Unspoken(16)

We didn’t talk as we walked toward the commons. Ellie seemed to instinctively understand that I didn’t have much to say. The campus looked magical in the evening light. The snow sparkled where it was illuminated by the lampposts that marched along the sidewalks, intersecting the campus lawns. Central was an old campus, over one hundred years old, and even though it had been modernized, the feel of it was nostalgic. The streetlights were made of wrought iron instead of hard steel. The callboxes looked like old-fashioned telephone booths. Even the sculptures positioned throughout had an old-world charm to them.

Maybe the student body took cues from it. For all the modern, liberal thinking that was preached from the professors’ podiums, the men and women who took classes here had some deep-seated, old-fashioned views. Girls who hooked up a lot were sluts. Guys who did the same were studs. Girls who wore their hair short and their pants long were lesbians. Guys who used too much product and cared too much about their appearance were gay. And those who didn’t conform were weirdos and easy objects of scorn.

During my freshman year, I’d have given anything to be thought of as a weirdo or gay. Being deemed a slut meant that you were fair game to every asshole on campus. They could slap your ass or casually grab your boob during the sober, daylight hours. Once the sun went down and the beer came out, the groping was more obvious. Then it was a full body press, trying to corner you in a dark spot and stick their hand up your skirt. If you said no at any time, you were a bitch or cock tease or cunt. And because no one wanted to admit being turned down by the class bicycle, rumors started anew.

I remember one guy whom I’d never met, never talked to, bragging in the library to a few others in his study group about how he had to force me off his dick so he could get another beer, that I was just so hungry for him. Another guy regaled the group with how he’d poured beer on his penis and then forced me to suck him off. They all laughed when he described, graphically, how he had held my hair in place and how the gagging noises I made only made him harder.

None of it had ever happened, but it didn’t stop me from feeling violated, used, and dirty. It wasn’t one thing that drove me off campus, but a hundred wounds both large and small. I felt that if I spent one minute more than necessary there, I would be nothing more than a dried honeycomb, all the life sucked out of me, exposed and used.

As Ellie and I walked down the sidewalk, no one stared at me. The cement at our feet didn’t crack in half. We were just two students in a big crowd, some moving toward the commons and some away. I felt anonymous for a moment, and I almost stumbled when relief poured through me.

The commons looked the same. It was a squatty brick building, one of the uglier structures on campus, built into the side of the hill. When you approached from the south side, it looked like Bag End, or some other building from the Shire, only without the cute circular doors. On the north side, it was all windows, so that when you were here in the morning you could catch the sunrise through the two-story foyer. Whoever decorated the interior must have used a focus group study from the ’80s. It was full of dark browns and blues with neon light tubes twisted into waves and circles. The café housed in the lower level served up a mix of salad bar fresh foods and mystery plates. You could hear the cacophony of the slap of forks and plates and trays against tables from the balcony that overlooked the seating area.

Ellie and I paused at the railing and looked down. “Do you see him?” I asked quietly. First rule of crush stalking was to ensure that you weren’t obvious. You can’t alert your prey that you’re observing his every move.

Ellie scanned the crowd and checked her watch. “No, but we’re about five minutes early. Should we wait?”

I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to eat and get the hell out. Even though nothing bad had happened, it was early yet. I wanted to ease back onto campus instead of jumping headfirst into an unknown body of water. Who knew how close the rocks were to the surface? I took a deep breath. I was here for Ellie, just as she’d been there for me all those times before. “Sure, let’s walk through the Bookstore for a few,” I suggested.

The commons had a lounge area with pool tables and a quiet study place upstairs, along with rooms that local high schools sometimes rented out to hold a prom. The bottom level was a major arterial vein of the campus. Lots of activity flowed in and out of QC Café and Central Bookstore, a small store where students could come and buy sodas, snacks, and Central attire. Ellie started forward, but I stopped her. I’d walk down those steps first just to prove to myself I could, even if I was trembling inside.