Susan is the leader and is being paid but I can't tell. Danielle introduces herself and hugs Susan. Danielle is wearing brown corduroys and a big sweater and is blond. Then Susan hugs Taryn. Taryn is wearing blue jeans and a big sweater and is fat. I'm sitting next to Taryn. I don't want her to hug me. I particularly don't want her to hug me because she is fat. I'm new and I look out the window at just the right moment and she doesn't. Toneesha and Caprice sit by themselves. They're black. I think they are trying to light the carpet on fire. Susan says she accepts being a Survivor with pride. It's who she is. Danielle and Taryn applaud. "I come here to be with people who understand," Susan says and starts to cry. Maybe she isn't being paid, I think. We are what my psychology textbook refers to as a cohort. I do not like my cohort and I do not want my cohort to understand this right away. Caprice and Toneesha obviously think the whole thing is a joke. They know they aren't going to survive. "Okay, um…I was raped," I say the next week. I’m having a hard time with the word. It just isn’t a very good word. Rape. Not capable of conveying the specificity of what occurred. Although everyone assumes they know what it means. "It was Halloween but I didn’t do anything. Fun, I mean. I stayed home. I was reading. I live off campus. I have my own apartment.” They don’t seem impressed. “I was in my house. Alone. I was asleep. I woke up. But I was asleep." I don't say it was my first apartment. That I made my own bed out of plywood and cinderblocks. That I’d sewn two floral sheets together to make a mattress cover so it could double as a couch in the daytime. A sort of if you could see me now nod to my doit-yourself ex-boyfriend. Only boyfriend. Actually. Ever. We had broken up 6 months before and I was done in. I was slowly stitching my life back together again now. Starting with the sheets. But the police had taken all that down to the police station: my sheets, my Lanz nightgown, my stuffed dog. Maybe everything is still down at some police station in a box in a back room with my name on it. "Did you know him?" Susan asks me and everyone perks up. They're ready to accept me. Of course not, I want to say. "No," I say and breathe in and they breathe out and sit back, bored. My night of terror feels insignificant in this room. Pulp fiction. Something unpleasant and invasive, but finite, like having your purse snatched. Something only a college student would mind. "Well," says Susan "you've come to the right place," and she shifts slightly in her chair. Her perfume, something sharp and sweet, releases from an intimate fold. I look down at my green suede hiking boots. Fabianos. I wear them to feel strong but I haven't been hiking since I was a kid. I'm afraid of twisting an ankle. I'm a senior dance major at Connecticut College, majoring in dance because I want to feel my body, make it say what I want it to say. Make it say yes.
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