Innocence
Page 25
Chapter 25
Sunday’s slow slog to the dining hall just before breakfast’s last call became a regular, weekend procession for us. It was mute parade, the five of us, clad in T-shirts, shorts or sweats, shuffling in our flip flops for coffee, OJ and eggs.
Some were hung-over. Some were dead tired. Some just weren’t ready to face a day of homework. It usually took the first cup of strong coffee to get the conversation going. But as we walked to the dining hall and Amanda thumbed her iPhone, something halted her in her tracks.
“Oh dear,” she exclaimed in her British manner.
That stopped us. We turned, and Lauren spoke. “What is it?”
“A student,” Amanda said, her eyes still scanning the Web page on her smartphone. “A young woman. A freshman, like us. She was assaulted. Sexually assaulted. Last night. On campus.”
“Raped?” Lauren clarified.
Amanda raised her widened eyes to ours. “It doesn’t say, but I’m guessing so. You know the legalese the university police use, trying to make it sound as good as possible. Apparently, the poor thing was beaten, too.”
“Motherfucker,” Lauren whispered under her breath. “Don’t these college dudes get enough pussy?”
“It’s not about that,” Sonya corrected. “It’s an act of violence. Always. Rape is violence against women and everything we stand for. And if this woman was beaten as well, this is rage. Real rage.”
Then I heard my own voice, dry and frightened in my throat.
“When?” I managed. “Does it say when it happened?”
Amanda lowered her eyes back to the smartphone screen.
“Sometime after 3 a.m.,” she said.
That sent shivers down my spine. Because I knew an angry someone whom I had set lose upon the campus.
Alec Keegan.
The immediate leap in my logic shocked me. I didn’t know why my mind had made such a connection. A connection between the wee-hours campus attack and angry, impotent Alec Keegan. But once it had, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop seeing Alec’s enraged, judgmental face, made all the more ominous in the shadows. And I couldn’t stop hearing his put downs of me. Saying that I was just like all the others.
All the other whores, was what he meant. Wasn’t it?
The chill of it sent goose bumps down my spine.
After Amanda’s bombshell about the coed who was sexually attacked on our campus, there wasn’t much spirit among us Five to chat about our Saturday night. This was good, because I didn’t know what to make of mine.
I had shared a heightened moment of unquestioned passion, excruciating excitement and newfound intimacy with Dante. Yet, we were the classic star-crossed couple caught on two different sides of the tracks. He was what us State students derisively referred to as a Townie. A local yokel whose life and livelihood were tied the college town through which we students passed en route to challenging careers in far-flung cities that would yield both personal and professional success.
At least that was what we students all believed. In that light, getting involved with a Townie just wouldn’t do. Not in the judgmental eyes of most college students, it would not. The question remained, was I one of those judgmental Old State snobs?
Then, there was the far more troubling matter of Alec Keegan. He was the polar opposite of Dante. He had the all the college cred, the intellectual chops and the pensive, John Lennon good looks. But I had yet to feel any real passion from him. Sure, our conversations were heady, and he could make my mind swim with his rapid-fire observations on life, society and the whole cruel joke of college in a country where opportunity was sinking, not rising. But I wanted him to slow down, stop talking and simply look at me. See me. Deal with me!
Then, last night, I got my wish. But it was nothing like I’d imagined. Alec’s passion poured out in the form of contempt. Contempt for me for being caught with Dante, whom Alec considered beneath both him and me. Alec’s interest took the form of some bizarre, late-night stalking around my dorm hall, even though we had had no official plans together. And his passion took the form of rising anger -- dare I even say hate? -- as he condemned both me and Dante. Then, he stalked off into the dark college night, rejected, defeated and impotent.
Word of the attack on that same night, occurring in the wee hours when Alec and all his impotent rage had been unleashed upon the campus because of me, only added to my swirl of confusion, guilt and shame.
What if I had done something to push Alec over the edge? What if I were the cause of his anger, condemnation and judgment that he then took out on another woman? An unsuspecting college freshman woman just like me, who in Alec’s eyes became my proxy and the convenient target for his rage? All of it -- his anger, these events -- unleashed by me and my actions?
Why did I even think such things? How could I even possibly think that scholarly, intellectual Alec could somehow be involved in a brutal sexual assault?
Maybe, because I had peered into his eyes. Perhaps, because I had felt the heat of his anger.
And maybe, just maybe, Alec had something to prove – to the world, but most of all to, himself and to me. Namely, that he was far from impotent.
I shuddered to even think it. But I thought it just the same. Obsessing as I sat numbly, not even tasting my breakfast.
Only thinking and imagining the worst.
Worrying like never before.