by Lucy Lambert
“Got a spare pen?” she said.
“Uh, yeah, I think…” I said, digging into my messenger bag.
That Eric guy who I’d met that first evening came in, his shorter toady, Joseph, as ever by his side. He always sat right behind me, always asking when I was going to come by the frat house.
Today, when he looked at me and saw who I sat beside, his mouth twisted in a petulant grin.
“Hey, Joe, check out Jenn the dyke!” he said in that fake whisper designed for everyone to hear.
Joseph sniggered, putting two fingers up to his lips and letting his tongue lick out between them. They made as much noise as possible dragging their notebooks out, slapping them down on the little built in desk on the chair.
“I didn’t know you swung that way, Stephanie,” Joseph said.
I looked up at the clock above the door. Still five minutes until lecture started. Doctor Mooney stood behind the desk at the front, fiddling at the computer getting today’s slides ready. More Jane Eyre today, I knew, and for the next couple weeks.
Mooney didn’t shush anyone until after class started. He had a horseshoe of black hair on his head, and a bit of a paunch pushing at his shirt and blazer. He shoved at his glasses, pushing them back up his proud nose.
“At least I’m not a dumbass,” Jenn replied, “I didn’t need daddy’s name and money to buy my way in.”
Joseph made a shocked sound, looking back and forth between Eric and Jenn. I guess no one really talked back to him. He was a really big asshole, and reminded me far too much of all the jock douche bags in high school who thought they were kings of the school.
Eric started to reply, but Jenn cut him off.
“You’re just pissed because I pull more girls than you,” she said.
There were about seventy five students registered in this class, I knew. Most of them had quieted and were either looking directly at us, or trying to hide that they were looking at us. If Dr. Mooney heard, he didn’t seem to care.
“Lesbo bitch,” Eric said.
“Small-dicked moron,” Jenn said, almost under her breath.
Eric’s reaction was priceless. He went cherry red in the face, his thin lips worming as he tried to come up with some retort. I covered my mouth to try and stifle a laugh.
I liked Jenn already. So far, I’d just tried to ignore or be polite with Eric.
“It’s big enough for you!” Eric said.
He jumped up out of his chair and started pulling at his fly, tugging at the expensive denim of his jeans. Joseph started waving his hands, hissing for Eric to be quiet and sit back down.
“Mr. Putnam! If you have to use the washroom, the facilities are down the hall,” Dr. Mooney said.
He flicked on the projector that was mounted to the ceiling.
The slide had the lecture title, which was, “From Poe to Bronte: The Gothic in America and England.”
Eric sputtered as everyone laughed at him. He jerked his fly back up and sat down, his lips pressed into a thin white line while the redness in his face ripened.
Jenn winked at me. Yes, I really did like her.
When the lecture finished, everyone started filing down the stairs to get out. The hall outside was so full of students that the tide of humanity carried Eric and Joseph away from us, even though Eric kept shooting hot glares back at Jenn.
She and I stood just beside the open door in a few feet of clear space.
“Thanks for the pen,” she said, handing it back to me.
The heels she wore made her a few inches taller than me. Now that I’d actually met someone who would talk to me, rather than sense that I didn’t come from money and just leave, I didn’t want to go.
“No problem. Any time,” I said.
I wanted to ask if she wanted to grab some lunch at the cafeteria in the student center. It was either that or buy a sandwich and go sit alone in my dorm for the next two hours before my final class for the day.
“Cool. Hey, me and a few friends are having a get together tonight. Bronson Hall. A buddy of mine has a double room all to himself. You interested?”
Instantly, my heart shot into my throat. I shifted my messenger bag on my shoulder and bit down on my bottom lip.
God, how I ached to go to a party. But I couldn’t appear too eager.
“Uh, yeah, sure, I guess. I might show.”
The traffic in the hallway started to die down. The chorus of conversation changed from the steady hum to a low murmur as people moved to and from the rooms, all intent on getting to their next class or to grab lunch.
“Great! Ten or so tonight, room 2A,” Jenn said.
She turned around and walked away before I had the chance to ask her to lunch.
Chapter 10
My whole body felt lighter for the rest of the day. Had I really just met my first potential friend here in this strange new place?
That night, I met the rest of the Redeemer Outcasts. They didn’t really call themselves that, but that’s who they were in my mind. That’s who I was too, I knew.
Bronson Hall was one of the few co-ed dorms on campus. It wasn’t far from the student center, and I could actually see that big, imposing building from Jim’s room.
There were nine of us there, sitting on the bed or on the bare floor.
Jim was a chubby eighteen-year-old with blond hair lighter than mine and a love of weed.
There were Cheryl and Janice, twins from Boston who had the exact same freckle pattern across their cheeks. I sat beside them on the floor as they passed a bottle of Jack Daniels back and forth.
Jenn sat on my other side, leaning against Jim’s bed as she leafed through a magazine dedicated to tattoos and piercings. The cover had the picture of a guy who looked like he’d just lost a fight with a nail gun.
They were all different, in some way, from that mythical thing known as a “normal” person.
Jenn was studying English Literature, while Jim was in Classics.
At some point, maybe around eleven, Jim stuffed a towel under his doorjamb, covered the smoke alarm with the plastic case from a spindle of blank DVDs, and pulled out a bag of pot.
Soon, the room filled with the pungent smoke.
“Here,” Jenn said, trying to hand off the joint to me. I’d never really done it in high school. A couple of my friends had while I was around, though I never really felt anything.
“No… I shouldn’t,” I said, trying to wave it off.
“Aww, don’t be so straight edge,” Jim said. He had a big smile on his big face.
Maybe this time the stuff was having an effect on me, because I couldn’t help smiling back.
The doctors had offered my mom this stuff in pill form, to help dull the pain. But she refused, saying she’d had more than enough of it in school herself.
If she’d done it, wasn’t it okay for me to at least try it, see what everyone was going on about?
So I took the joint and put it to my lips. When I took a pull, the end glowed a cherry red. It felt like someone dragged their fingernails down my throat as it went into my lungs.
There was a tickle at the back of my throat, and I knew I had to cough. But I didn’t want to; none of the others had.
But I couldn’t help it. I quickly handed the joint off to one of the twins and covered my mouth while I hacked. It felt like one of my lungs wanted to come up.
“Good, isn’t it?” Jim said.
We passed it around until there was nothing left to smoke. At first, I felt nothing. Tobacco had more to it than this.
“So, you’re from California?” Jenn said. She had one of her arms around my shoulders and used it to pull me against her. I could feel her body against mine. It was so warm.
For some reason, I found that absolutely hilarious. I burst out laughing.
Jim pointed at me and started laughing, too.
“What? What is it?” Jenn said. Then she joined in.
There was a numbness, too. Sort of like if you slept on your arm, but wit
hout the unpleasant prickling and throughout my whole body.
When the laughter died, we all just sort of sat in the circle, looking at each other and grinning. God, why hadn’t I tried this before? What else had I missed out on growing up?
What else was a missing out on now?
With that on my mind, I said, “So, what are you guys gonna do after school?”
“What, like, on weekends?” a guy with a bright pink Mohawk sitting across from me asked.
This brought another round of sniggering.
“No, no,” I said, waving my arms far too vigorously. If I moved them fast enough, they seemed to blur in the air. I almost forgot what I wanted to say.
“I mean, after you graduate. What are you going to do?”
“Get a job, I guess?” Jim said, “I don’t know.”
“Yeah, probably get to work. Gotta buy that house with the two-car garage, ya know?” said one of the twins. I thought it was Janice.
“Really?” I said, leaning forward and grabbing my feet. It seemed very important that I hold on like that, so that I couldn’t slip away, “Because I don’t know. I just have no damn idea what to do with myself.”
History seemed interesting so far. Maybe I could be a history teacher, I thought. That might be cool. But it felt like I was just thinking that because it was something I could do, not something I really wanted to do. Besides, I heard it was really hard to get a teaching job these days.
But I was afraid for my mom. What would she do if I got a job away from her?
I almost said something, then, about my mother. But I stopped myself. That was too personal to share.
Everyone started nodding.
This comforted me. They were like me, I knew. And that felt nice, having someone around who could understand what it was I was going through.
It felt like everyone was about to go into a sour mood when Jenn lifted her hands up suddenly.
“Guys, guys, I totally busted that guy Eric today in my English lecture. It was so fucking funny. Stephanie, tell them about it!”
“Eric? Eric Putnam? I went to high school with that guy. He’s a jackass. You know, I heard he once got in shit for trying to date rape a girl. But his daddy and his daddy’s lawyers got him out of it,” Jim said.
I hadn’t heard that before. There seemed to be a lot of family stuff going on in this town. If it really was almost as old as Boston, I imagine a lot of the names I saw on the buildings had something to do with it. Wasn’t there a Putnam Hall?
“What? Is he a witch or something?” I said, covering my mouth as I laughed again.
Jenn shoved me.
“No, guy witches are called warlocks. Didn’t you know?”
Jim was strangely quiet as everyone else laughed. Even being as high as I was, I found the blank expression on his face disquieting.
Of course, I quickly forgot about that when someone pulled out a family-size bag of Lays and pulled it open.
Chapter 11
Jenn and I cleaved together over the next few weeks. She was eighteen, and from Lansing in Michigan. Her demeanor and the way she dressed made her seem like the older of us, though, even with her birthday being more than a year after mine.
We sat together in class, and texted constantly throughout the day. There had been lots of Goths at my high school, but I they hadn’t really been part of my social scene. And I found that I’d judged them, too. They dressed so strangely, and loved modifying their bodies, and I just didn’t get it.
It made me wonder how many other groups of people I judged without even really thinking about it just based on how they looked.
Even though we only had the one class together, the timing of our schedules matched up pretty nicely. At the end of the day we’d both end up in one of our dorm rooms.
Jenn had a single as well. She had a few posters of heavy metal bands and lots of pictures of various tattoos and other body mods all around hers. She also had several different pairs of tall black boots, and a selection of leather jackets. A small jewelry box, its femininity out of place among all that other stuff, held all her piercings.
She had about twenty piercings, all over her body. She’d offered to show me them one night after we’d both a few shots from the bottle of vodka she kept in her bottom drawer under her socks. I blushed as she looked at me, and I thought that it was the alcohol flushing her cheeks, too.
I’d said no.
“Well, all you have to do is ask…” Jenn said, winking at me.
She had to be one of the strangest, most unique people I’d ever had any sort of real interaction with.
Though, it turned out we both shared a guilty pleasure in watching bad romcoms. We’d both be sitting on the edge of the bed, watching them on either her laptop or mine.
“Oh, come on!” I’d yell as the guy scaled the side of the house to get to her bedroom.
“Creeper!” Jenn would chime in.
Sometimes, I caught her looking at me from the corner of my eye. There was something in those looks, but I couldn’t recognize it.
The credits of our latest romcom conquest were scrolling down on my laptop screen, hundreds of little white names and titles, as some corny, upbeat love song played. We sat on the edge of my bed, my lights all turned off. The room was hot; I’d closed my window so that the noise of the wind outside wouldn’t blot out the dialog.
The shadows shifted in the light from the screen as I sat up straight, stretching my arms and arching my back, wincing as I felt the muscles stretch.
I saw her, then, lying on her side supporting her head with one hand, just watching me.
“What?” I said, facing her.
She jerked like I’d got the jump on her.
“Huh?”
“Why are you looking at me?”
I got up and opened the window behind my desk. Crickets chirped outside, and the breeze found its way in, ruffling my curtains. It felt good on my skin.
“I wasn’t,” Jenn said.
I flopped on the bed beside her, our faces a maybe six inches apart. Her long, red hair was the color of old, dried blood in the weak light of the room.
“Yeah, you were,” I said, giving her shoulder a shove.
“I just thought you looked really good in that light. Pretty, you know?” Jenn said.
Her voice took on an earnest tone, and the words were more breathed than spoken.
“Thanks!” I said, not really paying attention to her tone. It was nice to get a compliment like that, even if it was from another girl.
“You’re welcome…” she said, looking down at my comforter. If I’d been a bit more attentive, I might’ve caught the hurt in her voice. But I wasn’t.
She really helped me when it came to my homesickness. Even though I didn’t really share many of the details with her (I couldn’t really bring myself to talk about my mom; it was like a cut that had just closed up and could reopen at any moment).
It was having someone to smile and laugh with. Someone who didn’t ask me how much my jeans or my shoes cost. I guess someone like her was used to being judged, so she chose to withhold judging others. Or, at least, judged them based on better qualities, like their sense of humor, their personality. You know, those stupid, unimportant things that money can’t buy.
It was nice having someone to ask if they wanted to grab lunch, or just to talk to.
If it hadn’t been for Jenn, I think I would have left Redeemer in those first, critical moments at school.
Chapter 12
“Yeah, yeah! Just a sec!” I said.
Jenn pounded on my door again.
“Come on. We’re going to be late!” she said.
I rushed around my little dorm room, hopping up onto my bed to grab a shirt I’d thrown down onto it.
The word “late” was relative here. It was already a few minutes past eleven in the evening. Jim usually started his parties around ten or so, which is when he had the deal with his residence don (which I believe involved the exchange of
pot as a type of hush money).
But Jenn was more fashionable than she cared to admit. As in, fashionably late. It was a strange trait for the pretty Goth girl, but who was I to judge?
With Fall really getting into full swing now, I chose a long-sleeve shirt and my jacket. Since I’d become a regular there in Jim’s dorm room, I didn’t really see the need to try and make a spectacle of myself, so I just pulled on a pair of jeans and my runners.
Jenn hammered at the door again.
“Steph!” she said.
Jeez, what was her hurry? I pulled the charger from my cell and shoved that into my pocket.
I took a quick moment to look at myself in the mirror on the back of my door. Not my best day, but at least it wasn’t a fat day, or a bad hair day, or any of those otherwise undesirable days.
I threw the deadbolt and yanked the door open.
As I suspected, Jenn stood there, arms crossed under her breasts, one foot tapping out an annoyed tune on the thin carpet on the hall.
“Who’s got your panties in a twist?” I said, locking my door behind me and giving it a testing shove. A lot of people didn’t lock their doors, but it was a force of habit.
“You, as a matter of fact. Come on!” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me away.
She wore her standard Goth uniform: high black boots, leather jacket, short black skirt over black tights. If her skin wasn’t so pale, she’d blend perfectly into all the shadows outside.
We practically jumped down the stairs, and outside I had to speed walk in order to keep up with her long strides. The chilly evening air prickled in my lungs and burst from my lips as lips as I huffed.
“Seriously, what’s up?” I said. I hugged myself against the chill.
As usual, there wasn’t really anyone else outside at this time of night. We walked by another dorm building all lit up from within. Jim’s wasn’t that far away, but I wished it was closer.
So Cal never really got cold like this. The weather here had so much more variety. Tonight, the sky was overcast, blocking out the moon and the stars.
