Adelaide Piper (37 page)

“Heady stuff,” I said. “Fill me in more one of these days.”

“You'd be fascinated by it, and it would make for great poetry.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it's rich. It's like the spiritual you has passed from death to life, and now the natural you—the human flesh part—has to pass from life to death. Or to put it another way, just like a tree has to shed its dead leaves in order to thrive, so we have to let the Holy Spirit subdue our fallen nature.”

“Mmm,” I said, not really attempting to comprehend the notion. My mind was still on my new romance, and I was a Homer Simpson, stumped in my thought processes by the image of a glazed donut. I blushed as I described Tobias's sweet, doughy goodness to my friend.

“Well, he sounds great,” Shannon said. “But is he great for you?”

“Yes, he is!” I declared a few minutes later as I hung up the phone, and from that point forward I couldn't put on the brakes. Dr. Atwood was calling on me constantly, and I was reworking Peño's case before the first hearing in November. Tobias phoned me every night, and I melted into his warm voice at the other end of the line. It felt so good to be adored and to be on the front line of an important issue, and I couldn't resist falling in love with him and his role in the fight against violence.

While he was sensitive, he was also tenacious, and he found excuses to come down to NBU to visit. Also, he invited me up twice to DC when his organization needed a student to speak on behalf of the victims.

I almost breathed easy on that quick flight up to National Airport even though the landing and takeoff unnerved me. I still remembered the 1982 crash of Flight 90 into the Fourteenth Street Bridge.

I was eleven at the time it aired on the nightly news as my family and I ate dinner on our den trays and watched the icy horror unfold. I'd had nightmares about the plane plummeting into the Potomac River, and if I closed my eyes, I could still see the rescue workers pulling the handful of survivors out of the freezing water.

“This is the shortest runway in the country,” a businessman told me when my white knuckles clutched the seat beside him one Sunday afternoon just before the ascent that would deliver me back to Roanoke.

“I really needed to know that,” I muttered, looking out the window.

Behind the thick airport glass, I could see Tobias, who was still pacing at the departure gate where he'd gently kissed me good-bye. He knew I hated the takeoffs, and he wanted to see me through it. How dear he was!

I had finally shared the story of my conversion with him that weekend after a Violence Against Women awareness dinner at the Watergate Hotel.

“I know you're spiritual,” he'd said, squeezing my hand when I told him exactly how I'd become a convert.

“So, I haven't ever really heard from you on the subject. What about
your
faith?” I asked. I was a novice Christian, but even so I knew I needed to be with someone who was on the same page.

“Well, you know I don't go to church every week or anything,” he said. “But I'm open to that. I grew up in the Unitarian Church, and I have good memories of my time there. But I think
doing
something is the best way to get in touch with the divine. And with Rachel's Rape, I like to think I'm doing something every day to help someone somewhere. I think God can see that, don't you?”

After he said this, he repositioned me on the inside of the sidewalk. He said he always wanted to be on the outside so that he could protect me from a speeding car or a daredevil cyclist. And he had practically shrieked with fear when I'd gotten turned around in the subway earlier in the day and nearly boarded a train for the rough inner-city neighborhood of Anacostia. I'd noticed that his forehead was wet with anxiety after he pulled me out of the train compartment just before the doors shut and prodded me down the escalator to the next platform. He had taken a towelette out of his back pocket and patted his forehead while we waited for the train to take us to Capitol Hill, where he had promised me a tour.

“I'm fine, Tobias,” I'd said, sensing his shortness of breath.

Then he walked me to his coworker's apartment just off DuPont Circle. Glenda Lyles was a thirtysomething African-American lady who had worked at an array of Washington nonprofits from the Hunger and Homelessness Alliance to the National Organization of Women, and she had taken me in during my two visits to DC.

Glenda's spare bedroom smelled like cinnamon and Ivory soap, and I loved to stay with her because of this and because she kept the place so warm that you didn't even need to put on socks when your toes hit the tiles of her bathroom floor.

“Good night, Adelaide,” he said to me before buzzing up to Glenda at the top of the brownstone steps.

“I wish you just lived here,” he whispered, his voice making the edge of my ear tingle. “Wish you could just glide on home with me to Adams Morgan and stay there forever.” His eyes glistened beneath the glow of the streetlight, and the laughter that poured from an apartment next door made me smile.

“Maybe one day,” I said.

(Randy had been dating the cheerleader off and on at this point, and I considered Tobias and the cheerleader to be acts of grace that allowed us both to broaden our horizons. But then again, I didn't want to hear all the details from Georgianne.)

Tobias winked at me once, then squeezed my hand. “Breakfast before your flight, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll meet you at Starbucks.”

“Meet me, no. I'll swing by and pick you up at eight.”

Feeling a poem coming on now, I closed the door to Glenda's guest room and fumbled through my backpack for a pencil. My fingers sifted through the crud in the front pocket: a handful of lint, three dull pennies, the last mint in a tube of Breath Savers, and the St. Christopher medal. I rubbed it with my index finger before it dropped back down into the pocket.

The poem was sappy and superheroesque.

He worships

with his hands

on paper

petitioning

for protection.

(I trashed it.)

Seek ye first,
the third voice surfaced as Glenda's guest-bedroom pillow cushioned my head, but I was intoxicated by the laughter from the apartment next door—trying to piece together the conversations as if they were the definition of bliss and well within my reach. I fell asleep breathing in the cinnamon and the romantic love that was saturating my heart with its gratifying scent.

At 4:00 a.m. I awoke in blackness, the hum from a busted street lamp sounding off across the street. My heart raced as I suddenly pictured Rachel during the last days before she took her life, and in the quiet I wrote:

The morning

claws its way

into your quiet room—

white light

through a thick pane.

You wake as a child

blinking twice

before memory,

the edge of a hoe

in a fertile

garden,

digs up

the blackest soil.

Tobias rang the doorbell at 8:00 a.m. sharp the next morning, carrying a bouquet of pink tulips wrapped in waxy green paper.

Seriously perfect
, I thought, looking at his damp blond hair curling up from the back of his neck and an overlooked tuft of shaving cream tucked in the curve of his ear. When I hugged him, he smelled clean and manly all at the same time, and I thought I might never let go.

19

Senior Year

I
cringed when I received two letters from my professors one early December morning.

“The first portion of your thesis is overdue,” Professor Dirkas had written me. “What's going on, Adelaide?”

And then another from Dr. Shaw, “You've skipped two classes in the last week. Are you all right? You'll need to get with a classmate to catch up before finals.”

I had been so wrapped up in the campus-assault stuff—the placing of the attack buttons, the interviews, and the letters that came pouring in after the
60 Minutes
show aired in October—that I could barely keep up with my schoolwork.

Two letters had been slipped under my dorm-room door late at night. One said, “Thank you (from an anonymous victim).” Another said, “It still happens.”

I took these victim letters as a sign to keep going, and I became consumed once again with my role on the student life committee and my budding relationship with Tobias.

“Randy's still waiting on you,” Georgianne said when she called one night.

“But that cheerleader is bull-headed, and he can't hold out forever.”

“I think I'm falling for someone else,” I said.

“Well, don't expect
me
to tell him,” she said.

By the end of the fall semester of my senior year, I received a C– in Dr. Shaw's Advanced Religious Studies class and a C+ from Professor Hirsch on the first installment of my Flannery O'Connor thesis. Then I botched my GREs and put a halfhearted effort toward applying to MFA school, and in the spring of my senior year, I received four complimentary rejection letters that encouraged me to try again in a few years with a larger body of work and, hopefully, a matured literary voice.
Ouch,
I thought as I read those words in the campus post office while sneakers squeaked across the linoleum and a small herd of senior frat boys guffawed in a corner as they read their own employment rejection letters before pinning them to a kiosk in the center of the hall
. Maybe it's not meant to be,
I said to myself as Frankie crept up behind me, resting his chin on my shoulder.

“Bummer,” he said. “Let's get a pint of Cherry Garcia and rant on the quad.”

“Let's,” I said, handing the letter over to him. He ripped it into tiny strips before throwing it into the trash can on our way out.

Cecelia Honeycutt had won her case against Kevin Youngblood, and he was expelled in February 1993.

After his expulsion hit the local papers, Dr. Atwood lined up an interview with
Mademoiselle
magazine for Cecelia and me, and soon after,
Seventeen
magazine called to see if we would be willing to be on the cover of the “Off to College” issue that would be in print in June. Our story had an unusual hook: I had been quiet for two years until

I saw what happened to Cecelia, and we spurred each other on in the name of justice.

Yes, my fight against campus assault was my priority for now. And even though I went with Ruthie to vespers on Sunday night, the remembrance of my dance on the Magnolia Club dance floor, two years ago was tightly sealed in a box in my mind like the molded Christmas ornaments in the hot and humid Williamstown attic.

Who had time to see about them?

I truly believed that my Maker wanted me to help make people aware of the crime. To have a little part in making men think twice and making women wise up and not put themselves in vulnerable situations. But when I missed both of Harriet's plays because of previous committee commitments and interviews, I began to wonder.

Harriet wrote in an e-mail marked “High Importance”:

What is up with you, Adelaide? Even Jif made it up here for my spring play. And so did Marguerite avec walker, and even my mother, for God's sake! I was the writer and the director, and it was the O'Connor Redemption story this time. When you missed the one in the fall, I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but now that you missed the last one before graduation, I am truly bummed out and concerned about the ordering of your priorities. It sounds like I'm going to see your face on a magazine rack before I get to see you in person. What gives? And what did the MFA schools say? Are you going to move to NYC with me after graduation?

Harriet

The e-mail hit me between the eyes. I wrote back with a simple “I'm sorry. Rejected from graduate schools. Let's talk via phone.”

What
would
I be doing after graduation? It was March, and the thought had just now occurred to me. Normally, my parents would have been pressing me on this, but the final divorce proceedings were drawing near, and their lawyers were keeping them occupied as they duked it out over their meager assets. No one else in the Piper family could see past April 25, when Greta and Zane would officially be torn asunder.

Now Jif was going to go home to Williamstown after graduation to get a boob job and work in her father's office until she could get back in at
Vanity Fair
in Manhattan. Marny wanted to spruce her up before she went back to New York, and she needed to earn some extra money so she could float as an intern for a few months before she got in on the payroll as an assistant to one of the editors.

“I can go for Diet Coke runs for six months if I save enough before heading back,” Jif had said when we tried on our caps and gowns that spring. “As long as I land that job sometime after that, I'll be golden. Then I'm going to claw my way up to the feature section. Just watch me.”

Ruthie was interested in teaching psychology in a high school, and she was applying for a Teach for America job as well as some in the Charlotte public school system.

Every now and then a collective female scream would breakout on the quad or in the dining hall as several NBU couples became engaged. It was sort of like a flu that was spreading around campus, and several couples that had been dating for six-plus months decided to band together and tie the knot shortly after graduation so they wouldn't have to enter the real world alone. I was surprised to see how quickly the frat-boy seniors followed the lead of their pretty girlfriends on this, but I guessed they were as scared and lost as everyone else, and they were willing to say, “I do,” to make themselves feel better.

“I'm holding out,” Jif said to Frankie, Ruthie, and me as we picnicked under the elm tree that March.

A Northeastern blonde named Porter had just strolled by us, staring at her own two-carat diamond as it caught the afternoon light. It was making little crystal-shaped rainbows on the sidewalk, and we were worried that she might bump into the next tree, she was so engrossed in admiring her finger.