“Don’t be Drunk Girl – you’ll know Drunk Girl when you see her. I remember the girl who got really drunk the first weekend of school, and we called her Drunk Girl whenever we saw her for the next four years,” my dad said with his head half-turned as he tried to keep his eyes on the road, multitasking navigation and last-minute advice. My mom, who went to the same college as my dad, nodded in agreement from the passenger seat. Soon I wouldn’t be in their control anymore, and every piece of information that might help me maintain the person they had crafted was hurled around the car. The clutter of clothes, boxes, and a later-discarded, broken, full-length mirror all swayed from side to side in the trunk as we traveled north to unpack everything into my freshman year dorm room.
My dad continued, “Make sure to shower everyday, and wash your hands whenever you think about it. College breeds germs. And STDs.”
“Collin!” my mom interjected from the side.
“It’s true. I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to know these things,” he shrugged as he continued holding onto the steering wheel of our oversized car, holding the excessive amount of what everyone else claimed to be college necessities.
Later that day, when the unpacking had finished faster than any of us had expected, we looked to each other to say goodbye. My best friend Maggy had stepped into the room, and because she had been settled into her room since 9 that morning, she quickly told me about all the facilities and buildings and dining halls that we should check out. My parents and two younger sisters, the only ones out of my five siblings to venture on this road trip, turned to me to say goodbye. Surprisingly, I didn’t shed a tear. The wave of sentimentality never knocked me over like I had expected it to do. I was just excited to figure out what exactly this college thing was that everyone was doing.
Later that semester, I called my friend Nora to check in on her. In high school, I’ve always been loud and had a comment for everything – one friend called me “One Step” because I took jokes one step too far – and something about Nora’s quiet spirit made us inseparable. She could crack a joke under her breath, and being there to catch that small breath of air before it fell to the ground and disintegrated made every moment with Nora critical. Because no matter how hard you tried, and I tried countless times to retell and recreate these moments to our friends as Nora sat silently giggling by my side, it was never the same as living in that moment. I called regularly to hear how things were going with her, and hearing how happy she was made my days brighter. Even if I couldn’t be with Nora, I still liked to check and see how she was feeling, what her new friends were like, and how UVA was so different from our small, all-girls high school.
“Chloe,” she said one time in the middle of a call. Obviously we both knew it was still me on the other end of the phone, but the direct address warned me she was about to let me in on something serious, like we would do when it would be just the two of us in a car talking about something that might be consistently bothering her and distracting her. “I went to a vigil last night for Hannah Graham, and I just started crying,” she continued. “I don’t even know the girl. But it’s so sad, and everyone here is shaken up about it.”
Hannah Graham had recently had her face plastered and reshown online to the point that everyone who saw it merely recognized it as “that girl.” That girl who went missing at UVA. That girl with her last couple moments documented, as she runs away from a man power walking some distance behind her early in the morning/late at night. That girl who in this footage wore slimming black jeans, like Maggy and I had bought in August in order to prepare for the abstract destination of “college,” and an olive, sequined crop top that I would want to borrow. That girl whose remains were recently discovered near UVA, confirming that the worst-case scenario is the only-case scenario.
And her parents. Her poor, poor parents. For some reason, this was all I could think to myself after I hung up the phone. They have to live through the unimaginable torture of losing a child in a grotesque, brutal way that no one would ever want to have experienced for themselves, let alone have it senselessly inflicted on their daughter. They have to sit on the sidelines and watch as their daughter becomes nationalized. She will grow into an image, an example for college girls, and serve as a reality check to remind everyone that evil does not select a rare few but anyone. She became “Drunk Girl,” a tale that parents could tell their kids while delivering a certain fear factor without the cost of personal grieving. Those poor parents probably try to hold onto their personal image of Hannah despite all the press spreading photos that previously were only seen by visitors and friends passing through their living room. Perhaps she loved riding her bike or talking loudly on the phone or doing her homework alongside her dad as he did his own work. But now she is “that girl” and they are “those poor parents.”
I tried to nap after talking to Nora, but laid restlessly still in my bed. Please just let me sleep, I tried to tell my whirring train of thoughts. Maybe it was the exhaustion that comes with being a college student driving me to this whirlwind of sensitivity I had never experienced before. But honestly, people don’t warn you about how much you will miss high school and being surrounded by the people who know you once you step onto your college campus. Everyone simply says, “College – the best four years of your life, you will have so much fun.” But no one says, “Hey, it’s going to seem like everyone else is having more fun or like you’ll never make friends but you will.” Why does no one say that?
I was exhausted thinking about the four-year process it took for me to feel like I had found extensions of myself in my high-school friends, the people who deal with my quirky, weird mannerisms and my obnoxiously loud laugh. The thought of going through it all again made me feel hopeless, like looking at that point in the future through tunnel vision. It would happen eventually; it always does. I wasn’t at a point of despair. I just felt like I had lost my patience with walking in a sea of strangers at this huge university full of tens of thousands of kids. People you would meet here wouldn’t wave to you if met them the day before. They would actually go out of their way to avoid eye contact as their sign of recognition, which was the opposite of what my small high school did. My hand could be constantly waving the entire five minutes it took to move across campus to my next class.
Homesickness never seemed like an option for me, and you would’ve thought that the Hannah Graham situation would have made me want to count my blessings for my health, my education, and everything in my life so far. Instead, it simply made me realize that I was not in familiar territory, like the real world pried itself from under the ground in plain sight. Like a tornado throwing my house into a fantasy world, I slowly realized (in a figurative sense, since I’m from D.C.) that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Gray seemed to soak into everything, from the off-white, cloudless skies to the infamous cobblestones and all the notable, brick-townhouses in between. Katherine, one of my best friends from high school, hosted me for the night in her dorm and now walked with me through Georgetown University’s campus to where my mom had neatly parked outside the large, steely gate.
My cousin would be getting married that day, and my parents set up transportation for me to come home for the weekend. Since I had the Friday night of my return to DC open, I immediately dropped everything to visit Katherine at Georgetown, a twenty-minute drive from my house and next-door to my old high school.
As we walked early Saturday morning to my mom’s car, Katherine talked about some of her friends that I met that past night, discussing which ones she liked and which ones reminded her of our friends. We walked along the same uneven sidewalks that I would tread with my high-school-uniform Sperry’s whenever my friends wanted food after school. Katherine’s eager attitude about all the new friends and classes radiated from her speech as she continued thinking of things she had meant to tell me and other excerpts and adventures that reassured me she was happy in college. A slow pause filled the air while I waited for Katherine to think of the next thing: “Wait, did you know a girl died here recently?”
“No…How would I know that?”
“I don’t know! But it was bacterial meningitis. Like, not the kind that you get a shot for. That’s viral, so she wasn’t protected against this, and she died, and the whole campus is freaking out.”
“Aw, that’s so sad.” And I did feel sad, but at some age I had cemented some wall that prevented me from feeling too sympathetic with everything, or I would never leave my room.
“Yeah. She was in my nursing school – you know how my nursing school is really small? I never met her, but I think she was in a couple of my bigger classes. One of my guy friends was freaking out because it’s super contagious and he made out with her, so he didn’t know whether to go to the student health services or not. But I think he did and he’s fine.” Her speech had picked up its pace as her eyes widened and her hand gestures became more animated.
“Oh,” I responded. This feeling of pity became real as the situation settled in. I could imagine Katherine with her dark curly hair, asking this girl for a pencil in the middle of a lecture, interrupting the entire class with her raspy yells of a “whisper” that would carry over multiple rows in her lecture hall. Or I could see one of my friends making out with some random kid at a party, then going back to her room and feeling a little sick. While I could be there taking care of her, I wouldn’t know that these were some of the last moments I would have with this girl who I had barely gotten to know, or that I was unknowingly putting myself in danger as I held her hair and rubbed her back.
I got in the car with my mom and shook off the images of the flyers from the inside of bathroom stalls calling optimistically to prevent the contagion of meningitis. I created images of this girl for myself and became more obsessed with this wild idea. The people who loved her the most – her parents, her siblings, her best friends from high school – didn’t know that when they waved her off to college, they really waved to the last time they would know her as healthy and independent. Some of the best friends probably didn’t even get a chance to meet her at the hospital. Instead, this girl, Andrea Jaime, could’ve been surrounded by people she didn’t know that well, makeshift friends that were supposed to hold the place of her true friends she would find in the years to come, when she had more time. Granted, I found out later that she was a sophomore, but imagining her as a lost freshman, as I first assumed she was, cut through my self-revolving mindset.
The day after the wedding, I started the return to college on a huge bus that made a three-hour trip a full six hours. The haunting smell of sweaty strangers, someone’s morning breath, and whatever torturous, poisonous sanitizer scent crept from the back of the bus and pressed on my face the entire ride down to DC, and now I would have to return to the poorly circulated scent chamber. The memories of the odor made me dread the trip as I stood in line carrying bags and waiting to board.
While I mentally fidgeted with the idea of six hours of nasal torture, my dad ran around Union Station grabbing things I would need for the trip, such as a sandwich, $3 headphones, a huge bottle of water, and a travel-size Purell. My dad smiled as he hugged me goodbye, remembering my move-in day six weeks earlier. “I hope you’re still washing your hands as often as I told you to,” he said as he gave me one last hug before I left.
The bus ride heightened my emotions. It seemed to throw me onto a roller coaster of nostalgia for home-cooked dinners, for movie nights with my family of eight bickering about being too close together on one couch, and for doing homework at the kitchen table late into the night alongside my dad, who types his patient’s charts past midnight every night. I missed John, one of my younger brothers. I had barely had the time to see him at all on this trip with the adventure to Georgetown and then the wedding the next day. He seemed to have his normal sense of humor, arguing with the kids and sometimes provoking our two younger brothers, but most of the time I was home, he stayed in his room. I missed spending time with him and my other siblings. Time usually seems drawn-out like a marathon race at my age but on weekends home, it moves faster than a 40-meter dash. I wanted to be back in my bubble, away from the diseases and plagues and terrible people that had no regard for the other people around them.
Maybe it was easier to be blind to reality back in high school, an age of ignorance. Beneath the McDonald’s trips, school traditions, sleepovers, and random adventures as amateur hikers and ice skaters, my friends and I could ignore current events and the wild reality of the outside world even in the heart of our nation’s capital. I could spend time with my siblings watching movies or frying eggs, and that could even escalate into the most important thing that happened that day, especially if someone ate someone else’s omelet without asking. To be fair, food thievery was a more common occurrence than expected in my house. It’s easy to disappear into a realm where my self-obsession reigned and included only the people I deem important, exiling the dismal and dreary topics of life. I was learning quickly this was not how the real world worked.
But as soon as I stepped back into my dorm to see my roommate, I felt happy to be back in my second home. And I had even called it home when I talked to my friends the next day, saying “yeah, the weekend back was nice, but it’s also nice to be home.” I’m not even sure if at this point I was conscious of having two different homes yet.
Really peculiar how the mind works sometimes. Too many ups and downs to count.
One day, when I was trying to nap, all of these memories came back to me at once, connected by some unperceivable thread. Then, I thought about something that happened a week before moving into college, before any of these other things had happened. I was lying down on my bed when the memory rushed to me like I was watching a film in my mind.
Right before I left for college, I drove with John to Barnes and Noble so we both could have something to do together before I actually made the big move. I vividly remember being stopped at a red light. The red seemed so bright, so ephemeral, so fleeting. My brother, after a pure, contemplative silence, quickly spurted out, “I think I might be depressed.”
I stopped. My jaw dropped, and my hands clutched harder to the worn steering wheel until I felt that removing my hands would also remove that fake leather layer from the wheel as it stuck to my hands with sweat. I took a second to slowly hinge my jaw back to where it was supposed to be. “For how long?”
“Maybe the past two years. A while.” He looked at me almost apologetically, but I couldn’t think of a reason for him to be sorry.
My heart stopped, but the tears didn’t until they completely swallowed my pupils. Another pause. Do not let them slide down your cheeks, I thought. Do not let him see you cry. I know there is always some kind of school assembly that tries to instruct about what to do in these situations, but here’s a fair warning: your mouth will feel like sandpaper, and your eyes will feel like they’re swimming in a hazy ocean as you try to think about what you could’ve done to prevent the pain your poor brother has had to deal with for approximately 24 months, and you have to push through the feeling of failure as an older sister, because it’s not about you. Then you will involuntarily think back to when you were both little and untainted by the world and would pull each other up the slide by your chubby little hands, even though your nanny warned you in broken English that you could get “hur-ut.” And finally you will have to throw yourself into the reality of the situation, back into an extremely used Honda Civic with a broken windshield and throw back your tears and say something.
His light blue eyes stared forward at the still red light, the red light that seemed to go on as long as we needed this moment, like a stranger walking into a room and seeing a heated dispute before walking out, saying, “I’m sorry, I’ll give you two more time.” The bottom of his eyes now had a thin layer of tears sitting on top of his thin, brown eyelashes.
Our glances kept missing each other, as I would look forward thinking about what to say. Then I would look over at him, and he would be looking through the windshield to avoid seeing whatever I was thinking.
“Promise me you’ll keep in touch with me when I go. Please just promise me that.”
His pale, pale blue eyes met my muddy hazel ones as he said, “Okay.”
And the light turned green.
Out of solidarity, I wanted to stand by him and say, “I’m definitely not 100% there either, kid, you’re ok.” My competitive nature has driven me to stress attacks, as I pushed myself to the highest honors classes, the most elected positions, the most obligations to friends and families and teams and clubs, until I seemed to no longer work for myself. I don’t hate this. I actually love always being active and finding something worthy enough to throw myself into fully. However, being involved and dedicated to things easily puts my heart on my sleeve, where other girls who do better, speak more eloquently, look prettier, stand taller, and especially win more erase any pride I have in what I’ve accomplished and throw me back to square one in approximately seventh grade, my bob haircut period. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. It’s chronic.
I had been so blind to truth that I had lived in my small, contained world without thinking that the people closest to me could be facing major obstacles, even myself.
The salty residue of tears dried onto my cheeks as I stared up at the ceiling in my dorm room. I would have to go to class soon and continue on with my day. My friend Megan had texted me, carrying on the constant, light-hearted, entertaining conversations we had been having. We had bonded over ordering massive pokie sticks and handing out the greasy, cheesy pizza bread to other girls in our sorority like St. Nick in December. We both missed our high schools and friends in a community that will say “hi” instead of acting like a greeting is a punishment. Although she already had a bright personality, and all who met her were drawn to her, to me she was starting to look more and more like the light at the end of the tunnel.
It would be so easy if we could control everything. Even writing this piece now, I think I know the ending I want. But life follows a path that the rest of us don’t see or understand, and there’s no changing that. The truth is, the ending is always unclear until it’s right in front of your nose, but instead of running away to hide in my dorm room, I would rather face it. One time in a particularly bizarre conversation with my friends, I told them that if the apocalypse was to come, and something freaky like zombies popped out of the ground, I would be the first to go like a nameless extra in a movie. But if you think about it, I think people today could try to run away and escape from their lives in a world sans apocalyptic conditions. I don’t want to be one of those people. I never was someone that could be knocked out with a challenge or meltdown, so I’m going to keep fighting. I’ve decided there’s a lot worth fighting for, and I want to see how things end.
This piece was originally published in Kalliope 2015.
For more information on the author, Chloe Cullen, check out our feature on her here.