Nice Girls by Catherine Dang
Dedication
To Mom, Dad & Teresa
Epigraph
Behold the beast, for which I have turned back; Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage. For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1
My father was growing bald. All my life, his hair had been thick and black, darker than the pieces of charcoal that I’d use in elementary school art class. But as he hunched over his toolbox, I couldn’t seem to look away from the bald spot. It was slightly bigger than a quarter.
He pulled out a screwdriver and stared back at my desk lying on the floor. It was nicer than anything the school had offered. Now its legs stood straight in the air like a dead animal’s.
“You need me to help with anything?” I asked.
Dad said nothing. He began unscrewing a leg from one corner of the desk. When it was out, he chucked it on the floor and unscrewed another one.
He’d driven to the dorm in less than twenty-four hours. Coming from the Midwest, it was a seventeen-hour drive, nonstop. Dad had probably slept in the rental van during his breaks. And when he finally made it to my dorm, Dad had only handed me a box of black garbage bags. Told me to pack up everything as fast as I could. He had nothing to say to me in person—he’d barely even spoken over the phone.
My room was now mostly packed, except for my backpack, my suitcase, and the desk. The black garbage bags were piled in the moving cart. I used that to block the door—I didn’t want one of the other RAs barging in.
Throughout the morning, I kept hearing voices out in the hallway. The walls in the dorm were paper thin. You could hear everything here—freshmen urging each other to take a shot in their rooms or a poor freshman girl awkwardly moaning as some boy jackhammered her. After three years, you got used to the noises. You blocked it all out like the wind.
But I kept hearing my name in every loud conversation or hushed tone, in the laughter as a pair of girls walked by.
I didn’t know if that was better or worse than the text messages. I currently had forty-three of them, unopened, burning on my phone. They came from friends, acquaintances, coworkers, but nearly half of them had come from numbers that I didn’t recognize. It was as if they all smelled blood and came for the carnage.
The texts were straightforward: You’re a fucking bitch, Mary. You deserve worse.
And what could I say to that? I didn’t disagree. It was my own hands that had reached out, my own fists that had flown. The damage that I’d done to her—only a bitch could do it. Even my own father was stunned.
He’d finished dismantling the desk. He left the legs on the floor and laid the desk on top of the moving cart. It looked like it would slip off any second. But Dad was already opening the door, gesturing to my suitcase, backpack, and desk legs.
“You carry those,” he said, wheeling the cart past the door. I scooped up my things and took one last look at the room. For the past two years, I’d lived in a small off-white box with a window and a tiny nook of a closet. I didn’t mind the faulty thermostat and the muggy heat in the winters. Over the summer, I’d kept my things here, even as I’d bounced far away from one sublet to another—a perk of being a resident adviser.
The room hadn’t been glamorous, but it had been home enough for me.
Now it was over.
I followed Dad as he wheeled the cart down the hallway. He wasn’t moving fast enough. I stared straight ahead as we passed by the dorm rooms, then the common area.
There was a group of freshmen sitting around the couches, their laptops and coffees spread out in front of them. Like sheep, they all looked over as soon as the cart squeaked by.
Carly was one of them.
And I felt it again—that burst of white-hot rage in my veins.
Carly smirked, then turned to whisper to a boy sitting next to her. And I saw it, my stomach flipping over.
She was wearing a thick pair of glasses today. Her red hair was piled up into a bun over her head, pulled away from her face. Her lips were swollen. There was a large, black bruise that covered the top of her right cheek, just below her eye.
The bruise shouldn’t have been that dark—it hadn’t been that dark yesterday.
As Dad and I waited for the elevator, we could hear loud laughter from the common room, where Carly and the others sat. My phone was vibrating now—more texts pouring in. The news was spreading throughout campus. I could feel it.
On our way to the front desk, Dad and I passed by more freshmen, all flocking in for lunch. They seemed to rush out of our way. Two freshman boys slipped past us, snickering, their arms raised in surrender, as if I were putting a gun to their heads.
I hated them all. At least now I could be fully honest about it. They were so bright-eyed and ambitious. Every freshman thought they were going to make something of themselves, like working for the UN, running a Fortune 500 company, or writing a future New York Times bestseller. Some of them were awfully cocky about it.
I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t worth it. That it wouldn’t happen. That the world didn’t give a shit about most of us.
At the front desk, I handed my work polo and my badge over to Mohamed, the RA who lived two floors above me. He studied economics. I once gave him a joint that I’d confiscated from the women’s bathroom. He once shared some of his Adderall with me during finals week. The two of us got along pretty well.