The smell hits her first. It’s rancid, stale, and strong, and, as Angela Hodgeman enters the sophomore’s single dorm room, she sees the mason jars. They are everywhere—stuffed under the Twin XL standard issue bed, packed onto the birch wood windowsill, spilling out of the walk-in closet. And, they are full of urine.
I reach into my bag, the wrapper crinkles, and, suddenly, I think I want to climb a mountain. Well, I take that back. I’m rather un-athletic, my legs are disproportional to my body, and recently I’ve developed an incessant rattling cough, so I know that that’s a poor idea.
I am much more comfortable sitting in my room writing about issues than I am screaming pithy rhymes in front of John Kerry’s house. And yet this past March 2nd, I found myself doing exactly that. I had finally been stirred to get off Microsoft Word and head to DC because so far as I know—and to his great loss—John Kerry doesn’t read the Nassau Weekly.
Have you ever blindfolded yourself and ran head-on towards oncoming traffic? Or laid down in an empty road at night with Ryan Gosling? If Benjamin Franklin never flew that kite, you would never have even seen that seminal, dangerously romantic film.
On a map, the penobscot Bay in Downeast Maine looks like shattered glass. Rivers and inlets crack through the rocky coast, carving out hundreds of islands and peninsulas. A favorite of fishermen and vacationers, the Penobscot is the halfway point on the coast between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia.
When I called Rachel, she answered the phone cheerfully. I should have listened more carefully to that tone, should have let it linger longer before I brought the sky crashing down over her. Last year, around this time, just as the weather was starting to turn and leaves began popping up on all the trees, our uncle died in his sleep; our grandparents were visiting for the week and found him the next morning.
I am in a jet somewhere over the Pacific, and a friend is offering me Grey Goose and cranberry juice. We are both seventeen, but no one is enforcing drinking laws—we are the only two passengers. This is a private plane, because the private island we’re heading towards doesn’t have a commercial airport. We sprawl across leather seats and continue to raid the bar and talk about college plans. We both want to go to Princeton.
For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.
Her page, arrested in those golden years before anybody cared how many likes your profile picture had, was the picture of adolescence: I smiled when I saw the wall posts about biology homework, the album titled “January!!” In 2008, she had attended Homecoming and a Quidditch Club Meeting.
When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.
They breed in drains. A tinful of groundnuts. Fist in the honey pot. Can’t. Cultured, in a bad way. And bloom into quintillion coils. Theft at midnight, errors in the yard.
Recently, the Daily Princetonian reported that a senior had been arrested for possession of marijuana and prescription drugs. In the article, the arrested student was named, meaning that his legal troubles are now fully Google-able.
