The girls behind her tittered in surprise.The Baptist girl thinks!
“You’re mean, Natalie,” Reena said. She was slurring a little bit, her tongue anesthetized from vodka. This conversation never would’ve happened if she wasn’t drunk. “You roll your eyes when we talk. You make little comments under your breath. You think we don’t notice, but we do. And you’reextramean to me, you ignore half the things I say to you, and I think it’s because you’re jealous of me, because I have friends and a boyfriend”—even in this moment, I registered that this was a big stretch for her to make, a surprisinglybrave or perhaps embarrassingly drunk one, especially in front of these girls—“andyou,on the other hand, are all alone with your imaginary friends, Jesus and Mary and the holy fucking spirit.”
I stared at the page, my brain clicking softly as the girls laughed. I thought, for the millionth time that autumn, of my mother. What was she doing right now? Probably wiping down the countertops, putting away the leftovers from dinner. Humming one of the church hymns she always had stuck in her head. In my entire life, I’d never known my mother to hate anyone, but I felt certain she would hate these girls. At the very least, she’d be appalled to know what they spent their time thinking about.You’re wrong, Mama. Not everyone believes in something. At college, there are an astonishing number of people who believe in absolutely nothing at all.
My mother had always encouraged me to be a shining light for others. But I was certain that no level of illumination would save these women from the horror of themselves. If anything, they seemed to revel in the pitch-black aimlessness of their lives. They were proud of it. Happy to wander blindly forth into a lifetime of selfishness. It was deeply disturbing. Most disturbing of all was the fact that these lost, hateful girls thought someone like me should inherently be jealous of someone like them.
No fucking way.
(Sorry, Lord.)
“I’m not jealous of you, Reena,” I said. I closed my book on my finger to keep the page, then I looked at her. “If anything, I feel sorry for you, because you’re unintelligent and you lack creativity. But most of all, I feel sorry because a person like you will never know true wonder, not once in your life.”
Her mouth fell open. “You are such a bitch!”
“Well.” I tapped my finger lightly on the golden embroidered cross on the book cover. “I don’t concern myself with the opinions of whores.”
“What did you just call me?”
“You heard me.” I looked past Reena to her friends. “She lied, you know. That boy who went home with her the first night ofschool? He didn’t hurt her. Not even close. In fact, sheaskedhim to have sex with her. She practically begged him, and now she’s telling everyone who will listen that he threatened her, when he did nothing of the sort. So if you ask me …” I shrugged. “She’s the real predator. Not him.”
There was an otherworldly noise, a shriek that split the world in two. In the single moment before my focus returned to Reena, her fingers were already in my hair.
Reena, poor thing, wouldn’t remember any of the details of that night. She would wake up the next morning in a shirt covered with vomit, her knuckles bruised, a note from the disciplinary committee taped to our door. As for me, I would remember it mostly as the night I learned an old saying was actually true: the Lord did work in mysterious ways. After months of requesting and being denied, I finally got approved to move into a single. As it turned out, all I’d needed was to get my roommate to punch me in the face.
The next day, I moved into a small single on the opposite side of campus. Clean and quiet and mine. Finally, I could wake up each morning and whisper my daily prayer of gratitude without worrying she would make fun of me. I could read quietly at night with a door firmly closed, rather than suffering the backward looks of pity from Reena’s friends while they came in and out to borrow makeup and clothing in preparation for their weekly excursion to the local frat house, where they would, if they were lucky, revel in ten to thirty minutes of verbal abuse with the object of their affections before he got bored and decided to finger someone else.
At night, while my new dorm neighbors laughed and screamed in one of the rooms down the hall, I stuffed a towel under the crack of the door. I did my homework, and then I did all my extra assignments, and then I sat at my desktop computer and scrolled through a series of low-fi internet forums, searching for answers to the questions that had sprung up since I arrived at college.
Why do modern women hate men so much?
Why do modern women hate kids so much?
Why do modern women hate themselves so much?
How can you have afull-time job and breastfeed at the same time?
Instead of answers, though, I only found stories, as well as more questions.Why is the anger getting worse?the modern women asked the forums.Why am I not ready for kids? Where does unhappiness come from? Why can’t I seem to remember what I was originally going to do with this college degree?
At the end of my first semester, I ran into a girl I’d met at orientation. She was the same year as me, and she belonged to a church group that served Christian students from schools all over the city. I’d gone once, at the very beginning of the semester. It had not been my cup of tea.
“You really should come to a meeting again,” she said. “We’ve got a great group of regulars.”
“It’s just not really my thing,” I said. This was, I thought, much nicer to say than the truth:The girls in your group are dumb as rocks, and the idea of sharing spiritual communion with them would probably feel like getting intellectually stoned to death.
Her expression faltered. “To be honest, Natalie, I’m worried about you. You don’t look so good.”
I smiled stiffly at this girl who’d only ever seen me in passing. “Excuse me?”
“Your hair is greasy, and you have these dark circles under your eyes. Are you eating? Sleeping? Do you want to talk sometime?”
It was the kind of pathologically invasive comment I was used to getting from my mother and the other women at church service back home; the kind of thing you would say to a stranger only if you’d been raised to believe that one woman’s failure to keep up appearances reflected poorly on all other women, too. Someone like Reena would’ve immediately told this girl that she was being rude and inappropriate and sexist.Fuck off!But neither of us was like Reena, and this girl knew it. Suddenly I was so homesick I burst intotears. Before long the girl was hugging me, saying, “There, there, I know,” as I snotted up her shirt.
The next week I started going to the church group. It was held in one of the basement rooms of the main library at Harvard. I sat with the dumb girls, I suffered their little snuffling moans and sighs ofglory to God,and it was fine. At least the people in the group knew the sky was blue. At least they didn’t spit outmotherlike the word alone was a pregnancy contraction. At least they were friendly to me. I was still lonely, but now the loneliness felt manageable, like something I could survive.
Then, one cold winter evening in the early weeks of my second semester, I met Caleb.
7
