Rae climbed the dorm’s metal stairs and let herself inside her austere dorm room where Hester sat, waiting for her.
Rae almost groaned, but Hester was her roommate and had as much right to the room as Rae did.
Hester perched on the edge of her twin bed on the threadbare quilt, still in her church clothes, her ankles and wrists crossed, her hair covered by a prim, starched bonnet, despite the fact that it was just before six in the morning. Her sallow skin bore no make-up, and her eyelashes and brows were nearly invisible.
The dingy walls looked half-bare. Hester’s Christian music posters were gone. The walls loomed higher, as oppressive as the silence. Dust motes floated in the dim sunlight that filtered through the insubstantial curtain over the high windows.
“I’m just going to sleep for a few hours,” Rae told her. “It’s okay if you can’t talk to me or whatever. I understand. You don’t need to get disfellowshipped, too.”
“Your mother made a deal with Reverend Stoppard,” Hester said. “You can come back.”
“She what?” Rae dropped her new backpack on the floor. It thumped, heavy with the clothes and toiletries that Wulf had bought for her.
“She humbled herself. She begged him. I went with her,” Hester said. “I told him that Jim Bob was lying and that it was just a bar where you were working, that I had seen for myself.”
“You told them that you went to a bar?”
“He was unhappy with me, but he believed me.”
“I can’t believe they would let me come back.” Rae plopped down on her bed across from Hester. She let her head drop into her hands. The left side of her face was still warm from Wulf’s shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Rae.” A tear dripped out of Hester’s eye. She mashed it away with one hand. “I’m so sorry that I gossiped. It was wrong of me. I beg your forgiveness.”
“Are they making you do this?”
“No! They didn’t say anything at all to me, but it was all my fault and I’m so sorry. It was just stupidity and immaturity.”
“Everyone does it,” Rae said. “Don’t beat yourself up.”
“There are conditions.”
“Of course, there are.”
“They want you to drop out of school this week and move back home over spring break next week.”
That one was obvious. “Not even the end of the semester?”
“Reverend Stoppard said that it was the corrupting influence of education, especially psychology. I didn’t tell them about the theater classes. I swear I didn’t.”
“Oh, Hester.” Rae’s forehead felt burning hot under her hands.
“Reverend Stoppard quoted Mark eight, thirty-six, ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ He said that it applies to women, too.”
What would it profit Rae to gain her family but lose her ability to help children? “But there’s Matthew twenty-five, forty, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ I can help Daniel and autistic kids like him. Surely, they’re the least of God’s brethren. How can I just abandon them?”
“I’m not allowed to argue with you,” Hester said. Her panicked voice sounded strangled.
Of course not. They would have told her that the Devil can quote Scripture for his own purpose.
Hester continued, “But I can beg you. Please, please, Rae. Please give up this worldliness and sin and go home.”
“I’m so tired. I can’t think. I’ve got to sleep for an hour before class.”
“You keep staying out all night. Were you really a—I can’t even think of it—a woman of ill repute? And is Dominic your—I don’t even know what to call him.”
“No,” Rae said. “I’m a counselor. I listen to people, and I help them. I’ve never had sex with anyone.” She meant a client, but she was so tired. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“Please give it up. Please go home. I don’t want to lose you.”
Rae lay down on the unforgiving mattress, still wearing the navy blue silk dress. She kicked her pumps off the end of the bed. “I just want to sleep. It’s all too much to think about.”
She rolled Aunt Enid’s afghan over herself and tried to sleep.