Snow fell in a blanketing white out of freezing ashes from the black abyss that wrapped itself around the world that night. Black and white were the only options down to the details, leaving no room for nuance or complexity. Only blunt questions that came with answers too bleak, detached and chilling to think about asking another. The blue lights marking emergency phones, the green of a traffic light in the distance, the red brake lights of cars, the paranoid yellow of the lights lining the walkway. Black and white. Everything only black and white. And nothing else.
The campus of Stapleton University was deserted. It was a weeknight. Getting late. Midterms were going on. The main quad, referred to by students as the Front Lawn, seemed to sprawl outward from the main library, especially that night, forever. The iconic library building, on the cover of all Stapleton brochures, quickly faded into nothing in the immediate past. And walkways of the vast Front Lawn offered no attainable future.
Valerie Bristol was walking home that evening in a black and white present with no resolution.
Though she tried, her hands couldn’t be forced any further down into the pockets of her long wool coat. Passing a row of empty wooden benches, she brought her head back down after a quick glance up to confirm her direction. Gusts of wind whipped across her face and she winced as snowflakes melted around her eyes. There were no sounds aside from wind blowing through trees and snow crunching under foot. Windows of surrounding dorms and lecture halls produced faint, barely noticeable glows. (Glassy open wounds left untreated in the otherwise impenetrable austerity of looming brick façades adds a withdrawn quality to an already disapproving, intimidating atmosphere, suffocating students, teachers and visitors alike in a particularly insidious culture of higher learning that implies permanent injury and a life of holding bitter grudges. It is the physical manifestation of centuries old, unresolved genius and the campus thus feels like a trap that is to be escaped and survived and any honest edification or self-improvement is purely coincidental bordering on accidental and the ability to ignore these threatening feelings comes at the price of any ambitions you might have, yielding an entirely different, yet objectively more troubling, set of problems.)
She continued her numb, beaten down trudge through the Front Lawn, across the street past the various shops and eateries that lined the main drag on Atlantic Avenue, down several blocks of poorly lit back streets comprising fairly shoddy housing mostly for hip undergrads, then the snobbish Greek section of well landscaped monuments to old money legacies and secret societies, then a reprise of even shoddier housing for starving but still hip (even hipper?) undergrads and Stapleton holdovers not ready or able to leave the place, and finally, quite suddenly, in fact, to a freshly gentrified, well lit mirage of new apartment buildings just beyond the last gasps of the unrefined, woeful dirge of students too academic or juvenile for their own good.
Upon entering her building, Valerie stopped in the doorway, waiting for the feeling to return to her face. Without exchanging a word, a man behind the front desk handed her a stack of mail as she passed. Valerie flipped through it on the elevator ride up to the fifth floor. She walked very slowly down the hall and around a corner, fumbling to find her keys when she reached her apartment door. She walked in.
Her apartment felt warm and she instantly felt much better. Valerie dropped her bag and her coat on the couch in the living room and went to the kitchen for a quick sip of water from a bottle she left in the fridge. It was dark, but the excess of light struggling to make it down the hall from the master bedroom was enough to see that the apartment had at last received a long overdue round of cleaning. And the job appeared thorough. It came as a refreshing surprise to Valerie who breathed in a lovely scent of lemon and inspected the unfamiliar new vase which held a collection of fresh tulips on the coffee table.
Walking into the bedroom, she pulled off a cashmere sweater and tossed it on a chair. The only light source in the room was a lamp stationed on the dresser in the corner. The daily mail in this home typically occupied a spot on the kitchen counter, but as Valerie had forgotten to drop it there on her way in, probably distracted by how clean everything was, she flipped through it one more time very quickly, return addresses not registering, took a deep breath, moved all the envelopes to one hand and raised it slightly to drop the stack of meaningless post at a height sufficient to make a satisfying thud on the desk below, the long awaited period on what had been an especially trying and exhausting run-on sentence of a day.
But just then.
A voice from behind her.
“I’ve been cheating on you.”
Valerie froze in position for several moments, then finally let the mail drop down to the desk.
She exhaled and rubbed her eyes.
Turning around, she continued to avoid eye contact with the girl sitting on the bed. Valerie gently stepped out of her shoes and walked to the dresser to take out her earrings while looking in the mirror. She cleared her throat and asked, “So, um…what time did you want to be at the gallery tonight? How soon do you think we should leave? Weather is pretty awful out there tonight so traffic shouldn’t be too bad, but I’m sure finding a close place to park is going to be murder because it always is every time we go there so I think we should take a cab. What do you think?” A long silence. “Have you been outside today? It’s nuts. Hasn’t stopped snowing for a second. But still, though,” she retrieved a dress in a plastic dry cleaner bag from the nearby open closet, “I think I’m going to wear this. What do you think?” Another long silence. “I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since lunch. I went to that new café in west campus next to the rec center and they made me the worst Cobb salad in history. I only had like three bites. So do you want to stop somewhere on the way or did you already…”
The girl behind her jumped off the bed and stomped toward her. Grabbing Valerie by the neck from behind, she pulled her head back and snarled into her ear, “Did you hear what the fuck I just said to you?”
Valerie pried the hand off her neck. “Let go of me, Rachael.” Breathing deeply and massaging her neck, Valerie turned to her girlfriend with a glare and asked, as calmly as she could, “Did you go to work today, sweetie? You didn’t answer my texts.”
Rachael stood up straighter and put a meaner look on her face.
Valerie stepped closer and whispered, “I’m glad you’re talking to me again,” trying to reach out and touch her.
Rachael slapped her hand away. She growled, “How long do you think you can keep this up?”
“What do you mean?”
“DON’T,” Rachael shouted, catching herself in the process of making a move for Valerie’s neck again. The burst of rage was so sudden and intense that it actually surprised them both and Rachael had to laugh briefly into her hastily retracted claw of a hand. After taking time to try getting back down to a good level, Rachael continued with an evened tone, “Don’t…talk to me in that fucking baby voice. You’re 26. I’m 25. Can I please talk to my adult girlfriend right now? Please?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“My adult…girlfriend…,” Rachael’s breathing was getting heavier as she stared into Valerie’s eyes, “The scholar…the grad student…my perfect…beautiful…brilliant…,” she ran out of descriptors to mumble to herself while she again had to pull her hands back in, stopping a tentative series of slight gestures that seemed to be about wanting to adjust something about the way Valerie looked. More deep breaths. She still was not at that good level. The frantic look in her eyes was the dawning realization that she would not be getting there this evening. Keeping herself at a somewhat manageable level for the duration of this talk was now all she could hope for. And hope was all she could do. This sort of thing was always out of her hands.
“Rachael, what’s the matter? Just talk to me. I’ve been worrying about you for days. I want to know what’s on your mind.”
Dropping her arms to her sides, Rachael replied, “I just told you what was on my mind, didn’t I?”
Valerie looked away, the deeply forlorn expression landing hard on her face and her shoulders. “Yeah.” She couldn’t find the right place to fix her gaze around the room, so she simply pushed out words to dismiss the metastasizing dread. The only words she had at the moment. “Why? Why are you telling me this now? Why do we have to have this discussion tonight?”
“Because,” Rachael said through gritted teeth.
An even heavier burden of hopelessness sank down on Valerie, dropping her head to look straight down. She closed her eyes and waited, each passing second of silence more dangerous than the last as fear exponentially tightened its grip on her heart. “Is it because we’re going to see her tonight?”
“God.” Rachael shook her head. “You’re pathetic.” She put her hands on her hips. “You make me sick. Honestly. Sometimes, Valerie, I’m not sure I don’t hate you. I thought pushing you away and ignoring you for almost a week now would send the message. But look at you. You either still aren’t getting it or you don’t care. Jesus, I really can’t stand the fucking sight of you anymore.” Rachael bites down hard on her lower lip, waiting for some kind of response. Waiting as long as she could before her very limited complement of patience had been spent. She screamed at full volume, “LOOK AT ME!”
Valerie remained perfectly still.
Rachael hissed her demand again, then hit Valerie hard under the chin to force her head up. Shocked, Valerie held her line of vision where it had ended up somewhere on the ceiling just beyond the leggy blonde standing two feet away from her. She then reluctantly lowered her head to achieve eye contact. Too afraid to make any other move or say anything, Valerie truly studied her partner.
No one else alive had an angry stare as menacing, as penetrating, as overwhelmingly hateful as Rachael Margaret Mercer. In moments like these, that girl was looking at you from another world. She went to a dark, dark place that was authentically frightening to even try to think about. That evening, Rachael was wearing for the first time a red cocktail dress that was given to her as a birthday present and made specifically for her by a very famous fashion designer who is one of the biggest names in the business. The dress, if it were for sale on that night, would be outrageously expensive. It had the very real potential, however, to someday be considered priceless. Rachael was planning on going out on a muddy, slushy, snowy evening in an irreplaceable Kennedy Carteret original. As a middle aged industry titan, Carteret was notoriously reclusive and almost never made clothes with her own hands and that dress could quite possibly have been the last one she did in her life. Valerie was not particularly interested in fashion and only knew what Rachael had taught her about the subject, but she knew enough to understand that this creature of pure malicious loathing and poor impulse control was wearing a bona fide work of art and a relic of pop culture history that rightfully belonged in a display case never to be removed. Just because she could.
“Talk to me, Valerie. Please. And don’t just say shit. I’ve got no use for that. I want you to really tell me something. Okay? That’s what I need from you, honey. I know you can do it. I need you to seriously fucking give me something right now or I’m going to lose it.”
Valerie swallowed hard and took a step back, still holding a very worried expression that she couldn’t shake. “Rachael, there is nothing I can say that will stop you from freaking out and you…”
“Yes, there is! Valerie, yes, there is. I am not going to…”
“…and you know it! You know it, Rachael. These goddamn fights always happen the same way. And you never…”
“No! No, no, no. Valerie, shut up. This is not a fucking fight. I’m just trying to talk to you.”
“You never listen to me. It doesn’t matter what I say. You just want to talk at me. So go ahead. Get it all out.”
“Valerie, goddammit,” Rachael balled her fists at her sides, “You are so full of shit and you don’t know what it does to me when you act like this.”
“I’m not acting like anything.”
“You FUCKING…,” Rachael stepped closer to Valerie and loomed over her in a very imposing manner.
Valerie, in her strongest tone of the evening at that point, asked, “What are you gonna do? Hit me?”
Rachael’s eyes widened as she slowly inhaled a deep breath, caught off guard, but trying not to gasp. She unclenched her fists and smoothed the sides of her dress. In a newly uncovered meek, somewhat nervous voice, Rachael said, “I’m just trying to talk to you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“YES, I AM,” Rachael yelled.
“I can’t do what you want me to do right now. Okay? You want to have a scene and I can’t give you a goddamned scene. You want me to act like I had no fucking idea about you and Annivette, but you barely even did it behind my back! You gave me hints every chance you got! You made it as obvious as you could, Rachael. You gave me time to get used to it. You let me get used to sleeping alone a couple times a week and not needing to ask why. You let me get used to feeling like an idiot in public with everybody whispering about how clueless and naïve I must be. You let me get used to the idea that you were about to fucking LEAVE ME. I have nowhere to go and no one else in this goddamned town to help me with something like this. And for a month and a half, you’ve made me constantly feel like we’ll be finished at any moment and I’ll be on my fucking own and there’s NOTHING I would be able to do about it.” There’s a long pause during which they glare at each other without blinking. “A month. And a HALF, Rachael. You deliberately let me get used to knowing you were cheating on me. And now, what, you want me to FUCKING ACT SURPRISED?”
Rachael shook her head and furrowed her brow. “Why…Valerie, why…why would you want to just get used to something like that?”
“I was trying not to think about it. I don’t know. I was hoping it would just…go away. That it would just stop.”
For about a full minute, Rachael stood and stared, mouth slightly agape at Valerie. Finally, she muttered, “I don’t believe it. I don’t…I don’t know what kind of person you are.” Genuine disgust dripped from her words.
“I’m in love with you. That’s what kind of person I am. Don’t you love me?”
Rachael snickered and shook her head. “Come on. We need to leave soon,” she said, walking past Valerie toward the closet.
“What? Rachael…”
“That’s all for tonight, Valerie. That’s all I can take.” She turned on a light in the closet.
“But I thought you wanted to talk. I’m trying my best to…”
“I said that’s enough, Valerie.”
“Why?”
“Because, Valerie, you’ve got NOTHING TO SAY and I have FUCKING had it with you.” Rachael threw down the dress she was holding and stormed toward Valerie again, getting in her face. As Rachael screamed, Valerie recoiled away, forced to slowly walk backward. “How many times are we going to have this same fucking discussion before you finally understand what it’s about? Huh? I’m fucking SICK of it and I know you’re sick of it, too. It’s no fun and when you’re like this, YOU’RE no fun.” Valerie nearly stumbles when she backs into the desk chair. Rachael continues, emphasizing points with aggressive hand motions. “And that’s why we’re doing this, right? That’s why we’re together. This is supposed to be fun. We…Valerie, you and I…are supposed to be having fun.” She wheezes out a crazed, angry laugh through gritted teeth. “So let’s have fun tonight. Okay? We’re doing something YOU want to do for a change. So get ready and try to see if you can fucking smile tonight. When you’re in public, sweetheart, you forget that people see you. And when you look miserable and frumpy it reflects poorly on me. I’ve explained this to you several times before. It’s inconsiderate and selfish. Do you understand?” Valerie has her back against a wall, her head turned away slightly in fear. Rachael leans in and gently nibbles on Valerie’s earlobe, then whispers, “Think about what I said tonight. Okay?” Valerie doesn’t respond and after quickly losing patience for waiting, Rachael punches the wall, just missing Valerie’s head. Pulling Valerie’s hair and forcing the eye contact she hadn’t been getting, Rachael growled, “Don’t slouch, stop mumbling, and fucking LOOK at me when I’m talking to you. A little dignity, Valerie. A little self-respect. I’m trying to help you.” Rachael slammed Valerie’s head against the wall and walked away.
For the next several minutes, Valerie watched Rachael get ready to go out from a crumpled position on the floor in the corner of their room.
Jeremy Hurd 