Chapter One - Rachel
I couldn’t believe it was finally my first day of college. It seemed as if this day would never arrive, and yet, here it was.
The scent of fresh cut grass blended with the wafting aromas from the food trucks, which formed a daisy chain on the circle drive around the Student Union Building. Both the groomed lawns and the culinary extravaganza were acts in the show. It was as if the administration was showing off how much money it could extract from freshmen to pour into unnecessary displays.
This was a strange contrast when you considered the fact that this university embodied the best theology school in the state. This was the site of the type of scholastics I’d dreamed about since I’d discovered such institutions existed. I just didn’t realize that they’d be so showy in their wealth.
While other girls my age were hanging pictures of Bieber and his ilk on their bedroom walls, I, as a young teenager, had a glossy photograph of these hallowed halls on my wall. Right next to the oil rendering of our Lord and Savior.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Dad asked, the wheels of my last suitcase touching down on the asphalt.
“Yes, Daddy,” I lied.
I wanted to slap myself.
I was eighteen, about to start university, and I was still talking to him like I was a little kid. But the truth was, I had always been scared of him, and this level of childhood fear was still ingrained in me.
There was something about my father that had always scared me, and I was glad to finally be getting away. He fought like hell against me even being able to go to college, but was glad that it was at least seminary school and not something like medicine or science, which he felt were areas of study better reserved for men.
In our strict religion, women couldn’t become pastors. But he assumed I was just getting further educated in the Bible so that I would be able to teach my children. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Like the fact that I yearned to be able to date. To be able to kiss a guy. Even to have my virginity taken, at some point, although I wanted to wait for marriage for that.
“I’ll go up with you, just to be certain,” my dad said.
From what he needed to protect me, I couldn’t fathom, but I never argued with my father. Particularly when he insisted on paying through the nose for my tuition and carrying my bags up to my dorm room, leaving me to unload just a small backpack. He was a man of extremities, my dad. Both in terms of love and hate.
Part of the deal the university had made for hosting the theology school was that the students had to live in general housing. The administration was far too tightfisted to splurge on a whole new dorm building.
Once we got inside, it was like a paint-ball game exploded. The corridor of the residence was a riot of bright colors and shapes. I thought my dad might swoon right then and there, but he plucked up his Irish courage and forged ahead, his steely blue eyes set on an imagined Calvary.
The administration had saved money by “letting” the students decorate the dorms. For no pay, of course. They were no doubt expecting the results of letting a pack of young adults, free from the confines of their parents’ home for the first time, loose with decorating supplies. One brave soul even got away with painting a depiction of an orgy on their door.
“I am really having second thoughts about this school,” Dad mused out loud.
I was supposed to be sharing my room with another girl named Jinx Devlin. But when we arrived at room 113, there was only one name on the whiteboard screwed into the powder blue door. Mine.
“No roommate? That’s different,” Dad commented.
It was, but I wasn’t about to say so. Not least of all because when he said ‘different,’ I got the strong sense he had meant ‘wonderful.’ He had been rather insistent that I get a big room on a floor ‘with no boys.’
The housing office couldn’t promise the lack of males on our floor, but they said they could be sure they roomed me with a girl. Now I wouldn’t even have that. It gave me the opportunity to be cloistered away and focus exclusively on my studies. And to eat occasionally.
I suspected Dad would have sent me to a nunnery if that was still legal. Though my previous twelve years of convent school had been close enough. I suppose it said it all that our headmistress had been appropriately nicknamed ‘The Wrecking-Ball.’
“In fact, it’s wonderful!” Dad exalted, finally saying what he meant as always, consequences be damned.