Hastily, she clicked on the email, thinking that if her professor was telling her that her failure of an essay had dragged her down to a D, that would be the last straw on a camel basically knee-deep in the sand at this point.
Dear Catherine,
I am writing to inform you of your near-perfect score on your Blake essay for my class. I do not usually email students personally, but since these essays are not returned in person and you merely see the results of your efforts on the online grade reports, I wanted to tell you that this essay really stood out from your peers. I could see the effort you had put into your study of Blake (no easy poet, either, with all the nuances in his work).
I strongly suggest you submit this piece (I have scanned my notes in the attached document—minor revisions, mostly grammatical) to the college’s English Literature Conference, which will occur in May. Deadlines, I believe, are in late February, giving you plenty of time to polish this piece and send it in for consideration. I think your chances are quite good, and the three top papers shared at the conference receive a monetary prize, I might add.
I hope you have a very restful holiday season, and again, well done!
Yours sincerely,
Professor Emily Graham
Catherine stared at the screen for several moments and then reread the message before opening the attachment. Her essay downloaded onto her computer, and she scrolled through it, noting the penciled comments in the margins, the two paragraphs at the end praising her, the oversized A+ on the cover page. Ninety-seven percent. She didn’t think she’d gotten a ninety-seven in anything before, in high school or college.
I can’t go back.
But I want to.
Why the hell do I want to?
Amber and essays and the leaves falling on the quad, late-night fries and groggy early-morning coffees and the library smelling of dust and oil and ink.
She’d lied to her mom. She had liked West Washington University. Loved it, in fact. She remembered hearing about some girl in her biology lecture who had transferred out in October and being baffled, wondering what had happened to make her leave.
But could she actually go back in just a few weeks? Lug her duffel bag into her room and walk to class and study in the library at three in the morning, stifling a yawn because it was the quiet floor and people would kill you for breathing loudly?
But he didn’t kill me.
What had happened to her, exactly? Would more come back to her? Could she handle it? What if it all came back, maybe in the middle of some freshman seminar and she stood up and screamed and had to run out of the lecture hall with two hundred people staring at the crazy girl who was her? What if she couldn’t handle it?
But what if she could? What if this thing that had happened to her…hadn’t? What if her mind was making up nightmares? What if she was blowing this whole thing out of proportion? She’d had too much to drink, passed out, woke up—
blood shower bruises
and she’d been scared, which was normal. Totally normal. So she’d freaked a little and made a big deal and—
Mom Mom pick up Mom
thought something bad had happened. But maybe she was just putting details in to fill the blackness, to make sense of everything. Like when she was seven and somehow convinced herself a monster lived in the downstairs coat closet. She’d made up this whole story about how it hid behind all the stuff they shoved in there and sometimes ate their shoes, which was why she’d lost the left red sneaker of her favorite pair. But of course it had all been in her head, trying to explain away the missing shoe and the creaks the house made at night. She created something that made sense to her, that scared her, yes, but not as much as not knowing.
She grabbed her cell phone off the nightstand. If she had to be alone with her thoughts another second, she was going to lose it.
Amber picked up on the third ring. “Thank God,” she said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Amber?” Catherine asked, relieved. “You’re awake?”
“No.” Amber’s eye roll was almost audible. “This is the Ghost of Christmas Past or whatever. Little Timmy died and I’m here to make you feel really bad about it.”
“Tiny Tim.”
“Oh, fuck off. Where have you even been?”
“I—” Catherine swallowed. “Do you remember the party last week? At Sigma…whatever?”
“I thought it was Delta. Wait, did something really happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. You said you were going to walk back. I…I said I’d come with you but you sort of waved me off and then I was talking to someone….Shit. Cordelia mentioned something as I was leaving, but then she shut up about it and told me to go away. I kept asking, too, and she just told me that nothing happened and then my Uber was there….Did something happen?” Amber asked again.
“I don’t know,” Catherine repeated.
“Well, what the hell do you know?” Amber, impatient, the opposite of ditzy, hating small talk and tact.
“I woke up,” Catherine said, her eyes closed. She could see the laptop’s glow against the back of her eyes, hear the rain against the roof as though it were trying to break through and reach her. “There was a guy—”
“Where?”
“The dorms.”
“Which one? Ours?”
“No. I don’t know which one. Not ours. I…I went outside. I didn’t…Maybe East Johnson, or the one next to it, I forget the name, you know they’re kind of grouped together—”
“Myers,” Amber said. “The one next to Johnson is Myers.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? The fuck, Catherine? Are you hurt? Who was the guy? What—”
“I don’t know!” It burst out of her, and with it, tears. “I don’t know, Amber, okay? I keep remembering stuff, but then I think I’m remembering it wrong. And I couldn’t see the guy, it was dark, but there was—I mean, maybe it was my period, but it hurt so I showered and fuck, you’re not supposed to shower but then Cordelia was there and she called campus police and it was this huge mess and I didn’t want it to be so I just said it was nothing and maybe it was—I don’t fucking know—and now I just want to transfer out because when I think of going back my whole body just freaks out and I can’t do it, Amber, I can’t—”
“Catherine.”
Her name made her suck in a breath, wipe her face. “Sorry.”