College Girl (6 page)

“Wait. What happened to the
psycho?”

“No idea. We spent half the night
filing a report with the campus cops—”

“And the other half of the night
making out! Fuck, Alex. That is unreal.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I
was thinking the entire time.”

“So, when are you going to see him
again?”

I looked down.

“I’m not.”

“
Whaaa
? Why the hell not? Super hot guy saves you from a psycho, you
make out with him all night … and then nothing?”

“Yeah, nothing. He gave me this
whole speech about how young I was … blah, blah, blah.”

I laughed to hide the fact that my
eyes were burning.

“Young? How old is this guy?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Oh shit. That is old.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

“Well, he
is
kind of a cradle robber.”

I smiled crookedly.

“A
hot
cradle robber.”

“Damn, I want to see this guy.”

“Well, then come to Calculus with
me Tuesday night.”

Julie made a face, and I stood up.

“You want to grab something from
the DC? I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Sure, let’s go. Maybe
I’ll
find a hot TA down there.”

I smiled at her, but deep down I
was afraid that I was never going to find anyone who could make me feel
anywhere close to the way Ryan Bennett had last night.

Ryan

After taking Alex Reed back to her
dorm, I spent way too long in the Rec Center mangling the punching bag. Then, on
Saturday, I put in another ten hours straight trying to ingratiate myself with
Robertson by developing another impossible homework assignment. I hadn’t told
Alex, but I knew why she was failing his class. The old fucker was teaching to
the top half percent of these freshman courses. He
wanted
to fail these kids.

The study of mathematics, to him,
was the be all and end all of existence. Divorced four times, he was apparently
impossible to live with. He was also impossible to TA for. I knew if I tried to
develop a homework assignment that fifty or sixty percent of the class could
finish, Robertson would throw it out. In lecture he seemed like an easygoing
guy, but in reality, he was a fucking fascist.

If Alex had gotten any of the
other professors in the math department, she might have passed her second term
of Calculus. But after what she had told me, I started thinking it might be
better if she flunked now. It might shake her up a bit, fuck with her
GPA—but in the long run it was probably better for her if she took her
life back from her mother and everyone else who had told her what they thought
she should do.

On Sunday, I spent the entire
morning on the computer, but my mind was elsewhere. I picked up the tennis ball
I had been throwing to Finn earlier and bounced it savagely off the wall.

“
Fuck
.”

Why the fuck couldn’t I get this
girl out of my head? I wasn’t her freshman advisor. I was her fucking Calculus
TA—who had very nearly violated her. My throat tightened. The sick part
was that she was goddamned lucky it
had
been me.
Because
I
had stopped.
The stalker from the library?
Just
thinking about what might have happened if I hadn’t caught up with him when I
had made my jaw clench. I had lost him on the second floor, and by the time I
had made it to the third floor and seen him with his hands on her …
My
knuckles cracked.

Reaching for my phone, I hit the
number for a girl I knew in the bursar’s office. She happened to be getting
married to Jess, a guy a year behind me in the program. Poor girl had no idea
what she was getting into by marrying a mathematics doctoral candidate.

“Brenda? Yeah, hey. How’s it
going?”

I listened for five minutes as she
related the latest in their nuptial planning.

“Is Jess around?” I asked during a
pause.

“Already on campus … on a Sunday.”

I laughed, secretly relieved.

“Can I ask a favor?”

“Sure. Name it.”

I gritted my teeth.

“Do you have remote access to the
undergrad database?”

I could hear Brenda breathing.

“This isn’t something that’s going
to get me fired, is it?”

“I just need a guy’s school
address, not his social.”

I could hear her typing.

“All right. But if anyone ever
asks me, you’re a hacker and I don’t know you.”

“I’ll owe you,” I smile.

“Yeah you will.”

I gave her as many details as I
could.
Monday undergrad Creative Writing workshop.
Professor Salinas. Justin … no last name. Then I tapped out a rhythm on the
table, hoping there wasn’t more than one Justin in that class. But usually the
workshops in the School of Letters & Science, or LNS as people call it,
were small.

“Here it is. Justin Garibaldi.
Local address is 312 Park Place, Apartment 4-D.”

“That’s all I need. And if you
want me to, I’ll stage an intervention if Jess talks theorems past seven
o’clock.”

She laughed, and I hung up. Then I
stared down at the name and number and tried to talk some sense into myself. No
luck. Justin Garibaldi was about to get bitch-slapped. I got up and opened the
backdoor for Finn before grabbing my jacket, backpack, and the aluminum bat
before walking out to the bike. The dickhead’s apartment was on Undergrad Lane,
which was just a row of shoddy buildings that hadn’t been updated in two
decades.

I passed by Alex Reed’s dorm
building on the way over there. In the back of my mind, I realized that I was
being a complete psychopath, but I couldn’t
fucking
help myself. The thought of this jackass fucking with her again was more than I
could stand. Parking the bike at the back of the complex, I walked around until
I found 4-D.

The door was cracked open, but
there were no lights on inside. I toed open the door and listened to the steady
thump of a bass. The smell in the apartment was a combination of cat piss,
vomit, stale beer, and weed. Flicking on the light switch, I started moving
toward the back of the apartment. Tacked on the walls were countless pictures
of girls on the university’s quad. I studied them until I saw one of Alex
coming out of her dorm. Pulling the picture from the wall, I pushed open the
bedroom door with the bat and walked in, turning on the overhead light and
shutting off the music.

“Wake-y, wake-y, shit head,” I
said to the pile of blankets.

“What the fuck, man?” mumbled a
groggy voice.

The shapeless mass shot up in bed,
staring blearily at me.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

“How the fuck does what feel?”

“To be stalked?”

“Who the fuck are you?” he
growled, jumping out of bed.

I held out the bat at arm’s length
until he backed up against the wall. His watery, blood-shot brown eyes narrowed
with recognition.

“I fucken know you. You were with
that little freshman from Salinas’s workshop. Look, man. I didn’t know you got
there first. I just thought she was fresh meat.”

I stepped forward and let my arm
bend until the bat was pressed up against his throat. He flinched when I leaned
toward him.

“Listen very carefully, you
fucking sadist. If I see you anywhere near her … if you so much as look at
her—or any other girl on this campus—you’re going to find yourself
fifty miles from here buried up to your neck in pig shit. If you doubt me …” I
laughed humorlessly. “Well, go ahead. See what happens. People disappear
everyday.”

I eased up with the bat, and he
coughed. I had just started walking toward the front of the apartment—and
fresh air—when I heard the heavy steps of someone very hung over thudding
toward me. Turning in the narrow hallway, I figured why not? I pulled back and
cold-cocked the guy.

By the time I got back to the
house, I felt better. Opening the front door, I looked down at my knuckles. It
had felt good to smash that guy’s face. I smiled. Let him go to the cops to
report me and then explain his night job as the campus rapist. I looked down at
the picture of Alex Reed, her expression serious as she left Mercer.

I worked until sometime past two
in the morning before passing out. Monday I went into the department. When I
ran into Jess, I asked if he wanted to go over to the courts. A hair shy of
turning into Robertson with his math obsession, Jess talked about his thesis
the entire walk over to the Rec Center. I shot him the ball, and he grinned at
me.

“Brenda says your stalking some
undergrad.”

“Stalking? Brenda’s got a vivid
imagination—and a big mouth.
But, hey.
At least
she got you to concentrate on something other than your thesis for once.”

“What I’m working on right now is
going to blow everything else out of the water,” Jess said.

“Good to know you’re staying
humble.”

“So? Stalking? Seems beneath you,
Matthews.”

I blocked his shot, which was easy
to do with half a foot on him.

“Your fiancée’s got it turned
around. I wasn’t stalking anyone. I caught some douchebag following a little
freshman from Robertson’s intro class. I just took a little trip over to his
apartment and scared the shit out of him.”

Jess threw me the ball.

“Yeah? Why didn’t you just let the
campus cops handle it?”

“And let the guy grab her the next
time she walked to the library? What if it had been Brenda?”

Jess nodded, and I took the shot.

“Was she hot? The freshman?”

“She was eighteen.”

“That’s legal.”

“Legal, not ethical,” I corrected
him.

Which reminded me: how the fuck
far had I been from ethical last Thursday?

“But was she into you? I mean, you
should get
something
for having
Robertson as an advisor,” Jess laughed.

We played two more games before I
reminded him that Brenda would be getting off work. I headed back to the house,
and by the time I got out of the shower I had two voicemails.
One from my mother.
And the other from
Gretchen.

That was the problem. They both
thought that I was going to
come to my
senses
. My mother liked Gretchen. Of course, I hadn’t told her about
Gretchen’s penchant for pill popping. I didn’t need to instigate more fucking
drama in my life.

“Hello, dear. I wanted to remind
you about your father’s event. Please wear a tie … and I’d really love it if
you would call Gretchen to work things out.”

As soon as I erased her message,
Gretchen’s started playing.

“Ryan, we need to talk …”

Deleting the message, I threw the
phone on the bed. The last thing I needed was to talk to Gretchen. The two of
us had been a mistake. On paper she looked good to my parents, but at some
point I had woken up and realized that their approval didn’t matter as much as
the potential for a fucked up marriage that would have ended in a tragedy of
Shakespearean proportions. She had wanted me to be someone else.
Someone who didn’t exist.
She had thought our life was going
to be a fairy tale, and it had been easy to tell when she had started planning
the wedding that she would have ended up disappointed in reality.

The last thing I needed was
another person to be disappointed in me. During high school I had insisted on
going to public school, something my mother had found
inappropriate
. She would have preferred all-boys, Catholic,
private. It had been my first act of rebellion, not the last. The day I had
arrived home in the back of a squad car for fighting, she had called it a
disgrace.

It hadn’t made any difference that
I hadn’t started the fight. My crime had been that I won. The dick from the
football team who had started it ended up with a busted nose and his arm in a
cast. To this day, I’d like to think he regretted calling me a rich faggot and
then charging headlong into me after I had calmly pointed out that he was the
one who enjoyed tackling other guys. Not that I would have had a problem if he
had been into guys.
My
problem had
been—and always would be—shitheads who thought they could terrorize
everyone around them. Still, in my mother’s eyes, I had been the fuck-up.

When I had announced that I was
going back for my doctorate, it had just pissed everyone off. Of course, no
university had wanted to take me by the time I finally applied.
Too old.
It didn’t matter what my GPA had been in undergrad.
The study of mathematics was a young man’s pursuit. Or at least everyone
in
the field thought it was. Ironically,
Professor Robertson had a quote from G. H. Hardy’s memoir tacked to his
corkboard: “
No mathematician should ever
allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science,
is a young man’s game.
”

But I hadn’t gone back to school
for glory. I just wanted to study something
I
found interesting before inevitably returning to the family trade. The important
part had been doing something for myself before it was too late. Maybe that was
why Alex Reed’s story had struck me. Only eighteen and she was deciding her
fate based on an overbearing mother and a TV show. And then there was me, her
Calculus TA, who had nearly deflowered her. That should turn her off to math
forever.

Still, I couldn’t deny it. I was
looking forward to Tuesday night’s lecture. If I had really wanted, I could
have gone over to Mercer and stood at the door, waiting for her to come out.
But then I would have deserved—even more than her stalker did—to be
in a jail cell.

I ignored Gretchen’s message and
sent a text to my mother, smiling as I sent it. She hated texting. Then I went
to the kitchen and got some milk and cold cereal. No point to putting on a show
without anyone to impress. The thought made me curse. Was that what I had been
trying to do? Impress the pretty little freshman?
You’re one sick fuck, Bennett
, I thought miserably. Before it got
completely dark out, I took Finn out to the park. After that, the rest of the
night and most of Tuesday dragged. This feeling wasn’t going away—the
near desperation to see Alex Reed again. I couldn’t remember the last time I
had been this fucked up over a girl.

When I headed over to my
infinitesimal office about twenty minutes before lecture, Robertson stopped by,
which meant I couldn’t escape. I ended up listening to him pontificate for the
entire walk over to the 1500 building. The undergrads called 1500
the prison
. And it looked like one. All concrete.
Few windows. It was depressing as fuck. And I couldn’t wait to get there.

For being a
genius
, Robertson didn’t know dick about computers apart from the
modeling software specifically designed for math geniuses. But in the real
world, he needed someone to set up his PowerPoint presentation. I watched as he
got swarmed by students—most of them already failing. Alex wasn’t among
them. Finishing up with the laptop, I took out the graded assignments from last
week’s lecture.
All of them except Alex’s.
I kept hers
with me, which turned out to be a good move. The lecture hall had already
filled up, and her roommate was in the front row—war paint applied. But
Alex wasn’t there. When Robertson started, I stayed at the front of the room, scanning
each row.