Crescent City Connection

By now, just about everyone who was going to class was already there. She felt suddenly panicked. What was the point of going to college if you couldn’t be more conscientious than this?
    She had such a long way to go she slowed for a while to get her breath. She heard something behind her, not footsteps but something.
    And that was all. A hand went over her mouth, another around her waist. She never resisted, never had a chance.
    She figured later that he must have done some carotid-artery knockout thing, or maybe she was so deeply in shock that she lost her memory. Whatever it was, the next thing she knew, she was in a car, gagged, lying down on the seat, hands and feet bound.
    The last time she had felt so helpless she’d been eleven, at her dad’s cabin in some forest in the middle of nowhere. He had shot a deer and wanted to show her how to clean it. Horrified, finding no words to describe how dreadful she found it—the dead animal, the prospect of defiling it—she ran away.
    He chased and caught her, and made her sit and watch. He hadn’t needed bonds, but she might as well have been tied tight as a calf, so much a prisoner was she.
    The place was awful. Her dad was awful, with his damn lifetime supplies of everything (including ammunition), his tobacco-chewing friends with their camo fatigues and their doomsday scenarios. So far as she could tell, they pretty much thought everybody was stupid except them, and the world was probably going to crack apart any minute, causing black people to storm these pathetic cabins in the woods.
    She chided them for being racists, and they said if she had any sense she would be, too. In fact they made fun of her, called her Little Miss Yankee Liberal, and she shrank further and further into herself. That was the summer she made it through about half of Dickens and a little of Dostoyevsky.
    She would get a Coke and some Oreos and retreat to her closet-sized room with one of the books she’d brought. Then she’d dunk the cookies in the Coke, lose herself in stories of people—some of them kids—who were worse off than she was, and she’d feel almost happy. She gained weight just when she was supposed to be having an active outdoor life, and her dad was cruel about it. He called her names she couldn’t remember without feeling the heat and shame of tears, even now, and so she never thought about it.
    The little room—she thought it really had been a closet—had been okay, though. All it had in it were two things—a narrow built-in platform fitted with a mattress and, perpendicular to that, a sort of wide shelf with a mirror over it that served as a dressing table. That left about enough room to stand up and undress, and no place to put anything other than a couple of stacks of jeans and T-shirts, which was how she kept her clothes—in stacks on the floor. Her books she tucked under the shelf, and she put her panties on top of them, decently out of sight.
    Her dad had built the bed and shelf just for her, so she could come visit. Much as she wished he hadn’t bothered, she did love the room. It was her only refuge from her opinionated, nasty, gun-toting dad—and from the place itself, with its dead animal heads, off-putting noises, and primitive appointments.
    There was indoor plumbing, but everything leaked. There was a gas stove, but it was about fifty years old and didn’t always light. There were naked bulbs for light.
    The only bedding was worn sheets and army blankets. The sheets were soft and nice, but she couldn’t hack the sandpaper wool of the blankets—indeed, had pitched a tantrum until she was allowed to bring her own twin-sized duvet, which her father had ridiculed and called her “sissy cover.”
    Pretty soon, he was calling her Sissy, and so were all his friends. Of course it beat Blubberface, but that came later and didn’t last. Sissy stuck.
    She was so unhappy that summer, she actually missed her mother. God, her mother! Jacqueline the Queen. If her father was a minimalist, Jacqueline was his antithesis. Her apartment was so full of frills and pillows and fuss you had to struggle for breath. Jacqueline had more clothes than Macy’s and more makeup than Maybelline. She loved to go partying with her boyfriends, and she stank of gin on weekends.
    Her dad hated to party, hated almost everything, Lovelace included, and Jacqueline was way at the top of the list. But he did love to drink. Her mother said she worried about it and even asked