The Word for Yes by Needell Claire

Author:Needell, Claire [Needell, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-12-28T23:00:00+00:00

14

The tour of the Brown campus had been wonderful. Erika particularly liked the engineering and biology buildings, which were, as they should be, in the exact center of campus. The engineering building was tall, a tower, and the biology building wound itself around like a maze. She loved this too. Still, Brown was not her ideal school. There was a strangeness to the quad area that Erika did not like. There were kids who seemed to be sitting around with little to do, the way you sometimes saw kids in the city, kids who lacked purpose. Erika could deal with people who weren’t like her, who didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing in life. That was most people, anyway. No, what she didn’t like about Brown was its slant. The whole campus occupied a side of a hill. If Erika went to a hillside campus, she would want the campus to go all the way over the top of the hill, and not to merely hang off the hill on only one side, the way Brown did. It would make her nervous, she felt, to be hanging there. It would be altogether better to go someplace that was simply flat.

After the day on campus, Erika, Jan, Mom, and Melanie had an early dinner, though Melanie said she didn’t feel well, and just moved her pasta with meat sauce around her plate, unjustly committing at least one unfortunate cow to a second annihilation—first its animal life was taken, and then it failed to be eaten as dinner. In the interest of keeping the peace with Melanie, Erika restrained herself from saying something about eating what had been murdered for her wasted culinary pleasure.

But then the most exciting thing had happened. Melanie and Mom went back to the hotel, and Mom agreed to let Erika spend the night in Jan’s room. Erika had a spare toothbrush in her purse, and everything else she needed she could borrow from Jan.

“I’ll text Eliza,” Jan said. “You can sleep in my bed, and I’ll use my sleeping bag and camping pillow on Eliza’s. I’m sure Eliza can find someplace else to sleep. She does it all the time.” Jan rolled her eyes when she said this.

“Oh,” Erika said. “I thought she didn’t like girls who, you know, hooked up.” She and Jan were on their way to the protest that Eliza had told them about earlier. But they weren’t there really to protest, more to watch. As they approached West Quad, they heard the beat of drums, and other instruments, a flute, perhaps, and a tambourine. It was dark and a crowd was gathering, so it was difficult to see exactly what was happening. On one side, there seemed to be a group of boys sitting sprawled on the steps of what Erika assumed was a fraternity house. The boys weren’t doing much of anything, just sitting, some with red cups in their hands. She smelled pot, too, and she wondered whether

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