Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (14 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked gently.

“The bed's squeaking,” I said.

He rocked harder and squeaked it louder, laughing.

“Everyone can hear,” I said.

“So what?” he said.

I made him stop, get up, and put the mattress on the floor, so we could do it silently. Luckily he was totally unfazed by anything I did. As we lay together afterward, Matt kissing me before falling into blissed-out slumber, I lay awake, paranoid everyone on my hall had heard, uncomfortable in my body, unsure in my skin, wanting everything but terrified I was doing it all wrong.

We never even came close to having sex without a condom. And yet, that fall, I missed my period, for weeks and weeks. Matt was overjoyed. He wanted us to move to Tennessee and raise the baby together. When I went home for break, I knew I had to do something. Mom remained calm and took me to the doctor who had given me my first pelvic exam. I wasn't pregnant. But I still hadn't had my period. I told her this wasn't uncommon for me. She couldn't find anything wrong. I was incredibly relieved not to be pregnant. So everything was fine, until I had sex with Matt again but still didn't get my period. I hadn't gotten pregnant before, but I could be pregnant now. I started keeping pregnancy tests on hand, which didn't exactly make me any more relaxed about sex.

Matt was a devoted boyfriend. He dressed up in an oversize pink tuxedo shirt and took me out to dinner at the town's Mexican restaurant. He literally sold blood to get money to spend on dates. When I
mentioned this fact to my mom—like many teenage girls, I was not a humble despot—she laughed. “Your father used to sell blood,” she said.

The boys in my dorm could be hard on Matt, and I could be short-tempered with him. But he had several female devotees in his class, including a pretty girl named Maxine, who did not try to hide her crush. It was a small school, so our paths crossed often, but we didn't have more than a nod-and-smile relationship. One night, there was a knock on my door. I expected a friend, or one of my kids. I was surprised to see Maxine.

“Matt isn't here,” I said.

“I'm not here to see Matt,” she said.

I didn't say anything, just waited to see what she wanted.

“Why don't you like me?” she asked.

I was too horrified to speak. This was my worst nightmare: (A) being confronted in any capacity by anyone, and (B) having to lie to avoid hurting the feelings of someone I didn't particularly like when I was already fed up with the situation.

“I don't dislike you, Maxine,” I said. “I just think that my relationship with Matt isn't any of your business, so you should stay out of it.”

She nodded. There wasn't anything else to say. I watched her round the corner before shutting my door. When I mentioned her visit to Matt, he seemed nonplussed.

As the end of the first semester of my sophomore year approached, I began thinking about transferring to a school with a good writing program, maybe Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, or Bard—which students of Simon's Rock could automatically attend. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stay, but I couldn't go. Finals loomed. Break was in a week.

That weekend Galen found me in the Kendrick atrium. He was a terrible mooch of cigarettes, which were always in high demand on campus, since most of us were broke. But I was always happy to give him a smoke in exchange for one of his great, witty philosophies
on anything, profound or mundane. I automatically began to shake one out of my pack for him, but he surprised me by holding out two unopened packs of Parliaments.

“I got you back for all of the cigarettes you've bummed me,” he said.

I stopped short, stunned, always sure people weren't really paying attention to me, or what I brought to their lives, whether it was friendship or a smoke.

“Well, that might not be
all
of the cigarettes I've bummed you,” I said.

He laughed, leaning into me as he lit a cigarette for me. I slumped against his body, happy and comfortable around him, as always.

That Monday night, I was studying for my environmental science exam in my room when I heard a strange noise from the direction of the road that led onto campus. It sounded like fireworks, but I didn't see how that was possible. It was December in the Berkshires. I figured I'd just imagined it. Then I became aware of a flurry of activity in the halls outside my dorm room. I ran into another student's room and waited there with her. The sound came again. Louder. Closer. What was that? More fireworks? It couldn't be. I heard yelling outside. More running. I poked my head into the hallway and then stepped out. None of the adults were anywhere to be seen. Someone said it was Wayne Lo. He had a semiautomatic rifle, and people were injured. Another RA, my friend Jay, had told our kids to stay in their rooms. Stunned, I went back into the room, and the girl looked up.

“They're saying Galen's been shot,” she said to me, cradling her phone.

“What?”

More frantic movement outside. We looked out her window toward the empty dining hall and saw activity through the glass walls of the student lounge, which also housed the snack bar. I'd begun crying, and I couldn't stop. It was impossible. Galen was the best of the best.

“It's just a rumor,” I said. “We don't know anything.”

We looked out the window. A handful of police officers were advancing up the snowy hill, in classic television poses, guns drawn. As I braced myself for more gunshots, the police officers burst through the door and disappeared into the student lounge. I watched them arrest Wayne. The rumors were true.

P
eople called between the dorms, sharing bits of information. Someone had talked to someone in the library, where Galen had died. The person on the other end of the gun was definitely Wayne Lo. Our classmate. Based on his overly aggressive behavior on the basketball court and his stupidly hateful opinions in the classroom, we had thought him an asshole and a homophobe, and we had felt justified in our dislike of him. He had hated us enough to want us dead, and he had done his best to make it so.

Both Galen and Wayne lived in Kendrick, and Wayne had shot into the dorm's atrium as he'd run by. The bullet holes were clearly visible. After the police took Wayne into custody, they fanned out over campus, dealing with the carnage. We waited, crying, talking, hugging, accounting for friends who were not immediately visible.

Finally, we were given some instructions. We RAs were expected to round up our kids and keep the peace until we were summoned to the dining hall for an informational assembly. As we walked out of
Kendrick, police tape already crisscrossed the front of the dorm, hot yellow against the pristine snow. I peered down through the naked trees and the darkness toward the library, spinning red and blue lights flashing frantic through the cold, clear night. I looked over my shoulder, feeling like a gun was trained on me as I crossed the suddenly unfamiliar quad Wayne had sprayed with bullets, my body responding with pure panic and the instinct to flee, my mind unable to weld any logic onto the situation.

I found Matt in the crush of students moving toward the dining hall. He'd been with Maxine, and she'd given him some kind of a muscle relaxant. He was pretty fucked up. I was annoyed with him and with her. I didn't think it was an appropriate response. I didn't want him to be out of it; I wanted him to be in it with the rest of us—in the pain of this fucked-up situation that meant life would never be the same.

We all slunk into chairs around the same tables where we'd eaten dinner a few hours earlier. I looked through the glass doors to the balcony where Galen and I had sat on dozens of nights, smoking. I could feel myself still on his lap, the smell of his hair, which usually needed a wash, the bristle of his beard as he kissed me. All gone, all gone. The tears had never completely stopped, but now they came on hard again. I clung to one last hope. The announcement hadn't been made yet. Maybe there was still some way out of it. I looked at the dean, the provost, his wife, the resident directors. Our Kendrick RDs, Floyd and Trinka, were still nowhere to be seen, which was odd. It was rumored they'd been evacuated earlier in the night.

There was a flurry of movement at the front of the room. The cops and administrators in charge began to speak. It was all facts now, nothing but the coldest, hardest facts. Wayne Lo had gotten a gun, an SKS-47. He had started at the guard shack, where he had shot our security guard Mary. She was alive, but badly wounded. Then he had shot our professor Nacunan Saez as he was driving off campus. Dead. Then he had shot Galen as he exited the library to investigate the disturbance and help out if he could. Dead. Then he had run up the path toward the
dorms, shooting three students along the way. His gun had jammed. He had gone to the student lounge and told a student he found there to call the cops. He had surrendered. He was in police custody.

“You are safe now.”

Only, this was our home, and now we would never feel safe again. They were closing Kendrick so they could begin their investigation. Those of us who lived in Kendrick would stay in other dorms. Finals were canceled. Campus was closed. We could leave in the morning if we wanted. We could stay if we chose.

We cried and hugged one another and held on, hysterical or in shock. We talked and talked, but there was nothing to say. It was already past midnight. We were wired. We were exhausted. I was still sixteen but felt a million years old. Finally, after three hellish hours, they dismissed us, and I walked with Claire and Matt to her room. I used Claire's phone to call my mom. I pictured the phone ringing above the counter in the kitchen, letting it ring and ring to give her time to wake up, get downstairs, and answer.

“Hello?” she said.

Hearing her voice, I started to cry hard again.

“Mom,” I said.

“What is it, Sarah? What's wrong? Are you okay?”

“There was a shooting, Mom. Wayne Lo got a gun, and Galen is dead. He killed Galen. And our teacher, Nacunan. His gun jammed, so he couldn't kill the rest of us. And the police have him now. But, Mom, he killed Galen.”

I heard hard plastic hit the wood of the counter, then silence.

“Mom? Mom?” I said, looking from Claire to Matt, panicked.

“Mom? Mom?” I said, desperate.

“I'm sorry,” she said, her voice slurred and weird. “I fainted.” She paused. “Galen, really?”

I had introduced Galen to Mom and Craig when they'd been at school for parents' weekend in the fall. He had the kind of sly sparkle people remembered.

“
Yeah, Galen,” I said, crying harder.

“But you're okay?”

How to even begin to answer that question.

“Yeah,” I said, the word more of an exhalation than anything else.

“What's going to happen now?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “They wouldn't let us go back to Kendrick. Matt and I are in Claire's room. They're closing campus. Finals are canceled. I don't know.”

“Okay, try to get some sleep. We'll talk in the morning. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I hung up. Claire and Matt and I looked at one another, the glassed-over, hollowed-out glaze of survivors, hanging on to the in-out of our breath, nothing more. Around dawn, my system thankfully shut down. I slept in Matt's arms, on the industrial carpet.

The next day, the phone began ringing. Mom and Craig had gotten in the car and started driving, their urge to bring me home stronger than any other thought. They were parked at the arts building across from campus, but the police weren't letting any of the parents through. I didn't want to leave my friends, the only people who understood exactly what I was feeling, but campus was a horrible, bloody place.

A small group of us walked down to the library, the sunshine impossibly bright and normal. Police tape covered the entrance to the library, bullet holes visible in the cement walls, broken glass in the snow. A shrine had already gone up featuring notes, photos, CDs, flowers, candles, and Galen's favorite things: cigarettes, Moxie soda, Taco Bell hot sauce, the tools he used in his beloved job doing lighting and tech for the school's theater, a plastic chicken in reference to his favorite non sequitur: chicken enchilada. As we watched, hunched together in a small, sad pack, a stretcher topped with a gray body bag was wheeled out of the library. A group of adults stood a respectful distance away, keeping a watchful eye on us, as if they didn't think
it was a good idea but realized everything had gotten so fucked up it wasn't really their place to say. It was terrible but necessary. Seeing Galen's covered body made it real.

I went back to Kendrick to pack. When I walked into my room, the red light on my answering machine was flashing. I listened to the messages, hopeful: Mom calling to tell me she and Craig were on the way. Friends from home who had seen the news report. If the story was already in Maine, it had to have reached Boston, which was in the same state as Simon's Rock, and only three hours away. And yet, my dad hadn't called.

I climbed into a van that drove us by the place where Nacunan had been shot, and the guard shack. It stopped at Alford Road. Across the street, a throng of parents braved the December weather, eager to catch sight of their children. Fighting them for space was a pack of news reporters and photographers, their TV cameras and telephoto lenses already pointed at us. The sight of the reporters reopened the gash. They didn't know Galen. They didn't care about Simon's Rock. They could never understand what had been lost.

I climbed out of the van and pushed past the microphones and cameras, head down, looking for Mom, wanting that hug. When she hugged me, I felt that intrinsic comfort of
Mom.
I was able to breathe finally, for what felt like the first time since the shooting. We were jostled in the pandemonium of the parking lot, where students and parents were crying, and journalists were mostly getting snubbed. Nobody seemed to know what was supposed to happen next.