If By Your Art
David McGlynnThe last time any of them had seen the campus, it had been winter, when the trees were bare and the lawns were covered in snow. In August, when the freshpeople arrived for move-in, they marveled at the greenery. Vines crawled up the brickwork and the grass was so thick it looked painted. In the months since their prospective visits, an iron archway had been erected at the campus entrance, where almost every car stopped for a photograph before pulling around to the residence halls. The college’s name and crest framed the view of the maple-lined pathway leading to Main Hall’s stone steps and curlicued ionic columns. Beyond the old building was the library and the NatSci Annex, and in the distance, below the hill, was the mirrored lake that curved to the north across the center of Wisconsin and disappeared over the horizon.
Cars began arriving at eight on Sunday morning. SUVs and minivans, pickups and rented trucks, German-engineered wagons with Scandinavian roof racks. The packing list had been mailed in June, but throughout the summer, members of the orientation staff—themselves rising juniors and seniors—had posted reels of their own must-haves: four-inch foam mattress toppers, tower and clip-on fans (res halls were heated but not air-conditioned), K-cup coffee makers and electric tea kettles, immersion blenders for late-night smoothies. The Target at the mall sold everything as a kit, including the blenders, which they could pick up on their way into town.
DAVID M C GLYNNZippered IKEA bags were the rage that year. They were compressible yet capacious enough to hide a dog in, which some students tried to do, though the RAs weren’t stupid and knew what to look for. Therapy animals required paperwork and an additional security deposit; a separate check-in desk had been set up to process the students who were able to present the necessary documentation. Plastic totes and wheeled suitcases overflowed with hoodies and joggers, six-packs of underwear, chest binders, leggings, high tops, shower shoes, meds in brown bottles and daysof-the-week organizing trays, tinctures in glass droppers, CBD ointments, Delta-8 gummies in cellophane wrappers, Delta-9s in greasy baggies, air purifiers, white-noise machines, Bluetooth speakers, Xbox consoles, fidget devices, salt rock lamps, weighted blankets, Lego sets of the Sydney Opera House, the Batmobile, the Sanctum Santorum. Tampons, pads, pube oil, body sprays, medicated powders, manscapers, petal wipes, septum rings, hair dyes. Boxes of condoms and discs of progestin pills, even though most freshpeople were virgins.
They received their lofting kits when they received their room keys. In the summer group chat—a cool discussion until a dickweed named Alan began to blow it up—everyone agreed lofting was the way to go. Top bunks were still pretty dope, even with no one beneath you, and the extra space would be useful. Slide your desk under the bed and you had your own little Spawn’s Alley. Lofting made it hard for the moms to make the beds, scaling the footboards and kneeling on the mattress while stretching the fitted corners, and the pictures weren’t as cute with the blankets and pillows two feet from the ceiling. But whatever. The beds, like their half of the rooms, were theirs
Musical instruments were carried in last. They were too precious and expensive for the roller carts, their velvet-lined cases redolent of cork grease and slide oil and peppermint, stuffed with
sheet music and playbills from the world’s great orchestra pits. The singers dreamed of performing Carmen at Glyndebourne, Toscana at La Scala. Who cared if majoring in opera wasn’t practical? If they’d wanted practical, they wouldn’t have chosen a liberal-arts school like Buchanan College.
One student—no one would ever know his name—brought a piano. Not an electric keyboard, but an upright mahogany Kawai. It took four men, dads conscripted into service in the parking lot, to move it from the U-Haul to the front door of the hall. Afterward, the dads stood together, drenched with exertion and Midwestern humidity, congratulating themselves, after a morning of schlepping so much useless junk from the car, for moving a real piece of furniture, an object with some weight and heft. They also congratulated one another for making it to today, the day they took their kid to college. A day right up there with their first concert, their first naked woman, their own first days of college, none of which were half as nice as this place. They leaned against their hatchbacks, admiring how the buildings’ edges softened in the hazy afternoon sun, how the lake reflected in the glass panels of Boyle Hall. Boyle Hall looked like the Death Star, one dad said. “Makes you wonder what goes on inside there.” Another said it must be nice to have that kind of cash, enough to put your name on a building, whoever this Boyle person was. He noticed the water stains creeping out from behind the ivy on Main Hall and said the building could use some tuck pointing. You’d think, with all the money they were forking over for tuition, not to mention room and board, the college could spend a little on tuck pointing.
The dads talked until the moms started coming out, already in tears. Their sons and daughters came after, sliding their phones into their back pockets so they could hug with both arms, first Mom, then Dad, then both together because they were all crying now, it was all happening so fast, after months of planning and
years of build-up, college fairs and brochures and driving all over hell’s half acre to visit one campus after another, so much possibility—it all came down to this. They’d waited years for their parents to leave them alone or, better yet, to go away altogether, and now, at last, their wish was being granted. They were bidding childhood farewell. They watched the cars pull away. They stood waving until their parents were gone.
By that evening’s first Orientation Pod Meeting, the kid in Room 317 was also gone. He was supposed to have been Evan Hanusa’s roommate. He and Evan had Snapped over the summer, though not a lot, and Evan could remember the guy moving in that morning—his baby blue comforter and hanging shoe organizer, his gigundous Costco jar of dried apricots, like a vat of shriveled ears, atop the mini-fridge. Evan should have taken a picture of the jar so others could see how big the thing was because when he came back from lunch, the entire side of the room had been cleaned out. The mattress was bare and the hangers were missing from the closet. The only evidence someone had been there at all was the height of the bed, still lofted.
Skye, their pod leader, said it happened. Sometimes, you got to campus and knew you were in the wrong place. Choosing a college was a huge decision, the biggest of your life so far, and not everyone got it right the first time.
Now that he was gone, Evan said, he had to admit the dude seemed a tad sketch. He’d tried to cram all his shoes into the dresser drawers, but left his socks in a pile on the floor.
They sat on the couches and chairs in the common area, between the floor’s laundry room and kitchenette. Skye circled the center of the square, stepping over toes, personally handing each freshperson their own Orientation Survival Guide—a thicker-thanyou’d-have-guessed booklet of topics and activities for the coming
week. Mornings were for training seminars, afternoons set aside for mixers, socials, and opportunities for practice. Miranda Bloom flipped to the table of contents. The Roman numerals went from I to XXX, with topics ranging from “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Internet,” which no one seemed to get, to “DM to Collab: Stay Safe While Hooking Up,” which everyone thought was lame. Skye said not to worry; they’d take everything step by step. A senior, Skye planned to pursue a career in workshop facilitation after graduation. They could all rest assured their pod was in good hands. Miranda had the sense she was being practiced on, like an animal in a lab. The common area was so hot she felt drowsy, and she wondered if the heat was intended to lower her defenses. Skye wore a T-shirt that read Have the Courage to Exist and said the first thing they needed to know, the single most important thing, was that they belonged. Whoever you were, wherever you came from, you belonged, Skye said. There was someone, and probably more than one someone, ready to meet you where you were. “You belong,” Skye kept saying, “you belong, you belong,” until Miranda began to worry that she didn’t.
She’d actually committed to the University of Illinois, in Urbana, last April. Her parents had gone there, her sister Emilia was a junior there, and Caleb, her boyfriend, would be going there, too. Caleb was a middie on the Batavia High School lacrosse team and could run for hours without getting winded, but he was even better on the computer. Code made sense to him in ways ordinary languages did not. During their eleven months together, he and Miranda had kissed more than they talked, so it was fine. They did the bulk of their making out on the damp sectional in Caleb’s basement, tucked so far back in the corner by the water heater, the wooden stairs so creaky, it was impossible to get caught. She had more than enough time to get her bra and shirt back on and for Caleb to cover his engorged crotch with a pillow whenever Caleb’s
mom came down to check on them. Only after they’d broken up did Miranda realize she needed more space than a large campus— even an enormous campus—could offer. She needed a completely different state.
She called the other schools where she’d been accepted, but they’d given her spot away. But when she called Buchanan, the admissions officer recognized her name without having to look it up. He recalled her application essay, about the protest Miranda had organized the fall of senior year, inspired by her summer service-learning trip to Belize. Political activism was a huge part of the Buchanan identity, the admissions officer said. Of course, they’d find room for her for next year. They’d been hoping, in fact, she’d call.
Once she switched her deposit, she began to receive texts and emails from alumni—there were so many in the Chicagoland area—welcoming her to the Buchanan family. Some were older than her parents and some were young, only a year or two out. All said picking Buchanan was the best decision they’d ever made. One woman, vice president of the Young Alumni League, told her Professor Landsman was cool if you were into sociology or stuff about Japan, which she totally was, but warned her Professor Tomlin was a dick who should have been brought up on Title IX charges and fired years ago. Her advice: stay in school as long as she could. The real world was a cold, dark place, and she shouldn’t hurry to join it. She said she was there to listen if Miranda ever needed to talk. She shouldn’t hesitate to call about anything. Before they broke up, Caleb had said things like that. Miranda could call him day or night and he’d be there, no matter how small the need. He’d likely sensed what was coming and hoped to stop it. He was making bank interning in the IT department at the Aldi Corporate Office, and would have, had Miranda only asked, bought her anything she wanted. She could’ve told him to drive
his car off a cliff. She’d been planning on having sex with him, before things turned weird, and sometimes she still fantasized about what it would feel like to wield such unlimited power over another person. To make someone do something simply to see how far they’d go.
In the morning, Miranda carried her caddy down the hall to the showers. The bathrooms, at either end of the tunnel of doors, were both gender neutral and Miranda debated which way to go before deciding on the building’s south end for no real reason. She’d showered in locker rooms plenty of times, but this felt different, padding down the corridor in her bathrobe with her shampoo and conditioner and body wash in a plastic basket. It felt like announcing to the world that she intended to get naked. If you wanted to see a naked person you knew where to find one. The shower stalls, thankfully, had two curtains. The first was for an antechamber changing area, where she hung her robe and towel, the second for the actual naked showering. The girl in the stall beside Miranda’s—confirmation she’d chosen the right bathroom, at least—had brought her dog with her, a brown shepherd with a patch of white fur beneath its collar. It sat looking at the closed vinyl curtain while its owner washed. “Mama’s right here,” Miranda heard the girl say, nakedly, from behind her double shower curtains. “I’m right here, Princess. Mama’s getting clean. Mama’s almost finished.”
After breakfast their pod watched a video on cyber threats. Trolls and bots and Russian adolescents had engineered malicious algorithms specifically targeting .edu email addresses. Once the criminals gained access to the system, utter pandemonium ensued. The entire college could be crippled, grades manipulated, student accounts zeroed out. The video showed a clip from Ghostbusters, the one in which the unleashed spirits filled the Manhattan skyline
like shooting stars at dusk. One student a few rows ahead of Miranda, Robyn Something, took issue with Russian teenagers being lumped in with trolls, bots, and ghosts. Robyn had oodles of Russian friends at home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and as far as she knew, they all identified as human beings.
They had to score a perfect one hundred on the quiz before they could access their university email accounts. Miranda missed two questions the first time, tried again, and was able to log in. Her inbox was already full. There were welcome messages from the Vice President of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, the Dean of Student Success, the Dean of Student Wellness, the Dean of Student Support, the Vice Dean of Freshperson Experience, and the Associate Vice Dean of Orientation, notices about the upcoming Associated Students elections, and a list of first-week events—not officially parties, but folks were welcome to hang out after—hosted by the members of the council running for reelection. Miranda’s spam folder contained automated messages from her course websites, a notification from the bookstore that her fall textbooks were backordered, and promotions for HelloFresh, StockX, Stitch Fix, and Subway. She couldn’t recall a Subway anywhere near campus, though she supposed that didn’t matter. She deleted what she could and saved for later the twenty or so flagged as high priority.
When the session ended, they paired up to walk campus. The idea was to work together to find the buildings where they’d have class, and to map their routes from one to the other. By working in twos, they’d have at least one other person who knew where they were at a given time. Along the way they should stop to admire the Buchanan Boulder, a wedge of jasper unearthed from a quarry in 1877 and towed to campus by horsecar. Or the statue of the dreaming huldra reclining in the memory garden. Or the Buchanan Organic Garden, the BOG, where student
agriculturalists grew, without pesticides or gas-powered tools, the vegetables served in the dining commons.
Miranda’s partner was Sophie Zagen, from Lexington, Kentucky. Sophie said her parents taught sculpture and photography at Transylvania University.
“That’s a real place?” Miranda asked. “Do they teach blood sucking there?”
“Everyone asks that,” Sophie said. “And if all the classes are at night and whether bio students dissect bats instead of frogs.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of it.”
“I accept your apology.”
As they walked, however, they found they liked the same things. Freddie Gibbs was awesome; so was ASMR, One-Punch Man, and Love Death + Robots. “Have you seen Binging with Babish?” Sophie asked, and Miranda hadn’t, but things were going so well she said she had and she loved it. Babish was peak. They entered the buildings and followed the numbered placards to their classrooms, going so far as to open the doors and stand inside in the dark among the empty desks and scrubbed dry-erase boards, as though to verify that a classroom was really there. It was weird to think of herself as a college student, Miranda told Sophie. Weird that she was no longer a kid depending on Mommy and Daddy for every little thing. Sophie reminded her that not everyone had a mommy and a daddy, or either one, but in general she agreed. It all felt pretty surreal.
They stuck together through lunch, skipping the pizza and burger bars and waiting in line for the stir-fry station. Sophie showed Miranda how to stir peanut butter into the soy sauce with some maple syrup from the breakfast bar and lime from the salad bar and the result was amazing. The people they sat with noticed the sauce, too, and they all talked for a while about their favorite foods. Sophie said her biggest disappointment about Hanover
was the lack of a decent Ethiopian restaurant. She and her dad had tried Hanover’s one Ethiopian joint when they came for her prospective visit and thought it was a total let down. Miranda said Batavia had a super authentic Argentinian (or was it Argentine?) bistro in this cool historic house near the center of town. Yet, when she thought of home she thought not of the Argentinian place but of Briana’s Pancake House, in a boring suburban strip center, where her dad liked to go for eggs.
Miranda was in line for the president’s handshake when it happened again. She and Sophie had walked together to The Chapel, still called The Chapel despite the fact the college hadn’t had a religious affiliation in at least a century. President Sharkar stood in the center of the colonnade at the top of the steps. He wore a cap and gown with blue stripes on the sleeves and a huge medallion, like a Mayan artifact, on a gold chain. The Chapel doors behind him had been propped open and the sunlight coming through the stained glass filled the interior with pulsing, prismatic color, like a kaleidoscope. The freshpeople lined up on the sidewalk, ascending the stairs to join hands with the berobed highness long enough for the photographer to record the occasion. Miranda was swatting at the black flies around her sunglasses and worrying about her deodorant when a car drove past—some low-to-the-ground thing with a loud growling engine. The driver laid on the horn and revved the gas until a plume of charcoal smoke burst out the back. The guy standing in front of Miranda shot both middle fingers into the air, thrust his hips forward, and yelled, “Fuuuuuuck you!” as the car squealed away. Even the president laughed from his elevated perch.
Miranda laughed, too, and turned back to Sophie, but Sophie was gone. Miranda stepped out of line and held her hand over her eyes as she stared down the row of bodies. Among the squinting faces of her still-nameless classmates and the T-shirted backs of people crossing the street, she couldn’t see Sophie anywhere.
They’d become friends in the last two hours, Miranda thought, even if they’d yet to exchange numbers or Snapchats. Miranda tried searching for Sophie, and Sophia, Zagen on Instagram and Twitter and even on Facebook, but couldn’t find her.
In the residence hall that afternoon Miranda learned she wasn’t the only one. Jarrod Harbinson had been talking to a guy in the computer lab about the newest version of Hadean Eon, his all-time favorite open-world game, when the guy left to take a piss and never came back. Elias Stamer went to check out the weight room with three other guys, but they got turned around coming out of the locker room and the last guy in their group never reappeared. They waited a solid twenty minutes before giving up. Their classmates were disappearing, like in some cheeseball church movie where the righteous vanish and the shitheels left behind wonder what they could’ve done to live a better life. Except it wasn’t as though a ton of people had ghosted out, just a select group.
“Think they’re dead?” Jarrod wondered.
“Don’t be stupid,” Elias said. “They bailed, man. They came, they saw, they bounced. They saw the place and said, ‘No thanks.’ Like that first guy. Evan’s guy.”
Though it turned out Evan had also left. His room was now all the way empty, the door left propped open. Even the lofts had been taken down. Skye said it was ultimately a good thing. The college was short on housing and had a list of sophomores, juniors, and seniors waiting to fill the vacancies. By the end of the coming weekend, when the rest of the students moved in, the rooms would be full again. “Speaking of which,” Skye said. “If a junior or senior tries to get you to play Truth or Dare or Never Have I Ever, say no. Say it loudly enough to be overheard, then move to a more crowded location. You’ll end up getting used before you know what’s happening.”
“What about sophomores?” Miranda asked. “Depends on the person,” Skye said. “If I were you, I probably wouldn’t.”
“What if we want to be used?” Lorelei Devine asked. “What if we want to be used and abused until we’re dazed and confused?”
“You’re not in a position to consent,” Skye said. “The power dynamics aren’t anywhere close to equal. That’s exactly what causes the upperclasspeople to freak out. They’re as new to power as you are to sex.”
Miranda was new to sex, or would be once she had it, though she understood freaking out. After months of holding hands in school, walking shoulder to shoulder, Caleb inexplicably started walking behind her, holding onto her belt or with a finger hooked through her beltloop. He tried snaking his arms around her waist, but it was impossible to walk like that without looking like two humping dogs, so she made him stop. Whenever she came out of class, he was waiting. Miranda didn’t know how he conned every teacher into letting him go early, but he was always there. He wanted to carry her backpack for her, her purse and car keys, to play around on her phone. After she dumped him, he started showing up places: at Sarah Curtin’s pool party or Imani Phillips’ mother’s condo, Lew’s Drive-In where Miranda and her friends went for nachos. She wondered how he knew where she was until Imani said he must be tracking her phone. Miranda made an appointment at the Apple store in Naperville, to make sure the factory reset would wipe out whatever creeper spyware he’d installed, and the next morning his car was parked across the street, in front of the Rasmussen’s house. Her dad wanted to call the cops, but Miranda told him to wait. She pulled on her jeans and hoodie and pounded on his window until Caleb woke up. The interior of his car, when he rolled down the window, smelled like Arby’s. His eyes were red, and they darted from side to side.
“Why?” she asked him. Her dad stood in the front doorway of the house, waving his phone, ready to make the call. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know.” The Rasmussen’s sprinkler splattered his passenger side windows.
“What do you want?”
Caleb rubbed his left eye with the heel of his palm. “I don’t know that either.”
Skye ran through potential scenarios and asked how they should respond. You overhear a fellow student physically threaten another person, even though it sounds like it could be a joke. A casual acquaintance shows up to class with a split lip; she’s mentioned a boyfriend in the past, but you don’t know her very well. Do you ask about her lip? You’ve finished your workout after dark; it’s below freezing, and snow is forecast. Do you cut across the darkened tennis courts or take the long way along the lighted path? Should you carry your keys in your backpack or in your hand?
“That one’s a no brainer,” Lorelei said. “You hold your dorm key between your index and middle knuckles. It’s brass for a reason. If anyone tries anything, you punch for the neck.” Vivian Corum said she’d aim lower, but Lorelei had given it a lot of thought. “Guys have an instinct to protect their junk. Their hands know to go there. Go for the throat and they’ll never expect it.”
Skye hoped no one would have to do something like that. They key was to be prepared.
“That’s what I just said,” Lorelei said. “Use your key.”
“I meant a metaphorical key, not an actual one,” Skye said. “Well, I guess I meant both.”
Either way the message was clear. College was perilous. College was scary. College could kill and maim, and if not that, inflict traumas from which they’d never recover. Many of them,
Skye acknowledged with both hands in the air, had endured so much trauma already. Some of it was personal, but more was cultural, intergenerational, and epigenetic. They carried trauma in their bones. College couldn’t make it better, but it could at least expose the cycles of oppression and subjugation, the injustices endemic to their cherished American institutions. It could help next the generation arise from their dogmatic slumbers, peel the scales from their eyes, take heed of the voices of change crying in the wilderness. “People suck,” Skye said, pacing in front of the group now, red-cheeked and agitated. Miranda couldn’t tell if the speech was an item on the agenda, or was simply happening. “People suck first, then they justify their suckitude with a system.” The point, Skye said, as though emerging from a fugue state, was to stay vigilant. Anything could happen. Nothing was impossible.
At lunch, away from Skye, they tallied the empty rooms and tried to make sense of what was happening. One student bailing the first week they could understand, but how many had quit now? They remembered their dads helping move the piano into the residence hall, their gross dad grunting as they strained to keep the Kawai from slipping. They wondered who helped move the instrument out? Was it possible the piano wasn’t so heavy after all, or their dads not so strong?
“Something must have happened,” Jarrod Harbinson said. “I mean, like, really happened.”
“Like, beamed up by aliens?” Elias Stamer said. “Back to the mothership?”
“Like some sort of crime,” Jarrod said. “Everything Skye was blowing up about.” Could it happen that fast? Your first few days of college?
Of course it could. The calendar was public information. Anyone with an internet connection could see when the freshpeople moved in. Creepers and sleazes and townies could be
lying in wait. “Every year there’s a new crop of us,” Vivian Corum said. “No idea what’s coming.”
“The thing is, though,” Elias said. “As many guys are leaving as girls. Maybe more.”
“As if that means anything,” Lorelei said.
Ginny Sutton had a theory. They leaned closer to hear it. Her dad said that back in the ’90s, the first semester of college was the “weed out term.” Professors deliberately made freshperson classes extra hard so the slackers would fail and have to drop out. No one cared back then. You could skip every class and no one said a word. People drank high-fructose corn syrup and gorged all day on trans fats and wore their clothes backwards. It was sink or swim, and the sinkers ended up on the curb, destined to work in warehouses or sell push brooms door to door. Maybe something similar was happening now, only in a slightly different way. Like, the college couldn’t go public with the fact that it was culling the herd, so it kept things on the down low. It was like how people showed up at the airport expecting to get on the plane, only to learn their seats had been given to someone else. The college let you move in, waited for your tuition check to clear, and then packed you up while you were in a seminar learning about the four food groups. There was, after all, a housing shortage.
“There are five food groups now, actually,” Elias said.
“Actually, there are seven,” said Vivian Corum. “Drinks are separate. So are sugary foods.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ginny said. “Everything we used to think is wrong now. Like, you come to college expecting to, you know, go to college, and then out of nowhere you get a tap on your shoulder. So long, Buckaroo. We’ll keep the change.”
Improbable, but not impossible, Miranda thought, especially when she considered the eagerness with which the admission officer had welcomed her back. The college enrolled too many
students on purpose and use orientation as a try-out, like the first round of American Idol. It made a certain sense, even if she couldn’t deny the possibility of an alternative.
Miranda waited until her roommate went to non-violent language training to call Caleb. If the college knew what he was capable of, they’d kick her out for sure. She stayed off her laptop so he couldn’t hack her camera. “Are you doing this?” she asked when he answered.
“How you mock me,” he said. “You’re the one who called.”
“Are you making people disappear from school? My school?”
“I can make people disappear online,” he said. “Or appear. But not in real life. I mean, I wish. If I could do that, I’d make you appear right here. I’d download you right into my bed.”
“Stop it,” she said, though the familiarity of his voice made her homesick. She’d been here for four days and already missed certain things. Wheat Thins in the cupboard, her mom’s Nivea on the bathroom counter, Smokey snoring in the hallway between the bedrooms at night. The stupid jewelry box with the springed ballerina that popped up and twirled when she opened the lid, the gold Seiko watch she got for eighth-grade graduation that she never, ever wore. Way back when, she and Caleb had talked every day, not only at school but on FaceTime at night, with their blankets over their heads. Once she fell asleep talking to him and when she woke up, he was still on video, his long eyelashes close to the camera. She missed him—if not him, exactly, then the daily dependability of him, the fact that she could count on finding him whenever she looked around. Even, in a weird way, when she didn’t want to find him. If she asked him to come to her, she knew he would. He’d leave right away. She could make him appear as quickly as the others had vanished.
“I bet you have a nice room,” Caleb said. “Not like here. We have mice in our basement.”
“It’s okay,” Miranda said. “I’m still getting used to it.”
“I wish I could see it. Your purple comforter.”
“How do you know the color of my comforter?” Her bed at home had yellow flowers on it.
“You said that was the color you wanted. You talked about it all the time.”
Had she? She couldn’t remember.
“Are your string lights always purple or do they turn different colors?” he asked.
“Oh my God, can you see inside my room?” She unplugged her laptop from the outlet, though the lid was still closed. She looked at the light fixture in the ceiling, the black slivers of the electrical outlets. A camera could be anywhere. “Are you watching me right now?”
He laughed, and Miranda could almost see his face, his upper lip folding across his teeth when he grinned. That time he slid into the booth beside her at Lew’s, trapping her against the wall.
“Now, Miranda,” he said, “how would I do that?”
“Stop fucking with me.”
“I’ll be wise hereafter.”
On Friday night Skye went home for the weekend and the rest of them gathered in the common area. What stumped them was not why so many freshpeople had jumped ship—whether they’d quit or wandered too far from campus or been disappeared by the college’s undercover gestapo—but why they themselves had stayed. They’d been proud of their endurance at first, but now they wondered what the others had known, what red flags they missed. Jarrod Harbinson was convinced something big was going down. A mindfuck potion, like Scarecrow’s Fear Toxin, would be crop-dusted over campus or pumped through the bottle fillers. The whole place was about to blow.
Elias Stamer told Jarrod he was full of shit, as per usual. Conspiracy thinking was exactly what had gotten them into this mess—not just the six of them in the room, but the entire country. Western Civilization was on its way out and it had only itself to blame. As far as Elias was concerned, it was no mystery why they’d lasted. They were stronger than the others. They were the ones who could hack it. They went around the room, comparing their GPAs from high school. Sure enough, they were all above a 3.0. “We’re smart and we’re not afraid of hard work,” Elias said. “Or of missing home for a few months.”
Ginny Sutton said they’d been allowed to stay because they were the good kids, the compliant ones. Case in point, she’d been to every single orientation seminar without skipping even one. For God’s sake, she’d taken notes, with a pen and everything, at bystander training. As if, what? she was going to flip through her notebook the next time she saw some rando guy trying to get her friends drunk? She’d been Little Miss Perfect her entire life.
Miranda said she had, too. Jarrod, Lorelei, Vivian, and Elias admitted they’d never been in any real trouble, unless you counted being grounded or losing driving privileges.
“That’s it,” Ginny said, pounding her fist in her hand. “This ends tonight. Right now.”
They went to their rooms and brought back what they had. Three beers, a bottle of grapefruit vodka, a fifth of Fireball that Elias had received as a grad gift from his cousin. Jarrod collected dollar bills and went to the vending machine for sodas. They laid their pills on the table. Dexedrine and Provigil, Prozac, Celexa, Risperdal, and Clozapine, a few random Xanax, Trazodone, Prednisone, the Promethazine Vivian took when her periods made her nauseous, even Ginny’s Nystatin, which she needed because she was from Dubuque, Iowa, where generations of toxic dumping and regressive climate change policies had polluted the Mississippi
River and turned her body into a yeast factory. They swallowed the bus-shaped tablets and did two-count pulls on the Fireball to see if they could stand the burn. They plowed through their stashes of cinnamon bears and Kettle corn and trail mix, wads of Big League Chew so thick they couldn’t close their mouths. Vivian found a jar of dill pickles in the lounge fridge, and when no one claimed it, they surmised it had been there since at least last year, if not longer. One of those forever jars that never got moved out. They dared each other to eat one and everyone pinched out a gherkin. The pickles were nothing more than mushy cucumbers in brine, but eating them made them feel stronger, as though the jar had been a trap set for them by the college, a snare they’d walked into and come out the other side. They were invincible now.
They watched the clock turn from 2:59 to 3:00. Lorelei swore she could see light in the sky. “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!” she howled, and they laughed as hard as they had at any point all week.
“We should watch it come up,” Lorelei said. Vivian said they had hours to go before sunrise, but Lorelei said they really needed to watch it happen, someplace where they could see the sun the instant it popped above the horizon. Watching the sun come up meant something because everything now meant something, that’s what college was all about, things meaning things, and without discussing it further they left their cozy warren of sofas, their heaps of wrappers and sticky plastic cups, their pill containers, and took the stairs to the basement of residence hall and through the fire exit to the crushed stone path that led down the hill to the lake. The trail crunched as their feet shifted, like Rice Krispies in milk, and ended at a small beach. Felled trees had been sawn and dragged to form a barrier wall that doubled as a bench. The lake appeared in every, or almost every, picture they’d ever seen of the college, every Reel and TikTok and YouTube. It was always blue,
flat and serene, and flanked by dense, leafy trees. The kind of lake one finds in horror movies set in Finland. The water that night was black and there were waves, uneven and unending, pushed up by the wind. Past the beach, the waves crashed against a granite slab, a thundering clap followed by a softer trickle of water. Then the sudden slap of the next wave. There was no rhythm to it.
They took off their shoes and stuffed their socks inside. They shimmied out of their shorts and T-shirts and stood in only their underwear. Miranda had forgotten her underwear was purple and thought again of Caleb, whether he could somehow see her here. She crossed her arms to hide her breasts, though it was too dark to see anything. She couldn’t recall the moment they’d stopped talking, only that it seemed wrong to say anything now. She felt better than she had all week, more at home here than at her actual home. Better, maybe, than she’d ever felt in her entire life. She loved everyone—all her new friends, the entire college, even Skye. Even Caleb. She loved the whole world and the warm mud sucked at her bare feet. The water wasn’t as cold as she expected and felt thicker, oddly, than Lake Michigan or even Nelson Lake, which was always green and slimy. The waves slapped her thighs and stomach and splashed her face. She dove in and came up in the trough of a wave about to crash. She went under again, and when she came up the second time she looked back and could see her friends’ dark heads sticking above the water. She could hear them laughing.
They had to swim out to get past the breakers. The buildings of the college and downtown Hanover rose above the trees, and the wind grew stronger and louder. Miranda breaststroked toward her friends’ voices, her head above the water, but when she got to where she thought they were, they’d drifted away. She put her face down and swam a dozen hard strokes before stopping to call out, “Hey! Where are you guys?”
“Here!” one of the boys called. She didn’t know them well enough to tell their voices apart. “Over here!”
Waves were crashing over her head again, and into her mouth. She couldn’t get any words out. She stopped hearing her friends’ voices. She was far enough out that she could see the whole of campus, the stadium on the north end, Boyle Hall on the south. Flood lights shined on the cupola atop Main Hall, illuminating the domed turret and the American flag twisting in the wind, which shrank the longer she watched it. She could feel herself drifting but didn’t have the will to fight against it. She floated on her back and looked up at the sky. Clouds lumbered across and the stars were gone. She rode the waves up and down. She didn’t feel dry, but she no longer felt wet. Whatever was holding her up felt like a warm hand cupping her head and back and shoulders, and she understood, finally, that her number was up. It was her turn to disappear.
Miranda lay in an inch of gunky water. She could hear the birds in the trees and the sun was on her face. She remembered losing contact with the others, how she hadn’t felt panicked about it, and that she didn’t feel panicked now. She felt wet again. She wondered if she’d floated all the way across to the lake’s invisible northern shore, but when she pushed herself to her knees she saw her shoes sitting on one of the sideways trees. Her clothes were gone, but the shoes were definitely hers. Her feet slipped on the stone path, she had to use her hands, and when she reached the door, the fire exit was locked. There wasn’t even a handle on the outside. She scrabbled around the side of the building until she reached a metal staircase that climbed the side of the res hall. At the top was the parking lot. It was full of cars again, as it had been the weekend before. Hatchbacks and trunks were open, and people were carrying suitcases and laundry baskets. The upperclasspeople, the
sophomores, juniors, and seniors, were returning. They’d fill the vacated rooms, the empty beds, the yawning voids left by all those who hadn’t made it through last week. Miranda stepped out of the trees and waited for people to notice her, the feral girl in purple underwear covered in mud. She wanted everyone to see she was here. She’d survived orientation.