Chapter 2 #3
There was a beat. And then the girl ended the call, and handed the phone back to Lucy with a rueful little shrug. “She hung up.”
Lucy attempted to arrange her face into an expression other than gaping. She’d never had a rescue unfold quite that spontaneously before. Though when she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been rescued like this at all. “Thank you,” she said.
The girl grinned. “Kinda seemed like you were struggling.”
She knew that sympathetic look. She got a lot of them when it came to Jillian—from teachers and classmates, from customers at the hardware store, even from strangers.
It made her want to stick up for her mother, or at the very least, contextualize things a bit.
But She lost her father was enough of a damper on polite conversation.
She lost her father, and her mother a few years before that, and my father when I was a kid was a cold bucket of water.
So she kept things light. “Do you make a habit of saving people from awkward phone calls?”
“Well, I saw you looking distressed. And then heard you say ‘Mom,’” the girl said. “And not to brag, but I’m an expert at managing helicopter parents. They can’t resist my No-Nonsense RA charms.”
Lucy laughed for real that time. The girl was the building’s residence assistant—that made sense. Her air of confidence didn’t seem easily shakable. At least, not by anxious mothers.
“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” the RA said. “Big campus, I know, but still. Are you a junior or a senior? I’m a junior, but don’t tell the other residents. Some of the seniors think I’m a grad student, I want to see how long I can keep that going.”
Lucy kept smiling, but abruptly realized she was a bit too queasy to launch into even the abridged version of her life story. “I’m neither, actually.”
“Oh, are you our first-year resident? I was going to stop by and introduce myself this afternoon. Good timing, I guess.” The RA leaned a little closer to look her over.
Lucy couldn’t help but feel a bit—sized up.
“Well, I’m guessing you weren’t lying to your mom about going to the health center.
You look, well, very nice—love the dress—but a little gray in the face, there. ”
Lucy wasn’t going to be gray for very long if the RA kept leaning in like that. Not a single thing within her at that moment felt particularly up to flirting. But she was ill, not dead.
“So what’s going on?” the RA continued. “Your orientation group hasn’t been trying to scare you off, have they? I promise you do not need a fourth major. You don’t even need two.”
Lucy laughed, though she was aware how flat it sounded. She’d intended to make her excuses and continue on her slow, queasy way. But under the RA’s searching look, something in her crumbled.
“It’s not stress, I don’t think,” she said. “I don’t even know what I want my first major to be. I’m not one of those…genius multitasking poet laureate types they usually let in here.”
It was far more honest an answer than she meant for it to be.
But the RA, for her part, looked unruffled.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not a genius multitasking poet laureate, either.
Plenty of us aren’t. I love and cherish every single turbo child prodigy at this school, but we don’t all have to be them, you know?
Figuring out what you want is what you’re here for. ”
That would have felt nice to hear yesterday. It still felt nice. Even if it wasn’t Lucy’s primary concern right then. “Do you think…” She stopped herself, at first. But the RA’s steady, patient face didn’t waver. It made Lucy want to keep talking.
“Do you think the health center could help?” she said. “If I…don’t know. Took something?”
It felt like a bombshell, but the RA still didn’t look rattled. “Depends, I think,” she said. “What did you take?”
“Hah. That’s the question.” Lucy rubbed at her temples, suddenly unable to meet that unruffled gaze anymore. “I know I should call campus police. I should, but…”
But explaining herself to them would have been only slightly less intolerable than explaining herself to Jillian.
But her skin might crawl right off her body if she had more than one pair of eyes on her right now.
But they’d probably be politely useless at best and actively hostile at worst.
All of the above.
Thankfully, the RA didn’t seem to need her to finish that sentence.
She sat down on the couch beside her then.
“If you don’t want campus police called, I’m not going to be the one calling them.
Generally, I think the thing you ‘should’ do in any given situation is the thing you feel ready to do.
” She took a breath. Lucy could sense the caveat coming.
“But before you say anything else, you should know that if someone hurt you, and you tell me about it, I’m obligated to report it to the university. ”
“Oh,” Lucy said quickly, automatically. “It’s not that serious, I…”
The RA’s eyebrows rose, just a little, and Lucy wondered if she could hear the uncertainty in her words.
Lucy herself had no idea how serious it was, after all.
As Natalie had said, there hadn’t been a lot of time for someone to—hurt her.
At least, “hurt her” in most of the ways she could conceive of.
But that didn’t mean that nothing had happened. If nothing had happened, she wouldn’t feel like this, would she?
“Hey,” the RA said. “If something happened that you didn’t want to happen, even if you feel like it was just a little thing, it’s serious.
That doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it if you don’t want to—not with the police, not with anyone.
But the ‘serious’ part isn’t in question. Not to me, anyway. Okay?”
Lucy wasn’t sure why she laughed again. None of this was funny. Maybe it was the no-nonsense tone, jarring but not unpleasant after the distant, dreamy haze of the night before. Maybe this was how divers felt, surfacing too quickly. “If I did tell you,” she asked, “what would happen?”
The RA shrugged. From her, it seemed like a thoughtful gesture.
“I’d put you in touch with someone from the Title IX office.
Which I realize sounds like bureaucratic bullshit, but I know a few of the staff, and they’re good people.
They wouldn’t make you do anything you don’t want.
If you want to talk to campus counseling, they’d help you get an appointment.
If you change your mind about the cops, they’d help you make a statement.
Or if you tell them you want to do none of those things, they’d respect that, too.
Whatever you want, they’d follow your lead.
“But I know even that’s too much sometimes,” the RA said. “So before you say anything, I wanted to warn you. Give you a chance to decide what you do want to do right now. And if you need to think about that for a second, you’re not keeping me waiting. It’s a comfortable couch.”
Lucy swallowed, and sat back. She could see why anxious parents folded in the face of the RA’s calm competence.
She had to be a few years younger than Lucy, if she was a junior.
But for all the Big Decisions Lucy had had to make over the last several years, she wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken with the kind of confidence and certainty she could hear in the RA’s voice.
This was someone who didn’t seem to spend much time flinching.
Lucy might have been envious if she weren’t a little enthralled.
So Lucy tried to allow some of that certainty to rub off on her.
“I don’t know that somebody hurt me, exactly,” she said.
She was fairly sure they had—the bruise on her neck was proof enough.
But she didn’t want to report that to anyone, not yet.
Not until she knew more. “I think I took something without knowing it. But I don’t know what it was. ”
The RA inclined her head and took that in. “Health center, then. Did your orientation group show you where that was?” Lucy nodded, and the RA nodded back. “Great. The campus shuttle is easiest. Do you feel up to walking? Can you make it there?”
Ah, Lucy realized. Those really were two very different questions.
She almost lied. But in the face of the RA’s straightforwardness, she found she wanted to respond in kind.
“I can walk,” she said. “But I think I’m having some kind of…
migraine, or reaction to whatever I took.
It’s like everything feels…too bright, right now. ”
For a moment, Lucy thought she saw a ripple across the placid surface of the RA’s face. But she only nodded again, slower this time. Her lower lip slid thoughtfully between her teeth. And then, standing, she took off her bottle-green cardigan.
In her sweater, everything about the RA had looked soft, from the curled ends of her hair to the flush of the warm mid-morning against her cheeks.
But Cute RA wasn’t just cute—she was ripped.
Sitting there in her tank top and jeans, all the hard edges of her were on display: the curves of her biceps and her broad, lightly freckled shoulders, the strong and confident lines of her forearms. She held herself like an athlete at rest. Not tense, but ready.
“Well,” Lucy mumbled. “You haven’t been skipping arm day.”
The RA arched both eyebrows. “Sorry?”
Lucy’s mouth snapped shut. It was good to know that even now, of all times, she was still capable of being entirely too forward with a beautiful girl. “No, um—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to be, like…a line.” Though she couldn’t deny that any other time, it would have been.
“Hey, you’re not wrong. I have been known to skip leg day, though.” The RA gently draped her cardigan over Lucy’s head. Her fingertip brushed Lucy’s shoulder as she pulled it back. “Okay. This is a bit of a DIY solution, but—does that give you a bit more shade?”