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I see the look on her face, and it occurs to me that I’m not…doing this right. I dig a little deeper, past that uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach and that empty space in my chest cavity where my heart was before it got in the elevator and left, and try to find some remnant of the girl I was before all of this happened—the prom queen, the cheerleader, the party girl. She knows how to navigate this.
I flash her a smile. “What about you? You’re local?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Well—semi-local. I’m from Monterey. Hey, are you planning on rushing?”
It takes me a minute to process what she means. “Yes,” I reply. “Absolutely.” That’s something old Mel would have wanted.
“I got invited to a party at the Delta house tonight. Do you want to go?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “That sounds amazing.”
“Ahhhh, I’m so glad!” Ashley says. She throws herself down onto the bed, then leans over and feels around for something between the bedframe and the wall. She smiles when she finds it, pulling out the bottle of vodka. “My worst nightmare was that I’d end up with a roommate who didn’t like to party. You can unpack tomorrow when we’re hungover. Let’s pregame.”
“A girl after my own heart,” I tell her.
She opens the mini-fridge beneath the window and pulls out a two-liter of soda. “Mix it or chase it?” she asks.
“Chase.”
“We’re going to get along just fine,” she says.
It didn’t take me long to fall into a rhythm; it wasn’t hard for me to bend my broken pieces until they fit into this place with these people—until they made something new, something objectively better.
It was easy for this new person to exist in this new place. No one here knew about the girl who grew up barefoot and wild in the mountains in Oregon; they didn’t know about the terrible thing or how I got here. And if no one knew, I could pretend like none of it happened. The more I pretended, the easier it was to stuff down that feeling in the pit of my stomach that something about this wasn’t right. I went to my classes, I went to the right parties, I joined the right sorority, and slowly but surely, those things started to fill the void until I’d all but suffocated that feeling and the girl from Lost Hollow completely out of existence.
I was new, and I was almost whole again.
It took longer for summer to fade into fall in Northern California, but it happened all the same, and as it did, so did the last of that girl. My conversations with Ty became stilted as it grew increasingly difficult to dig her up. I assured him I was fine. I told him I was trying to heal, that I was doing better, but I needed space. He promised to give me whatever I needed and told me he loved me, and I convinced myself it was okay until, eventually, I stopped returning his calls.
When I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, I removed the ring and slipped it into an envelope in my dresser.
But it was December when I knew it was over—when I knew that I could never go home again. And I don’t mean to the cabin where I grew up.
I’m your home. And you’re mine.
A few days before Christmas break, my mom called and told me that Ty’s father had died. She looked up a bus route for me to come home for the funeral. She said she’d be there to pick me up in Klamath Falls and take me home.
And I meant to go. I should have gone.
I got dressed, slipped on the ring, and went down to the Greyhound station. I stood in front of the bus with ‘Redwood/Mt. Shasta/Klamath Falls/Bend’ scrolling across the marquee, but the fear of confronting my past and what had happened to me again when I’d done such a good job ignoring it for months now was overwhelming, and I panicked. I couldn’t make my legs move.
Instead, I dropped the ring in a post office box and spent the holidays alone.
When I moved out of the dorms and into the sorority house, I didn’t give anyone my new address or phone number; I’d stopped writing back to Emma months ago anyway.
And that summer, when I slept with someone else for the first time in my life, I went home and threw up, then cried myself to sleep.
But even that got easier, just like everything else.
And it was just easier. I didn’t know how easy it would be to forget here. I was able to compartmentalize what happened to me and put it in a box labeled ‘Lost Hollow,’ and it was like it happened to someone else—someone who suffocated when I closed the lid—and I was lighter without her.
I didn’t think about the other things I’d have to close inside that box when I laid her to rest. I didn’t realize when I left that I’d never be able to go back. If I did, maybe I would have done things differently.
For the most part, she sleeps and stays dormant. She doesn’t try to fight me anymore.
But sometimes, imposter syndrome will settle in. I’ll be at a party, surrounded by beautiful, happy people, and we’ll laugh and tell stories. We’ll dance and drink, and I’ll look around, and it’ll occur to me that none of them really know me, and they’ll never know me.
And I’ll realize that I’m alone…completely and utterly alone.
