Yes, Mother. I’m ready to go home.
“I’d like to leave, now,” I announced, even though this was my bedroom.
“Sure,” one girl said comfortingly. “You can totally do that.”
As I walked away, the beginning of a new overlapping conversation unfolded: “She’s Amish, right?”
“I think Orthodox Jewish—”
“—Mormons are totally—”
“But have you ever met an Evangelical?”
For an hour, I sat in a floral upholstered chair in the recreation room, listening to the pregames taking place up and down the hall. When the last thread of laughter disappeared behind the entrance doors of the dorm building, I got up, walked back to my room, and began to clean up the mess.
This is Hell,I thought calmly as I scrubbed at the sticky red stains all over my brand-new computer keyboard.
No,thiswas Hell: four hours later, I woke to Reena stumbling into the room with a boy, talking loudly but in such a way that suggested she thought she was actually whispering. “You’re so hot. Here.Here.Quiet! My roommate is sleeping.”
There was the slow creak of her mattress as it sagged beneath the weight of two bodies. The boy didn’t speak, but I felt him in the room with us. I heard him breathe.
“Come here,” she whispered, and he did.
Soon, the sounds that came from the other side of the room were as intellectually incomprehensible as they were instinctually horrible. Laughter and grunting. Rustling of sheets. The sticking of skin against skin. A thick, wet slipping. A terrible mechanical suction. A long, choking, guttural sound, like water moving through a clogged drain. Then: a rushing gasp, not unlike the first breath of air one takes after breaching the surface of a lake.
Reena mumbled, “Didn’t like that.”
“Oh,” was the first thing the boy said. Then: “No worries.”
“Feel sick.”
Pause.
“Want me to go?”
I was praying so loudly in my head that it seemed possible they might hear me, too.Please send him home please send him home please send himhome—
“No,” she said. “All good.”
They moved forward. A minute later, he was pushing inside her—slower,she said—only it felt like he was pushing inside me. The pain was unbearable. I wanted to screamno,to tell them to stop, please,stop,that I didn’t want it, I couldn’t bear it, but the pain and the fear and the humiliation had snatched the sound from my mouth, and so I lay there beneath the covers—heart still, blood frozen, mouth stretched open in a breathless corpse gasp—and let them have their way with me.
And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.
An entire lifetime later, the boy left. Reena got up and moved around our bedroom slowly in the darkness, getting dressed. Then she opened our bedroom door and shut it quietly behind her. I listened to her footsteps carry down the hall and into the dorm bathroom, and then I leaned over the side of my bed and vomited strawberry jam.
5
In the daylight,it’s easier to see how ramshackle this house truly is. The floorboards are old and rotted. Through the ceiling eaves in the kitchen, I can see slivers of sky. As for the kitchen, it’s as simple as mine at home: a long wooden countertop; a big sink made of cast iron; a series of open shelves holding big containers, each of which I peer into and inspect. Some of the contents I recognize: flour and animal fat and potatoes, jarred peaches and cherries and pears. Then there are containers of seeds and syrups and strange-colored substances I can’t begin to name. “For aches and pains,” the older girl said, when she saw me scrutinizing a jar containing a scarlet-colored syrup. She frowned at me, suddenly watchful. “Do you have a headache?”
I did, but I wasn’t going to tellherthat.
In this kitchen, there’s no hidden pantry containing a massive refrigerator, two dishwashers, and a microwave. There’s no laundry room with a shelf of chemical-free, scent-free, dye-free detergents. No bathroom, either. Through the kitchen window I can see a small shed by the chicken coop, undoubtedly an outhouse. (I am actively, at this moment, ignoring the nerve cells screaming upward at my brain about how badly I’d like to use it.)
The floor plan of this house is identical to mine: a small, single-story house, with a large kitchen and living space, and four bedrooms down the hall. The bedrooms are in the same locations, but instead of bunk beds and Pottery Barn bureaus, the children’s rooms have straw mattresses and exposed wooden shelves, each of which holds a few small piles of ratty-looking clothing.
Like a time machine,I keep thinking as I poke my head into every room.Like a bruised and beaten version of my life.
Finally I can’t take it anymore. I approach the girls at the table and say formally, “I need to use the restroom.”
