled around the Antioch campus, Freret Street and Kavane University, hoping someone who had seen how terrible she looked in the cafeteria would see her in this bright red dress. Vicki thought the dress made her stomach look big, like she was pregnant, so she went back to her dorm to change. She took the elevator to floor 3 then to floor 6 and then to floor 9. She took the elevator back down to 1 and repeated 3, 6, 9. When people tried to get onto the elevator on the first floor she would show them her rubber gloves and say the elevator was closed for cleaning. She did this five times. Students trying to get onto the elevator on the first floor were starting to complain, asking her to please let them on, “Closed for Cleaning” Vicki would say.

“You don’t look like a janitor.” They would say before the doors closed on them. Annoyed at the constant interference of people, she decided it was too busy, and she would have to wait until later, but she could at least get to her lucky number seven. Two more times she did 3,6,9, each time explaining to students at the open door that she was cleaning the elevator and it was closed. The students suspiciously looked over Vicki, dressed in a bright coral red Michael Cors designer dress, with her greasy hair, as her rubber-gloved hands told them not to enter. She made it to seven and she felt relieved and proud she had completed 3,6,9  - 7 times, her lucky number, while fending off so many idiots trying to use the elevator. She went to her dorm room and sorted through the piles of clothes. She needed to put more meat in her mini-fridge. The pile of raw meat sat on the second shelf. A sludgy pool of fat and blood dripped from the meat onto the bottom of the mini-fridge’s interior. She had three Gatorade bottles of urine filled, and she peed into the fourth. The plastic dinner-wear cups stood serenely in a circle of 32, 16 reflecting 16. The bed that should have been occupied by her other roommate was piled high with dirty, wrinkled designer dresses, pants, tank-tops, food from the cafeteria, rolled up wrappers for flank-steaks, old scrambled eggs from breakfast last weekend or a couple weekends ago, and a small purple vibrator that buzzed when you hit the button. Vicki bought a set of Old porn Dvds from a record store next to Kavane. The dvds had long plots and horrible acting, but the sex was good. She liked when the guys fucked the girls, and then came on their chest and face. She liked going to the record store, and getting used Dvds and cds. The store had cool punk and rock posters all over the wall, and they guy who was always there kept the Dvds behind the counter to prevent shoplifting. He was really friendly, and always recognized Vicki because she came in so often. When She watched movies in her own bed on her laptop and ate, she usually let the crumbs and food settle into her sheets. The bathroom with the crooked tiles was disgusting, so she had not taken a shower since she could not remember. She had to poop, and the Gatorade bottles were too small. She thought of the humid grime between the slanted tiles. Vicki refused to wear any of her nice clothes into the dirty bathroom. She walked out of her dorm naked. She passed other people on her floor returning to their rooms after dinner or heading to the library. She walked past a girl washing her hands in the bathroom, and made no eye-contact. She quickly got onto the toilet, tried to relax and not look at the tiles. She wiped, and then ran out of the disgusting smelling bathroom. She knocked into two girls coming into the bathroom. She said “sorry” then continued back to her dorm. The girls scrunched their noses and laughed, as they watched her completely nude body walking down the hallway.

Vicki recorded the message into the voice modifier she stole from the Children’s section at a nearby convenience store. “You backstabbing cunt. Watch your back bitch. You’re not going to like what happens next.” She replayed the message as she ate French fries that were on the pile of junk opposite the bed she slept on. She realized as she kept having to chew the French fries she could not remember when she had gotten them. She had trouble keeping track of when things had happened, since her parents had left. She replayed the message a couple times using the different filters: Alien, Robot, little child, reverb, echo, and her favorite setting Villain. The Villain voice filter gave her message a heavy, fuzzy, sinister voice like the archetype of a villain’s voice on a children’s television show. She wanted to create fear, instability and chaos. She hit *67 and then dialed Alex’s phone number. She heard Alex’s sweet Southern lilt say; “hello?” on the phone. She hit the play button, listened to the metallic, male-like, evil voice say: “You backstabbing cunt. Watch your back bitch. You’re not going to like what happens next.” Then she hung up. She put on a beige-brown Simon Miller Lavon Slip dress, but she had trouble finding a place for her gloves. She walked out of her dorm holding her blue rubber custodial gloves then she remembered Jack. She turned back around. Vicki felt she looked fat and ugly in this dress, roundish, like an over cooked meatball, she thought. She changed into her Black Chloe Cady Bell-Sleeve dress. She grabbed four pieces of raw meat - 3 rotten rib steaks and a gray colored tenderloin. Her gloves were tucked into the waistline of her underwear.She took the stairs down to the fourth floor, where she vaguely remembered Jack had said he lived. Vicki put two pieces by the locked door that lead into the fourth floor hallway. She did not have a key, so she could not go down and find his dorm. She was angry about not being able to go down the hallway, and find out which dorm was his. She took the stairs back up to 11. Vicki threw the two pieces of remaining rotten meat. They made a lou,d life-less thud, against an eleventh floor dorm room. She thought that was where the two girls, who had laughed at her, as she came out of the bathroom naked, lived. A girl opened the door, who was not one of the girls Vicki had bumped into naked, and looked at Vicki, as she walked calmly down the hall back to her own dorm. “Did someone just throw this stuff at my door? It’s like bleeding.” The girl yelled down the hall to Vicki. They were the only people in the 11^th floor hallway.

“I didn’t see anything.” Vicki said dismissively before turning the key, and entering into her dorm room.  Black made her stand out she thought. Everyone was noticing her. Vicki changed into her dark blue ATM Anthony Thomas Melillo Extended Shoulder Pique Dress. She figured this dress would match her bike. She put on her pair of blue Eileen Fisher Willow Espadrille Wedge sandals to match her bike and her dress. Vicki grabbed her Antioch sweatshirt, and ran down the stairs trying not to think of the jagged numbers she was walking over, like bare feet on broken glass. Vicki stepped out the front door of Biever Hall, and paused to catch her breath. It was 7:45 pm. Rause’s Supermarket would close at 10 p.m. and she could easily get there in time. A pale, thin boy with greenish-blue eyes approached Vicki from the smoking bench. “Would you like a cigarette.” She panted, out of breath from running down the stairs, “No, Thank You.” She said between breaths. The boy awkwardly stood by Vicki, as she bunched the sweatshirt against her chest, and put the greasy strands of hair hanging over her face back behind her right ear. She composed herself. The boy acted like he was going to ask her something else, but after a few moments he slinked off to the smoker’s bench. One of the druggy kids by the smoking bench was talking loudly about a quadruple homicide that occurred in a FEMA trailer in his old Neighborhood in the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers. “That’s the thing man. If you do something so bad, like rob one of the heads of these gangs or fuck around with their money - something unforgivable - just to make a statement they’ll just light up your whole family. They shot the baby lying in the crib. The Grandma, the mom, the dude and blew the little girl’s arm off. Yo, these cartels don’t give a fuck. I heard they asked to just talk to the dude, and they all went in with ski-masks and AK’s. It was like 3 in the morning, everyone was asleep, and they just went in and sprayed everyone. Kid I graduated with knows mad people in that Trailer park, and he says dude was fucking around with money, selling yay and brown, and messing with the people he was getting it from. Stupid.”

Her unlocked bike was still on the bike rack. She was glad it was still here. She figured someone would have stolen it by now. It was a nice bike. She liked the cool blue color. She made an unnecessary pass by the smoking bench to show everyone how well her dress matched with the dark blue of the bike. She rode towards Rauses. There was little traffic, so she weaved her bike in the middle of the road. The cracked concrete, and piles of rotten refuse laid solidly below her tires. Vicki passed through the thick humid air she felt she could almost see, as it reflected in the streetlights. Spanish moss, bare Magnolia trees, Big Oaks with ferns growing in the settled, crooked, horizontal joints, as they branched up and outward. Vibrant green Louisiana Cypresses hung low in the clear night, like heavy clouds over the wet, broken, wind-battered houses. Vicki saw a house with a screen door leaning off, with only one hinge attached. Another one story house had a section of its roof missing, and a blue tarp strapped over it with different colored bungee cords. Another house had boards over the windows, and a muddy pile of rotten wood, furniture and countertops out front by the curb. The rotten pile had previously been the house’s interior. She was dressed in dark blue, and when she passed under a street light the blue reflected in the white-glow made her feel like Mary, something non-human and all-encompassing - a noble and pervasive spiritual entity.  One man sat on his stoop smoking a cigarette. Vicki made eye-contact with him and did not look away. He kept smoking his cigarette and calmly met Vicki’s stare. After the clicking gears of Vicki’s bike passed he got up from his stoop and looked in the direction she had gone. He did not see her, like she was a ghost. ‘Strange stuff going on in this city’, he thought settling back down on his stoop. Vicki had turned right, steering around the messy pile of mud and broken concrete by a sewer drain on the corner. A woman yelled from her porch for her kids to come inside. Vicki passed a bunch of kids playing in the dark street and wondered if they were ignoring their Mom. A dog darted across the street in front of her. She passed a collection of trash cans in a driveway and saw a rat scurry black and blurred along the ground.

She thought of the Grandma seeing the baby get shot by the AK-47. The Grandma must have thought: “Oh my god. Is this really happening?” The grandmother, deaf from the assault rifle blasts, coming out of sleep, as reality aligned itself for her, but then just as quickly, herself, in relation to this reality, was disassembled in a strobe of muzzle flashes. ‘Drug Money’ Vicki thought. How would it would be like to get shot? Vicki asked herself. Vicki thought of Anne Frank and Hitler. She always loved Anne Frank and hated the cruel Hitler, but she was starting to become more interested in Hitler, especially since she heard he had been bullied as a young art student. She thought of herself hiding under the floorboards. She thought of taking one of the German’s machine-guns, and spraying everyone, like the family in the FEMA trailer. Vicki wondered what the gun laws in Louisiana were. Maybe she could get one. When the Grandma got shot did she know it right afterward, even though she was dead, along with her entire family. Why was the little girl’s arm blown off? Did she not scream? Why were there four dead and 1 wounded? Did the girl know she was alive after she had been shot? But the grandmother, was she unsure? Did she have to figure it out, and then slowly realize that her body was in the FEMA trailer, but she was not in the body anymore.

Vicki thought what it would be like to put a pistol up to her forehead and pull the trigger, blowing all her swinging thoughts into a gory, powerful release. Having a gun would be cool. And it would be cool to shoot somebody, like Alex and Jack. She’d get a gun at some point, not right now, but when she needed to use it. She thought of Anne Frank with a shaved head standing in line for the gas chamber - thinking she was going to take a shower.

The large bubbled and blocky letters for the exterior sign to Rause’s Supermarket glowed bright Red, as Vicki parked her bike. She stepped through the automatic doors. Once inside she saw they had one security guard on upfront. Her Eileen fisher wedges squeaked over the clean tiles, as she made sure to step on every other tile. No cracks. No lines. She developed a carefully planned pattern where she went two squares to move forward. To move laterally over the squares, she rotated them into diamonds, so she avoided any lines. She headed for the meats: red, raw and wrapped in cellophane. Vicki thought of blood streaming down the walls of Antioch, as she looked over the neatly packaged parcels. Frat houses burnt to the ground, as brothers begged for someone to pour some water on their flaming clothes and smoldering skin. A pipe bomb exploded in a crowded cafeteria; piles of corpses burned; blood was pooling in the the bullet riddled FEMA trailer; Mary looked up to the cross at her only son; Vicki tried and tried and it still was never good enough.

The future was an oppressive weight, drained of all optimism, stretching violently forward, jostling her into psychic chaos and pain. Some nebulous idea of becoming somebody was brutally forced onto her, even as everybody was so negative about who she already was. It made her feel frustrated and constantly misunderstood, like there was no hope. The lack of hope made it so the only thing that gave her hope was destroying everything that made her feel inferior, weird or out of place. Many days it felt like either she was ugly or some deep ignorant tradition was being picked up on by people more easily influenced than herself. The criticism was so constant, like a revolving door of people completely disconnected, but all similarly resentful about her existence. She did not want to create a job or a family or a life for herself, but destroy the institutionalized norm of daily life that had excluded her from being able to comfortably become who she naturally was. Everyone focused on greed, money and fake, soulless jobs to finance their fake lives. People treat the most minuscule difference in a person, with intense suspicion and ultimately violent, mandatory conformity. A conformity that Vicki always ignored, failed to participate in, then outwardly fought, so she found herself tangled up in fights and friendless, but, as she saw it - Immaculate, like Mary. Her purity had been of profound importance to her, as she stayed free from the pitfalls of the sick society she belonged to. People who were rich and uncompassionate were seen as good people, while compassionate people with no money were seen as bad. So Vicki was bad, and she probably always would be. Things beyond her control had made it this way. Long before she was born. She was simply reacting. She realized in an instantaneous moment of horror and depression that she was the same monster as everyone else: reactive, cruel, and uncaring.  Vicki hated the weak excuse, but it was true: She had no control. It made her really sad.

Vicki stuffed 4 flank steaks, 2 tenderloins, and rack of ribs into the sweatshirt draped over her arm. She calmly walked to the front of the store. She saw a bike lock in the center aisle, and decided to add it to her sweatshirt. Vicki walked to the exit, and gave the mustached, middle-aged Security guard a friendly “Hi.” This had worked on numerous occasions before, but the magnetic sensor in the bike lock set off the store’s security alarm. The security guard stepped forward, and tightly grabbed her arm, so all the meat and the bike lock fell onto the ground just outside the automatic sliding doors. He started to pull her back into the store. Vicki confusedly said “Hey! Let go of me.” She realized then the alarm was going off, and she was caught. Most likely she was being brought back into the store to be detained or arrested. She thought of her other charges from her night out and figured this would do her in at Antioch. She saw German troops looking through the floorboards with machine-guns pointed at the floor as something in German was yelled. She saw the little baby burned by muzzle flashes in its crib. She heard Mary begging a Roman soldier to please take him down. The Security Guard’s hand remained solidly immovable, not responding to Vicki’s cries to let go, as he pulled her into the Supermarket. “I said let go!” She kicked the Security guard in the groin. He went down to one knee. He loosened his grip, but seemed determined to hold on, until Vicki bit into his hand: the old, flaky flesh gave way to blood, and she cinched her jaw down harder. It felt good to hear him howl, as she kept biting harder and harder. She started jerking her head, and she felt skin serrating and tearing between her teeth. Vicki pulled back and spit on the Security Guard, splattering him with his own blood. He took his other hand and pulled out a radio, but Vicki was running for the door. She was on her bike and pedaling with her head down back to Antioch. She looked behind her to see if anyone followed. Behind her she saw quick glimpses of the empty, wet, formerly flooded street, deserted now, like the whole city had been abandoned.

When she got back to Biever Hall she needed to calm down. She needed some beer. The 711 on Magazine street stayed open all night, and the clerk, who usually worked, had sold her beer before. She slammed her bike into the bike rack, and spit onto the grass. She swept her hair off her face and held her hands together over her head like she was trying to keep it from exploding. She was breathing very heavily. Had she just spat blood at a Security Guard? Things were out of control and coming at her fast. She swore it was not her fault. She was stealing. It was..but.

“Are you okay?”

The slight boy with greenish, blue eyes asked Vicki. She seemed to be always out of breath or collecting her wild thoughts. She was breathing heavily, sweating, swearing to herself, and spitting into the grass.

“Aaahh!!” She screamed. Putting her hand to her chest, as she exhaled slowly. The slight boy put his hands in the air and backed away a short distance, but he stood looking at her, trying to figure out what was wrong. Vicki laughed.

“haahaha.”. Oh my God. I’m Sorry. I’ve just had one of those nights where the whole world is against you and things just keep jumping out.”

“Sorry I did not mean to jump out at you.”

“Oh no, no, no.” Vicki was still collecting herself. She put her hand up to her forehead, and then over one of her eyes, and said “it’s just, just a, crazy night.” He seemed much too young to be in College. Vicki thought he looked about 13 years old. But he had an innocent-caring urgency in his eyes, like he would be really upset if Vicki was not okay. She thought that he had a boyish-child-like-sincerity in the genuinely concerned and caring way he considered Vicki.

“It’s sweet of you to ask. “ She added softening.

“I like your dress.”

“Thank You.” Vicki beamed. It began to get awkward again, but right as it did the boy extend his hand and said; “ Hi, my name is Luka Knezevic.”

“Nice to meet you. My name is Victoria Heller.” Vicki wiped sweat off her palm, and extended her hand into his.

                                                            ***

The way he had asked seemed like he was offering a formal invitation. “Would you like to go out to Frenchman Street on Friday. I have been meaning to go, but I could not find anyone to go with. Would you like to go?” Vicki was slightly caught off-guard. She had literally just met the kid. Vicki put her greasy hair behind her right ear. She was still not sure if anyone from Rause’s had seen her go back to Antioch and her mouth tasted like blood. Vicki shrugged her shoulders upward and said “Sure, that sounds fun. What floor do you live on?” The question jutted out of Vicki. Luka paused at the unusual forcefulness Vicki used to place the question to him.

“Uuumm the 7^th floor.”

“Nice! Definitely!” Vicki beamed, almost shouting. She cocked her arm at her hip and then waved her head so her dark hair flowed down her left shoulder. She looked Luka up from head to toe, a smile came across her face, and it seemed like her lips were about to move, and she would say something, but she said nothing, and just kept staring at Luka. To break the heavy awkwardness that was accumulating, Luka said: “I’m from Saint Louis. Where are you from?”

“Nowheresville, Massachusetts. It’s like 20 minutes West of Boston. Place called Wellesley.”

“Oh like the College?” Luka asked

“Right ya Wellesley College. I grew up just about next to Wellesley College like half a mile away.”

“Cool.” Luka grew more confident, as Vicki seemed to be at ease in the conversation. He thought she was really pretty. When she acted her natural-self she was really beautiful, Luka thought. The look of terror had gone out of her eyes. “That’s where Hillary Clinton went to College.”

“That’s true, Luka.” She said the name slowly.

“I’m from Saint Louis.”

“Cool, Luka.” She looked him over from head to again: He had on Dockers’ dress shoes, white socks, skinny legs, boney shins, a pair of pale Khaki shorts, little wisps of leg hair on his calf, and then a navy blue button-down, long-sleeve shirt. She thought he was dressed very well for a college student, and dressed even better for a college student having a cigarette just before 10 ‘o’clock at night. He had messy brown hair that was cut very short along the neck and the sides, but left longer up top. His face looked very young, but he had these large bluish green eyes that stood fairly intense and imposing on his face. There seemed to be a wrinkled tiredness to the skin below his eyes, like crow’s feet, and his pale face was off-set by the bluish- purple pits that made him look weary although he seemed to be hyper-alert. He spoke very well, but there seemed to be an underwater-like slowness to his speech, and on certain syllables he paused and seemed to sound them out, if he did not slow down the words got chunky and unnatural sounding. She found it intriguing that instead of trying for any further forced-awkward conversation he decided to look her up and down at the same time. He thought Vicki was beautiful. He had noticed her the first week and had only conjured up the courage to talk to her and ask her out, after many lonely nights and mornings. He noticed her hair had a greasy film to it. She also smelled a little. She had pimples at the corner of her mouth, and she seemed like she had a lot of dried sweat on her. Luka thought her pale arm looked yellow, and then he thought he saw a streak of dirt, but scanning again he just saw the feminine delicacy of her arm, slight and thin, girl-like, but with an understated muscularity that made her arms look healthy, and gently strong. Her delicate wrists held an attractive allure, as she nervously moved them around various fidget points on her body. Soft blue fabric draped down, barely covering her shoulder.

He noticed how thin and long her fingers were when she took her left hand and fanned her hair out over her left shoulder, while using her right hand to put her bangs behind her right ear.

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot, Luka.” She was very interested in this tired and battered-looking young boy. “What kind of a name is Luka?” She jumped into the question again. She had meant to ask him about how he spoke, but on saying the name Luka out-loud she realized it was a very odd name for a boy to have down here in the deep South. Just another oddity that seemed to poke out of this boy, like the constant stream of oddities that other people identified about herself.

“I’m from Sarajevo.” Vicki stood unresponsive trying to think of what state that was in.

“I thought you said you were from Saint Louis?” Vicki said after not being able to think of where a city named Sarjevo was. It sounded familiar.  She tried to think of what the cities in Alaska were.

My family moved to Saint Louis when I was six from Bosnia or Yugoslavia, former- Yugoslavia.

“Wow.” Vicki said. She looked at him again, a foreign refugee. She knew there was some kind of war there. She was going to ask him about the accent, but it made sense now, and she did not want to push it. He seemed to grow embarrassed and self-conscious, after he told her where he had grown up. Vicki decided it would be best to change the subject.

“That’s so cool. Ya, I’ve been meaning to go to Frenchman street. I’ve just been hanging around the campus on the weekends, and I want to get out more. I’m glad you asked me. I don’t know too many people, and I didn’t want to go by myself.” Luka regained his confidence and stopped looking at the ground, as Vicki spoke. He looked into Vicki’s face and watched all the features of her face animate, as she felt a rising emotion, exciting and unsettling her. “I’m not doing anything this Friday. That would be great.” Vicki decided to go back into her dorm, before things got awkward again. She was very glad he had asked her out and she did not want to ruin it.

“I have to go and finish up some homework I was working on.” Vicki lied, but did not even think of it as a lie. She had not done any homework since being at Antioch. But when she told the truth it seemed to upset people even more, so lying and creating the proper appearances were a learned behavior that was sanctioned by the people around her because they left her alone when she lied. Her lies were ok. It was who she truly was that was not ok. So lying had become an improvised tool she had to bring out every once and a while to get what she wanted from people. Things had to appear and be presented in the right way, and the right way was, usually very removed from the truth, so she could draw out what she needed with constant streams of what she viewed as white lies, but the lies were becoming more true than false and a sickening horror took hold in her stomach again, as she flippantly realized in a moment she did not care about the truth. She cared more what the people she hated in her environment thought. She was just like the people she hated, obsessed with superficialities. She liked Luka.

“Ok.” Luka responded somberly, with a note of understanding. “I know ya. I’ve been swamped since Midterms.”

“I really don’t have to go do homework. I just don’t want to look stupid. God it is so hard not to lie and not look weird.” She looked up to Luka to see what he thought about what she just said and he was frowning, confused. He was unsure what to say. He was going to say she could stay and talk, or they could go for a short walk, or she could go do her homework, but she was lying about it, or something. Luka did not understand, and he tried to respond but words failed him.

“Nevermind.” Vicki laughed out loud at herself. “My brain is fried. Crazy night.” Luka noticed she kept licking her lips and using her tongue like she was trying to push something out of her mouth, like a hair, but her brownish-black hair elegantly framed her pale face -  highlighting dark brown eyes. She spit on the grass behind her quickly, and then took out her phone.  She quickly moved forward with her phone out like she was trying to make Luka forget about the spitting, although he must have clearly just seen her do it. “What’s your number.” She clicked his number into her phone then dialed. “There’s mine.” She extended her hand and said: “Well nice meeting you Luka. I look really forward to Friday.” She smiled, brimming with enthusiasm, but trying not to look too enthusiastic. The whole thing had been so adult, unlike the cliquey frat and sorority circles of Antioch and Kavane that resembled the gossip and two-faced fakeness she remembered from high school. This was mature, serious. Luka was odd, like her. Not through any fault of his own, but just how he was. He was sweet, uncorrupted in his other-worldly peculiarities. “I’m glad you asked me.” her face turned red.

A smile came onto Luka’s face for the first time, Vicki noticed with a brief air of surprise that she had not seen him smile during the whole conversation, although he never seemed unfriendly. “I’m glad I asked you too, Victoria.” Luka said shaking Vicki’s hand eagerly. “Friday will be a good time. Especially with a girl as pretty as yourself.” An embarrassed smile broke across Luka’s face. “Thank you. You know you’re not so bad yourself.” They both loudly laughed, releasing the nervous energy between them. Vicki withdrew her hand slowly out of the handshake, like Luka had just kissed her hand. She moved her hand away elegantly. Her tone going serious as she said “thank you”, sincerely, returning the compliment and adding in a stately, low tone: “I can’t wait for Friday Night. By the way you can call me Vicki. Good night Luka.” She said walking towards Biever Hall. “Goodnight Vicki”, Luka called after her. Luka walked back to the smoker’s bench, and sat there for a while. After he smoked his cigarette, he stared up at the night sky, and felt like having another one.

                                                            ***

On the Thursday night before she went out with Luka, Vicki could not sleep. The Eleventh-floor hallway seemed to be so quiet and still it was somehow vibrating. It was just after midnight, so she went down to the bike rack outside Biever Hall. She could not find her blue bike, so she took one of the other bikes that was unlocked and headed for the 7-11 on Magazine Street.

Before she left, she went back up to her dorm to get her blue hoody. It was not as warm as previous nights.  There were low clouds in the sky. The air had a kind of static energy to it that was palpable to Vicki, but hard to discern by external appearances. There was a steady wind that gusted, and then settled and then gusted again. The air was soupy, but the constant gusts and the after midnights temperatures made it cool enough, so Vicki had to fold the hood up, over her head and pull the strings.

There was just so much pressure. Vicki felt weighted to her bed some days, unable to get up. She knew that she was pretty. Many guys, girls, parents, and random creepy men had reinforced this idea to Vicki over and over again since she was 16. Now that she was 18 she was still unsure of her constantly changing body. But the years of attention from others had given her a confidence, a confidence that wavered when she looked into the mirror and saw her bloated features. Vicki knew for certain somewhere in the back of her head that she was a truly beautiful person. Uncompromised by the sick social interactions she was a product of, she liked to think of herself as the Virgin Mary, pure. But look what had happened to Mary, the Bible’s forlorn victim. She watched her son slowly die in public, as soldiers shoved spears into him. This was the fear that bounced off the walls in Vicki’s dorm room, so she frantically was pedaling her bike through the brick entry way on St. Charles Avenue into Audubon Park.

There was something okay, if not highly desirable about her superficial appearance. Everyone agreed on that. Vicki saw the leering faces of pubescent boys, construction workers, jealous girls, and exuberant Aunts all telling her the same thing: you look beautiful. This was always the first step, an individual would hold her to some sort of high standard based off of her physical appearance. She had the look to be successful, have a good job, find a good husband, have some kids and get fat, old and ugly. But she did not want this. She was not trying to perfectly emulate what her parents had accomplished. Her parents traveled from one destination to the next, buying this gadget, or car, or whatever would keep their mind occupied for a little while. There seemed to be very little substance, actual reality, to a lot of the people she grew up around. Most things seemed to revolve around image and gossip. Truth became secondary to these louder and more easily understood forms of communication. Sensational gossip, with its spell-binding allure, seemed to be the only reliable way of communication. If someone said something to your face one had to go find the gossip on them. Go dig for the dirt. They could not be believed at face value. In an environment where individuals manipulate image so readily, the concept of face-value becomes bankrupt. An individual who puts on a good surface appearance must be hiding something Hence the need for further information, like what is being said about them by anyone for any reason. If the community gossip checks out, they will leave you alone to be your natural well developed self. If you people have developed a reputation for you, like Vicki, then you will be harassed into becoming who you are not and could never be. Truth became irrelevant when hearsay could throw people’s overly judgmental energies into a breakneck aggression. Aesthetic appearance that did not have to be scrutinized or reasoned into being an accepted part of existence. People liked looking at pleasant things, without having to read into it too much. That’s why people were so fanatically disappointed with Vicki. She did not play the part she looked, and she looked so good. Vicki had grown up with kids who were truly kind, and she watched as they were harassed, bullied, stigmatized, and then exiled - unable to break through the wall of vicious hyper-critical gossip. Vicki’s reputation for being weird was one of these unbreakable narratives people had continually forced onto her.  “She’s going to go crazy one day.” It was like they wanted a juicy crash-and-burn story so bad they would actually try and commit actions to set their desired story into motion , so they could sit around, safe from the misery of life, the misery they had harnessed and  enacted upon their victim: “Can you believe what that Vicki girl did”. They tried to fulfill their own prophecy, as if the world spun around their bratty, immature appearance-mimicking opinions about how the world should look and act. Her appearance was always accepted, but it was underneath that made people cringe. The lie perpetuated against Vicki stung all the more again and again, as she realized it was replaying. The backlash was always the most painful: We thought you looked normal, but you are actually really weird.

She rode along the concrete bike path. She saw the go-cart way off in the distance. It’s search light listlessly scanned the park, so it looked like, from a distance, the two dark figures on it were asleep. It slowly bumped along its circular route, and Vicki figured it would not be back where she was for another 20 minutes. Willows swept down into the man-made sludge of water along the bike path. The surface of the water was immovably black, as the wind rustled the  willow branches, the pond seemed to be primordially exempt from the nighttime-wind. Nicely built houses bordered Audubon Park along Calhoun street, but it was very late, and many of the residents were asleep, so the park was almost completely devoid of light.  A bug bounced off her forehead. She tried to make out the shapes of the big tree trunks. She looked up from a thick Oak trunk and saw the branches snaking ash-like overhead, only discernable as they caught small portions of light that still floated in the atmosphere from the concrete reflecting the streetlights on Saint Charles Avenue. The black clouds above seemed to be shifting so constantly they never caught the glinty oil-slick-like splotches of calmer nights. Vicki looked up and could not see the clouds moving, but she could sense the wispy instability above her. The clouds seemed closer to her than they did on the still, flat, humid nights. Tree branches swelled into loud, long sighs, as invisible large, healthy, green leaves rustled. Passing under the bare lower branches of the tree, she felt like she was in some other time, when everything was a swamp, and creatures had not developed brains that were so complex that they made themselves miserable.

Everyone was always criticizing her for over-thinking things, making too big of a deal, being easily excited, out of touch, with her head floating in the clouds. People said these things to her, or whispered them behind her back. They were proving in the moment that while this Vicki girl may be pretty and get all this attention, they could still make her look stupid by just getting her to react to some linguistic jab they knew would hurt her feelings. Vicki would grow indignant at the mean-spirited behavior and seeked some sort of restorative justice against the constant outrages, sometimes as little as a raised and confused “Hey!?” At which point, people would laugh at her, prod. Turn the small emotional frustration expressed by “Hey!?’ into a full-blown tantrum, as they strung her along with insults and passive-aggressive nudges. “Why are you doing this?” she would ask, as they got exactly what they wanted, a reaction, proving to themselves, and whoever witnessed the indignant outburst, usually the bigger the audience the more humiliation, so these hyper-competitive jealous types would just continually win. They never answered her question. There was no answer, and their silence spoke to the fact that if Vicki had to ask there was something wrong with her. She just did not get it. Again and again she was returned to her rightful position below them. Vicki did not have the social desire to make other people look bad, so to make herself look good, but apparently, that’s what her real problem was. She would silently grow anxious, imagining the evil-aggression devolving into wars and gas chambers, as it played out over time, so she withdrew, scared of being a part of the victor-loser relationship. She was not doing what she should be doing. She was weak and withdrawing. She should be involved. Gossip more. Tear more people down, at least then she would look shrewd, even if it accomplished actually nothing that was irrelevant. It was all bark and no bite. The more people emphasized the bark, the more she faded into odd obscurity. She was concerned with concrete realities, truth, what was actually going on, and this was a dangerous thing: to be critical of all the things that people could easily see. She was compromising her own physical beauty with her behavior. They tried to negate her own beauty, short-circuiting people’s naturalized positive responses by getting out in front of Vicki with gossip. “Last year that girl did this, this and this. And then she hangs out with this bad person. And she hooked up with this boy, but he did not want anything to do with her once he found out ____.” And there it was with Luka. What she really cared about. Why her dorm room had felt like it was painfully reverberating her thoughts. There was something she wanted.

A family of Possums scurried away, as Vicki passed them.  She was momentarily shocked by the rat-like tail, the dog-like size of the parents, and the straggly hairs that made up their nocturnal coats of greyish-white. The scruffy parents ran from the sound of Vicki’s bike, as their children tottered, bumped and followed behind them. She thought the four little-baby possums were cute, as they tumbled back into the thick-set shadows.

Vicki expended all this energy rationalizing how she did want to be part of their evil and sick social order, as she sanctified herself above the ladder-climbing, the hyper-competitive posturing, and the two-faced, disintegrating alliances that fell apart as often as they were created. And during some instances she was genuinely relieved to be on the outside of all these scripted dramas meant to compliment some person’s image obsessed ego, but it hurt. It really did. The unending pressure of loneliness, like a hopeless unknown weight that was so self-evidently persistent it was exhausting. Vicki felt tired and run-down all the time, so she slept all day.

Vicki looked up at the white specter of a large palm tree completely cloaked in night, as it lightly swayed in the wind. Jack, Alex, Lynn, and Sue were all still friends, and it really hurt to think they went out together and had fun, while Vicki sat in her dorm room watching used dvds from the record store down the street. And she had just written them off as mean, or judgmental or taking advantage of her when she was just being open with them. Grainy images of that night had slowly seeped, fragmented into her consciousness. She distantly remembered throwing up more than once, swearing at people, hitting things, a lot of people yelling, and then impenetrable darkness. She sighed as she thought it was her fault. Everyone was responsible for their own actions. She was weird and odd. Maybe so many people saying it so often made it so, maybe there was something wrong with her.

Vicki heard windchimes softly pinging. They would moan out slowly, and then the wind would pick-up, as the ghostly notes rose into a calamity, a clanging chorus mixing with the sound of the wind rustling through leaves and whipping over surfaces.

She grew angry as she saw her life defined as a series of instances when she was forced to prove her viability over and over, while a separate easier standard seemed to apply to those who could easily conform and fit into large social groups. She sensed unconscious resentment from people throughout her life. These individuals would usually tell her she was crazy for thinking they disliked her, if she ever acted suspicious of them, but as always it came, the passive-aggression resentment built over time, and the individual usually snapped on her about some inane triviality. Her mother always criticized Vicki, snapping on her for letting her food get cold, or leaving laundry on the floor when Vicki got the sense that her mother was really upset about the self-doubt surrounding her own aging body image. Her mother had trouble losing weight, after she had Vicki, so she only had one child. Mrs. Heller had been  a young beauty like Vicki, but age, stress, child-birth, and a career had taken its toll on her mother, and Vicki felt the ceaseless disparaging comments were some result of her mother’s confidence in her body slipping away into insecurity, and when this hysterical, miserable energy had nowhere to go, as it grew with time, it was projected onto Vicki, because she was an easy target, even her mother knew her head was too in the clouds for Vicki to ever be taken as a serious threat. Vicki was a joke. The level of respect people had for her was transmitted through this base-line feeling of inferiority - first of themselves, and then unconsciously and violently thrust onto Vicki. Awareness was seen as her downfall. Her analytical and observant nature usually led her to critique her environment. Less-aware, more-conforming, appearance-based individuals, who seemed to hold sports and competition as their true religion, ignoring the hard to follow “Treat others, as you yourself would like to be treated.” The rule being too simplistic, so only compassionate weaklings like Vicki fell for that kind of lack of spunk. Unless of course they had to appear holy, self-righteous, concerned with the well-being of others, and then there were crucifixes everywhere. Big muscled chests with glittery gold crucifixes. The more crucifixes there were seemed to be in ratio to how much evil activity was going on in the situation.  So, as Vicki observed, and attempted to discern meaning from what was going on around her, others just thwarted her, harassed her, created a million little games they knew Vicki could not win. And then they pointed and laughed, and the prophecy was fulfilled, because Vicki was upset, misunderstood, and not expressing herself well, because she had thought a conversation was just what it had been, a communication between two people, but it had actually been a competition. Vicki lost when she opened up about herself. Vicki felt that being open with people was kind of generosity that two potential friends could share. Being able to freely express one’s feeling to another was a comfortable position Vicki had never been in, even when she was opening up. Her openness about herself was viewed as a naïve and impractical vulnerability. The showing of her hand, so the information she conveyed was usually read back to her augmented into some distasteful piece of gossip. The prize was social acceptance, friends, and so Vicki had not sacrificed her own purity for playing the game, so she had few friends, and was widely considered strange and anti-social, although she was constantly seeking out friendships. She could see herself being less open with people, and becoming more hostile and suspicious when people wanted to know information about her. She was known for being weird. This strangeness seemed to feed off of its own reputation, once the first instance happened it seemed to replay again and again, like some unavoidable waking nightmare. The more it replayed the more it solidified her status as an outsider, and the anger grew. She was boxed out farther and farther away from the things she and others enjoyed. Isolated she had trouble standing up to loneliness. Her mood got worse, as there was no reprieve. The bullying, transforming her over time. The little bits of accrued aggression were unconsciously seen as not her own. Traits, she believed, that had been thrust upon her, as she was too pure to pick them up, but she had picked them up. Vicki had learned a lot from her bullying experiences, and she kept rationalizing each new level of aggression with a higher need for self-defense.

She left Audubon park as it intersected with Magazine Street. The brightly lit 711 had stacks of 30 racks, little shooters of hard alcohol, cigarettes and old food. The large kid behind the counter must have been six feet and around 300 pounds. He often saw Vicki, as she liked to buy two tall boys and a shooter to get to sleep. “The Usual.” He said as Vicki showed him her school ID, and placed the Two Busch Tall boys on the counter with 3 Jack Daniel’s shooters. “Ooh getting a little bit more into the Jack tonight.” but it was always the middle of the night when they saw each other, so he did not care. Vicki usually chatted him up, but tonight she was too focused on her tumultuous past and how this may destroy relationships she cared about in the future.

“People are stressing me out.” Vicki flatly said, as she took the hood off of her head, trying to be more friendly and sociable, as she combed out her greasy hair with her fingers.

“I know how that goes. People going crazy in this city. They say crime is up 230 percent. I didn’t even know percents could go that high.” He laughed and Vicki giggled, a smile cracking onto her face. Vicki started leaning away from the counter, not really wanting to socialize. She tried to stay in the center of the white tiles she was standing on and having to keep looking down was causing an uneasiness in her face.

“Everything Ok?”

“Ya. I just am stressed out.” The boy lowered his face into a more serious tone. “Anything I can help with.”

“No…just people.”

“Alright, well I know you can handle it on your own. I’ve already told you to be careful out in a city like this at this hour. Careful heading back to Antioch. And if a cop stops you with this stuff.” Vicki put her finger to her nose and said

“Officer, the clerk at Walgreens sold me these.” The boy smiled pointing to his own nose saying

“That a girl.” Vicki laughed.

“Keep ya head up, Vicki.”

“I will, if you will.” She looked back to him, like what she had just said was a question. He nodded he would. Vicki nodded back, pulled her hood over her hair, and then exited out the door.

She was afraid of not getting what she wanted. At Antioch if she did not find a boyfriend she had nowhere to belong. Back home if people made fun of her, she could count on her Mom and Dad to find somewhere to fit-in. Her Dad made sure her mom was not picking fights with Vicki. She was scared that all these sacrifices for her own purification would leave her like a nun in some isolated abbey. She really like Luka. She was afraid that the misunderstanding and conflicts would rise up and strangle her future with Luka. She wanted a boyfriend. But she had been seen as not-girlfriend material, because of her aloof and non-competitive nature. She really wanted Luka to like her. She did not know him terribly well yet, but their date was tomorrow night, and she felt like her own existence breed these horrible catastrophes which people had to safeguard themselves from, leaving her alone. The suppressed anger and the constant irritability had taken its toll. Vicki would launch herself at anyone she believed was trying to compete against her, not realizing that she was acting incredibly competitive herself. By winning many these scorched-earth victories, she made a lot of enemies. The results of many of these altercations were people telling her to calm down, psycho. But they had started it. They had started in on Vicki, as long as she could remember. When she fought, and won, she saw it not as the brutish and sadistic reactive aggression she had always had to face, but a more decided and necessary pro-action that would halt any further attempts at bullying, as she made examples of people, cruelly showing other people she was not to be messed with. Her own personal responsibility was slipping away from her, everything was everyone else’s fault. Her temper had become more hair-trigger as she developed. She shot into wild, uncontrollable rages. They made her act this way. This was her decided response to their reactive aggression, so it was morally okay to do anything in the face of these evil acts in order to combat them. Vicki did not realize she was becoming the bully herself.

Vicki stood under the incandescent light in the overhang of the 711. The Orange, white and green sign seemed to hum, as its illuminated colors seemed to transfer, like a multi-colored halo, into the air directly around the sign. It was like there was a vibration coming off of everything physical around her. She snapped off the plastic cap to one of the small Jack Daniel’s bottles. She looked down Magazine street, as it lead back into Audubon park. Vicki took the small plastic bottle and tilted it up into the air. Liquid became fire as she swallowed, calming, as the liquor irritatingly settled into her stomach. She saw a silent streak of lighting illuminate a thick mountainous grouping of clouds. The clouds appeared instantaneously purple against the light from the bolt snaking across the sky. Vicki burped and felt better. The thunder reached her ears and cracked like an enormous tree limb slowly snapping.

                                                ***

It had rained earlier in the day. Frenchman Street, while gearing up for a Friday night was not very crowded. The ground was wet, and low clouds still hung. It felt like it would rain, but it had stopped. Luka and Vicki had walked off-campus through unstable swaths of humidity. The clouds were constant, so there was no moon and no stars, but the atmosphere seemed to be moving. The clouds while amassed all in the same black-gray shade seemed to swirl, creating gusts that blew rain off of branches, and the wind seemed to be saturated with water. There was no rain falling, but everything had the wet, constantly shifting, unbalanced charge of different airflows colliding and creating energy. As They got out of the cab Luka held an Umbrella over Vicki’s head as she got out. Vicki thought this was really cute. “Thanks Luka” The wind pulled the umbrella sideways, and Vicki held her dress down.

 Her light blue Lafayette 148 New York Welma seamed sheath dress was the last totally clean dress she owned. She would have to ask her mother to send her more clothes. She wore thin, navy blue-leggings because of the damp wind.  She wore her black Hinge Mere flat slide sandals. She had changed clothes more times than she could count to finally put the cheery ensemble of color together. She had kept changing, until everything was right. The fact that it was always so hot made it so she could constantly wear dresses, which made her happy. She had thought of every possible disastrous outcome for tonight, and then when she thought she was done, another would organically arise in her head, and she would mull over the conceivable details.

Upon waking up that day she had gone to the deep, quiet racks of the bookstore. She had seen a sign for selling textbooks back, and stolen three.  She put the books in her backpack and innocently looked over the T-shirts and sweatshirts, before she coolly walked past the worn-out looking black women, behind the cash register and out of the bookstore. She read the name Cynthia off the woman’s employee name badge on her chest. She stashed the heavy, hard books in her dorm room. Along with the Biology textbook, she would have four now, an even 2 and 2, so good, but not great. She saw the perfect circle of 32 dinner-wear cups. If she put the textbooks in stacks of two and two she felt good, like two were mirroring two. But there was too much to risk with Luka, so she went back to the bookstore to grab three more. She knew the tired looking black woman named Cynthia was probably too kind and uncomplicated to ever think that someone offering her a friendly greeting was stealing from her. Vicki bought a Cray-pas set they carried in the bookstore. The three textbooks were in her back pack. “I’m doing an art project and can’t decide on the right color shades.” Vicki said. Vicki asked “How’s your day going?”

“Alright.” Cynthia replied heavily like she was looking at something scary, far-off in the distance. Cynthia watched Vicki gathering her cray-pas, as she signed her parent’s credit card receipt. Vicki was able to go and enjoy the freedom of her day, as Cynthia looked at the clock and saw she had another seven hours and nineteen minutes. She had forgotten her lunch, and would have to buy the overpriced food she could not afford from the cafeteria. Cynthia had been the first to come back to New Orleans with her two boys, aged 13 and 9. Her former husband was somewhere in New York. Her sister lived in her brother’s house in Minnesota. Her mother was staying with her brother in Houston.  There were shootings every day, and she was afraid her oldest boy would get involved with the directionless street-kids and wanna-be-thugs roaming and taking advantage of the misery in her old neighborhood. Funding for the school’s after school basketball program was cut, because so few kids had come back. She had to be at work every day and she could not watch her two boys. The home she grew up in was destroyed, and some days it felt like the rest of her life would be sitting behind this counter selling art supplies to spoiled rich kids. She worried what her two boys would be doing after they got out of school at two-thirty that afternoon, when she would not be home from work until eight that night. “Thanks Cynthia.”

“You’re welcome dear.” She thought Vicki was sweet, very pretty, but the look of constant fear in her eyes made Cynthia wary. Cynthia could not put her finger on it, but there was something off with this girl.

Vicki had returned to her dorm room. The pile of seven crisps textbooks gleamed glossy and perfectly stacked in a vertical rectangle

Seven was the only odd number she felt was even, or stable and in-control, so she returned to it again and again for reassurance. Vicki slept through the hot, downpour of rain during the afternoon, as night fell the temperature began to drop, and now it was in the upper 50’s.

Luka folded his umbrella closed, as the wind kept jerking it out of his grip. He closed the umbrella then held out his hand, and realized that surprisingly it was not raining.

Slick, black surfaces seemed to envelop Frenchman Street. Only the pink,  blue and purple neon that framed club windows, and the bright yellow lights that illuminated the colorful signs of  various bars and music clubs gave the street any sense of occupancy. Even then the lights, as Luka and Vicki walked from the cab to the sidewalk had a wistful, beacon- like distance, like a light-house from a ship far out in the ocean. Vicki looked up to the balconies, empty now because of the bad weather, and saw the low, churning clouds set against the wrought-iron railings. Palms and Ferns clumped into small clumps of hanging pots, as there green outgrowths cascaded down. The electric green leaves were placed in a well-thought-out pattern Vicki respected. Each fern and palm should have trailed perfectly centered, in between two pillars that supported the balcony that the vibrant plants cascaded down from. But the wind kept making the pots swing, so the flowing, falling trail was just off, and it was making Vicki stressed to see the palms and ferns swing from just off to just off, missing the perfect center, then back, like a pendulum, never resting where they should be, as the wind howled around corners in quick gusts. Her and Luka had not said much on the cab ride over which was making Vicki restless. She began touching every light post they walked past. She noticed his umbrella bunched up in one of his hands, and thought again how cute he was. While she was thinking this she missed hitting a light post, she quickly turned and panicked, she walked back five feet, touched the light post, calming relief flowed into her, and she continued forward, smiling to Luka and his confused face: “For good luck.”

A gust of wind picked up. “Want to go in here?”

“Sure.” Luka said. They walked through an open door into a small, wood-floored bar where a Jazz band played. The Jazz band seemed pushed into a space too small for itself. The elbows of the singer and the trumpet player seemed to almost hit one another. The drummer and the bassist, with his huge bass that was larger than he was, and probably twice as tall as Vicki, seemed to be directly next to one another and in each other’s way, but they all looked triumphantly happy, as they played on what you would definitely not call a stage. Older people in their 30’s and older sat around, extremely close, listening to the music. The tighly-clustered band seemed to collide with the messy cloister of the audience, as they sat in various chairs, randomly arranged two to three feet away from the band.

They took a seat at the sparsely populated bar. Vicki realized the whole place was probably not bigger than maybe two of her dorm rooms. The walls were Maroon and the trim along the bottom of the walls was black. The bar itself was comprised of wood and encased in a filmy stain of lustrous dark amber.  Vicki asked the bartender, who was looking them over carefully for a water. She had decided, although she was really nervous it would be better if she just drank water. She was still dehydrated from last night, and she did not want to mess this up. Luka also asked for a water.

“You’re not going to drink anything?”

“I’m only 18.” Luka said

“Oh, the bars around Antioch let people in under 21. I got really drunk one night.” Vicki laughed

“I haven’t really been out much. In order to stay on my scholarship my GPA has to be above a 3.6, so I really have to keep studying and writing papers all the time.”

“Huh. You got a scholarship? That’s cool.” Vicki said.

Luka nodded. The bartender brought over their waters then went and got his manager.

“How are your classes going?” Vicki had not been to any of her classes since her Biology teacher had made fun of her.

“Oh ya. I was working on this essay for my nursing degree to today. All day just typing, editing, proofreading. It’s due next Friday. I wanted to get an early start on it. It’s about the development of Teenager’s brains.”

“Wow.” Luka looked forward at the bar and drank from his glass of water. “So does Antioch have a school of nursing or are you in a pre-med program? It’s cool they are letting you do such advanced studies. I’m still taking all the boring standards like Math, English, and Biology. My classes are so boring. But your program sounds interesting.” Luka was about to ask more questions about Vicki’s school work and she could sense his curiosity. Creating a good appearance was more important than the truth. Vicki unconsciously recognized this was the same thing she hated about other people, fakeness, and being overly-concerned with superficialities, but she suppressed the thought, almost without thinking the thought was gone, and she was very pleased Luka seemed impressed for the moment.

“So Luka, what’s growing up in Saint Louis like or Sarjevo. Same thing right!” Vicki smiled, letting him know she was being sarcastic.

“Ya, I can barely remember it. Sarjevo Just memories of hearing explosions mostly. If I don’t hear something you are saying it is because I am partially deaf in my left ear. The doctor’s don’t really know when it happened. I didn’t go to the doctors until I got to America, but they think it was from the shelling.” Vicki was fascinated

“So why were they shelling you?”

“They came and sealed off the city. It was like these guys after the independence vote and they wanted to make their own country and other people did not want them to, so they decided to fight it out where I grew up. They put people like me into camps and killed them. Amazing how much despair stupid people can cause.” He gave a forced smile that Vicki could tell was full of a suppressed bitterness. Vicki thought of Anne Frank.

“Wow. My family is Jewish and we’re not particularly devout, but you know, the Holocaust had a big effect on my Mom and Dad and how they view things.” Luka nodded like he fully understood, and he appreciated Vicki’s attempt at trying to relate to how he felt. Vicki stayed quiet and backed off the subject, because she could see Luka becoming lost in his thoughts and memories, before he seemed to snap out of it and said:

“I’m Muslim, so people always hate me.” He laughed. “It was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. But Saint Louis is cool. There is a big community of Bosniaks and Slavs there and sometimes I felt like I was still in Bosnia.”

“I like Muslims. You may be the first ome I know, but I don’t have a problem with Muslims or Bosn…Bosniaks. That’s the name for people from Bosnia?”

“Ya. A lot of people don’t view me as Muslim, because I am super pale. But that’s why I speak with a slight accent some time. My Mom and Dad still talk to me like we did back home.” Vicki nodded, thrilled to have a portal into this modern world of conflict. But she did not want to ask too many questions.

“So. It was like the Holocaust in Bosnia, but it was Bosnians getting put in camps by…”

“The Serbs, Croats or Croatians. Or Bosnian Serbs.” Luka said detached, informing.

“And they would just kill people? Because they were Muslim?”

“Ya. Basically because of cultural differences. Like Croats are usually Catholic, like Antioch, but they still got persecuted and chased out like the Bosnian Muslims. My aunt and her entire family were killed in the Lasva Valley. They died when an Artillery shell fell right next to their home. The Croats had a planned system to kill anyone of Bosniak descent. They would shell Bosniak civilian villages, then go into the houses and kill the people inside, rape women, throw grenades through people’s windows, set their homes on fire, and stuff like that. My mom never got to see my aunt’s body, it’s her sister, or go to the funeral or anything. We had to leave for America.”

“Y’all got I.D.” Vicki and Luka looked up at a female bar manager. They took out their school IDs, and they showed her their driver’s licenses.

“We’re not drinking.” Vicki added, annoyed this woman was destroying this moment with Luka.

“Sorry, no one under 21 allowed.” The bar manager pointed to the large sign next to the door.

“Oh, we apologize. We did not see the sign.” Luka calmly retorted. Vicki started staring at the women. Vicki wanted to smash her glass right across her face. The bar manager authoritatively pointed towards the door.

“This is unbelievable!” Vicki felt like she was going to cry, how humiliating. She felt like the women was picking on them because they were young, which made them easy targets. Luka patted Vicki on the back seeming to communicate through the light touch: ‘That’ll do no good. Let’s get out of here.’

“You’re lucky he’s so nice.” Vicki said loudly, as she stood up from her stool. The female bar manger ignored Vicki. Luka smiled and gently guided Vicki towards the door.

“Unbelievable!” Vicki said again when they were outside. She was really angry. “That women ruined. I am going back in.” Luka stood between her and the door and said.

“Don’t worry about it. They have all these liability issues. She‘s just doing her job.” They walked up and down the dark sidewalk, passing people smoking outside of bars, but no other places would let them in when they saw their IDs were under 21.

They were both getting cold and tired from walking outside. Luka asked if Vicki wanted to head back. They took a cab back to Biever Hall.

“Some night out at Frenchman street.” Vicki said in the cab, still angry at the Bar manager.

“Do you want to come hang out in my dorm?” Vicki forgot about the bar manager. Vicki and Luka went up to his 7^th floor dorm. On the way up they talked about television shows they liked, and Luka told Vicki how he had several Seasons of the Simpson downloaded on his computer. His roommate was out with some friends, but he would be back in an hour or two. Luka turned on his laptop and they began watching an episode of the Simpsons.

They would focus on the show, laugh, but it was like they were both acting. Trying to look like they were watching the show, but actually watching each other. Vicki leaned in closer, Luka’s head began to get closer to Vicki’s, as they laughed louder at the show, but they were really laughing about the tension between them, so finally Luka went in and kissed Vicki. Her head turning sideway, as she met his lips. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, and wanted to feel the warmth of his body more as she pulled him towards her. She felt the muscles on his arms, his chest, his back, and then she paused and looked into his sad eyes. Vicki began putting her hand down his pants. Luka started rubbing Vicki vagina over her underwear. She got up on the bed and wanted to make out with him more. She slid her dress over her head, and began feeling underneath Luka’s shirt. Luka started fumbling. “I’d have you stay over really, but my roommate.” Luka paused and Vicki tried to get him to refocus, by taking off her bra.

“We can go to my room. I have a private room.” Vicki said picking up her dress and covering the naked top-half of herself. They quickly went up to the eleventh floor. Vicki pulled Luka into her room, not wanting to discontinue the passion.  Luka was amazed at the horrible odor of something rotting, as he was pulled in and found himself in the crowded and dirty room. Vicki’s bed was a mattress with no sheets on it. The bed opposite was piled high with half-eaten food, empty cups of yogurt, old spaghetti, raw meat, a brown banana peel, piles of unwashed, smelly laundry. She had taken her bed sheets and hung them over the windows. There were different colored stains on the wall. The stains looked like the result of food being thrown against the wall. There was a burn mark on the floor about two-feet wide that looked like there had been a sizeable fire there. It singed the end of the bed with trash piled on it a deep black on the side at the end. Luka looked up the side of the bed and thought he saw a light, yellowish stain. The smell of rotting food seemed to mix with the smell of urine. Flies buzzed around her minifridge and he saw congealed fat and dried blood making a puddle on the floor in front and underneath the closed mini-fridge. “Do you hunt?…” Luka quietly asked. He saw laminated cards with different images of the Virgin Mary being the only decoration. They were strewn randomly around the room and taped onto the walls at random points.  He looked to the symmetrical grouping of cups and asked: “Why do you have so many cups from the cafeteria?”Vicki was only wearing her underwear, her breasts were exposed, as she let Luka look at her, before she put her arms on his shoulders, around his neck, and looking into his eyes, she seemed to pounce.

Afterwards Luka said he had to go back to his room. He was getting nauseous form the smell. Vicki had had enough. The languid relaxation of an orgasm settled over her, and she said: “Ok” to Luka, without even thinking about it.

A few days later Luka texted Vicki that he had a great time. He was wondering if Vicki wanted to go to a Halloween frat party at Kavane. Vicki was ecstatic, but coolly answered: “Ok.” Luka knew some people from Saint Louis at Kavane. He did not dress up. Vicki didn’t wear a costume either. “Why just because everyone else is.” The frat party had wine coolers hanging from the ceiling. The house was a giant wood-beamed structure where everything seemd to be painted white. There was a band out back on a stage. There was a large plastic barrel that people usually used to pile leaves into that was filled with Jungle juice: a concoction that had everything from Tequila, flavored mixers, inexpensive whiskey, cheap Vodka to ground up Xanax in it. Vicki stuck with drinking beer and wine. She sucked the wine out of a pouch off the ceiling when they were inside. Many of the rooms had a haunted house kind of theme to them. And drunken boys with their shirts off chased girls wearing very exposing costumes, because one could dress how one wanted at a Halloween party. As Luka stood next to her a boy came up and asked her who she was supposed to be. “I’m Vicki.” She said with hatred in her eyes to the boy. He was confused, and a little scared, so he was walking away. She let the red wine drip down around her mouth, and then looking at Luka, “Luka, look I’m a vampire.” She kissed him on his neck. They stayed at the Halloween party until midnight. She watched people’s costumes get messier and more disorganized. They decided to stop by some bars before they closed at 2 am. Vicki was pretty drunk. She explained to Luka how she could not go to Friars or The Palms. Luka listened intently, as Vicki told him what she remembered from her night out drinking. At the end of the night they were both incredibly drunk and they stood on Freret street making out. They had been walking back to Biever Hall. Luka was nervous about going up to Vicki’s room. He wanted to have sex with her, but he felt she was getting too fanatical and fixated on him. At the Halloween party she had refused to talk to anyone but Luka and when other people approached Luka she would act like they were threatening her time with him, so she would chase them away. The other stories she told him of beating up Security guards surprised him. He did not know what to think of it. He thought of the smell and the trash in her room. He started to get uncomfortable the closer they got back to being on-campus. He did not want to give her the wrong idea, but she looked so good naked. “I have this scam where I steal textbooks, and I am going to try and sell them back. Make a bunch of money.”

“You steal textbooks?” It was right before they were about to walk onto campus and Luka told Vicki to hold on. He bent over and threw up all over the sidewalk.

“I should head back to my dorm. I don’t feel so good.”

“Are you sure you’re okay. Do you want me to watch you. So, you don’t choke on your vomit.” She was extremely upset he was not feeling okay. She was worried. She kept stroking the back of his neck, so he would feel better. Luka was like Vicki’s public play toy to show everyone how much she loved her new boyfriend. Luka felt like he had to inform Vicki that he was not her boyfriend. Yes, he had asked her out twice, but this was freshman year of college. He was no one’s property. They were friends, who had happened to sleep together. Luka had even tried to stop it, but Vicki had insisted on going up to her room. Secretly he was relieved he had an excuse. He figured he would put a stop to things before they got out of control. Vicki treated him like a pet dog when she drank. She kept rubbing his neck and calling him “sweetie.” He felt dizzy, drunk, and dehydrated, but only his stomach felt terrible and he just wanted to go back to his dorm. He had really wanted to have sex with Vicki again, but the odor and trash in her room had made him also not want to, causing a stressful indecision. The memories of his previous night with Vicki, combined with too much alcohol, Vicki’s unfiltered tales of her personal life, and the unattractive authoritarian control Vicki exerted over him, as they interacted, throughout the night had made him agitated and uneasy. Luka brushed the arm off his neck and stumbled towards Biever Hall. “Good night Vicki. I’ll call you.” He mumbled

“Goodnight Luka!” She called weakly after him, but he did not look back.

“Night!” he yelled over his shoulder. She thought of running after him and trying to ask why he did not want to come up, but she did not. He had gotten sick. It was a reasonable excuse. The sudden moment of abandonment left her faced with a renewed, familiar feeling of horror, as she stared down the harrowing constraints of loneliness again. She felt powerless to avoid the unending desolation. “What did she do wrong?” Maybe he was just really sick, but Vicki got a sense he was relieved to get away from her. The claustrophobic pressure was so all-encompassing she saw nothing else. She started to get mad. Her wrists, forearms and her hands felt so light they began to shake. She realized she could not do anything about it, there was no action she could take, and a deep hopelessness began to metastasize over her mind and body. The pain seemed like it radiated out of her brain, and struck down into the vital organs in her abdomen. Reality in front of her began to vibrate. A sharp, climbing stress that seemed to unsettle everything in her body. It felt like her body would fly apart in different directions. The seams of her skin ripping, as her brains and organs violently ripped up and away, like she was in the center of a tornado. More time alone to spin all the tortuous thoughts around in her head. But she stayed together. No escape into someone else. She did not fit in. She never would.  Her face started to get hot, her eyes felt itchy and dry, until they became painful. She could not do this all alone. The night turned into a blur, as tears spilled over onto her cheeks. Like all the energy in her face was exploding outward, through her nose, eyes and mouth. She choked in air and wiped her nose. Vicki collected herself and went up to her room, remembering she had a warm six pack of Budweiser under her bed.

                                                      ***

For the next two days she was unable to sleep. She drank beer and sat around reading and watching dvds. After the third day, Luka had not called her and she began to get nosebleeds. The blood tasted metallic, as it went down the back of her throat. Dark red, almost black blood kept pouring out of her nose. She kept shoving tissues in it, but they were almost immediately soaked a bright red, before she had to switch them. She thought it would just stop. It seemed to take her mind off the whirlwind of thoughts: Alex, Jack Luka, her mom, Kids she grew up with, Anne Frank, Hitler. The thoughts began to run, spiraling into a frenetic speed, as they careened back and forth slamming her physical body around. Vicki had gained seventeen pounds since her parents had left. The extra fat on her arms, around her stomach, and dropping under her chin made her depressed. Her dirty dresses were getting really tight. Her looks were what gave her real power, and now she was losing even that. She was still approached by boys, but she felt ugly, so she figured she would start going to the gym and then start trying to find a new boyfriend. She texted Luka about her nosebleeds. “I’ve been getting nosebleeds for days and they won’t stop. It would be good to see you again.” A day later he responded. He said he would come by her room. Vicki was lying on her sheet less bed looking at the ceiling holding a tissue in her nose. The billowing shadows of sheets on the window were outlined by stifled daylight.  Luka knocked on the door and Vicki let him in. The smell was worse. It was like he could taste it. He looked at Vicki. He saw the blackish-brown hair he remembered being so pretty, but now it was so greasy it clung together in thick clumps, almost like dread-locks, and crusty mattes of her hair clung flattened and oily to the back of her head where she had rested it on her bed. There was  drying blood on her mattress. The pile of food, beer cans, and smelly laundry had gotten taller, so the bottom layer was decomposing, and the smell was like a wall. “Vicki, I think you could get sick living in here.”  Luka quietly observed. Bloody tissues were all over the floor. There was an open copy of Mein Kampf and a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank filled with small little pieces of ripped paper to mark pages. She went to change tissues, and Luka saw blood almost immediately dripping from her nose. Vicki had contacted and invited Luka up, but it was like he was not there. She would start saying something: “it’s because of all these people. My mom is a jerk. What time is it?” Luka told her that it was 12:30 in the afternoon, but she seemed to not hear him. “I remember when I was little my Mom would call me difficult.”

“I’m sorry.” He empathized. “Vicki you’ve lost a lot of blood. It may not be a bad idea for you to go down to Student services, and ask for a counselor or a nurse or someone to take you to a doctor.”

“You wouldn’t take me?”

“I have class in 3o minutes, and I don’t have a car. I can probably borrow my friend’s car, but that won’t be until later. I think you need to go see the doctor. About your nosebleeds.” But Luka was concerned. He had never seen anyone as dirty as Vicki. She had all these expensive designer dresses soaking in moldy food. She smelled. There was a yellowish, sweaty glean to her skin. There seemed to be a circular burn mark on the floor where it looked like a piece of paper had been set on fire. He noticed the expensive textbooks, all Science,  Law,  Math or thick History textbooks. Luka figured the seven must have cost over $1,500.

“How’s your nursing program going.” Luka asked. Trying to get Vicki to respond.

“I think I’d like to be a mother, but I have no training. What do you think of putting up posters to become a professional babysitter?”

“Being a nurse is good training for how to care for someone. Don’t you have to do your bachelor’s degree, and then go to Nursing school. You’re a freshman like me, right.”

“What?” she took the tissue out of her nose and turned to him blankly. Blood began dripping around the edge of her nose, and then down onto her lip.

“Shit!” She said sharply, jerking her arm up quickly, before cupping her hand around her nose and grabbing another tissue.

“I just think I’d make a great mother. I care. Unlike so many other people.” Luka looked with horror, as the tissue she put in almost immediately turned a bright red.

“Here, try and tilt your head back.” Luka got up and tried to get Vicki to lie down.

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” As she eased onto the bed, she smelled Luka’s neck, and she gave him a deep kiss on his lips. She shoved her tongue into his mouth, before he pried her off of him.

“Come on, Vicki. I’m trying to help. You got your fucking blood all over my face.” Luka looked around the room and realized there were no mirrors, so he could not look at the blood on his face. He kept wiping it. He scanned the room for something clean to wipe it off with, but everything seemed to have a coating of rot and the decomposing food smell seemed to cover every object. He saw a copy of Number the Stars by Lois Lowry  open faced downward. A dog-eared copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The number of small, laminated Virgin Mary cards taped to the walls seemed to have multiplied, so big blocks of them stuck together on every wall held there by layers of transparent mounting tape. He scanned over the different forlorn poses of Mary then turned his head back to speak to her, as she lay on her bed.

“I think you would make a great mother too. But I just think you need to figure out what’s going on with your nose.”

 “You say you care, but you won’t even kiss me, as I am bleeding to death.” She said dramatically.

“You’re not bleeding to death.”

            Vicki shot forward, aggressively, her voice raising into a scream that reverberated off the small dorm room walls. “How do you know!?” Luka was caught off guard by the sudden forcefulness of the yelling and he stopped and looked around scared. He was getting creeped out. Vicki looked unhealthy. Luka thought she resembled the possessed girl from The Exorcist after hours of being thrown around her bedroom, as the priest tried to free her body from Satan. He still could see and remember the beautiful girl he had been so attracted, but it was buried deep under a weary grime.

            “Vicki I got to get to class.”

            “What are we going to do next weekend? Want to go to the French Quarter?”

            “Vicki listen to me. Vicki. Vicki.” She was listlessly staring up at the ceiling on her bed. She turned, suddenly alert at her name being repeated to her. She wore a big pink sweatshirt that had blood, dirt and food stains all over it. She wore a Maroon and yellow pair of men’s swishy basket-ball shorts she had stolen from the bookstore, with the Antioch symbol embroidered on the right leg.  Luka did not notice she had gained weight. He thought she was gorgeous, if she just took a shower or something. But he realized there was something more wrong than usual.

            “Do you have classes today?” Luka said still trying to wipe the blood off his upper lip.

            “My dissertation….Ya, you know I could be a great mother. I am going to print out some posters.”

            “What? You have to do a dissertation? Isn’t that what PhD students do?

            “Ya, but mine is a really good dissertation.”

            “Vicki, I gotta get to class. Can you please go down to Student Service and get checked out.”

            “Fine! Leave!” She screamed. The blood momentarily coming out faster, as she switched tissues. Her voice softened in an instant and she said in a breathy, soft, wistfully detached way: “But you care.”

            “Yes, I care. I got to get to class.”

            “Well, just go then. I may be dead from bleeding to death, but what do you care. You’re not going to help.”

            “Vicki. I’m sorry. I can help tonight. I have a class right now and then a Biology test after that.”

            “Well then just go.” She said in a huff, snorting out spats of dried blood. Luka shook his head and walked out of her dorm room. He yelled back inside.

            “Just go see the nurse at Student Services.”

            “Fuck You!” She yelled back. Luka walked down the Eleventh floor hallway, and hoped Vicki would be okay. He would check on her tonight, but he had ton of work due at the end of the week, and this was the only night he could get a big chunk of it done.  He walked down the hall feeling guilty about walking away, but he could not think of what he should do. Should he have had sex with her right there. That seemed to be like taking advantage of a girl who was too drunk. Vicki needed some help, not someone to take advantage of her. He had not seen that amount of blood come out of someone’s nose, without it being otherwise injured or broken. He still thought she was beautiful, but he was glad to be out of the room. The rotting smell, the burn marks, the urine. He hoped Vicki would be okay, but he had his own life he had to take care of. He told himself he’d call her from the library tonight.

            Vicki decided to go down to Student Services, so she could tell Luka she went. She was also close to running out of tissues. When she walked through the glass doors her face was pointing up at the ceiling, as she held a bloody tissue over her nose. She removed the tissue and said in a nasally-clogged, flu-like voice: “I’d like to speak to somebody. My nose won’t stop bleeding.” The receptionist told her to take a seat.

            “And what was your name.”

            “Victoria Heller.” She said through the clump bloody tissues.

A counselor came out and introduced herself as Ann. She was a fresh young woman in her late 20’s or early 30’s with a short haircut. Vicki imagined Ann as being what a social worker or a probation officer was, although she had never interreacted with an individual from either profession.

“Hi Victoria!” She said enthusiastically. “oh no,” Ann said seeing the tired expression on Vicki’s face, as she held the tissues up to stem the flow of blood. “We’re going to try and figure out what’s going on, just step right into my office.”

Ann asked Vicki, if she had ever been on any medications. Vicki told her how, “when I wa arounds twelve to about fifteen I had tried taking pills from this docor. Anti-depressants mostly.”

“Can you remember any of the names?

“ like Fluoxetine, Zoloft, Paxil, welbutrin and Clomipramine,  but I stopped going once I started to gain weight from the medication, and my mother got in a fight with the doctor, so we stopped going.”

“And do you feel your mother was overly critical of you and your appearance.”

“Yes.” Vicki said. She exhaled and felt a little better. She watched Ann write down stuff in a notebook. The faced each other on two very comfy leather chairs.

 “And you’re not currently taking any of these medications? Are you still taking the Clomipramine?”

“No.”

“Do you drink or do drugs?”

“I like to have a drink with friends now and then. I have trouble sleeping, since I got to school. Sometimes I walk or ride my bike all night long until the morning.”

“Are you able to wake up for your classes?”

“Ya.”

“How are your classes going?”

“Alright.”

“And has there been anything bothering you or causing undue stress.” Ann looked down to the dirty pink sweatshirt and Vicki’s oily hair and made a note in her notebook. Vicki sat there, trying to think of something to say. Her mind jumped to a million different thoughts and faces all tearing at her, and mocking her. The ceaseless battle. She was tired. She wanted a break from the constant competition. The fights. Vicki did not want to fight anymore. She needed things to slow down. Things were coming too fast. Her mind was always moving so fast. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead and her temples often. Everything she did was wrong. Or people made her unfairly feel like she was doing something wrong, even though she was not. She could not tell anymore. Who was good and who was bad. Maybe it was a combination of both, but having to sort it all out left her exhausted and overwhelmed. She was tired of fighting to prove she was normal. She admitted defeat. She was weird. There was something off with her. It was not okay. She would not have the things everyone else had. She would die alone in some horrible little spinster apartment. She saw herself very old with gray hair and she was talking to a group of cats she was feeding in her apartment, as she had to sit year after year and slowly admit that at her core there was something wrong with her. There was no one else like her. She did not fit, and she would just watch days pass as she became more and more isolated, weird and alone.

“Yes” Vicki’s voice cracked and she tried to compose herself behind the stiff tissue, but she felt she looked stupid with the tissue, like she always looked Stupid, and this last small, minor humiliation let all the other instances flow out like a Levy collapsing. “I don’t’ know.” Vicki said crying hard. Snot coming out of her nose and mixing with the blood, so she could barely talk or breath. “I miss my parents. And everywhere I go people seem to hate me.” Vicki screeched pathetically, before she lapsed into a miserable crying spasm. She kept having to spit and blow her nose.

Ann told her to let it out. That this was a safe place to let her know how she felt.

         “have you spoken with your parents?”

“No, they’re busy doing stuff more important than me, like everyone else.” Vicki said, burrowing down into negativity.

“We’re going to have the nurse come in and check out your nose. And then I’m going to have you talk to Dr. Theodule. His office is on Calhoun Street off of Audubon park, just a short walk across St. Charles.”

Vicki went out to the waiting room and a Nurse came in. The nurse was an overweight, middle-aged or older looking-woman wearing a pink t-shirt, underneath medical scrubs with flowers on them. She had short blond hair cut. The nurse had the look of a mother, who was now a grandmother.  She told Vicki to try and relax. “Nosebleeds can occur, from just being too stressed out. Just try and stay calm.” The nurse spoke to her in an authoritative, but soothing, motherly tone that made Vicki feel better. “Okay, so sit up, pinch your nose closed, and I’m going to hold this ice-pack on it” Vicki sat in the chair and tilted her head up. The nurse stood in front of her, holding the ice-pack on her nose. They awkwardly stood there silent for a minute, as Vicki stared up at the ceiling, and the Nurse tried to not look at Vicki in the awkward position her head was in. After three minutes, it got boring. She sensed this girl was having troubles that had nothing to do with any physical malady relating to her nose. She didn’t want Vicki to get tense, so she asked, “How are your classes going?” Vicki tiredly closed her eyes. She looked at the nurse and said, “Things are looking up.” The nurse laughed quickly, and she had to focus again to hold the ice pack on. After ten minutes the bleeding had stopped. Vicki told the nurse, “Thank You.” The nurse gave her some cotton swabs, and told her to come back if  it bled for over ten minutes again. The nurse told her to go eat something because she had lost a fairly good amount of blood. Before Vicki left she wanted to take Vicki’s blood pressure. The nurse checked to make sure she had not done it wrong three times, but it was the same each time. Vicki’s resting heart rate was a racing 120 beats per minute. She put down in her notes: Very fine tremor. Skin is moist and cool. Reflexes extremely reactive.

Doctor Theodule seemed weary from the sheer amount of prescriptions he had to write to homesick, depressed and anxiety ridden children each Fall. Every kid seemed to be convinced they had ADD and needed Adderal, preferably not XRs, but the fast-acting kind. Vicki thought it looked like he may not have gotten out his big arm chair for multiple days. He was in his 60’s. He had a big head of dark brown hair that was swept back, and over his balding forehead. She wondered if he dyed his hair. He started.

“So, Ms. Heller. How can I help you. Is your nose okay? Did you bang it or did anybody hit you?”

“No, it just started bleeding profusely. I guess that’s kind of why I’m here.”

“Ok, if you had to give a reason why you came here. Without someone telling you why, what would you, yourself say.”

            “ Wellll.” Vicki started slowly and then her thoughts picked up fast. “I really miss my parents. And I just seem to be hated everywhere I go. I’m always the object of vicious gossip and bullying. It seems like there’s something about me that makes people attack me, or see me as someone who would be easy to attack.”

“Uh huh.” He said. Jotting down what she said in his notebook. “bullying is a real problem. Causes severe emotional disorders. Nothing to be taken lightly.”

“It gives me a lot of Anxiety and I hate being around people, but I’m really lonely.” Vicki said her voice breaking.” And. And And I just want to be part of things, and I don’t understand why I can’t be. I stay up all night getting angry and sad about how I get treated by people.” Vicki confessed, a weight off her shoulders. She knew what she was about to say would make him alarmed. She slowly mentioned when she first started doing her rituals. “In order to relieve Anxiety I have to do, like exercises to calm myself down. Since I was about 10 I started feeling the need to do them. ”

“Exercises. Can you describe these exercises.” Vicki did not want to. She knew it was bad. “Like running or walking.” Dr. Theodule was staring into Vicki’s face, trying to see what was behind it. He saw a beehive of activity, but did not understand the nature of it yet.

“Just like touching my door over and over to make sure it is closed, stuff like that.”

“What other stuff.”  Vicki sighed. She knew she was caught and he would give her back the Clomipramine or the Prozac. But she wanted some sort of sedative out of it because she felt like she was loosing her mind, so she told him, emphasizing her lack of sleep.

“I skip cracks, add numbers up. I’m obsessed with Symmetry. I touch things to make sure they are there. When I was 10 I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety and depression.” Vicki said with little inflection in her voice. “Me and My parents had been successfully managing it for the past 8 years, but it seems to be back.” Vicki seemed to hear the magnitude of what she had just said out-loud. Her face turned into red cringe, and then tears began to spill out over her eyes. She blew her nose. “The Nurse said I was not supposed to get upset.” She said wiping her eyes, blowing her nose, so dried blood came out. “I can’t sleep.” She whelped.

“I’m sorry if you are upset, but I am glad you shared this information with me. You have a very serious disease. It’s not your fault, or any sort of deficiency on your part. It’s like catching a cold. It could happen to anyone. People bullying you are most likely extremely insecure, and you just have to ignore those people. They have their own problems and they are trying to off-load them onto you. You don’t need that. You need to work on managing your symptoms and understanding what is going on in your brain, so you can live a happy life. Opening up to me was the first step and I appreciate how hard it was, Thank You.” He said, handing Vicki an extra box of tissues.

                                                                        ***

            Vicki sat staring at the creamy walls in a blurry out of focus, as “Take me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver played faintly overhead. The sound distorting, as her imagination ran wildly forward, and memories flooded Vicki’s head.

            “Victoria Heller!”

            She had gotten three prescriptions form Doctor Theodule, but she only got one filled. Red drops fell. She paid for the orange bottle filled with 30 white Ativan pills. Red drops went up. As she went through the automatic doors to the CVS she realized that it was probably in the 80’s and it was not even noon yet. It was the beginning of November. The leaves had not turned any color, but the few crackly cool nights gave the trees, bushes and grass a kind of demure limpness. Contrasted with the rising temperature and the blasting sun, the weak leaves, sad bushes, and scuttled grass did not look as green as they once did. It was not something one could see on the surface, but Vicki could sense nature slowly dying around her. She hunched forward and watched the blood fall out, and then she made one go up in her head, as soon as one red drop went down, and this took a lot of concentration. A person walked by and asked, “Are you okay?” With her head pointed downward, and blood dripping into the exact center of a square on the sidewalk, Vicki ignored whoever was talking to her, and she was relieved when she heard them walking away.

“Just try skipping one exercise, and see how you feel. The medication should help with urges when you don’t do an exercise.”

            From the CVS to Home Depot Vicki stepped on one crack. Faces of kids calling her weird during recess. She did not want to take the medication. The medication made her super-hungry, and stupidly-sleepy, so she could not think long thoughts. Everyone stopped buying from the Jewish Grocery store, until they went out of business.  Whenever she moved she would get so tired she would have to lay down. She was not sure if she should listen to the doctor. Impenetrable darkness. Someone gave a command in a language she could not understand. A man responded, distraught, and then the man came out of from behind a corner. A bunch of soldiers shot him, as he was saying something with his hands in the air. She began skipping every crack and line, and then she hit every Stop sign she passed.

            “It’s like they think I’m messing with them. But I really am just doing what comes natural to me.”

            “It’s not about you. You need to remember that  it’s unresolved anger in other individuals.  They use you as a prop to enact their own ideas of supremacy and control in a world where they feel powerless and out of control.”

            Someone was screaming something in German and there were gunshots. She turned to look, but nothing was there. There was a big group of haggard, homeless Mexicans shuffling around the front of Home Depot. One man had a s swollen hand that looked infected. Green and yellow puss stretched out of the soars where his skin expanded. His hand was about twice the size of a normal hand, and he had to hold it up by the wrist, so he could keep wiping it with a dirty handkerchief. A pick-up truck with a stack of dry wall pulled up in front of the pack of guys and stopped. The driver yelled “ Cinco para trabajo.” They all swarmed the truck, and tried to jump on, but the man in the truck yelled and hit a couple guys, and then drove forward, so some guys fell off onto the concrete. The pick-up accelerated away quickly, with what looked like four or five guys clinging desperately to the back.

            She went inside and went to the plumbing section. She got a short length of pipe, and its two ends that screwed securely on. High amounts of energy being held in place, condensed, fortified, controlled, until there was too much pressure, and it could not be contained, causing an explosion. She went over to the section where they had grills and patio sets. she picked six bottles of 32 oz. odorless lighter fluid and eight boxes of wooden matches. She perused the big warehouse style aisles and a package that said .22 caliber caught her attention. She held the Master Shot 0.22 Caliber Powder Actuated Tool in its thick plastic casing. She looked over the instructions and figured she could handle how to load it. The .22 caliber powder loads and a box of nails and washers were on Sale on the shelf below the gun. Walking to the front of the store she saw a folding knife for skinning deer in a thick clear plastic package. The handle of the knife was camouflage. In a snowy little village someone knocked on her door, and told her something urgent. She saw a big guy standing by the Exit, so she decided to pay.

            “It just seems endless. Like people just keep coming and coming. People with no authority. Not like my Boss or a professor. But these self-imposed people who want to have all sorts of attention given to their Authority. They Demand I do this, They demand I do that. And when I just try to politely ignore them and go on living my own life, It’s like I’ve committed some outrageous crime, defying them. When they were never even in charge of anything in the first place.”

            On her way back to Antioch she saw a family trying to live out of their car. It was very warm, but there seemed to be a slight crispy breeze that kept it from the soup-like humidity of September. The muted vibrancy to the warm day gave Vicki the feeling of cold creeping in, things decaying, as nature had succumb to the pressure of the seasons, and the stiff, unforgiving laws of reality. She thought of a group of Nazis marching through a village, as all the helpless villagers looked on in horror. Artillery emplacements fired. She pictured a pipe bomb blowing up in a crowd of people happily socializing. She saw black after the flash of the bomb, and its deafening explosion. And she listened, ears in a high-pitched ring. Voices felt the pain and pitched into a horrendous sound of terror. They tried to realize what had just happened, wailing, looking around them, screaming for help, until eventually they became exhausted, and their screams turned to helpless moans of agony, because for whatever reason, no one was coming to help them. She thought of a line of people lined up along a ditch and then a line of soldiers firing rifles at them, so the people fell backwards into the ditch.  Blood gently dripped out of her nose. She took a tissue stiff with dried maroon blood and wiped the new, bright red blood off.

            “What usually happens is a person will attack someone they deem as vulnerable, either because of their inherently kind nature, or by some external classification that makes them viewed by the greater society as not equals. Some people unfortunately view kindness as a weakness to be taken advantage of. In the minds of many of these aggressive, authoritative, bully-types, People who are kind are therefore not equal to tougher, crueler personality types like themselves.”

            “They seem to be attracted to me.”

She put her supplies into her dorm room. The thirty-two cups had dust on them, but it was better if it was not disturbed. Cool pools of reflecting blue dinnerware.  She changed into a Navy blue Tahiri Bi-stretch Sheath dress, and then scrunched up a Carmen Marc Calvo dress she had used to clean up after the bed had caught on fire and she had to poor a Gatorade bottle of urine on it to put it out.  She could not find her rubber gloves, so she would use the Carmen Marc Calvo dress like a rag to use on doorknobs or anything else metal. She walked down Ferret Street to a Liquor store next to the record shop. The store was right between Kavane and Antioch, so it would usually sell to students. Vicki put a $50 bill on the counter with the Handle of Maker’s Mark. Before the clerk could say anything Vicki said: “Keep the change.”  He nodded and let her carry the bottle out of the store. Vicki went back to her dorm and turned the air conditioning on.

She recorded a voice message into the voice modifier. “You’re not going to be able to get rid of me so easily. You’re going to die Cunt.” She *67ed Alex’s number and played the message when she heard the sweet little voice answer the phone. She went through her contacts and *67ed jack’s number. She listened to him answer then hung up. She *67ed Alex’s number again and listened to Alex scream into the phone: “Who is this?! Stop calling me and threatening me!” Vicki laughed and hung up. She *67ed Luka. He did not pick up. She *67ed him again and he picked up. He did not say anything and Vicki tried to hear him breathing. She got a text from Luka after she hung up. The text asked: “Did you just call me?”  She replied: “No, it was probably your conscience.” Luka did not respond. He had come out of the library to answer the second time his phone rang. He had a lot of work due. Luka felt very strongly that Vicki had called him and said nothing. She was looking for attention. Luka figured the best thing to do would be to not let her distract him from the work he had to do. She would just get worse.

“And that very well, may be the case. Many of these types do not want to communicate, but want to compete and win. So, when a person like yourself comes along and tries to communicate on a level playing field, they see an easy opportunity to win, and they will subconsciously start trying to make the playing field more advantageous for themselves by saying things to throw you off balance, even if they believe they are not acting out of aggression at all. Sometimes the aggressor believes they are helping a friend in need when they, are in fact beating “their friend” in a competition to win whatever, usually a very vague image or definition,  of what the aggressor personally views success and winning should be and look like.        

She took two pills from the orange bottle. She mixed the Maker’s Mark with Coke in a big plastic cup from the Audubon Park Zoo There was a hologram of an elephant on the side that slightly moved if you looked at it from different angles. In 5^th grade a bunch of girls made up a rumor that she was a lesbian, many people still believed she was a Lesbian until her Senior year of High School. Kids in her High School were shocked when she developed so beautifully, got so much attention from boys, and actually went on dates with boys.  Rockets flew into the air. The point was to demoralize the enemy by hitting civilian populations.. She put the two pills in her mouth then drank a large amount of the Coke and Maker’s mark, surprised how good it tasted. It was better to wound someone than to kill them, because then the wounded had to be cared for, and they were still alive and in pain, which brought down moral, until they could be evacuated, if they could be evacuated. She put in a little more Maker’s Mark, and decided to go to the elevator. She still could not find her gloves and it was making her upset. A black 40-year-old developmentally disabled man could not understand what was happening. A rented truck pulled onto a bridge and the guys inside started firing at anyone who was black, as everyone ducked for cover and started running. They were police officers, but they had no uniforms on. They chased the developmentally disabled man down and shot him in the back with a shotgun. She slipped on an aqua-light blue Charles Henry Tank Dress. She looked out into the hall, until she saw a janitor go into the custodial closet. She kept sipping on her Maker’s Mark and Coke, and ate one more Ativan. She finally saw the Janitor come and she ran out of her room, saying the toilet in the bathroom was overflowing and there was water everywhere. The janitor ran into the girl’s bath room, and Vicki leaned into the closet and took another thick pair of rubber gloves. She saw the set of keys sitting in the lock for the custodial closet. She thought they could be useful, so she twisted it out of the lock and ran back to her dorm room, just as the Janitor came back out of the bathroom. He confusedly looked both ways down the eleventh floor hallway for the girl who had told him about the non-existent over-flowing toilet.

            “It’s just the anger seems to be like constant, pounding into any free moment I have. I am always thinking of this person and that person and I just want all the fights, and all the thoughts and scolding voices and negative suggestions to just stop. Like if everything could just slow down.”

             She loaded a nail into the nail gun. She pulled up the metal sleeve securing one nail in the front of the gun. She put a .22 charge into the chamber then put the nail gun into her back pack. Shadows shifted, as she tried to not look at the kids on the smoker’s bench. The desolate aisles of the book store appeared. The stiff carpet, bookshelves and fluorescent lights eased Vicki into a momentary tranquility. She stole five textbooks. The fifth one did not want to go into her bag. Vicki had to kick it. She started swearing at the books, and then she had to take them all out and reorganize them, so she could fit the fifth one. She managed to squeeze the zipper closed. To be able to possess was to be able to control. The nail-gun was hidden from view in her armpit. Cynthia did not wave back, when Vicki walked out of the bookstore waving at her.

            “Why would someone do that? I guess not understanding why it happens, makes me just as sad.”

            “Everybody has a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure and a lot of stress in their lives and they use acts of aggression to release this pent-up energy. But most people have a self-image that is understandably positive and good. Acts of unfocused rage and aggression are seen as inherently evil and bad. So, they usually justify acts of aggression into other necessary forms like defense, or achieving a positive goal. Participating in sports and ‘beating’ one’s opponents is one healthy way of exercising that energy. Creative endeavors like art can also be helpful in directing this energy into a constructive outlet, as opposed to committing destructive acts to one-self or personal relationships around you.”

            Vicki stashed the uneven five textbooks back in her dorm and felt like going outside. She took two more Ativan pills. Vicki went to the Daq- shack at the end of Saint Charles Avenue, right in front of the levy. The sun-burnt skin of the ancient white people who kept slaves in the beautiful homes and gardens that lined Saint Charles existed somewhere now. The black slaves in the shadows, excluded, broken shapes, contrasted with the French arches and sweeping palms. She walked over and sat in a sand trap on the Audubon Golf course. The Trail of Tears went through Tennessee. A U.S Army officer told an elderly Chocktaw man this was not his home anymore. Spanish moss caught the muddled breeze as it swung back and forth in the shifting wind. She looked up and saw the orange and pink clouds reflecting the already set sun.

She went back to her dorm and tried to call Alex again, but forgot to dial *67, so she just hung up. Vicki got a text from Alex, and then a call back from Alex right after, so Vicki silenced her phone.  A group of police officers lined-up with Shotguns and assault rifles began firing into the black families seeking refuge from the flood on the Danziger bridge. She walked down the stairs, and over to the big white wooden frat house, where she thought she remembered ending up on her night out drinking. There was a big blue dumpster in the back of the driveway by the garage. She sprayed lighter fluid into the dumpster, and onto all the boxes, trying to empty the 32oz bottle. The match went in and the cardboard roared. B-52’s carpet bombed the dense jungles, because they believed the people in them were sympathetic to the enemy. Vicki was shocked by how bright the flames were, so she sprinted back to Biever Hall, throwing the empty bottle of lighter fluid into some bushes. The people with the bombs falling on their families did not want to take sides, and had tried to stay out of the whole conflict. She tripped and fell down, almost landing on her face. She scraped her hands, forearms and knee really bad, but she got up and almost instantly forgot it happened.

Back to the safety of her dorm, She ripped pages out of her copy of Mein Kampf. She put her rubber gloves on and used the ripped pages to hit the button for the elevator. She took it down to the bottom floor. A military parade marched forward with tanks and men stepping in-line with rifles. She stumbled into the rec room she always hated. Kids were sitting on couches watching reruns of Frasier. If she could just get a hold of her mom or Dad and just talk about all this stuff coming at her, but she did not want to bother them. She went to the television and began changing channels from 7 to 21, 7 to 21, 7 to 21, over and over. As soon as the channel was changed the kids on the couch started yelling at Vicki: “Hey”, “We were watching that.” She took out the camouflage folding knife, unfolded it and said simply: “Everyone shut up.” She turned back around and continued changing the channels 7 to 21, 7 to 21, 7 to 21, using the rubber gloves and the ripped pages of Mein Kamf to touch the buttons. A boy approached “Could you please just sit down, so we can at least see the television, you’re right in front of the screen.” There was a microwavable bowl of pasta on the couch that she discerned the boy had just been eating. Vicki picked up the plastic half-eaten cup of Ziti and instant tomato sauce and threw it against the wall. She kept her eyes stonily locked on the boy, as she threw the plastic cup of Ziti. “Fuck You!” Vicki said, unfolding the knife again. Kids started to leave the rec room. Vicki turned and continued 7 to 21, 7 to 21 for about 20 minutes, until someone from the front desk walked in and asked her: “Did you throw that Spaghetti all over the wall?” Bloody bodies were strewn all over the rec room, blood spattered all over the wall and the ceiling, as Vicki hacked at injured students with a knife and they pleaded: “Please, Why are you doing this? I don’t want to die.”

“No.” She responded.

“Well, you are the only one in here, and a boy outside is saying a girl that looks just like you threw his dinner all over the wall and started randomly changing channels.” Vicki ignored him and kept doing 7 to 21, silently mouthing the numbers with her lips, under her breath. 

The Student advisor left the rec room. Vicki left and circled through the laundry room, where she had never actually been before.  She used crumpled pages of Mein Kampf clutched in her hand to click the elevators up to 4, 8 12, 16, 20. She went down, painfully and stopped at 11. Back inside her dorm, she feverishly ripped out the pages of Mein-Kampf, the Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The pages wafted in the air-conditioning, as Vicki messily, ripped, and threw the fluttering and torn pages and book-spines against her wall. She changed into a blue Burberry Michelle Chambray Flare-Sleeve Dress. “Boys don’t like girls who don’t dress well. You need to dress well to make up for you being so awkward.” Her mother had said.

            When the door opened on 20 she got out and saw a sign that said Service Door Maintenance Use Only. She turned from that door, and looked down the row of doorways. She found room number seven and took her key out and twisted the handle using her gloves, using several of her keys, before finding the one that opened the door. Vicki took the ripped shreds of pages into a vacant dorm room. She took out matches she had put in her underwear. Electricity surged through the water when the telephone poles fell down and people were still making their way to dry land in the flood-water. She lit the pages on fire. She watched the fire consume the pages, until a fire alarm began to go off, so she got on the stairs and ran down to her dorm.

            “Surprise is one tactic many people use in order to win these personal-destructive victories. If they can convince someone that everything is alright, and that you are their friend, and generally considered an equitable peer, until they attack. The victim, confused as to what’s occurring, has usually lost by the time they can even figure out what is happening.”        

            “And that’s the thing. I’m tired of being the confused one. I’m tired of reacting and responding to these tactics. I want people to respond and react to me.”

Vicki called Jack Allen again. The fire alarm was blaring. She ate two more Ativan, because she was getting hungry, but she did not really want to stop and eat food, so she felt less hungry right after she ate the two of the pills and took a long pull from sweet-tasting big Audubon Zoo plastic cup of Coke and Maker’s Mark. She made another drink, and waited for the fire alarm to go off. A 50’s housewife trapped home with the kids and her speed, while her husband was away at the advertising company. The screeching alarm ceased and Vicki ate three more Ativans, before leaving her room. She went down the stairs to the fourth floor. She opened the door to Jack’s floor and went down to where she thought his room was and began pounding on the door. A bomb fell, the house collapsed and the father and mother fought and blamed one another, because they had thought the kids would be safer if they stayed inside. She was unlocking the door, rifling through her small set of maintenance keys. A boy, who was not Jack, walked up behind her and asked: “Hi this is my room can I help you?”

“Does Jack live here?”

“I Live her and a kid named Ben. No one named Jack, Sorry.”

            Vicki told him to, “Tell Jack, Lynn-Sue, and Baby Alex to watch their backs. I am no one to be Fucked with.” She went to the elevator and hit 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20, and then down again 4, 8,12,16, and 20 and up. A boy on the fourth floor complained, and she ignored him with her rubber gloves on, before the elevator doors automatically closed.

“It’s exhausting. To just keep going and going against these people. It’s just like they will always win. And It’s not like I want to win I just want a moment where I can just be friends or have a boyfriend and not get played off of to gain some momentary advantage, so other people can look good by making me look stupid. You get so exhausted you can’t really think straight, and then I just start getting really mad at everyone and about everything. I mean it happens so often. It’s frustrating to the point of making me sad, and then back to mad again. Everyone is what is crushing me in the first place.”

            It was 6 o-clock and Vicki knew the bookstore closed at 7. A group of S.S. soldiers moved into a burning village on the Russian-German border.  Slinging her back pack over her shoulder, she ran down to the bookstore and shoved 11 textbooks into the back-pack. She had to take the nail gun out in order to fit them all. They would not fit, so she tried to re-organize them, so she could make an even 16 with the ones in her dorm. She looked up and saw Cynthia standing over her. Cynthia asked: “What the hell are you doing?” Vicki bolted upright and tried to leave, but Cynthia opened her arms and held her back. Cynthia said “Honey! You will be way better off, if you just stay here.”  Vicki halted in the wake of Cynthia’s stern tone. She slipped the nail gun up further behind her back, so Cynthia did not see it. Cynthia went up to the front desk to call Campus Security. Vicki flew past the front register, as Cynthia had just gotten connected with Security. Cynthia ran out past the exit and told Vicki to stop. “I already called Security! You can either do this here or they can come find you.” Vicki tried to slip past Cynthia’s lecture. Cynthia grabbed Vicki’s bulging, oversized back-pack. Without even really thinking, Vicki turned, pulled the nail-gun out from the behind her back-side, and pointed the nail-gun into Cynthia’s stomach. Vicki pulled the trigger. It sounded like a gunshot and Vicki heard Cynthia screech like a hurt dog. Long nights of wondering if her family would ever be together again. “Stop! What the Hell was that! Did you just shoot me?” Cynthia cried desperately, wheezing, as she ran after Vicki. Vicki launched herself outside and away from Cynthia’s pathetic pleading. Cynthia, rushing with adrenaline and anger from the nail embedded in her stomach, caught Vicki again by her huge textbook-filled back-pack outside on the small set of five steps that lead back to the dorms. Vicki dropped the back pack and took the empty nail gun out and threatened: “I’ll shoot you again.” Cynthia looked down at the red spreading over her shirt and she started to scream. Cynthia realized all at once that this crazy girl had shot her with a nail gun, and she forgot about the books and chasing Vicki. Cynthia turned around and went to the first Aid station at the Security Office.  Vicki ran to the elevator and did 3, 9, 12, 15, 18, and then she ran down the stairs to her eleventh-floor dorm. Blood dripped out of her nose. The backs of her hands were a baked red of dried blood from wiping it off her nose. Her face was pale, and dried and drying blood splattered messily on her upper lip and smaller spots of red dotted her chin and cheeks. The officer thought the teens fit the description of the armed assailants, so when they ran the officer got scared. A rookie got shot point-blank in the head, after talking to an armed robbery suspect. The rookie was young, and inexperienced. He was being nice, treating the suspect like an equal. He remembers the funeral and his widowed, young wife crying. It was just under two years ago, so he fired his gun into the backs of the fleeing teens, until it clicked empty.

“I just never really wanted to be this person. Fighting and fighting back. It just feels like it’s the way things are set-up. I will always be forced by others to be reacting and evening the score, so I am this hurtful person. I really just want to be left alone. I’m like confused into anger or something. I don’t even know, other than just the exhaustion.”

            Vicki had unlocked the exit door on the eleventh floor. She tried the different keys to open the door, so the alarm would not turn back on. She dropped into her dorm and ate three more Ativans. Floating in a cloud of ether, and she did want to be interrupted. Her limbs and her body were moving, but her brain was detached from the movements and actions, and she immediately forgot what she had just done right after she did it. Slamming the Exit door open and then shut made her feel in control. Open, Shut, Open, Shut, Open, Shut, Open, Shut. It felt better the faster she did it. The door was heavy, and she started to get hot. She took off her blue Burberry Michelle Chambray Flare-Sleeve Dress. She was only wearing her aqua blue underwear with no bra on. Her RA heard the slamming and came down the hall: “Oh my God, Girl. We need to cover you up.” Vicki ran into her dorm, before he got close. He knocked on the door, but Vicki did not answer. She finished what was in the big plastic Audubon Zoo cup. She made another mix of Coke and Maker’s Mark. Vicki drank it while she listened to the knocking stop. The Ativans were like Tic-Tacs, and she kept putting one in her mouth then forgetting the last one and forgetting the last one. Blood went down, and then she followed it up with her eye. Blood down, out of her nostrils, but up with her eyes.

            “Just why can’t other people give a person space, so they can be who they naturally are, as opposed to this is what you should be, so we will just force, force force it and if you don’t accept then we will harass, intimidate or make fun of you until you snap into the desired role. But Just how brutal, persistent these types are. It seems like there is no alternative but to either give in, or fight. They seem to want this image or annihilation. They seem to have no problem with destroying other people, as they just happily bounce through the rest of their lives, convinced they never caused any damage, because the people who they hurt deserved it, because they did not fit into some narrow definition of what a good person looks like.”

There was someone pounding on her dorm room door when she woke up. Blood from her nose dripped all over a laminated card of the Virgin Mary. The door was shaking when the person hit it. She took four more Ativan pills and drank out of the handle of Maker’s Mark. The sting of the alcohol woke her up. “Victoria!” A big, scary adult voice was saying on the other side of her door. The door opened. Startled, she panicked, screamed, ripped off the plastic cap and sprayed the three adults inside with lighter fluid. They tried to subdue her. She grabbed her nail gun and pulled the trigger, but she had never reloaded it. She hit one of the adults over the head with the gun. They grabbed her, but she had no clothes on, but her aqua blue underwear, so she squirmed free. She grabbed the plastic bag filled with 32 oz. squeeze bottles of lighter fluid. Lighter fluid was sprayed into someone’s mustache and eyes. She heard one adult screaming like a little kid. She took the bag with the bottles of lighter fluid then ran down the hall to the stairs to the fourth floor. She went to the same dorm room she had thought Jack lived in. She sprayed the rest of the lighter fluid into the plastic bag with the other bottles. She took a match out of her underwear, lit it and threw it into the bag. Vicki took the bag and threw it at the door. The bottles of lighter fluid clunked and tumbled out of the bag around the blue fame from the burning lighter fluid. She tried to throw the bottles on the floor onto the thin flames burning the plastic bag, until the boy who had answered before came out and yelled, “What the fuck!” And then she ran down the hall. Her greasy blackish-brown hair hung over her bare shoulders. Vicki took the elevator up 5, 10 15, 20 and she unlocked the door that said Service Door Maintenance Use Only on the twentieth floor. It took her several attempts to find the right key. She climbed the attic like steps to a hatch in the ceiling. She opened the hatch and she was on the roof. Vicki spit blood onto the flat rooftop, and looked up at only the sky above her.

            “It’s just like if so many people say it then it must be true. It lowers your confidence, so you don’t even know what’s up or what’s down. If you are good or if you are bad. Just like this constant assault. Where you are always being sized up and scrutinized.”

            “To try to make you believe you are terrible person. But you are not. They are trying to make you feel that way. You seem very intelligent, and people are playing their insecurities off you. It’s human nature unfortunately. Try to think of it as a challenging game you can work hard and gain rewards from instead of this negative idea of a kind of alien burden placed on yourself by some terrible people who make up all the rules. This is life. Your own attitude is what make you.”

            “Ya, But why the whole aggression in the first place. Like why start it. I didn’t start it. Like I’m tired, confused, stressed, pissed off and nervous. And I don’t want to play anymore.”

            Up here she could see the whole campus, Audubon park, Kavane, the way Saint Charles Ave slithered into a mess of lights through Uptown and Midtown down to the Quarter, until she could see the skyscrapers of the financial district and the low squat of the superdome. The tail-light lines of traffic blinked on I-10.  Around it snaked the ceaseless darkened-black-blue of the Mississippi. The river filtered out over the city into a mess of swamps, mud and silty unsubstantial islands, before the serene and ghostly-dark horizon of the Gulf of Mexico.  The distant, impenetrable blue of the immovable ocean, and the pitch black of immovable night only slightly contrasted one another. So it was hard to tell where the night sky met the ocean. The moon was a waxing crescent of distant yellow-white. She reached for her cellphone to call her mom, but she had forgotten it in her dorm room. She was only in her aqua blue underwear. She walked to the edge and looked down. Blood dripped out of her nose. She sniffled, and watched it fall then disappear below her. Caked blood spread out in a messy stain underneath her nose and onto her lips and chin. There were police cars and fire engines parking with their sirens on below.  She could make out kids on the smoker’s bench, and she decided to go to the other side where she knew there was just an unused road and dumpsters, before the fence that marked Kavane property. Vicki stepped off the edge, like she was stepping into a pool. In mid-air, she could not believe this was happening, and that she would somehow fix it later. She felt the rush of energy force her down. Her hair flew up, above her shoulders, clear of her neck, and floated above her eyebrows. She closed her eyes, as she let her arms rise above her head. Her body went sideways, as she fell. She landed on her left side. Her skull cracked off the pavement, instantly snapping her neck.

            An expanding pool of blood was slowly spreading outwards, like a shadow. The human eye cannot see the absence of light in a three-dimensional space. The perception of depth escapes us, until its darkened cast reflects off a surface.

A Fire Marshall responded to the call for assistance with multiple fires and emergency calls coming over the radio at Antioch University. One call right after the other. He pulled onto the road behind Biever Hall. He put his powerful high beams on in his unmarked Fire Department SUV. He slammed on the brakes when he saw the body lying in the road. The headlights picked up her aqua blue underwear, her naked upper-body, and the crimson stain spreading below her. Her dark brown eyes were open. The Fire Marshall got out of his vehicle, he walked closer to Vicki in the road, and he began to frantically fumble for his radio, once he was close enough to see.