Catherine blinked at the night, trying to get her father into focus. “It’s cold. I think I’ll go back upstairs.”
He nodded. She heard the creak of the rocking chair. He was right; the air did sort of smell like snow. Or maybe it just felt like snow, a heaviness to the air, a potential energy waiting to fall from the sky.
* * *
—
The facts were these and she was not proud of them.
One: she’d gone to the party. Sigma something. Maybe a Psi in there as well. Two: her dress was yellow and short and thin cotton that danced when she moved, her blond hair curled at the ends to brush her collarbone. And she did move—three—dancing and spinning. Four: she drank. Cheap boxed wine and then something green-blue that burned. No drugs in the drinks—she thought, then tried not to think about that at all. Just too many of them. Strangely, she felt guiltier for that. So much on her shoulders, her choices all her own.
Five: blackness.
Or was that with four? Levels of drinking. All of them wrong but some more wrong than others, like Dante’s circles of hell, a punishment to fit the crime and she was a woman upside down in a tree, damned, her hair tangled in the tree’s roots, all the blood rushing there as though the tree were feeding off her blood instead of rain.
He fed off her too. She didn’t know who. She didn’t even remember getting to the dorms back on campus, much less who the room belonged to. The one she woke up in hours later, before the sun was up, a dark room with a tall figure standing over her. He’d been hard to see without any lights on and the window showing only a black sky. He was shaking her.
She tried to push him off, turn over, into the cool covers, but the covers weren’t cool and she smelled smoke and turned the other way, coughing. She shoved at the hand on her.
“I’m up,” she managed, pulling herself into a sitting position.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
She wiped her eyes, swallowed. Her throat was so dry it hurt and she wanted to cough but was almost afraid to. “Water,” she said without thinking. Her dress felt twisted around her.
A sigh. Footsteps. The tall shadow in front of her walked to the other side of the room. She heard a tap run and then shut off seconds later.
“Here.” A cup in front of her face. She could just make out the edge of the rim. She took the cup, feeling for the first time a shiver of unease, but she was thirsty so she drank. It was just enough for a mouthful.
“Thanks,” she said. “Where—?” But she broke off. She’d righted herself a little more, shifting against the mattress, and an awareness of her body flung itself into her mind like a blow. She froze where she was, not moving at all, her mouth half open as her lungs inhaled sharply, burning her raw throat, which the water had not helped.
Fear came like a blackout, sudden and complete. A terror out of nowhere.
Now she noticed the height of the shadow—person, man, stranger—before her, how he was just inches away, looking down with a featureless face. The cup dropped from her hand and clattered—plastic—onto the floor. She heard every time it hit the floor. Five times, before it rolled away with the sound of grinding pebbles.
“Get up,” he said.
She hesitated for a moment, then stood. She tugged at the hem of her dress. The collar felt all wrong, too high against her neck. Backward, she realized. It was on backward.
Shoes, she thought, because that thought was safe. She felt for them on the floor, crouching like a child. Ankle boots with a low heel. She pulled them on. Her toes hit something hard in the right one. Her cell phone. She took it out and put the shoe on.
There were other thoughts in her mind—not cell phones and not shoes—struggling to get to the front, but she was stiff-arming them to the back like a no-nonsense hall monitor.
“Go.”
She looked at the shadow. She was slick all over, her skin twitching and sweating so much it was like it was trying to slide right off her bones.
Fear again, breathing at the place behind her ears.
She went.
Her sleep was a broken thing she couldn’t put back together. But she did try—over-the-counter sleeping pills: white and chalky. When she went back upstairs after talking to her father, she took one. Then another an hour later, her eyes dazedly scanning the back of the box; what was the max dosage? Did it matter? Her mind was thick with slow thoughts that scraped against the inside of her skull.
Don’t think.
I don’t want to think.
Slowly she fell into blackness and woke coated in a thin sheen of sweat. She smelled. When she sat up she realized she’d kicked the covers off her bed and that the room was lit gold from the sun through the thin, closed curtains. Her clock read three in the afternoon.
She stayed in bed for two more hours, watching random things on YouTube, letting the next video play without clicking, not even bothering to skip the ads. Her mom came in to check on her. Brought her saltines as though she were recovering from the flu.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No. I’m okay.”
But her mom brought her tea, then ice water, then a small bowl of spaghetti shiny with butter. Catherine ate it while watching a documentary about steroids in the Olympics on Netflix. When she heard her parents’ bedroom door close just after ten, she got out of bed.
She splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom and saw it catch on her eyelashes. She didn’t recognize the girl looking back at her: a mess, her blond hair dirty, the careful highlights barely noticeable under the grime. She had bruises: one at her neck, another on the inside of her right knee. They seemed to hurt more, the longer she looked at them.
She remembered seeing those bruises for the first time in the hall bathroom two days ago, a pulsing sort of heartbeat under the color. Her hands had gone to touch them, then had slid away, her feet moving almost of their own accord, to the showers. She’d stood under the water in her dress until she couldn’t feel her skin anymore, then took the dress off, her hands shaking on the zipper at her throat, her fingers slipping on the slick fabric. When she was done, she took the soaking dress and shoved it in the trash can, just as her RA, Cordelia, came in, wearing sweat pants and an irritable expression. She took one look at Catherine and rolled her eyes.
“You know you can’t throw away your own trash in here.” She pointed to the sign on the wall. “See? No nonbathroom trash. It’s already too full.”
Catherine said nothing.
Cordelia sighed. “Look, just take it outside to the dumpster if—”
“I’m not going outside.”