Slowly We Rot (6 page)

Seven years ago…

In late August, the first week of
classes for the fall semester was just a few days away.  For Noah, this would
mark the beginning of his college career, a landmark event he’d looked forward
to throughout his high school years.  He would be on his own for the first
time, out from under the thumb of his loving but overly protective parents. 
The increased level of freedom would be nice.  For a long time, that had been
the thing he’d looked forward to the most, but that had changed during the
weekend he’d spent on campus back in July for freshman orientation.  In the
weeks since then, all he’d been able to think about was the girl.

          Her name was Lisa
Thomas.  She was a student at the university, but she was a sophomore rather
than part of the incoming freshman class.  Lisa was an ambitious, motivated
young woman.  In addition to a wide range of other extracurricular activities,
she was a campus volunteer, which meant she helped out in a number of ways at
various events.

          It was in her role as
volunteer that Noah first entered her orbit.  She was circulating among the new
students at an outdoor mixer when she noticed him reclining alone in a lounge
chair by the swimming pool.  Noah wasn’t a gloomy loner type, but he wasn’t what
you could call a social butterfly either.  Being in a loud and somewhat rowdy
social setting with absolutely no one he knew around was something he didn’t
know how to handle.  He preferred to just hang out in the middle of it all and
observe, thinking maybe he could get a feel for this mingling with strangers
thing by osmosis.

          But then Lisa sat down
next to him, sitting with her legs folded beneath her on the pool deck rather
than in another of the lounge chairs.  Without any preamble, she introduced
herself and started interrogating Noah about his life and his plans at the
university.  Noah was slow to respond, doing a bit of half-coherent mumbling as
he struggled to get his brain in gear.  Part of the problem was that he was
something of an introvert.  The bigger factor by far, though, was that Lisa was
one of the prettiest girls he’d ever seen.

          There had been a number
of nice-looking girls at his high school, but every one of them was a hag
compared to this incandescent angel with honey-blonde hair and sun-kissed
skin.  Like everyone else, she was in her swimsuit, in her case a blue bikini. 
She was wearing a white button-up shirt over the top piece, but it was hanging
open in front.  She was fit, but, as Noah’s dad would have said, had “curves in
all the right places”.

          Noah had been sure he
was coming off like a drooling moron and that the conversation would end
awkwardly, but after a few minutes he settled down and started uttering
coherent sentences.  He was a witty guy, a strength he’d used to his advantage
well in the past.  Thankfully, it didn’t fail him this time, either, and soon
he had her laughing almost non-stop.  She queried him about his interests and
asked him whether he had a girlfriend back home.  He told a half-fib in response
to the girlfriend question, saying that he and Carrie, the girl he’d dated
throughout senior year, had broken up after graduation.  In truth, the
situation with Carrie was still up in the air.  Breaking up seemed inevitable,
but they had yet to make it official.  Noah had seen no reason to tell Lisa
that.

          In his mind, he had
already marked Lisa as Carrie’s eventual replacement, this despite being aware
of her status as a volunteer at the event.  Like the other volunteers, she had
an ID dangling from a lanyard around her neck.  Engaging students who seemed a
little ill at ease in their new surroundings was part of her duties.  He knew
this, but he was also sure they had a connection that went beyond that.  The
other volunteers flitted from place to place, interacting with people briefly
before moving on to temporarily engage someone else.  But Lisa sat there and
chatted with him for almost a full hour.  She eventually got up and excused
herself with what seemed to Noah extreme reluctance.  Before she belatedly
resumed mingling, she wished him luck in the upcoming fall semester and told
him to look her up on Facebook.

          Noah took his leave of
the event shortly thereafter.  By then he was already thinking of Lisa as his
dream girl.  They had a lot in common, including a similar belief system and
overall worldview.  In addition, they enjoyed many of the same books and
movies, a lot of them pretty obscure.  So, in addition to being beautiful, she
was smart and had amazing taste.  Basically, she was perfect.

          Later on, when he
started looking back and trying to figure out just where things went wrong, he
became sure his fate had been sealed that very night.

          After returning to the
dorm room he’d been assigned for the weekend, he took out his laptop and looked
her up on Facebook.  Predictably, there were a lot of women named Lisa Thomas
with Facebook pages, but finding the profile he was looking for wasn’t
difficult.  She was the first Lisa Thomas listed in the search results, possibly
because they were enrolled at the same school.  He clicked on her profile and
was unsurprised to find she wasn’t from around these parts, hailing originally
from Ventura, California.  Her accent had been devoid of even the slightest
trace of southern twang.

          Noah, worried about
seeming too eager to connect with her again, tried to make himself wait until
the next day to send her a friend request.  He managed to hold off a full half
hour before clicking the add friend button.  Lisa approved the request almost
immediately, not even a full minute elapsing before he saw the approval alert
appear on his screen.  This surprised him.  He knew she must still be
circulating at the orientation event, which meant she’d taken a moment in the
midst of all that to look at Facebook on her phone, see that he’d sent the
request, and approve it without hesitation.  It was a little thing, the kind of
thing people did all the time, but it made him giddy enough that he almost went
back down to the event in hopes of running into her again.  But he made himself
stay in the room, not wanting to come off as a scary stalker guy right away.

          He stayed in touch with
her on an almost daily basis over the course of that painfully long month
between the end of orientation and check-in day at Richardson Towers, the dorm
where he’d be living that fall semester.  Though their relationship was a platonic
one during that early stage, Noah assumed she knew he was smitten with her. 
She didn’t do anything to overtly encourage romantic feelings on his part, but
she didn’t exactly discourage them, either.  She sent him a message the day he arrived
on campus, asking if he might want to “hang out” with her sometime soon.  It
was the only thing remotely resembling a stupid question she’d ever asked him.

          They got together at a
diner near the university the next afternoon, having hamburgers and chocolate
shakes at a booth with a scuffed and dented Formica table.  Their rapport was,
again, immediate and strong.  It was as if only moments had passed since that
night at orientation.  As before, Noah was able to keep her laughing throughout
the conversation.  At several points during the meal, he noted the frank,
searching way she was staring at him from the other side of the table.  When it
hit him that what he was seeing in her expression was intense sexual desire, he
temporarily reverted to a tongue-tied mode of conversation.

          After their lunch date,
Lisa took Noah to her off-campus apartment, where they had sex for the first
time.  Her roommate, an attractive blonde named Melanie, was there when they
arrived, but she departed after a whispered word from Lisa.  Noah guessed they
had an understanding when it came to things like this.  It was a small place. 
He supposed having the roommate present when sexual activity was on the agenda
could be awkward.

          That first fast and
frenzied coupling set the tone for much of what was to come.  The entirety of
their short-lived relationship was just as intense.  They became obsessed with
each other and spent as much time together as possible.  In those first weeks,
they carved out time for being together between class and work schedules.  The
slipping began before September was half over, the mutual obsession becoming
nearly all-consuming.  Classes were skipped for the first time, assignments
ignored.  At first it was just a class here and there, an occasional missed bit
of homework.  By the time October rolled around, they had ceased showing up for
any of their classes.

          They craved one another
in a way that wasn’t unlike drug addiction, an observation Lisa’s roommate made
toward the end of September.  It wasn’t long before Melanie, together with
several of Lisa’s other friends, started trying to intervene.  They sought to
protect her from what they saw as a highly negative influence.  Lisa had gone from
being a tireless, motivated student and worker to something resembling the
exact opposite of that in a very short span of time.  Conversely, Noah, having
spent the vast majority of his time since arriving at the university in Lisa’s
company, had almost no other friendly acquaintances and thus had no one to
stand up and defend him.  The obsession went both ways, but Lisa’s friends saw
him as the bad guy in the equation.

          In truth, Noah had also
become deeply concerned about the state of things by October.  His first
semester at college was slipping away from him.  He still had time to recover at
that point, but he’d be on the verge of failing all his classes if he didn’t
turn things around soon.  He tried broaching the subject with Lisa, suggesting
maybe they should start focusing on their coursework before it was too late. 
It should be no big deal, because they could still spend all their free time
together.  But Lisa was in even deeper than he was, it seemed, and refused to
listen.  They were having a once in a lifetime love affair, she told him, the
kind most people never get to have.  She thought it was important to live
passionately and embrace what they had together with no thought to the future,
which would take care of itself anyway.

          She was very adamant,
but Noah did persist just a bit more, repeating the things he’d already said, his
tone becoming increasingly desperate each time.  He might even have swayed her
eventually if not for the drinking.  Lisa had already learned she could easily
distract Noah with alcohol.  In October she began doing so on a much more
regular basis.

          Until that time, there
had been no hint of real darkness in their mutual obsession.  The way Noah saw
it, even then, the obsession was a thing that would ease up in time, and they
would soon resume something resembling normal life.

          But Noah was wrong
about that.

          The drinking got out of
hand starting early in October.  Noah would later recognize this as the
beginning of the end.  Lisa had a credit card her father had given her.  Until
then, she’d used it almost exclusively for living expenses.  Suddenly, though,
she was racking up huge liquor store purchases with it.  They drank heavily
throughout that month, getting hammered every day.  They attended no classes. 
Lisa’s friends again tried to intervene, but the borderline violent way she
lashed out at them for trying ensured it wouldn’t happen again.  By the middle
of October, there was a definite tinge of darkness to all of it.  The intensity
of the mutual obsession had not lessened, but there was now a grim, desperate
edge to it.

          The day before
Halloween, Noah returned to his dorm room for the first time in weeks to
retrieve some things he needed.  He was exhausted from weeks of light sleeping
and decided to lie down for a nap.  When he woke up, several hours had passed and
it was now nighttime.  He checked his phone and saw that Lisa had sent him
dozens of text messages, each seemingly more distraught than the previous one. 
None of them specified what the problem was.

          Noah called her number
and got no answer.  It was almost nine pm by the time he finally got over to
Lisa’s apartment.  He knocked on the door, but no one answered.  There were no
lights on inside.  He checked the parking lot and saw no sign of Lisa’s Chevy
Malibu.  He then went to a campus pub he’d frequented with her that semester,
hoping to find her there.  Again, he came up empty.  He asked around, but no
one knew anything.  He went back to her apartment and tried again.  The lights
were still out.  His knocks on the door again went unanswered.  He decided to
sit outside her door and wait for her.  While he waited, he checked his phone
again, reviewing her flurry of texts.  The last one had been sent six hours
ago.  Before the cutoff, she’d been sending them at a clip of roughly every
five minutes.  The more he stewed over it, the more the long silence worried
him.

          When one in the morning
rolled around with no sign of Lisa or her roommate, Noah returned to his dorm
for a night of fitful sleep.  He woke up at eight in the morning, got dressed,
and headed back to Lisa’s apartment.  There were still no new messages on his
phone.

          His heart was racing as
he ran up the stairs to her second floor apartment and banged on the door. 
This time the door opened almost right away.  A surge of delirious relief shot
through him as he heard the lock turn.  When the door opened, however, it was
Melanie standing there in the doorway.  The grim, wary look on her face killed
his relief on sight.