Ten-Point Violations** (may include a $100 fine):
Deception
Allowing someone to enter the residence of a person of the opposite sex
Music, television, movies, or other media with a PG-13 rating or above, as well as anything else deemed untoward including but not limited to all rap music and reality television
**Appeals for 10-point violations should be submitted to the respective Resident Assistant within 24 hours of notification. Evidence is required. All appeal decisions are final.
Ruthie and I were on our knees, our hands clasped together, heads bowed, staring down at the gray carpet of the dorm’s hallway, and following Brigid in prayer.
“While we don’t dismiss their actions as they each inexcusably violated the Covenant Code,” Brigid continued, “we do pray, oh Lord, for your forgiveness. That you forgive them, and all of us, for the part we played. As a faithful community made in your name, we stand together in sin. We all must learn and reflect on our own actions, as all our friends do with theirs.”
As she passed us in her methodical pace up and down the short hallway, continuing to spew prayers, bloated with buzzwords and every synonym for God you could possibly imagine, I felt Ruthie’s elbow jab into my ribs. I opened one eye and looked at her. “I get that we’re supposed to pray for each other’s souls or whatever—” her mouth moved but no sound came out “—but don’t they also teach forgiveness? My knees hurt. It’s been a month. We’re still doing this?”
My knees were beginning to hurt, too—we’d been down there on the thin, hard carpet surrounded by Jesus and unidentifiable brown stains older than me for over thirty minutes—but I wasn’t sure I was allowed to complain. If I did, I could picture Brigid bending down to my level greeting me with a placating smile and a power grab, and saying, Jesus was whipped while carrying the cross for our sins. The least we can do is bruise our knees while praying for some of our sinner dormmates. Don’t you agree?
I wouldn’t respond—even in my imagined scenario, Ruthie is braver than I am, and would offer some side-eyed comment about how it was unfair that we were constantly expected to compare ourselves and our behavior to the savior of mankind.
A month ago, after Ruthie and I attended our first pseudo party in the woods, we had barely fallen asleep when we were awoken by the most startling scream. The kind of scream that sent goose bumps up my arms before I even realized what it was. Where my instinct was to jump out of bed and make sure our door was locked, Ruthie’s was to run into the hall and investigate herself.
“Something exciting is happening,” she said, a mischievous smile forming on her face.
I grabbed her arm as she turned toward the door. “We’re too drunk for this. This is a bad idea. Being in public is a bad idea.”
“But what if it’s Catherine or Annie? What if they need us?” She was out the door before I could tell her that they did not need us. They’d been doing fine on their own for the last three months of school. We were the ones who needed them.
Reluctantly, I followed Ruthie and the commotion down the hall. The yelling stopped as we took the stairs two at a time to the lobby, where we were met by easily a dozen other students in pajamas and with bed head, equally as excited as Ruthie to catch something, whatever it was, in the act.
We moved as a pack toward the West Wing until we opened the fire door and saw Brigid outside room 103, drumming her fists on the metal door like a toddler in a time-out. “Open up! Open up now!” she repeated, her high-pitched voice voiding some of the innate intimidation of an RA banging on your door after midnight. So did her pink smiley face slippers and the white robe over her shoulders with Ritz-Carlton Georgetown embroidered on the chest.
If Brigid noticed her audience, she didn’t care because she continued banging on the door until it was opened so quickly by Lucy McCarthy that Lucy almost got two fists straight to the face. One specifically to the perfect button nose that Ruthie was convinced Lucy received as a gift for her sixteenth birthday.
“What’s going on?” Lucy said, standing in the center of the open door, her arms folded against her chest. She was wearing glasses and a matching light blue pajama set that made her seem old.
Brigid stepped back, cleared her throat. “I heard noises,” she said. “A lot of them.”
Lucy shrugged. “Okay...”
“Where’s Isabelle?” Brigid asked, referring to Lucy’s roommate, a forty-violation demagogue.
“I’m right here.” Isabelle, in a knee-length dress reminiscent of ones my mother wore, appeared behind Lucy, all the edge in her voice of an angry teenager.
From the very corner of the hallway, I could tell they looked disheveled, but not just-out-of-bed disheveled, like the rest of us were. It seemed fake.
The three of them stared at each other like bulls, each waiting for the opportune time to attack. That’s when the microwave went off deep in their room with a cavernous ding that seemed to ping-pong through the doorway and around the entire hallway in slow motion. There was a moment of silence, a moment of thinking perhaps Brigid hadn’t heard it, maybe we’d all imagined it, maybe it hadn’t happened. But then, quickly, Brigid burst through the door, pushing past Lucy and Isabelle, the lights inside blinked on, and we all inched farther into the hallway to get a better view. Inside, standing with their backs against the wall like cornered deer, were two junior boys wearing lumberjack Halloween costumes.
“What’s going on?” I heard a whisper.
When I looked beside me, Catherine and Annie had joined the crowd, their hair a perfected fake bed head (something they should teach to the rest of us).
“They were coming back from the post–Hell House party,” Ruthie said.
Catherine giggled. “Sucks to be stupid,” she whispered, before offering me a wink and turning back toward her room, Annie following silently behind her. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to burst out laughing. Because the four of us had done much worse than these people that night. And we weren’t even close to getting caught.
As soon as Brigid registered we were there, she shooed us away, telling us to get to bed or else we’d all be written up for whatever Lucy and Isabelle were getting. She did not need to say anything more.
During our next Violation Rotation, Ruthie and I saved the West Wing for last, like the most favorite part of a meal you want to cherish on your tongue. When we finally stopped outside 103, there were two postcards taped to the door frame and I could feel Ruthie’s excitement as she bounced down the hall, clawing at them until she had them both in her hands.
One-hundred-and-sixty points. Ruthie nearly fell to the floor.
“This could have been us,” I said. Just the thought of it made me throw up a little in my mouth.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “We’re not stupid.”
Two weeks later Lucy and Isabelle were expelled and everyone in our entire dorm woke up to one-point violations on our boards. They said it was for association, whatever that means, but I took it as yet another warning. Your actions are important, but so are the actions of everyone around you. If your community messes up, everyone pays.
We’ve started our mornings praying for them ever since.
“Now bow your heads and close your eyes,” Brigid reminded us, still pacing the hallway in front of us. “Let us say the Lord’s Prayer for our friends and their sins...”
Everyone began whispering the Our Father, to themselves or to God or to both, the accumulated hush sounding like a waterfall.
For the past week I’d been tacking on an extra Our Father to the end of our session especially for Ruthie and me. For us and our sins.
Because Ruthie and I had acquired a lot of sins.
We had slipped right into our foresty friend group as if we were supposed to be there all along. If you saw the seven of us—in the dining hall, walking to class, sneaking drinks and smokes in the forest—you’d never know Ruthie and I were late additions. We blended right in.
Catherine was right. That was the key to not getting caught. If you play the game—study your lines, look the part—they have no reason not to trust you.
Ruthie and I stopped wearing makeup. We stopped straightening our hair and wearing jewelry, except for my mother’s necklace, which we all agreed helped sell our new personalities. I stopped borrowing her clothes—though they were the only ones that fit me at this point—and we both started digging through my closet every morning while we were getting ready for the day. Long skirts, tights, sweaters—modest options that took the Covenant Code’s dress code five times too seriously.
We almost exclusively ate egg whites and salads with grilled chicken so our numbers on the scale during our weekly weigh-ins stayed the same, even as we drank our weight in Bud Light and marshmallow-flavored Smirnoff a few days a week. When Ruthie and I got back from a jog together to check on our stash in the woods, Brigid greeted us in the lobby with such a massive smile on her face—“You guys work out together, too! You’re just a dream roommate example!”—that we started doing it every day. Not to the woods, but around campus and through town. As we started hanging out with the group more often, these runs became my favorite part of the day—unadulterated Ruthie and me time. No distractions. No other people. Just us.
We were never late for curfew—or so Brigid thought. We never missed a convocation. We became the students that Covenant University puts on the cover of their brochures, the photos that they handed out to parents and perspective students. We were thin, put-together, happy, God-fearing freshmen. The epitome of the perfect student.
If you want to break their rules, you have to do it from the inside; you have to become one of them.
Friday and Saturday nights were our favorite nights to hang out in the woods, when curfew was later and we didn’t need to worry about showing up to class with a hangover. Ruthie loved the drinking and the secrets; I cherished our time after: lying in my bed, going over every single thing that happened the night before. The instant replay of every conversation, every look, every drink. The laughter. The fun.
The whole thing was made tremendously easier after daylight savings time. There’s a lot of drinking you can do before curfew when the darkness overcomes campus at 4:00 p.m. It got colder, sure, but that only made us more innovative—bringing blankets from our dorm to warm the forest floor; wearing layers like we were going on a skiing expedition. Occasionally we’d sprint to the edge of the forest and back, hold little races with each other to get our blood circulating, to feel the bitter air biting our lungs, the warm sweat snaking down our frosty backs. I always won.
Andrew even “borrowed” a few Styrofoam coolers from his job in the athletics building and spray-painted them black so we could keep them hidden against the stone wall at our spot. Inside, we filled them with Covenant green gloves and hats and blankets. And alcohol.
If someone found the coolers, they’d never know who they belonged to. It was perfect.
Catherine was the one who procured the drinks. Every week her older brother made a trip to the liquor store for himself and his friends who were over twenty-one and lived off campus, a much tougher place for Covenant to police. Catherine would put in an order with him and, once he’d bought it, he’d wait in his parked car on the other side of the wall until Catherine would get onto someone’s shoulders and pop her head over the stones. He would pass the box of beer or handle of vodka or whatever we wanted that week to her, then he’d drive off like nothing happened. I’d never watched it happen, but the thought of it made me laugh. I imagined it looked like someone trying to sneak contraband into a prison.
Ruthie and I had done it. We were having experiences. And we weren’t getting caught.
On top of that, no one was dying. None of us dropped dead after taking a sip of vodka. None of us got so high we fell to the floor foaming at the mouth. None of us experienced anything that I’d been told I would my entire childhood. Life went on as usual. But it was way more fun.
As the weeks went on, Timothy and I started getting closer. He was a freshman, too, but he acted much older—he was generally calm and unconcerned, like he was so confident in his decisions he never needed to second-guess anything. He was studying criminal justice—a major you’d think only the RAs and narcs on campus would lean into. Brigid was being primely trained for the job.
I was ever impressed by him and the more I watched him move and listened to him talk, the less my mind focused on what he was doing and saying and the more I thought about what it would be like to be with him.
While he stood in front of the group, acting out a scene from a movie called My Cousin Vinny that I’d never watched, I thought about eating pizza with him on a date, laughing at a joke he made about one of his professors. While he pulled my hood playfully over my head and squeezed my shoulders after I said I was cold enough to go home, I imagined going to the homecoming dance with him, then sneaking out here and dancing together, our bodies touching in ways they couldn’t in the Covenant ballroom.
While he sat next to me and our knees grazed as he reached to the cooler to get me another drink, I thought about him in my bed, on top of me, asking me if I was sure I wanted to do this, he’d be gentle, he’d go slow.
I started blushing when I was with him, not because of anything he’d done in real life, but because of the things I’d imagined we’d done together. Things that sent a flash of heat to my cheeks, my chest, in between my legs. An entire life I created in my head with a boy I knew little more about than that he liked to snack on crunchy pickles and, like Ruthie, his parents had sent him to Covenant as penance.
“Tim definitely likes you,” Ruthie confirmed one night after she caught me blushing about him. “What’s the most you’ve done...with a boy,” she asked.
I thought about what I wanted to admit. I didn’t keep secrets from Ruthie, but the story of my first kiss felt like something to strategically leave out. Though was saying I’d done nothing even worse?
“What have you done?” I shrugged and turned the question back on her.
I was surprised it took us this long to talk about it. Ruthie told stories—kissing her older brother’s friends, skinny-dipping in Lake Erie, making out with a friend named John in her parents’ basement. Her retellings seemed anecdotal—lacking substance or feeling or any kind of reflection. But I’d never asked her for more details because I didn’t want her to ask me for any. Before reading Cosmo and Seventeen, I had gone my entire life without saying the word sex out loud. It was never talked about. And never talking about something—that kind of extreme restriction—just makes you want to binge once you finally have it.
Maybe that’s why Ruthie was so obsessed with losing her virginity. Maybe she was less experienced than she made it seem.
“Just hookups,” she finally answered, vague. I got the sense she wanted to avoid the question as much as I did. “I’ve told you about them. First base, second base. A little third. But that was high school. College is more fun.” A smile started creeping up her face, like she was trying to hide it. “You should get Tim away from the group. Go for a walk with him or something. See what happens.” She paused, then added, “I’m one night away from a home run. Maybe you’ll catch up to me.”
I didn’t know what qualified for each base in her metaphor, but I got the general idea, and I knew I was probably only on first. But I also knew what a home run was. If that’s what she wanted, that’s what I wanted, too.
Like a small battalion, we changed our spot in the forest every few days, dragging the cooler and drinks deeper into the trees, or farther down the stone wall. Though we were sure we’d never be discovered, we took all the necessary precautions regardless—loosening up any packed dirt formed from sitting for too long, covering our tracks. If we were going to be found out, it wasn’t going to be because we were stupid.
When it was Timothy’s turn to find us a new spot, I offered to go with him. It was getting colder and darker, and the combined directional knowledge of two people gave us a better chance at remembering where we put everything, so we didn’t have another mishap like last week. Ruthie had been in charge and immediately forgot where she set things up after she exited the forest. It took us forty-five minutes to figure it out.
“You’ve really gotten the hang of the misdemeanor life,” Timothy said as we trudged through the trees, a heavy cooler balancing over his left shoulder like a boom box in the movies. I had two handles of Smirnoff clanking in my backpack like a chorus.
“And you’ve gotten the hang of Covenant campus life,” I responded, indicating his church-issued khakis.
He shrugged. “They’re not as bad as they look.”
“Well, they don’t look great,” I joked, completely lying and barely hiding it. At that point he could be wearing full pastor robes and I’d still be picturing him naked any chance I got.
“So you grew up in this world?” he asked. “What was that like?”
I could imagine the confusion and judgment on his face as I told him about my parents: my mother, the ever-obeying wife; and my father, the domineering wannabe preacher. No one ever understands, especially not someone who grew up more closely tied to society. In the same way I don’t understand how Ruthie grew up having so much freedom.
“It was fine,” I said. “Like this but with worse punishments.”
He nodded and could probably tell by my tone that I didn’t want to discuss it more. “Do you wish it had been different?”
I used to. I used to spend hours at night flipping through those magazines wishing I lived in the same world as those women, that I had the same knowledge and resources. That I had different parents and lived in New York City and had friends I met in school. And once my eyes got heavy and I slipped the magazine back under my mattress, I’d say a little prayer that maybe when I woke up, I could be in a different bed, in a different home, in a different life. But it never happened. So I had to find another way out.
“Sometimes,” I said, uninterested in getting into the details; in telling him yes, I’d change everything about my childhood if I could. But no one wants to hear that. “Do you?” I could sense him slowing down so I met his pace, too. “Do you ever regret the stuff you did that got you here?”
He thought about it for a long time. “I don’t have regrets,” he said finally, something I recognized even at the time as a lofty thing for an eighteen-year-old to announce. “If it was the right thing to do in the moment, it was the right thing. So you take that in stride and move on.”
This place was all about regrets—wielding them and anticipating them. You’ll regret not saving yourself for your husband, you’ll regret having a drink, you’ll regret not obeying your parents and elders. You’ll regret eating that pizza, that ice cream cone, that bowl of cereal.
But do you really? I haven’t so far. I’ve enjoyed it all.
Maybe I don’t have regrets either.
Timothy stopped walking and the cooler dropped with an echoey thud to the hard forest floor. “This is perfect,” he said as we stood in a clearing small enough to fit only our blanket, surrounded on two sides by a thick brush.
He bent down and fluffed the branches, lifting one and scooting the cooler underneath until it disappeared.
When he stood up, he was next to me, our faces only a few inches away. When he leaned toward me, I did the same. When he kissed me, I was grateful I’d had some practice. When he pushed me back against a tree, my lips occupied, my mind racing, my back curdling in pain, I realized I liked it.
“I don’t regret that either,” he said a moment after he pulled away, half his mouth curled up in a satisfied smile. Before I could tell him I agreed, he was looking around, memorizing this spot so that he could lead everyone back to it later that night.
Then, just to be safe, he pulled a pocketknife from his pants, and carved a cross at eye level in the tree next to the cooler. It’s never helped us find our spots—tree carvings blend into the darkness—but it’s a fun tradition anyway.
And in a place like this, God forbid you break a long-held tradition.