The Outsider Copyright 2009 by EC EC's Erotic Art & Fiction - http://www.ecgraphicarts.com/ EC's deviantART collection - http://caligula20171.deviantart.com/ (warnings: language, adult themes, public nudity, sex between adults) Chapter 2 - Ruthie's evening Ruthie left her classmate with very mixed emotions. At the very beginning her reaction towards him was resentment. Because of him, she was about to lose one of the few small pleasures she had in life, the quiet two hours she spent in the nude under the shade every afternoon. However, once Ruthie calmed herself down, she understood that Mike had to do his job, just like she had to do hers. He was totally unaware of the consequences of his actions in her life and she had to remind herself that he was not acting out of malice, at least not towards her. In fact, he had offered her the small favor of not ticketing her car, assuming that she had one. He cared about her enough to offer a privilege that apparently he would not grant anyone else. No, he was not acting out of malice towards her, but most definitely he was acting out of malice towards the rich crowd that was abusing the lot. The truth was that Ruthie hated the spoiled elites every bit as much as Mike did. It would be nice to see them get theirs for once. Because of Mike Sinclair, the free parking the “beautiful people” on campus felt that they were entitled to would turn into an expensive hassle. Yes, it would be nice to watch the parking guy stick it to them. She especially loved that moment when that frat guy had called Mike an “asshole” and he had a come-back that forced the other guy to shut-up. There were so many times that she would have wanted to do the same thing at her job, to tell those miserable sorority bitches, and the disgusting sluts with fake tits who fucked the football players, and the arrogant TA’s who treated her like dirt…all of them…what she really thought of them. Ruthie’s mind replayed her interactions with her classmate several times over as she tried to figure him out. He was willing to talk to her, something that meant a lot to a person whose only other conversations that day had consisted of taking coffee orders and answering questions in class. Speaking to him, however briefly, had made her feel slightly less isolated. She had not been nice to him in class, but from what she could tell, he did not hold that against her. In fact, he had taken her advice and read the story she recommended. That was nice, having someone listen to her for once and care enough about her opinion to actually do something she wanted. Suddenly Ruthie stopped in her tracks. She remembered the slip she had made about not having any friends. It was true, but why did she have to admit that, without even being prompted? Mentally she castigated herself, because she was always saying idiotic things like that. That slip was only the latest out of many that she made out of habit, the stupid things that came out of her mouth that made people roll their eyes and kept her isolated. What a stupid thing to say…I don’t have any friends… Ruthie’s concentration began to drift. She was only partially in the real world as she walked to her afternoon class. Like a flock of agitated birds, thoughts circled around her mind, diving in and out of her consciousness. Her memory drifted to a customer who had snapped at her that morning, before shifting to a news story of a child’s murder that had upset her. She noticed a flier for an evangelical group, which prompted her to think about religion. Her mind wandered to an assignment she had due the next week, and then to wondering what was for dinner when she got back to the dorm. She entered the building and made her way to class. Being forced to focus on a lecture and class discussion forced Ruthie to clear her mind somewhat, but the background noise of her other thoughts did not go away entirely. It never did. ---------- Ruthie was a geology major, but the class she was attending that afternoon was a third-year literature course with the Spanish department. She had entered college speaking fluent Spanish and immediately tested into the third year of the program. She realized that she could take advantage of her language skill to get an easy double-major. She would take all of the literature classes offered by the department, throw in some Latin American history and political science classes, and that would take care of all her language and humanities requirements, plus getting her the extra major. From the time that she was twelve up until the previous summer when she graduated, Ruthie Burns had been surrounded by Spanish. Her mother and her uncle’s family originally were from Culiacan, Mexico and usually spoke Spanish at home and among themselves. Many of her classmates in high school spoke Spanish as their first language. At the insistence of her mother, Ruthie had taken the entire Spanish program in high school, which gave her a more formal knowledge of the language and compensated for the uneducated accents that surrounded her. As much as reading texts and conjugating verbs might have irritated Ruthie at the time she was doing it, she had to admit that all those classes in high school had benefited her upon entering college. Ruthie’s mind wandered again. The window of the classroom faced towards the south and she could see the hills the coastal range. Beyond those hills lay Santa Cruz and the elite suburbs that surrounded it. Further south the land flattened out and a person driving down Highway # 1 entered a totally different world once he hit Watsonville. Highway # 1 passed through miles of vegetable fields: asparagus, cabbage, and of course, artichokes. Past all those fields lay Salinas. Salinas’ claim to fame was calling itself “the artichoke capital of the world” and “the salad bowl of the nation”. Wow, what a thing to be proud of, thought Ruthie to herself. Just north of town there was a big statue of an artichoke. She rolled her eyes every time she passed that stupid thing. The only other brush with fame that Salinas could lay claim to was the author John Steinbeck. Steinbeck had written about the area in the 1930’s and there was a museum dedicated to him in town. Unlike most of her classmates, Ruthie Burns actually knew who Steinbeck was and had read several of his books. When her class visited the museum, she was the only person in her group who showed any interest whatsoever in the displays. As for her classmates, Steinbeck was irrelevant. Central California was a very different place back when he had written from what it was in the 21st Century. The area now was populated by people who had come from a totally place and lived a totally different reality. Ruthie’s mind continued to drift. She thought about her mother, vaguely wondering if she already had gotten home from work. She had promised to call on Sunday, but already it was Wednesday and Ruthie still had not talked to her mom that week. She couldn’t put it off any longer. As much as she dreaded calling home, she’d have to call that night. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on her, thought Ruthie to herself. She did help me get out of Salinas. I suppose the least I can do is call. Ruthie’s attention finally returned to where it needed to be: the class she was sitting in. She was among students that were two or three years older than she was, but her knowledge of Spanish put her at ease with material that many of her non-native speaking classmates struggled with. For her, reading in Spanish was every bit as easy as reading in English. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo, Ruben Dario, Jorge Icaza…it didn’t matter…she knew the material, some of which she had read for recreation when she still was in high school. For example, as a junior she had discovered “Pedro Paramo” and spent days reading and re- reading a novel that seemed to speak directly to her. Ruthie raised her hand and chatted in Spanish when the professor posed a question about Mario Vargas Llosa. Spanish literature was one place within her comfort zone, where she was on familiar territory. She had no hesitation showing off and embarrassing the rich, lazy gringos whenever she could. As she listened to a classmate with a very thick accent struggle to answer the next question, an interesting thought occurred to her. In the English literature class it was Mike Sinclair who dominated the class discussion, but in the Spanish literature class the obnoxious show-off was Ruthie Burns. ---------- When Ruthie stepped out of the Spanish literature class she stepped out of her comfort zone. She looked around at the people surrounding her, all of whom seemed from a different world than the one she had come from. She knew that she really didn’t belong in Davenport. She couldn’t relate to these people, all these spoiled rich types with their fancy clothes, and their fake tits, and the car that daddy gave them, and their drinking, and all their money. She couldn’t relate. She had nothing in common with them. And yet, if anything her ability to relate to Salinas was even less. As she always put it: “Maybe I lived in Salinas, but I’m not from there.” Even though she was half-Mexican, the tough-guy machista culture of her family’s homeland elicited nothing from her but disgust. She had been to Sinaloa several times to visit her grandparents and found the ingrained violence and oppressiveness of the culture there repugnant. The salsa erotica and narco-corridas that were popular in Culiacan offended and nauseated her, every bit as much as the rap music that assaulted her ears in Salinas. What Ruthie really hated, more than anything else, was the gang culture that had permeated both Culiacan and Salinas. She resented having to be afraid of being beat up in her school, of always having to seek the protection of her older cousin when walking in the hallways. She hated the graffiti, the bandanas, the tattoos, the drugs, and the sneering expressions of the gang members. She hated the way those guys treated her female classmates, and she hated the girls for putting up with it. For Ruthie’s mother, her escape and her defense against the hostile world of Salinas was evangelical Christianity. Ruthie accompanied her mother every time she went, but over time religion became every bit as disgusting in Ruthie’s mind as the gang culture at school. She was an outsider at her mother’s church, just as she was an outsider in school. ---------- Ruthie’s only escape was reading. From the time she moved to Salinas until she graduated from high school, she locked herself in her room whenever she could and read voraciously. Before she was twelve, she had lived in Nebraska, so she was well-aware that a world existed beyond the one inhabited by her mother and her cousins. She also knew that there were places and times when drugs and gangs had not been a feature of everyday life. She was fascinated with literature that covered different eras from the one in which she was trapped and reading about people who led lives that contrasted with the grim one that she knew. She started with C.S. Lewis (recommended by her Bible study leader) and from there branched out into science fiction and mid-20th Century British fiction. When details of the stories did not make sense to her, she returned to the library to look up answers to her questions, which led her to read histories and biographies. The past interested her, so she explored further and further back, teaching herself about ancient civilizations. Her curiosity led her to pick apart the Bible. She read several scholarly studies on how it was created and what the passages actually meant in the context during which they were written. The Biblical studies had a profound effect on her, because placing the Bible in its historical context took away most of the mystique that her mother’s church had ascribed to it. Ruthie memorized the entire New Testament and a large portion of the Old Testament, but the more she learned, the less divine the book seemed to her. Of course, she had to keep her growing doubts to herself. She was rebelling, but she rebelled in secret. Finally, she started reading about most forbidden topic of them all: evolution. Precisely because her maniacal preacher so vociferously condemned evolution, Ruthie was determined to find out everything she could about it. Anything that preacher hated had to be good. By the time she graduated from high school, she was reading professional-level studies concerning paleontology and the various theories surrounding evolution. That interest was what led her to declare geology as her first major. She was totally isolated from her classmates in high school. The more she read and the more knowledgeable she became, the greater were the differences between her and the others. Her social skills quit developing because she felt that in the hostile world of Salinas she had no use for them anyway. She was disgusted by the teenagers that surrounded her at school and scared by their belligerent behavior. They rejected her and she rejected them. The few times she did go out she went with either her cousins or her mother. Ruthie’s continuous reading was destined to determine the course of her life. She mastered a broad range of topics, so class assignments were very easy for her. If given the chance to do extra-credit work, she’d do it, in part because she really had nothing else going on in her life. She got straight “A’s” throughout the entire time she was in high school. Her grades, coupled with the fact she could claim a Hispanic background because of her mother, resulted in the grant she had received to attend Davenport State University. Ruthie’s uncle brought her to Davenport at the end of August and dropped her off at her dorm. At the beginning she was elated to have escaped Salinas. She fully expected to make friends with people whose intellect matched hers, but very quickly she found out that was not to be. No one except her professors cared anything whatsoever about the book knowledge stored in her brain. Instead what mattered was that her social and conversational skills were non-existent. She could not talk about light topics at all and had no interest or knowledge of popular culture. She tended to be quiet, but suddenly would become emotional and have an opinionated outburst. Then she would realize she had just made a fool out of herself and sink back into sullen silence. She felt that she was incapable of articulating what she was thinking in speech, that she really could only express herself in writing. Because she had spent so much of her life as a teenager alone, her gestures and mannerisms were not “normal” and she had no concept of what it was to have fun. On top of everything else, subconsciously many of her university classmates rejected her because she was an impoverished person from Salinas. In Davenport, she no longer had to be afraid for her physical safety, but she found herself even more isolated than she had been before she graduated high school. It seemed that everyone with whom she interacted disliked her and wanted her out of their presence. Her big dream to get out of Salinas had been realized, but the disappointment that followed had come close to totally breaking her spirit. ---------- Ruthie walked to her dorm just as it was getting dark outside. She was shivering, because the evening had turned cool. The breeze blowing from the hills whipped across her bare legs and flowed right through her light dress. The backpack protected her bare back from the cold, but the contents pressed uncomfortably and the canvas scratched at her skin. She dumped the backpack in her room. She extracted a book to take with her to the cafeteria. She got her tray and silently sat down. No one was interested in talking to her, which was why she brought the book. She was not really going to read, but she calculated that it would not be so obvious that no one wanted to sit with her if she was pretending to be studying while she ate. Eating in the cafeteria at night was always the hardest part of the day for her. During lunchtime she didn’t have any time to talk, but in the evenings she was forced to confront the hard reality that she had made no friends whatsoever during the two months she had been in Davenport. She knew it and everyone else knew it. Whatever chance she had to make friends at the beginning of the semester had long since passed. She failed to connect with anyone, the dorm cliques formed, and by the end of September she was completely shut out of the dorm’s social life. ---------- After eating her joyless dinner, Ruthie returned to her dorm room. Her roommate still had not returned. That meant that she could call her mother and talk to her in private. She took a deep breath and nerved herself to dial home. Ruthie always found talking to her mom very stressful. The conversation, after a brief exchange of personal news and gossip about family members, fell into the usual dialogue: “Ruthie, have you found a good church yet?” “No mom, not yet…really…” “But, why not? Love, you can’t tell me there’s no decent churches in Davenport.” “Really, Mom…there’s nothing here. Everything’s down in Santa Cruz.” “Ruthie, honey, you are lying to me and you know it is a sin to lie…Lourdes Rosales’ daughter is up in Davenport too, and she found a church the first week she got up there. Why can’t you?” “Mom…I don’t know…I haven’t found anything…and I haven’t talked to Cristina.” “Well, why don’t you just give her a call?” “Yes, mom…I’ll call her…” “Honey, please don’t forget this time. Call the Rosales girl. I’m very worried about you. You know that Satan is watching and he’ll get you if you’re not careful. You can’t fight Satan alone, dear…you have to find a church.” “Yes, mom…I’ll try…I promise…” Ruthie tensed up during the conversation, resisting the urge to scream into the phone: “Look Mom, I’m not going to find a church because I don’t want to find a church! I don’t believe in that shit! I’m a fucking atheist, OK? Deal with it! I’m a fucking atheist!” She knew that the moment was coming when she would lose control of herself and actually say that, but she figured that the longer she could put it off, the better. Her mother would be devastated when she found out that Ruthie had rejected her faith. ---------- Ruthie hung up the phone and calmed herself down. Just in time, because her roommate Shannon came breezing into the room with her boyfriend. With not so much as a “hello” the pair settled in and started spreading their books on Shannon’s bed. They had brought a box of pizza with them. They did not offer Ruthie a slice. Ruthie was extremely uncomfortable with the invasion into her space, which was Shannon’s intention. It was only 7:15, so she could not complain that her roommate was preventing her from sleeping. Nor did the no-sex-in-the-dorm room-rule apply, because Shannon had brought her boyfriend over to hang-out and watch TV. The point was that Shannon wanted the room and Ruthie needed to leave. At the beginning she had hoped to be friends with the other student, but Shannon quickly put an end to that hope. Shannon sized up her roommate within a couple of days and decided that she was a nerd who could easily be pushed around. She cut at Ruthie with several hurtful remarks and then proceeded to take over the room. She bullied Ruthie with her TV and her CD player, using the noise to spoil her concentration and chase her out of the room. She continuously invited guests over; people who were every bit as inconsiderate as she was. In Shannon’s mind, Ruthie was the sort of person who deserved to be walked on, because she was such a nerd and such a creep. Burning with resentment, Ruthie put on a jacket and stuck some notebooks in her backpack. She’d have to go to the library and stay there throughout the evening. Probably it was just as well, because she’d be forced to study and would have time to take some notes for class the next day. She left without saying goodbye. ---------- As she walked along the dark sidewalks to get to the library, Ruthie’s thoughts returned to religion. Nearly every religion imaginable was present on campus: evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, Moonies…everything imaginable. Ruthie hated them all. As far as she could tell, all the religious groups wanted the same thing from her: her brain and her money. Well, Ruthie Burns had no money and her brain was messed up, so guess what? She had nothing to offer them. Anyhow, the idea of believing in something that she couldn’t see or experience with her physical senses was something that she was incapable of doing. She knew the natural history of the earth and knew that the Bible could not have possibly been written by God. Her reading in history had convinced her that the most fervent religious believers were nothing but a bunch of psychotic killers, misogynists, and megalomaniacs. God’s love? Yeah, right. Tell that to the nine million women who were tortured and murdered for witchcraft in the Middle Ages. If Ruthie had her way, all religion would be illegal, or at the very least it would be illegal to practice any religion in public. All those obnoxious street preachers and Hare Krishnas would be going to prison. Fuck the First Amendment. The root of Ruthie’s hatred towards the world of religion was straightforward enough; she had it shoved down her throat from the moment she moved to Salinas. Until she was twelve, she had no opinion of religion whatsoever, because her father was a Christian in name only. He was the sort that believed in God and defended religion, but did not practice himself nor forced it on anyone. Ruthie’s mother was very different from her father when it came to faith. Her family had grown up Catholic, but like so many other Latin Americans during the 1980’s and 1990’s, she converted to Pentecostalism as a teenager when still living in Culiacan. When she and Ruthie’s dad split up, she joined a local non- denominational church. The oversized t-shirt she normally wore pretty much said it all: “the radicals for Jesus”. Twice per week Ruthie’s mother dragged her to a “Temple of the Lord” that had been set up in an abandoned store in a dilapidated shopping center. Twice per week she was forced to listen to a demented preacher as he screamed, cried, and sweat at the podium, his voice transmitted over a defective set of speakers that screeched and made the girl wince. Her mother and some of the other women spoke in tongues, which totally gave her the creeps. The first time she attended worship Ruthie was terrified by the spectacle and did everything she could to get out of going a second time. It took several hard slaps across the face to get her to change her mind. Ruthie reflected that her mother was by no means a bad person, but she was dealing with a lot of personal issues (including a brief and very dysfunctional marriage to her father). She had little education, so the only frame of reference she had to see the world and judge the people who surrounded her came out of the preacher’s interpretation of the Bible. Ruthie hated that preacher, in part because he was such a tyrant over his small kingdom of believers, including her mother, and in part because he was such a demented freak. ---------- The chilly breeze whipped around her as she took a short cut across a playing field that separated the dorms from the academic buildings. She was adequately protected from the waist up, but her legs had goose bumps from the chill. The wind blew up her skirt and felt cold on her bare bottom and vagina. She loved the feeling of exposure, especially when her skirt blew up and she was momentarily uncovered from the waist down. Ruthie was not exactly an exhibitionist, because she did not want other people to see her when her body was exposed, but she did enjoy being naked in places where she normally would be expected to be clothed. Along with studying evolution, Ruthie’s obsession with being naked was another form of rebellion against the values of that preacher she so hated. God had commanded people to cover up, so Ruthie made it a point to wear as little as possible, even if the weather was chilly. Ruthie’s fascination with being naked started shortly after she moved to Salinas. Her mother could not afford to turn on the air conditioning and Ruthie was complaining about how hot her room was. Her mother responded that she should sleep in her underwear. She followed that advice for several nights, but then realized it would be even more comfortable to sleep completely nude. At first the thought frightened her, but then she saw it as a daring adventure. She knew that if she were caught, at the very least she would get several slaps across the face and be forced to sit at the kitchen table for a couple of hours, but to her the risk was worth it. About six months after Ruthie moved in, her mother managed to change her work schedule so that she would be home when Ruthie got out of school. She left for work at 3:00 am and returned to the apartment at noon. She was concerned about keeping the girl out of trouble, forcing her to do her homework, and making sure she spent less time with her cousins, who she did not consider a good influence. The change of schedule did keep Ruthie under control in the afternoons, but what her mother did not realize was that it also gave her four hours of free time in the mornings. The girl referred to those hours as her “me time.” The moment her mother left for work, Ruthie got up and ran around the apartment naked. She enjoyed her own body, spending hours looking at herself in the mirror and taking self-portraits with a digital camera. She read, cooked breakfast for herself, listened to music, and masturbated in the living room. When she got a little older, occasionally she went outside when it was still dark and streaked around the apartment complex. Ruthie’s “me time” in the early morning hours affected her life in the afternoons. By the time she got home from school she was dead-tired. She studied and had dinner, but on the nights she did not have to go to church she was in bed asleep by 8:00. Her mother sometimes wondered about the girl’s constant sleeping, but had no problem with it because she was worried that if Ruthie were out on the street she would get in trouble or get beat up. She bragged to her fellow churchgoers that Ruthie was a “good girl” who never gave her much trouble. Had she known about her daughter’s “me time” she would have been horrified. ---------- Ruthie entered the library, went to the basement and found an open table all the way in the back. She unloaded her backpack and began searching among the Spanish literature collection for some titles that she needed for a report. After several hours, Ruthie had taken most of the notes that she needed. She looked around and realized that all of the other desks and tables in the basement were empty. When she looked at her cell phone she knew why: it was 10:15. She knew from experience that after 10:00 no one came into the basement and anyone wanting a study desk could get one on the main floor. The student took off her dress and returned to her seat to take some final notes. She planned to spend the final hour at the library nude. She calculated there was very little danger of being caught because she could hear the elevator if anyone came down at such a late hour. At 11:00 she got up and, still naked, re-shelved the books she had been taking notes from. She felt extremely daring walking up and down the aisles of bookshelves with nothing on. She loved the sensation of the cool air blowing on her exposed skin and the silence that surrounded her. When she got up and left her dress behind at her study desk, her heart pounded at the beginning, but the longer she stayed away the more confident she became. She never allowed herself to return to the safety of her desk before she was completely relaxed and comfortable with being naked in the library. She heard the bell of the elevator and scrambled back to her seat. She slipped her dress over her head just in time, because the person who had entered the room was a library employee. The man gave Ruthie a suspicious look, apparently having realized that she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Ruthie was disappointed, because she’d have to re-shelve the last two books with her dress on. She didn’t like to do that because she considered that her naked time in the library was not complete unless she could re-shelve all of the books she had taken to her desk that night before getting dressed. But with that guy in the basement she had no choice. She knew better than to leave immediately, because that would arouse more suspicion. She’d re-shelve the books, then get her backpack and depart. ---------- When she stepped outside, the chilly air hit her bare legs and a feeling of cold reality hit her soul. She began to feel resentful and morose as she walked past the engineering building and the computer center on the sidewalk that exited the main section of campus. She left the well-lighted sidewalk and plunged into the darkness to cross the playing field that separated the academic buildings from the dorms. The field was empty and silent. The silence was not peaceful to Ruthie; rather it had a sinister and desolate feeling for her. She knew that what she was doing was not safe; because a student had been raped on that same field just a month before, doing exactly what she was doing. She didn’t care. If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen, and my life sucks anyway. When she got to the middle of the field she stopped to stare up at the stars. Her thoughts wandered as her mood deteriorated. She thought of writers such as C.S. Lewis who romanticized about the stars and created something out of them that was not based on reality. For C.S. Lewis the stars were living beings, something similar to angels. She then thought about astronomer Carl Sagan’s speculation that it was the stars that first gave people the idea of supernatural beings, perhaps because ancient humans thought the stars were far-off campfires in the sky. Her mind shifted to the other science fiction writers that she had read as a teenager, and all those fictitious trips to “other worlds”, trips that in real life never would, and never could happen. Perhaps there is other life out there, but if there is, so what? It’s not like we’re ever gonna get out there…everything’s too far away. She thought about all the work-arounds that writers had come up with to cover those vast distances…warp drive…worm-holes…irregularities in space…time travel…but it was all fantasy, just like supernatural beings, alternate worlds, and the afterlife. The cold hard reality was that E=mc2 and there never would be anything anyone could do about that. We’re stuck here on this planet…we’ll never go to any of those other neat worlds…and the best we could ever do might be to get a few astronauts on Mars. That’s it. Science fiction and the whole idea of inter-stellar travel was BS, just like angels, ghosts, demons, pixies…whatever. It’s all crap. All of it. It doesn’t matter. In a few years we’ll run out of resources and all starve to death and go extinct. We’ll be gone just like the passenger pigeon, and then something else…rats, probably…will take over the planet. Not that any of that matters, thought Ruthie to herself. The planet eventually will perish, burned up by the sun in a few billion years. Or maybe earlier…because if plate tectonics were to quit, the planet will become frozen and dead, like Mars. She had read an article that plate tectonics already was slowing down. If that speculation was true, the natural processes that maintain the atmosphere were coming to an end and eventually all water and air would freeze and evaporate away. We don’t have to wait five billion years…the end of all life is coming a lot sooner. Ruthie reflected on the futility of her life, the uselessness of her own existence. In a planet that sooner or later was destined for oblivion, and being a particularly unhappy member of a species that was doomed to extinction much sooner than the planet, what was the point? Why bother to study? Why bother to open the coffee shop? Why bother to continue living? Everyone hates me…even that Parking Nazi…even he’ll see me for what I am and ditch me… There’s no hope…no hope for anything or anyone. It’s stupid to stay alive…for what? So I can spend the next 60 years taking shit from everyone? Fuck ‘em. I don’t want to take shit. I’ve had it. Fuck it. Suddenly she took off walking. No longer was she walking towards the dorms, but instead towards the path that exited campus, eventually descended a hill, crossed under Highway 1, and led onto a vegetable field that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of the field there was a cliff that fell straight into the Pacific Ocean. A good fifty-foot drop onto rocks that were covered by roaring surf. Her body would get torn up in the waves and they’d never find her. Fuck ‘em. Fuck all their insults and their money and all the rest of their shit… Ruthie ended up not going very far. She never did. She made it to the gate that exited campus, only to find it was locked. Had she really wanted to, she could have scaled the fence or gone through the main exit and then walked around to the trail, but to do all that would have taken more exertion than she was capable of putting forth at that moment. She was not scared of dying, but sheer effort that she would have to put into getting out to that cliff suddenly became overwhelming. Had she already been close to the edge, she might have worked up the courage to jump or fall off, but to actually get out there was too much. Her anger turned into depression, and once she was depressed, inertia took over and she was capable of doing very little. Depression shrouded the unhappy girl like a thick heavy cloak. She felt weighted down. Slowly she walked back, trying to shake off the numbness just so she could move forward. When Ruthie returned to her room, Shannon already was asleep and all the lights were out. She entered as quietly as possible, scared to wake up her roommate and risk an ugly confrontation. Her gaze fell upon Shannon’s head, which was turned away from her. She resisted the urge to take her roommate’s CD player and use it smash that bitch’s nasty face. After having withstood two months of mistreatment at the hands of Shannon, Ruthie hated her. She fantasized about somehow getting revenge. Unfortunately, life rarely gives people like Ruthie the chance to get even with those who have treated them badly.