The handwriting was girlish. Appreciation registered first, blushing my brain. Meaning took longer. It was like learning to read, that first moment when letters became words became blocks of meaning. It didn’t go the other way. I couldn’t unpick the words into harmless letters:
HE IS A RAPIST.
I scrubbed the marker off my whiteboard with my fist. My dad had bought the whiteboard at the big Walmart during move-in weekend. The exact same board hung off nearly every girl’s door in my freshman dorm. Sometimes I chafed against that girly ubiquity—there was nothing worse than being basic—but there was safety in it too. A warmth of belonging. We batted near like moths. Now, that sameness held a new comfort: This was a mistake. It was a case of mistaken identity. It was nothing.
The marker erased, its absence left a ghostly imprint. I could still see the letters, marked in paler white against white. HE IS A RAPIST. I scribbled a frantic marker tornado across the entire board and scrubbed it clean, and then it really was gone.
My palms were black. I doubled back to wash my hands.
My freshman roommate, Camilla, and I were rushing sororities together. When we began, we promised we’d only join a sorority that accepted us both. A package deal, we said. The sorority sisters found this cute. It was good to have a shtick, they said, but we weren’t thinking so cynically.
Camilla and I were in love with each other, it felt like. We played house like honeymooners, reveling in intimacy, breathing each other’s breath as I combed mascara up her lashes; Cami was squeamish about her eyes. We mingled clothes. We straightened each other’s hair.
That night, when I confessed to never having used a tampon before, not having a mom around to explain it, Cami locked us both into a bathroom stall and showed me how. Her fingers pressed into me without squeamishness—pain, pressure—then withdrew. She discarded the plastic capsule, then flashed me a solemn peace sign, her fingertips bloody.
“Blood brothers,” she said. “We’re bonded now, Penny.”
“I bet we’ll sync up, living together,” I said. I loved this thought.
“We’ll be PMS nightmares.”
“We’ll howl at the moon.”
I didn’t tell Cami about the message I’d found on the whiteboard that afternoon. I knew what she’d say: Dump his ass! She was reasonable and political. Her favorite writer was bell hooks. She’d gotten a breast reduction when she turned eighteen. She was voluntarily celibate because, she explained, she was trying to detox from the drug of male attention.
Anyway, the message was surely a mistake.
We bought bottles of Mountain Dew and poured out half to make room for vodka, measured ceremoniously in my souvenir shot glass from the Erie Canal. We did shots with the girls across the hall. We took hits of my vape and pretended to be drunker than we were. We wore stupid shoes and preemptive bandages and went screaming into the September night.
Next year, we will learn our underfunded state school’s library is full of asbestos. The frat houses were just as bad, rotten-floored, lining the street like teeth in an unwashed mouth. Behind them, the county jail, which we forgot about. All the college’s plumbing fixtures and door hinges were manufactured at Attica Prison, which was thirty miles away. We could forget about that too.
We danced and ground our asses into each other’s warm crotches. We fended off the men who tried to dance with us. We touched the arms of girls around us: “Are you okay? Is he bothering you?”
We moved in packs, pressed into the grimy bathroom three or four at a time. We went to another house. We shouted to girls we passed on the sidewalk, stumbling in the dark: “Are you okay?” They shouted back that they were.
At the third house, we found Nico. I’d been seeing him for almost two weeks now. Nico and his frat brothers had hauled a couch off somebody’s curb, gotten tired halfway, and left the couch in the middle of their overgrown front lawn. The springs screamed when we sat. The cushions were wet; I worried I was bleeding through my shorts.
I’d told Nico about Cami’s celibacy the night before. Now, he and his brothers had questions.
“It’s about decentralizing men,” Cami said. “It’s an experiment. And a moral stance.”
A brother exhaled smoke. “Isn’t not doing something the same as doing it?”
“No,” she said, “it isn’t.”
But his point struck me wise, philosophical even. I labored to explain, “You’re still centering men in your decision. You’re just depriving yourself of pleasure in the process.”
“I don’t need men for pleasure,” Cami said. She laughed and squeezed my leg. “Look, they’re embarrassed.”
The couch springs shifted seismically. The brothers didn’t like to be laughed at. I knew later in private they would call Cami a bitch, and I wished she wouldn’t laugh. Why give them a reason? Why had I mentioned her celibacy to Nico at all? I knew the answer: a suspicion I was boring. My association with Cami was the most interesting thing about me.
“Can you check me?” I whispered to her as I stood.
She checked my jeans for blood, gave me a thumb’s up, then a peace sign: blood brothers. “Are you staying? Should I wait?”
We were vigilant; we’d gone to the mandatory Title IX trainings and a self-defense seminar from a feminist club. We knew all the statistics about the red zone, intimate partner violence, buddy systems, active and enthusiastic consent. We’d watched all the videos with their convoluted metaphors.
Consent is like tea. Ask before you pour!
Consent is like a pepper grinder. Stop when somebody says when!
I looked at Nico. He smiled at me.
“I’m staying,” I said. “We can walk you home.”
So we walked Cami back to the dorm, all of us drunk. I walked in the middle, holding Nico’s hand and Cami’s hand, feeling like a beloved child between parents. They could swing me between them, lift me off my feet and put me down again, safe.
“You’re like my parents,” I said.
“I hope not,” Nico said.
Outside the dorm, Cami hugged me. She told Nico, “Take care of my wifey.”
Then Nico and I walked back to his frat house together, still holding hands, but now I imagined us as an elderly couple, moving slowly because there wasn’t any rush, in love all our lives. We stopped and kissed against the stop sign until people from a nearby porch wolf-whistled. I felt hot-faced and crazy with feeling.
A group of girls passed. One touched my arm. “Are you good?”
“I’m good,” I promised. I loved her for asking. I loved the army of girlhood. I believed in it uncritically. I imagined our benevolence like a spiderweb crossing the entire town, the entire world. Even the whiteboard message from that afternoon could be beautiful, some well-meant mistake. It didn’t bother me.
Upstairs in the noisy frathouse, rumbling with bass, the fitted sheet was half-off Nico’s bare mattress. We pulled it back on together, drunk and giggling; the corners kept coming loose, but we persevered. We fixed the duvet over the fitted sheet. We straightened the pillows against the headboard until the bed looked perfect. We fell on top of it kissing.
“I have my period,” I told him. “I don’t want to have sex.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s cool.”
In the morning, I woke and smelled Nico’s stale beer mouth. I pulled the duvet up to cover my breasts like a woman in a romcom. The only decoration in his room was a stolen road sign that said TRIPLEDICK DRIVE. I looked down at his face. Nico was beautiful, with long eyelashes and a break in his nose.
The night we met—eleven days ago, it seemed like a lifetime—he’d taken my hand and rolled the pad of my fingertip over the old crack.
Did it hurt? I’d asked. A little, he’d admitted bravely.
The upstairs bathroom of the frathouse didn’t have a toilet seat, so I had to hover over the bowl, and there wasn’t any soap. I braved the plastic shower curtain to squeeze 3-in-1 bodywash into my palm. It smelled like gunmetal and the color blue.
I had an email on my phone from a spam address. RE: NICO.
Stomach acid sizzled high in my throat. I deleted the email without opening it. I found my shoes, went downstairs, waved to the brothers smoking weed in their underwear on the lawn-couch. They surveyed me without recognition like birds on a telephone wire.
I made it halfway down the hill before I went into my “junk” folder and retrieved the email. I read it under the tree where we’d kissed last night. I read it several more times wading through the early-morning remnants of Friday night. Discarded seltzer cans. A girl’s shoe with the heel snapped. A cardboard nest of congealed cheese fries running with ants.
Regarding Nico, the email only elaborated on the whiteboard message: Idk you but stay away from that guy. He is a rapist seriously.
That week, Camilla and I got coffee with Miranda, a sister from our first-choice sorority. It was the most feminist sorority on campus. They had two sisters who were bisexual, and they no longer partied with the fraternity everybody called the Rape Frat. Miranda had a nose ring and a Harry Potter tattoo on her inner elbow—which, she said, she no longer stood by.
“It sucks when something you love gets ruined by somebody’s shitty politics,” she said. She said Cami and I were her favorite rushes. “Not saying anything official, but everyone thinks you guys are so cute.”
She had a list of questions to ask us. These rush meetings were structured like job interviews. What were our intended majors?
Cami: International Relations and Spanish.
Me: Undecided. I liked math.
What were our long-term goals and post-college aspirations?
Cami: To work as a translator at the UN or maybe the Hague.
Me: Maybe I would do one of those really long hikes? The Appalachian one.
Cami was shooting me sideways looks. I wasn’t being my best self. My brain was mud. The night before, I’d gotten a second email—a different spam account, the same message. I knew the syntax like muscle memory; all night, I shaped the words with my mouth, puzzling the grammar into new meaning.
What were our hobbies?
This was easy. True crime. We all agreed: obsessed.
What did we hope to get from joining a sorority?
Cami talked about solidarity and the radical potential of girl power, which wasn’t just a T-shirt slogan, which was a real thing, and men were afraid of it, which was why they trivialized it, and anything that made men afraid was cool to her.
I stared at the little tattoo on Miranda’s forearm. It winked like an eye as she folded her arms and turned to me.
“My mom died when I was six,” I said. “Growing up, it was just me and my dad. I feel like I’m not that good at being a girl. It doesn’t come natural or something. I always wanted sisters.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Cami asked, after, as we walked back to the dorm. “You’re being weird.”
“I feel sick,” I said. “I think I’m getting a UTI.”
She was disappointed in me. “You’re not peeing after sex! I told you!”
“I am!”
“Right after,” Cami said. “You’re using condoms, right?”
“I’m not inept. I’m a real person.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Stop being mom-friend. Nobody wants that.”
We were angry at each other for the rest of the day. She went to dinner without telling me, which hurt my feelings, but left a bottle of cranberry juice on my nightstand upon her return, a gesture of care which moved me tremendously. The fight was finished.
My statistics professor said I was doing good work. Would I consider applying for a research assistantship next semester? They never got enough female applicants, he said. We could find a time to get coffee and discuss my options.
Next year, he will text me sometimes about our research.
Once: Stopping at the grocery store. Need anything?
Most likely an error. I will read the message over and over, imagining who it might be intended for. Imagining all the things I might ask for. Embarrassed for someone, me or him. I will delete it without answering.
Chapter invitations arrived with October. Cami and I got bids to our first-choice sorority. We screamed to find our dorm room hung with streamers and balloons and lacy underwear with the sorority letters printed on the tiny triangle of crotch. Our friend across the hall didn’t get a bid and assumed a superior air of disapproval: It was paying for friends, cliché, anti-feminist. But we knew she was jealous, and what was more anti-feminist than that? There was a special place in hell for women who didn’t support other women. Taylor Swift had said so.
We wore the tiny, lettered underwear under our going-out jeans. I still had a sore, tender feeling down there, despite a seven-day course of cranberry pills. My discharge was a weird color. I announced its changes like phases of the moon. I’d spent so long living with my dad, being discrete about my body’s filths. I was starved to share.
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” Cami sang.
In the sorority house, we drank from gallon jugs, emptied and refilled with Kool-Aid powder and vodka. We let the sisters smear glitter over our eyelids and cheekbones, let them press temporary tattoos on our cheeks and bellies and tailbones. I remember Cami lifting her shirt to show us the scars from her breast reduction: a lollipop procedure, she called it, the line running vertical to her areola.
They made us chug. They got some mean, big-sister pleasure from it, but then they kissed our cheeks and were proud of us. They loved us. They wanted us for their littles. We were pretty and cool and cute.
“You’re with Nico, right?” someone asked, mouth close to my ear, shouting over the music. “He’s super into you.”
My ears rang. Shut in the bathroom with Miranda and another sister, I asked, “Do you think he’s a good person?”
“Who?”
“Some girl said he wasn’t,” I said. It was easier to confess to someone who didn’t know me.
“Sometimes,” Miranda said thoughtfully, “girls can be kind of crazy, you know?”
She made me drink from the bathroom sink so I wouldn’t pass out, a tender hand pressing on the back of my neck. All I could do was gulp and gulp.
Cami and I got home somehow, sick as the poisoned. I came to crouched in our dorm shower, shivering, holding out my hands to make a bowl, and Cami was vomiting into that bowl. The shower was on overhead, pouring cold water down onto us. Some lunatic tidy instinct had brought us here; the same instinct drove me to put out my hands and catch Cami’s puke. It made a stupid sense. We curled up together, too sick to move.
I fumbled, found the faucet, turned the water hot.
“I love you,” Cami said. She pressed her face into my neck. We were sticky and flush with Kool-Aid. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Junior year, Cami and I will both feature in a frat brother’s PowerPoint presentation, a slideshow ranking every girl he’s slept with in his five-year tenure as a half-hearted psych major. He’ll augment each slide with details, a letter score, screenshots taken from Instagram: girls in apple orchards, girls in study abroad castles, girls in Halloween costumes, girls cradling cats or little siblings or poor children on service trips. Photos from the frat chapter meeting will leak through various Greek life group chats.
Kissing sisters, Cami and I will call each other, crossing paths at a basement party. We are not close anymore, but it will warm me how quickly we can resume this silly rapport. Blood brothers, kissing cousins, spit swappers.
Buoyed, I will ask, “What happened to the celibacy thing?”
She will laugh. “I got lonely, I guess.”
I will laugh too—disappointed, surging with a longing I won’t act on.
Freshman year, that first week of October, I received a third email. I deleted it without reading and blocked the sender. I felt calm and judicious, doing so. I studied in the library with Nico. He was a junior econ major, but I was better at math. He wore a worried pinch between his eyebrows when he studied. He took college really seriously, he said. He wasn’t there to fuck around like the other guys in his frat. He got financial aid to come here, even with the lower in-state tuition.
“People never talk about that,” he said. “Everybody wants to talk about pronouns and race and shit, but nobody wants to talk about money.”
I said I thought that pronouns and race were separate issues.
He said yeah, that’s what he was saying too.
He bought us Adderall from his frat brother. I picked my cuticles bloody, watching his hands shiver with stimulation. I felt a wild outsized tenderness for him. I went back to the frat house, and we had sex in his bedroom with light coming in from the window. It hurt. I kept making him stop, but he was nice about it. We tried a different position and another.
Adjusting himself over me, he leaned a hand on my chest, and his weight crushed the breath out of me. I wheezed. I felt a peal of airless, animal fear—my body, not my brain.
“Shit,” he said, relenting. “Sorry.”
It kept hurting. We stopped. I wondered at my failure, felt the stunned, kiddish pain of skinning a knee. If I were alone, I would’ve curled over and tried to look up inside myself. The pain was deep in there, hard to identify, most similar to a toothache.
I kept thinking: cavity. I imagined black rot.
“Sorry,” I said. “I have a UTI or something.”
Nico played on his phone while I tried to make an appointment at the student health center, but I couldn’t get one until after fall break. I said never mind and hung up.
He asked did I want to suck his dick? I didn’t have to.
“Some girls don’t like to,” he said, but I promised I did.
I tried not to say no to Nico. I liked to say yes. I elected to believe in his goodness. As long as I never said no, he could not prove me wrong.
Nothing like Nico had ever happened to me before. He’d picked me out of the crowd. He’d walked right up to me in a sticky frat basement and said, “Hi.” I wasn’t that kind of person. This was a secret I was keeping from him and Cami and all my new sisters: that I was nothing special at all, not funny, not interesting, not especially kind in my private thoughts.
And so I couldn’t tell Cami about the emails. She would say to break up with Nico, but we weren’t even dating, and I felt a nudge of resentment at such flippancy. Sure, find someone else. Sure, because it was so easy.
I’m not like you, I imagined saying. I’m not brave enough to be disliked.
We napped on Nico’s bed. I woke to find it was close to midnight. Cami had texted me: dinner? And then: hello? And then: are you alive?
I felt a spiteful satisfaction before I remembered I wasn’t angry at her, only our hypothetical conversation, only the mental role I’d assigned her. Remorse compelled me out of Nico’s bed into the night.
It was a weeknight. Without the buzz of parties animating frat row, the hill felt long and threatening. I thought about the jail just beyond the houses, all those forgotten people living there. I was confusing jails with prisons; I didn’t know the difference. Still, I pitied them and felt my pity absolved me.
Someone walked behind me at a distance.
I heard the scratch of feet, but I couldn’t turn without being obvious. The quick bloom of my fear surprised me. Someone was following—the person who kept emailing me. They knew what I’d done. They knew every position I’d tried, every curl and contortion, everything I swallowed down.
I lifted my phone and pretended to answer a call, a strategy I’d learned from true crime. “Hello? Mom? Hi.”
I feigned listening. I babbled nothings.
“I was wondering about fabric softener. Do I need to use fabric softener? Because someone said. Okay. Okay, that’s what I thought. I’m almost home. I love you too.”
The steps accelerated. With the light of my dorm just ahead, I turned, ready to scream and use my fingernails and kick my feet and fight for my life. I was alone. My body seethed with dead adrenaline.
Mid-October, I took the train downstate for fall break. In my absence, my dad’s life had grown troublingly small. The fridge held two kinds of mustard and a carton of grocery-store chicken salad. The coffee table was tipped in a corner like a capsized turtle. In the evenings, my dad stood before the TV, watching naval crime procedurals, hitting golfballs into his automatic putting machine. It swallowed each ball with a genteel, pneumatic gulp and spat it back to him.
Dad was excited about the potential research assistantship with my stats professor; he’d saved me the financial section from two months’ worth of newspapers, a gesture sweet and heavy with obligation. Each time he left the house, I shuffled the stack around so it would appear I’d been reading.
I did not read; I spent the long weekend texting Cami how much I missed her. I wanted to text Nico the same but worried about seeming needy.
While Dad was at work, I snuck into his bathroom, which had the best lighting. I took nudes for Nico. Then I meticulously repopulated the bathroom with my dad’s toiletries, hidden away during my photo shoot. Bar soap, a razor, some medications. I googled each hyphenate name, full of fear, but it was only blood pressure medication and something for acid reflux.
I wanted my dad to exclaim at how changed I was. I drank coffee now! I’d lost a little weight. I’d learned to exist separate from him. I grieved it; didn’t he?
I was upset he hadn’t taken off work. We ate out each night I was home.
“More special,” he explained. “I’m out of the habit of cooking.”
While I was away, I’d come up with all sorts of questions I wanted to ask him. Absence exposed gaps in my knowledge of him. I wanted to know about his childhood. I didn’t know how he and my mom had met.
I was old enough now, I thought, to hear his account of her death. I knew it was a suicide, though I wasn’t sure where this knowledge had come from, whether I’d passively absorbed it or somebody—not him, certainly—had sat me down to explain. Shouldn’t I remember a thing like that?
I procrastinated asking. My curiosity was gauche, belated. Why had I never asked before? I worried his answers would make him a stranger. He seemed to feel the same. He asked no questions about my friends, boys, sorority sisters.
He said only, as he drove me back to the Amtrak station, “But everything’s good, Pen? You’re happy?”
The question turned me defensive. Hadn’t I declared my happiness all week? “What do you mean?”
“As long as you’re having fun,” he said, and lapsed quiet.
Sorority bids finished with Initiation Night. Cami and I spoke of it in excited whispers. We anticipated case races, handcuffs and handles, maybe shrooms. One of the less reputable sororities was rumored to lock their bids into dog cages, but that was nothing compared to the frats. Boys were brutal with each other. Nico took pride in recalling the violence of his own hazing, the origin of his slightly broken nose. Why did anyone submit themselves to it?
Brotherhood, he said. I wouldn’t get it.
That night, my sisters and I laughed nervously while the older girls played dress-up. They put us in tutus and plastic crowns and fairy wings, like dolls. It struck me as a little demeaning and a little comforting. So many things were both.
I opted for comfort. I let them make me their baby, drank what they told me, dressed as they instructed. We took photos. I felt dreamy and dazed as they gathered us into a line.
“What’s this?” Cami touched a bruise on my breastbone.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you good?”
“What do you mean?”
The sisters ushered us into the unfinished basement. I expected black lights, drinks, music, but the room was sparse and harshly lit. It held only a washing machine and a dryer beside it. We waited for the joke. I thought of 1960s housewives sitting on dryers for pleasure, but it was stranger than that.
In bras and thongs and fairy wings, one by one, pledging girls sat on the dryer as it ran and shook beneath them. The sisters used a marker to circle the parts of their bare bodies which jiggled. They were methodical and focused in this work, like a butchering. My mind supplied words: hock, loin, wing.
Cami clutched my wrist as we waited our turn. We looked at each other.
I wanted her to say she wouldn’t, so then I’d have a reason to go. A package deal, we’d say. Not one without the other. But when she lifted her chin, tilted her head toward the stairs, I stood frozen. I couldn’t make myself move.
She could have pulled; I wanted her to. I wanted the choice taken from me, entrusted to somebody else. Humiliation and tenderness were so mixed up in me. I could believe anything was love. Even this? Yes, even that.
I will let all sorts of things happen to me. I will trade so much for proximity to men. I will careen through feeling. I will love a boy—not Nico—badly, crazed with it. I’ll cry when he cuts his hair, mourning shed follicles like a death. I’ll find him at parties, follow him home, wait up like a beleaguered mother. He’ll find my devotion suffocating. We will argue on every porch.
I will hit him, once. His lip will bleed. He will be unexpectedly kind about it, though his frat brothers will call me a crazy bitch, will mutter darkly how I’m lucky they can’t hit back.
I will make a habit of drinking to black out and slipping away from the party to walk the dark neighborhood, peering through warm yellow windows, imagining each interior life as a performance for my benefit. I will flinch back at the face I find reflected there—the awful plainness of my desire. It will take me years to feel any gentleness for that wanting girl.
The morning after Initiation, we picked ourselves up. I pulled my skirt up my thighs, parceled in black marker like the instructive cut-out lines of a paper doll. My nose ran. My eyes watered. I felt hot pressure between my legs and wondered if my period was coming. The dryer had shaken everything loose.
I pinched Cami’s nose shut so she woke gasping. Her alarm made me laugh. We climbed the basement stairs and left without seeing anyone, shedding glitter. We walked down frat row towards the dorm, stopping once to hunker and puke. I kept smoothing my skirt, checking my palms, finding nothing.
Cami pointed to a discarded black thong in a storm drain. “Someone’s night was worse than ours.”
Thin humor. I remembered bright tears of humiliation in her eyes.
“We can’t, right?” she said. “We should—what’s the word? Disaffiliate.”
I felt a resistance. “What’s the point? It already happened.”
I expected her to argue, but she didn’t. Really, I didn’t know her that well. Cami looked at me like she was realizing the same. Her eyes skated my face. Panic shivered through my every soft part.
“I love you,” I told her. I wanted to beg her forgiveness.
“I think I’m still drunk,” she said.
In the dorm bathroom, Cami puked again. Crouching beside her, holding back her glittered hair, I could see down her top. I saw her lollipop scars, all the soft, treacherous places she’d been censured.
Something wet and warm lurched between my legs—a sensation heavier than arousal. Not pain, only a great slipping. It came away. I was more afraid then than I’d been all night.
I reached up my skirt and emerged with a mess of black, bloated cotton.
My first thought was to shove it back up myself. Too late—Cami caught my wrist. The month-old tampon hung from my fingers like a dead mouse by its tail.
Cami didn’t laugh. Worse, she was sad for me, her dark eyes tender and pink from vomiting. Some version of me was dying before her, was dead already, and I knew what was coming. I saw it with certainty, thought: I will not forgive her for seeing me like this. I will punish her for it.
Cami asked, “Are you okay?”
Grief clenched my throat. My mouth soured. Everything came fountaining out.
