The Gossip: New Wave Newsroom by Jenny Holiday

Author:Jenny Holiday
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jenny Holiday

Chapter Nine

December 1983

Dawn

The semester had been awful. I began each day by getting up and going through the motions of getting ready, doing the minimum required to get myself clean and push myself out the door. I sometimes looked at my vast collection of makeup with wonder, as if I were an archaeologist from another planet. What was it for? How had any of these powders and paints mattered to the girl who used to slather herself with them?

I attended my classes, sitting in the back and not making eye contact with anyone. I was the first one out of every lecture hall. I finished most days back home in my apartment, crying. I would hold it together until I burst through my door, and then a day’s worth of pent-up grief would come flooding out of me.

It was like I was drowning, except not. Because if you were drowning, eventually, I presumed, it would be over. You’d succumb to your watery fate. That fall at Allenhurst, though, I kept flailing and gasping, my lungs perpetually on the verge of collapse, unable to get a grip on anything that might anchor me, much less pull me to shore, dry me off, and set me to rights.

Except that wasn’t entirely true. There was an anchor, and his name was Arturo Perez. Art, he’d told me to call him.

He was constantly checking on me, and he wasn’t even trying to be subtle about it. He must have figured out my class schedule, because he was almost always waiting for me after my Environmental Psych class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was on duty, so he never did more than walk with me to the student center, where I usually passed the time until my next class. But it was a welcome break in the day, a pause in the assault I was perpetually enduring. The other students had calmed down somewhat and were mostly leaving me alone. They looked at me funny, still, and no one spoke to me—or rather, I didn’t speak to them. But no one was outright calling me a murderer anymore. The DA was proceeding with charges against Daniels—some other girls had come forward with their own, similar stories—and I had cooperated when they wanted to interview me about Julianne, but I would be out of here before anything got resolved.

I knew gossip. I knew how quickly people forgot things, their attention captured by something newer, shinier, more horrible. What I had less experience with was how long the voices in my own head were going to keep dogging me. The assault I was enduring was self-inflicted. And it felt like it would never stop.

But then Art would show up, and it would. Only for a while, only until he left me again, but the reprieve was always enough to restore me sufficiently that I could get through the next little stretch. Every time felt like a small miracle.

And God help me, I wanted more. More respite. More time with him.

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