Nu Alpha Omega

by H. Claire Taylor

  Jess took the phone and set it on her bed beside where she sat with Chris.

  Leslie watched from her desk chair, quietly taking in the melodrama.

  “I already know what Wendy’s going to say,” Jessica whined. “She’s going to tell me to hold a damn press conference. That’s what she always says.”

  “You don’t know that,” Chris said, though it was clear from his tone that even he didn’t believe his words. “They don’t really do press conferences on college campuses,” he said. “Or maybe they do. Wait, is that what the Free Speech area is for?”

  Jess shook her head. “No. That’s where you go when you don’t want anyone to listen to you, not when you want to actually be heard.” She groaned. “I hate Courtney. How did she even get ahold of Eugene Thornton anyway?”

  “First of all,” Chris said, standing, heading over to the mini fridge, and pulling out a Dr. Pepper for himself, “you don’t know it was Courtney.”

  Jess rolled her eyes. “Of course it was Courtney. It’s always Courtney.”

  “Well, fine. It was probably Courtney. And I’m sure it’s not hard to get ahold of Eugene. He’s friends with Jimmy, right? And Courtney knows him.” He nodded his head to let her fill in the rest.

  “Or Eugene could have an alert set for your name on the Internet,” Leslie added.

  Jess perked up. “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah,” Leslie said casually. “If anyone tweeted about it or recorded it on their phone, which probably happened, and they mentioned your name, he could get an alert.”

  Jess shot eye daggers are her roommate. “Why would you tell me that? That’s horrifying.”

  Leslie held up her hands defensively. “I’m just saying, maybe no one tipped him off. Maybe he just found out. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, this is what Jimmy said would happen, right?”

  Jessica grimaced and avoided eye contact with Chris, who hadn’t yet been informed of Jimmy’s threats.

  When Jessica looked up at her boyfriend, he was leaning against the armoire, brows arched as he waited patiently for her to kindly fill him in on what the fuck.

  Jess sighed. “Jimmy wanted me to speak at White Light and I told him no, so he said if I didn’t, he would set Eugene on me. But I still said no.”

  Chris’s expression softened and he pouted his lips and nodded. “Yeah, that was definitely a good call. Screw Jimmy.”

  “But look what’s happened!” Leslie countered. “Eugene’s made this story about the walk-out go wide. Jessica is even more hated now than she was before!”

  Chris held up a hand to stop her. “Whoa, easy there. Hate’s a strong word.”

  As much as she appreciated his lame attempt to protect her feelings, Jess knew Leslie was right. “I guess I should call Wendy. I’m out of ideas.”

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had a few ideas, but they were along the lines of visiting Courtney’s dorm room, laying a good smite on the girl, withdrawing from all her classes, and taking off to the remotest island she could find that had healthy biodiversity and no internet access.

  Jess picked up Chris’s cell phone and called.

  It was immediately clear from Wendy’s pleasant tone that she hadn’t yet heard about Jessica’s latest situation. Jess considered not spoiling the woman’s day with it, but knew deep down that Wendy actually enjoyed a good crisis. Why else would she take on a pro bono client like Jessica?

  “Hi Wendy. Uh, so I have bad news.”

  Wendy listened patiently as Jessica filled her in on how the walk-out had developed, and when it was all over, her first question was, “Unnamed sources? Any ideas?”

  “Courtney, obviously.”

  “Hmm … It seems like Courtney would have gladly given her name. Doesn’t matter. Here’s what you need to do.”

  As Wendy paused, Jessica shut her eyes to brace against whatever awful task was about to be assigned.

  Then Wendy said, “You need to do nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Jess echoed dumbly.

  “Yes, nothing. This is your new strategy. When something horrible happens, do nothing.”

  “Not even explain my side of things?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not apologize?”

  “Especially not that. Never that.”

  This didn’t make sense. “No press conference? I thought you loved those.”

  “I did,” Wendy stated matter-of-factly. “But they’re no longer what works. Tactics change, Jessica, and the best thing anyone can do nowadays when unflattering things come to light is do nothing.”

  She immediately made up her mind to never mention this strategy to Destinee, who would undoubtedly have strong words for the PR rep about “being a pussy.”

  “What if people ask me about it? Do I pretend I don’t hear them, or what?”

  Wendy chuckled dryly. “No, don’t do that. If they ask you about it, you need to own it.”

  “Own what?”

  “Whatever it is they say you’ve done.”

  “But what if one person says I’ve done one thing and another says I’ve done something else?! People will read both sources and think I’m a liar. And they’d be right!”

  Jessica’s head swam and her heart raced, but Wendy remained calm. “Don’t worry. No one will read both sources. That’s the beauty of it.”

  Jessica’s lungs deflated. “That doesn’t sound beautiful at all.”

  “Well, eye of the beholder and all that, but trust me, Jessica, okay? This is the right way to approach it. All the big names are doing it. There’s nothing the public hates more right now than a repentant sinner. Shameless brazenness is in. For now, at least.”

  “Fine.”

  “Repeat the plan back to me, Jessica. Do nothing …”

  “Do nothing.”

  “And accept everything.”

  “And accept everything,” she finished through gritted teeth.

  Push it back, push it back, waaaay back!

  “Great. Oh, and Jameson sends his best and says the invitation still stands if you ever—”

  Jess gagged. It was an unfortunate tic she’d developed only in the last month every time someone mentioned Jameson Fractal in her presence. She wondered if everyone’s PTSD manifested this way and in such a delayed manner or if she was unique.

  “Tell him thanks and I’ll think about it.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Wendy replied skeptically. “I’ll let him know.”

  Once she was off the phone, she chewed her lip and thought over the advice. Do nothing, own everything. It seemed completely counterintuitive. Yet she couldn’t think of a time when her social crisis intuition had ever been particularly helpful, so it was worth a try to simply do the opposite.

  While there was a part of Jessica that was genuinely relieved Wendy’s new strategy of do-nothing-own-everything was working, mostly it left her miserable. It was only three weeks into spring semester of her freshman year, and Jessica was ready to graduate and get the hell off campus.

  Philosophy class hadn’t particularly improved, but it hadn’t gotten worse, either. When she had returned the following class after the walk-out, Ms. Gershwin appeared furious. Many of the other students looked shocked, some even looked impressed. She supposed any normal person would have taken the hint and dropped the class, but she wouldn’t. She was owning it.

  And it felt like someone had filled her stomach with Diet Coke and popped a few Mentos down there for the hell of it.

  “You gonna eat all that?” Chris asked, interrupting her thousand-pound worries.

  “Huh?” The sounds of Commons Dining Hall seeped back into her mind.

  He pointed to the last two pieces of bacon. “You gonna eat that?”

  “Oh, no. It’s all yours.” She tried to make sense of the two realities—the one in her mind where she was fairly certain she was going crazy, and the one in front of her eyes where Chris was sharking her bacon even though they were at an all-you-can-fit-in-your-gullet dining hall.


  He stuffed both pieces into his mouth quickly and said, “You seem extra distracted today.”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “What’s on your mind? Someone say something to you?” His voice carried a warning that she appreciated but didn’t need.

  “No, no one said anything to me, per se. Just thinking about something we were talking about in psychology yesterday.”

  Chris rolled his eyes. “Okay, I want to hear about it, but first can I just remind you what I said when you mentioned you were taking philosophy and psychology in the same semester?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” She didn’t actually remember what he’d said.

  “I said you were going to overthink things too much if you did them both at the same time. I had a cousin who took two philosophy classes, two psychology classes, and a logic class all in one semester, and she was in the state hospital for like five years after that.”

  Jess grimaced. “From the classes?”

  “Yeah. Well, and I think she was kidnapped for a little bit there.”

  Jess choked on the orange juice she was trying to get down. “Kidnapped for a little bit?”

  “Yeah, by an ex or something.”

  “What’s a little bit?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember. I was super young at the time. Two years?”

  “Two years?! She was kidnapped and missing for two years?”

  He sighed impatiently. “Yes. But my point is that she wasn’t able to bounce back after it because she’d just taken a bunch of overthinking classes at Oklahoma State and her mind was on shaky ground.”

  Maybe Chris had a point, but she decided to take it with a grain of salt, considering. “Well, hopefully I don’t get kidnapped, then.”

  “So is that what’s got you worried? Those classes? Am I right?”

  She nodded. “Not so much worried as … well, yeah, worried, I guess.”

  “Knew it. So what are you worried about?”

  She hesitated, knowing he would fight her on whatever she said. Part of her didn’t want to tell him, for that reason and because it felt too personal and she was still sorting it out on her own. But there were a few new key pieces of information that she’d learned that had left her with what she considered to be pretty legitimate concerns over her own mental health. Among the chief philosophical concerns:

  Why doesn’t God show Himself to everyone if He exists?

  Why does God let innocent people suffer and die?

  And an oldie but goodie that she had yet to get a straight answer about: Could God create a rock that even He couldn’t lift?

  She hadn’t bothered asking God these questions, because she already knew what he’d say. He couldn’t show himself to everyone, because most people would find a way to believe it was something else besides God. He didn’t let innocent people suffer, Original Mistake did that and He’d been cleaning up the mess ever since it started. And while she wasn’t sure what he would say for the last question, she assumed it had something to do with being powerful and all that.

  But those answers were feeling hollow lately.

  And then there was psychology. Her chief concern from that class was straightforward: schizophrenia. She was pretty sure she had it. Her life so far had felt like a puzzle missing a crucial piece, and a schizophrenia-shaped one wasn’t an exact fit, but it was pretty damn close. Where it didn’t make complete sense, her brain was able to easily fill in a reasonable explanation. Or at least one that made more sense than “God’s daughter.” How had she allowed herself to indulge that cop-out answer for so long?

  For example, the smiting. She’d thought long and hard about this over the past week and had determined that it could have easily been all in her head. Nothing long-lasting had ever resulted from it, outside of Chris’s trauma from the bird. So maybe someone had fed that grackle rice previous to it perching on the playground, and then it had simply exploded at a particularly inopportune moment, and from that point on, her mind had assumed that she had control over things exploding. Maybe it was a mix of reality and fantasy. Maybe some things had exploded at strange times, but maybe that happened to everyone. She hadn’t learned much in chemistry, but she had learned that sometimes things explode for strange reasons other than God-power. That seemed an important takeaway.

  As to how she knew personal things about the folks in her town? Most of it could have been made up by her crazy mind, since she never bothered to confirm it. And it didn’t take a genius to see Mrs. Wurst and Mr. Wurst and know there was no love there.

  Her mind continued to dredge up more and more memories of her so-called powers, and each one that came through the line for inspection was fairly easily explained away, at least so far.

  And then there was Occam’s razor to contend with. Whichever possibility required the fewest assumptions was probably the truth. So did it require fewer assumptions to say she was God’s only daughter or to say she was one of millions of people who suffer from schizophrenia?

  She inhaled deeply and let it out. There was no point in hiding it from Chris. She’d have to tell him eventually. “I think I’m crazy.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Like how?”

  “I can’t be sure without a medical diagnosis, but schizophrenia, I think.”

  “Schizo,” he said dryly. “You think you’re a schizo.”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You think God would let His only daughter be a schizo.”

  So he wasn’t quite getting it. “No, I don’t. I think I might be a schizo and not God’s dau—” She couldn’t finish saying it, as usual. But that could easily be a crazy brain thing, so she didn’t let it derail her.

  The sudden redness on Chris’s face did, however, derail her. He leaned close to her, grabbing her upper arm, and hissed, “Seriously?” He glanced up, his eyes darting around before returning to meet her stare. “You’re going to pull that shit on me now, McCloud?” He sounded desperate, perhaps only a few seconds away from hysteria.

  She tried to move away, but she couldn’t shake his grasp on her arm. “What? I—”

  “Whatever happened to owning it? This is the opposite of that. Do you realize how much I’ve had to— No, that doesn’t matter. But seriously, Jess?”

  His anger blindsided her, and she stopped trying to struggle free of his grip. But she didn’t have to, because he let go of her with a small shove, like he couldn’t stand to touch her anymore. His eyes were watery and red, and she couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

  “Chris, what … I’m sorry. I just—”

  He stood up and tossed his trash onto his tray. “You need to get your head on straight, Jess. We can’t keep on if you don’t even believe in yourself. All this shit will be for nothing. I can’t give them that.” He wasn’t looking at her.

  “We can’t keep on? What do you mean?” She felt like she’d swallowed a sandbag.

  Finally he looked down at her. “I mean you need to stop this denier shit and get your head in the game, McCloud. Too many people have stuck their neck out for you to just give up and give in now.” He paused, staring forward and shaking his head. “God dammit, Jess. God dammit.” Then he grabbed his tray and headed off to the trash cans, leaving her alone to wonder what in her Father’s name just happened.

  * * *

  When Jessica arrived at the Student Health Center, a women’s wellness exam hadn’t been her intention, but here she was, sitting in a flimsy hospital gown, the cold air like glacier water drizzling down between her exposed butt cheeks.

  On the advice of her psychology professor, she’d started the day with a single mission: get a doctor to refer her to the university psychologist so that she didn’t have to pay for the sessions she knew she needed. But the female student working the front desk had been a startlingly good salesperson, considering what she was selling was to have a stranger look deep into Jessica’s vagina and possibly stick a few things in there. And Jess was disturbed by how easily she’d consented to it. The
brochures were really the clincher, as they triggered off a few memories from her seventh grade sex ed slideshow that she’d hoped would stay hidden in her mind for a few decades more, at least. Sure, she wasn’t having sex, but better safe than chlamydia.

  Dr. Sophie Page was kind enough to knock before she entered the exam room, but that was about where the boundaries ended with the energetic young doctor.

  She introduced herself to Jessica and took a seat on a stool by the examination bed where Jess waited nervously. If she’d known she was going to get her cooch examined today, she might have given it a little more attention this morning. Was it impolite to come without it clean shaven? She hoped not. Not that it mattered, since she wasn’t sure there was enough money in the world to entice her to put up with the itchy regrowth of labia hair.

  “When was your last wellness exam?” Dr. Page asked, grinning from ear to ear like she was minutes away from a cake tasting rather than peering into a feminine abyss.

  “This is my first.”

  “Oh.” That seemed to throw her off of her celebrations. “So, are you sexually active?”

  What did that even mean. Orgasm? Check. Fingering? Check. Brief attempt by Chris to use his mouth on her before she felt too much sympathy for him and made him brush his teeth so they could make out more? Check.

  But penetration by Chris’s terrifyingly big dong? Not so much.

  “Um, no?”

  Dr. Page narrowed her eyes. “No? Nothing?”

  “I mean, no sex.”

  Dr. Page narrowed her eyes further. “Listen, if you tell me, I won’t tell anyone. I realize you have a reputation you want to preserve, and I respect that. But this is your health.”

  Oh christ.

  It was always disappointing when Jessica thought she’d met someone who didn’t know about her unfortunate reputation only to find out the person was just playing it cool. She’d hoped Dr. Page might have been too busy the last eighteen years of her life to have heard that there was a supposed messiah on the loose in Texas, but it turned out that was too much to hope for.

  “I mean, I’ve never had, um, vaginal sex.”