Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 5

“Drink this,” my new college roommate commanded, and shoved a plastic cup into my hands. Her name was Reena Magliotti. Standing before me in her branded jeans, with her branded headband and branded sneakers and branded T-shirt, she looked like a walking, talking directory for the nearest luxury mall. It was the first night of college. We were hosting a pregame, the definition of which had been provided to me approximately fifteen minutes earlier.

I held the cup up, raising my voice to be heard over the rap music playing from the speakers on Reena’s desk. “Is there alcohol in this?”

“Don’t worry,” Reena said dismissively while she poured another cupful. “You won’t taste a thing.”

I sniffed the cup— strawberry jam —and then blushed at the sound of laughter. A few girls were sitting on Reena’s bed. They looked identical to the poster collage of models framed on the wall above: modern, manicured, and just a little bit surly. “It’s basically juice,” one of them offered. The other girl snickered again. Neither had opted to sit on my bed. They hadn’t even stepped over into my half of the room, which held the small handful of things I had brought from home: a hand-stitched quilt, a framed picture of my family, a desktop computer paid for by my scholarship. No posters on my side of the room.

I nodded politely, though it was starting to bother me, the way these women refused to answer the questions I did ask and pretended to hear questions I didn’t ask. Still, my mother’s voice bellowed through the hallways of my brain: Be nice!

Was it more important to the Lord that I abstain from alcohol, or get along with strangers? I took a sip. It was surprisingly sweet, less like juice and more like syrup, not unlike the fake wine they offered out at church service each Sunday.

I closed my eyes, then took a larger gulp from the cup, and then another, ignoring the girls as they laughed again, ignoring Reena’s whoop of support—“Hell yeah, roomie!”—as the juice dribbled down my chin and dripped onto the lace collar of my dress, leaving a spattering of blood drip stains that would never come out.

The music was loud. Louder than loud. How were so many young women capable of fitting into such a small room? Worse: they all kept talking over and around and past me. From what I could gather, these girls all knew each other already somehow.

Friends of friends.

Summer camp.

Boarding school.

Your dad went to—?

No way, my mom pledged—!

Across the room, Reena stood in a semicircle of women who all looked like misshapen clay versions of her and were equally covered in the cursive scrawl of corporations. Standing together like that, they looked like a huddle of branded cows, freshly escaped from the hot iron poke. They were laughing, or screaming. The music—it was really so loud. And the floor—I couldn’t see it, could see only dozens of sneakered feet, moving and shifting like snakes, the floor was filled with snakes, these people were snakes—

No. Silly. Sneakers. Not snakes.

Was this what it felt like to be drunk?

I wasn’t drunk. No, not drunk. Well—maybe a little drunk. The room held the atmosphere of a jungle. Every few moments a gust of rank, warm air drifted past. It felt less like we were in a college dorm room, and more like we were standing inside some horrible monster’s mouth.

Monsters. Mouths.

The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies. Their poison is like the poison of a serpent—

There it was: the lurch of panic. A tear rolled down my cheek. I was standing in (around? alongside?) a group of girls who were all talking to one another simultaneously, a strange simulacrum of conversation that was clearly preventing any true exchange of information. One of them caught my eye, then leaned forward and said, “I like your hair!” She gestured at my braid approvingly. “It’s so long .”

At once, the torrential monologues ceased. All the girls were looking at me, now. The pressure of their collective attention felt like a gravitational force. I resisted the urge to drop to my knees. “It’s so healthy,” another girl chimed in. They were all grinning at me now. Unnerving: everyone I’d met so far at college had teeth so straight and white, they barely looked like teeth at all.

“Have you ever cut it?” a third said, mimicking scissors. “Have you ever cut your hair?”

Oh. That’s what was happening here: these girls thought I was dumb. But how? I’d barely spoken enough to identify myself in a lineup, let alone to incriminate my intellect. I cast my gaze across our huddle, caught one girl frowning contemplatively at the juice-stained blouse of my prairie dress. She startled at my attention and looked quickly away.

So that was it. My hair, my dress—it signified stupidity to them. Too late, I wiped my tearstained cheek with the back of one palm and said shortly, “No, I’ve never cut it.”

“ Woooow, ” they said as one. A desperate, childlike loneliness fell over me. My free hand clenched into a fist. What I would’ve given to feel my mother’s skirt fabric in my grip, for me to look up and see her kind, authoritative expression peering down at me. Ready to go home, Nattie?

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, this was 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 him home—

“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 scream no, 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.