Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Students jostled her from behind, pushing her along down the steps. She fumbled in her backpack for her umbrella, forced it up above her head, and joined the streams of students surging through the uneven stone plaza. She looked at no one, spoke to no one. No one looked at her. She could have been a ghost.

In the two months she’d been at Baird, she’d made exactly zero friends. It wasn’t that she was a monster. With her fine pale features and thick dark hair, she had a darkling, changeling quality, intriguing, almost elemental.

No, she wasn’t hideous; it was just that she was invisible. She’d been in a fog of darkness for so long it seemed to have dissolved her corporeal being.

She walked on, blankly. Rain wept down the Gothic arches and neoclassic columns of the buildings around her, whispered through the canopies of oak. Someone else, someone normal, would have felt a moody pleasure in the agelessness of it. Any kind of adventure could be waiting over a stone bridge, under an ancient archway….

By all rights, she should have been wild with joy just to be there. With a— let’s face it —lunatic mother who in her best, properly medicated periods was barely able to hold on to temp work, Robin would never have been able to afford a school like Baird. Even with her grades, the AP classes she’d loaded up on, hoping against hope that the extra credits would get her a scholarship and out…

The scholarship hadn’t come, but the miracle had. Her father, known to her only as a signature on a monthly child-support check, had come through with a college fund: full tuition at his alma mater. A few strings pulled, a favor called in from a college pal on the board, and Robin was in, free, saved.

It had nothing to do with love, of course. Robin knew the money was guilty penance for abandoning his defective daughter to her defective mother. Who wouldn’t have fled long ago… only I couldn’t, Daddy, could I?

He had a new family now, perfect golden wife, two perfect golden children.

A voice in her head rose up, taunting her. He threw you away. Cast off. Cast out. You’re nothing. Nothing —

She gasped in, for a moment almost choking on her own volcanic anger. Then she pushed it back down into the dark.

When his letter came, her mother had raged and cried for days. Robin ignored the hysterics, coldly cashed the check, and packed her bags. Take his guilt money and get the hell out, fuck you very much.

But get out to where? The school was fine—she was the one who was all wrong. There was some fatal heaviness about her, a yawning black hole in the center of her that repelled people. They could see her darkness, her bitter, bitter envy of the light.

She’d escaped Mom but was still surrounded by herself.

Nothing but herself for the next four days.

And if she started hearing voices, alone in the dark, gloomy Hall?

Well.

There was always the full bottle of Valium in Waverly’s bottom drawer.

More than enough to end it.

The thought was cold comfort as she walked through the wind.

The exodus had already begun. Students with bulging luggage poured out the front door of Mendenhall and down the steps in a steady stream.

Robin came up the rain-drenched walk, blankly sidestepping residents climbing into cars and airport-shuttle vans idling in the circular drive that set Mendenhall apart from the other Victorians lining the west edge of campus.

Mendenhall Residence Hall, known to all as “the Hall” (sometimes “M-Hall,” sometimes even “home”), was a converted mansion, a sprawling hodgepodge of turrets, balconies, fire escapes, and gabled roofs, all under a spreading canopy of oaks. Once a fraternity house, until the campus had started admitting women in 1932, it looked like some mad designer had added a wing in every direction from every architectural style and period ever since. Under the dark skies, it was as gloomily gothic as anything Hawthorne or Poe had ever conjured from the fevered depths of their imaginations.

Robin moved up the steps, past students hoisting duffels and carry-on bags, hugging and shouting goodbyes. Their raucous put-downs and farewells seemed to come from a great distance, barely audible. It was so easy for Them, the Normals. Vacation, friends, love…they bubbled over with life and enthusiasm, fairly scorching her with their light.

She pushed down the black surge of envy and stepped through the triple-arched front door into a murky entry hall lined with rows of locked mailboxes. She hesitated by the boxes. Her hand slid automatically into her coat pocket for keys, even as a voice in her head mocked her.

Why bother? You know it’s empty. Spare yourself and go upstairs.

She pulled the keys out of her pocket, quickly jabbed the smallest into the keyhole of her box, and pulled open the door.

Empty.

See? Nothing. Nothing. You’re nothing —

Robin shoved the mailbox door closed to shut out the voice. She twisted the key, turned away blindly.

The entry opened into a decrepitly grand but effectively useless hall. Benches with high backs like church pews hugged the paneled walls. Across the hardwood floor, veneer long worn away, a sweeping staircase led up to three floors of big old rooms with diamond-cut bay windows and recessed window seats.

On this dark day, the two-story hall felt more cavernous than usual, ominous, even. Robin paused in the doorway, looking up. She’d never noticed how the high windows near the top of the balcony looked like watching eyes.

Just stop it , Robin ordered herself. You’re staying, and the last thing you need to do is to start freaking yourself out about this.

She crossed the bare floor to the staircase and made her way up, her legs still stiff with cold. The wide steps, of shiny old wood with carpet runners for safety, felt slightly spongy under her feet, beginning to give under the constant tramping traffic of sixty-some residents per year. Robin’s nostrils flared with the familiar smell of Mendenhall—an old smell, sickly sweet, a little musty: accumulated layers of dusty carpet and wet wood, vying with laundry detergent, pot, stale beer, sweat, lingering perfume. And sex, of course, always sex.

On the second floor, she turned to the right and walked the length of the landing into an enclosed staircase leading up to the third floor. In the dark, she pulled up short at a sudden movement right above her….

A guy with straggly hair and Lennon glasses brushed past her on his way out, duffel slung over his shoulder. He mumbled, “Sorry,” not looking at her.

Robin started up the last flight of stairs without bothering to respond.

Her own floor was the third on the girls’ wing. Not that anyone enforced the segregation; students went back and forth between all the wings at all hours of the night. And everyone but the Housing Office knew the Hall supervisor was living with his girlfriend in a flat three blocks away.

She stepped through the open door to the third floor and was assaulted by prevacation music blasting from various rooms in a mind-boggling cacophony: Green Day, the Sex Pistols, The Marriage of Figaro from some high-toned rebel.

Robin walked down the carpeted hall, the open doors on both sides of the corridor revealing girls throwing clothes and books into duffels and backpacks, rushing in and out of one another’s rooms with college-age disregard for personal space, shouting cheerful good-byes.

As she passed a doorway, the group inside burst into laughter. Robin stiffened. Were they laughing at her? The shapeless Goodwill coat with holes in its pockets, her worn shoes?

No, no one was looking. They didn’t see.