The Harrowing

CHAPTER TWO

The exodus had already begun. Students with bulging luggage poured out the front door of Mendenhall and down the steps in a steady stream.

Robin came up the rain-drenched walk, blankly sidestepping residents climbing into cars and airport-shuttle vans idling in the circular drive that set Mendenhall apart from the other Victorians lining the west edge of campus.

Mendenhall Residence Hall, known to all as “the Hall” (sometimes “M-Hall,” sometimes even “home”), was a converted mansion, a sprawling hodgepodge of turrets, balconies, fire escapes, and gabled roofs, all under a spreading canopy of oaks. Once a fraternity house, until the campus had started admitting women in 1932, it looked like some mad designer had added a wing in every direction from every architectural style and period ever since. Under the dark skies, it was as gloomily gothic as anything Hawthorne or Poe had ever conjured from the fevered depths of their imaginations.

Robin moved up the steps, past students hoisting duffels and carry-on bags, hugging and shouting goodbyes. Their raucous put-downs and farewells seemed to come from a great distance, barely audible. It was so easy for Them, the Normals. Vacation, friends, love…they bubbled over with life and enthusiasm, fairly scorching her with their light.

She pushed down the black surge of envy and stepped through the triple-arched front door into a murky entry hall lined with rows of locked mailboxes. She hesitated by the boxes. Her hand slid automatically into her coat pocket for keys, even as a voice in her head mocked her.

Why bother? You know it’s empty. Spare yourself and go upstairs.

She pulled the keys out of her pocket, quickly jabbed the smallest into the keyhole of her box, and pulled open the door.

Empty.

See? Nothing. Nothing. You’re nothing—

Robin shoved the mailbox door closed to shut out the voice. She twisted the key, turned away blindly.

The entry opened into a decrepitly grand but effectively useless hall. Benches with high backs like church pews hugged the paneled walls. Across the hardwood floor, veneer long worn away, a sweeping staircase led up to three floors of big old rooms with diamond-cut bay windows and recessed window seats.

On this dark day, the two-story hall felt more cavernous than usual, ominous, even. Robin paused in the doorway, looking up. She’d never noticed how the high windows near the top of the balcony looked like watching eyes.

Just stop it, Robin ordered herself. You’re staying, and the last thing you need to do is to start freaking yourself out about this.

She crossed the bare floor to the staircase and made her way up, her legs still stiff with cold. The wide steps, of shiny old wood with carpet runners for safety, felt slightly spongy under her feet, beginning to give under the constant tramping traffic of sixty-some residents per year. Robin’s nostrils flared with the familiar smell of Mendenhall—an old smell, sickly sweet, a little musty: accumulated layers of dusty carpet and wet wood, vying with laundry detergent, pot, stale beer, sweat, lingering perfume. And sex, of course, always sex.

On the second floor, she turned to the right and walked the length of the landing into an enclosed staircase leading up to the third floor. In the dark, she pulled up short at a sudden movement right above her….

A guy with straggly hair and Lennon glasses brushed past her on his way out, duffel slung over his shoulder. He mumbled, “Sorry,” not looking at her.

Robin started up the last flight of stairs without bothering to respond.

Her own floor was the third on the girls’ wing. Not that anyone enforced the segregation; students went back and forth between all the wings at all hours of the night. And everyone but the Housing Office knew the Hall supervisor was living with his girlfriend in a flat three blocks away.

She stepped through the open door to the third floor and was assaulted by prevacation music blasting from various rooms in a mind-boggling cacophony: Green Day, the Sex Pistols, The Marriage of Figaro from some high-toned rebel.

Robin walked down the carpeted hall, the open doors on both sides of the corridor revealing girls throwing clothes and books into duffels and backpacks, rushing in and out of one another’s rooms with college-age disregard for personal space, shouting cheerful good-byes.

As she passed a doorway, the group inside burst into laughter. Robin stiffened. Were they laughing at her? The shapeless Goodwill coat with holes in its pockets, her worn shoes?

No, no one was looking. They didn’t see.

Her steps slowed as she neared her room. The door was closed, but she could tell Waverly was there from the twist in her gut.

Should I go somewhere… wait till she’s gone?

She hesitated, deliberating.

Oh well—she’ll be out soon enough.

She reached reluctantly for the doorknob and went in.

Robin’s roommate was packing half her closet into a Luis Vuitton bag on her perfectly made bed, and, thankfully, was too busy dictating her travel plans and retrieval instructions into a cell phone to do more than glance huffily at Robin.

Robin crossed to the far corner of her side of the room, stripped off her wet clothes, found a long sweater on the floor to pull on over her leggings. She kept her back to her roommate, who traveled peevishly from her closet to the suitcase on the bed as if she were alone in the room.

Waverly Todd was beautiful. Apart from that, she had no redeeming qualities. Certainly, she must have been punishment for some terrible transgression in one of Robin’s past lives. A preening, prissy, size-two Southern belle, she could take up the whole room and all the oxygen in it no matter what she was doing.

She had followed her football-scholarship boyfriend out of Charleston to the hinterlands. A fish out of water in the cold East, she hated everyone around her with a black passion.

The girl clearly belonged in a sorority and had, in fact, been firmly interred in the Tri-Delt house, most prestigious on campus, until this year. Robin gathered that during rush week there had been some incident with the boyfriend that got Waverly kicked out of the house, and the boyfriend ousted from his frat as well. Waverly was fighting mad about her expulsion from the Greek golden circle into the outer darkness of general housing. She raged against her banishment and took her fall from grace out on Robin, the lowly civilian, by being generally insufferable in every way she could invent.

Robin’s only consolation was that her very existence was as annoying to Waverly as Waverly’s was to her.

Robin hung her detested coat to dry above the radiator, dug her Ancient Worlds textbook out of her backpack, and curled in the window seat with her back to the other girl.

The room itself was fantastic, really: diamond-beveled windows, a cozy, creaking recessed window seat, delicious dark mahogany paneling up half of the wall. But the decor was a battlefield, lines strictly drawn. Waverly’s half of the room was fussily, oppressively feminine: Laura Ashley linens and cut-crystal knickknacks perkily punctuated with various plush stuffed animals, a framed photo of the boyfriend on the dresser.

Robin’s half was dark and cryptic and arty: black sheets and worn Surrealist prints on the wall, the melted Dali watches a defiant blot in Waverly’s Martha Stewart universe.

Waverly finally hung up on whatever relative she was torturing and turned her full attention back to her suitcase. Robin bent over her book. She had no intention of actually studying, but she kept up the pretense of reading to annoy Waverly. It was working. Waverly watched Robin suspiciously, irritated to paranoia by Robin’s stoic refusal to acknowledge her presence. The silence fairly crackled between them. Finally, Waverly had to speak.

“You’re not going home?”

Robin turned a page, not looking up. “No.”

“You’re just going to stay here? By yourself?”

Robin’s eyes never moved from the book. “Looks like it.”

Waverly’s gaze narrowed; her drawl lengthened. “You never go anywhere, you know.”

Robin’s voice was flat. “I must be weird or something.”

“Or something,” Waverly sniffed.

The door crashed open and a tall, broad jock filled the door frame.

The boyfriend.

In the window seat, Robin stiffened, every molecule of her being instantly aware of him. If Waverly was a black hole, Patrick O’Connor was the sun, big and blond and full of life. Robin could feel her heart lifting, hope returning.

He swaggered into the room, duffel hanging from his shoulder. “Taxi’s here,” he complained in Waverly’s direction, Southern accent rich as butter. “Ready to roll?”

Waverly continued rearranging her suitcase, adding outfits she had no chance in hell of wearing over the four-day break. “He’ll wait,” she knifed back.

Robin kept her eyes glued to her book, raging inwardly. Why Waverly? It was always the golden, stupid ones who were chosen.

It was pathetic, really, a typical Southern disaster in the making. High school quarterback fucking what brains there were out of the prom queen. Prom queen bent on marriage, quarterback overflowing with hormones, scamming on every other girl in sight.

As if to illustrate the point, Patrick ran his hand along the curve of Waverly’s ass as she bent over her suitcase. She pushed him away. Unfazed, Patrick twisted his hand in her hair and pulled her head back to kiss her, full mouth grazing on her lips, dropping lower to nuzzle on her throat.

Robin’s jaw tightened; she pretended not to watch. Pathetic.

Even more pathetic was that against all logic and better judgment, Robin was hopelessly in lust with him. It was a stupid cliché, doomed, she knew—but Patrick was the only person at the school who’d paid any attention to her at all, who smiled when he saw her, as if she weren’t broken or damaged beyond repair. Granted, he lighted up for everyone, especially when he wanted something. But at least Robin felt there when he was around. At least he saw her. He saw her.

She’d listened to them make love in the dark, not knowing or caring that she was awake, and imagined herself under him, his mouth on her throat, his hands holding her down, his heat filling her—

She started back to the present as Patrick turned Waverly loose and flashed his grin at Robin, warm and brilliant. “Hey, Rob. Could not motivate myself out of bed this morning. I miss anything in Ancient Civ?” A direct blue gaze, irresistible.

Robin closed her book on her finger, kept her voice casual. “Besides that next Friday’s the midterm?”

Patrick’s look was comically dismayed. “Fuck a duck. I’ll choke.” His voice dropped, low and caressing.” ‘Less I can get your notes.” The Carolina drawl that was like fingernails on a blackboard from Waverly was a lingering tease in Patrick’s voice, full of warmth and promise.

Robin felt her knees go weak, but she put her book aside and stood, moving past him to her desk. She could feel Patrick’s eyes on her. He stepped to her side (so close!) as she flipped through a spiral notebook. The heat of his body beside hers made her stomach twist with longing.

She ripped four classes’ worth of notes on creation myths from the notebook and turned quickly, pages in hand, so he couldn’t see she was trembling. “That’s the last two weeks. You haven’t been for a while.”

He looked down into her eyes and she felt her breath catch. “Saved my ass. I owe ya—”

Waverly’s voice came from behind, a shrill note of warning. “Are you finished coming all over my roommate?”

Patrick winked at Robin, turned and hoisted Waverly’s suitcase, then his duffel bag, and then hooked an arm around Waverly’s waist and slung her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Waverly pounded on his back, her voice rising to a banshee shriek. “Put me down, you assholel”

Patrick ignored her and carried her out, calling cheerfully back over his shoulder. “See ya, Rob. Happy Turkey Day.”

Robin could hear Waverly starting to swear a blue streak, her voice fading down the hall.

She kicked the door closed behind them and stood still in the fading light.