One-Point Violations** (may include a $15 fine):
Late to convocation (1 additional point for each additional 10 minutes late)
Late for curfew (5 additional points for each additional 30 minutes late)
**Any further 1-point violations (no fine) are up to the sole discretion of the Resident Assistant, including but not limited to: untoward behavior, untoward language, untoward association.
The hallways of Willits Hall—and all the other dorms, I assumed—were as bleak as our bedrooms. Cinder block walls painted a harsh light yellow. Gray carpets worn so thin you could see where the stitch met the backing. A cross loomed above each and every heavy metal door. It felt like ghosts lived here. Not that I believed in ghosts. But if I did, this is definitely where they’d haunt.
The only thing that attempted to offset the general air of dreariness of the dorms were the dry-erase boards. Two days after we moved in, Brigid knocked on our door, offering an overzealous smile and a fistful of colorful markers, and asked us to pick one that represented our best self, whatever that meant.
Ruthie grabbed green and I chose pink, to which Brigid proudly responded, “Perfect complementary colors, great job, ladies!” From the floor, she lifted a recently bleached dry-erase board, a piece of thin black tape sectioning it off into four quadrants. On the top and bottom right, she wrote Ruthie’s name, and on the top and bottom left, mine.
“What are these for?” Ruthie asked.
“They’re our logs,” Brigid said. She held the finished board up to the wall beside our door and hung it on a protruding nail I hadn’t realized was there. “Your violation log and your scale log. Just keeps everyone on the same page. God loves transparency!”
“That’s what they say,” Ruthie muttered.
Brigid wrote 0 in the top two boxes underneath our names, then motioned for us to follow. All the other girls from our wing were standing outside their doors, too, watching Brigid as she moved toward the end of the hallway, where a strange machine was waiting. I’d seen something like it before in the women’s bathroom of the church. A small pedestal to stand on, a tall metal rod, a few knobs at the top I would move back and forth while I waited for my mother to finish peeing.
Everyone looked at one another, equally confused, and I couldn’t tell if they also didn’t know what the machine was for, or if they knew but didn’t understand why it was there.
Brigid cleared her throat. “Covenant University focuses on mind—giving you the best liberal arts education; soul—bringing you closer to God and all that is true and good; and, equally as important, body. 1 Corinthians says, ‘Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God...so glorify God in your body.’” She paused for a moment, to make sure we were understanding her, taking it all in. “Every week, we’ll meet here as a group and we’ll check in. We’ll check in with your minds to make sure everyone’s classes are going well; with your souls, that you are obeying and understanding the rules that help us live good Christian lives; and with your bodies, to make sure you are glorifying God and making all your diet and fitness choices through Him, with Him, and in Him.”
She snapped the cap off the pen in her hand and looked at us, her smile again threatening to permanently get stuck that way. She pointed the pen toward the machine. A scale, I realized. “Line up, ladies.” She giggled. “This will be so fun!”
When we were finished and everyone trudged back to their rooms, the boards had been updated.
0 and 128 for Ruthie. Next to Weekly Goal, Brigid simply put a bubbly smiley face.
0 and 152 for me. In my Weekly Goal, Brigid wrote 5!!! (the exclamation points, hers) and added a You Got This sticker.
The system of violations was, I found, the most difficult thing to learn at Covenant. While the rules of the student handbook seemed firm and finite—spelled out in the Covenant Code in detail so acute you’d understand what you were doing wrong and the punishment you’d receive in the same bullet point—the violations were seemingly as arbitrarily created and enforced as my parents’ rules at home. Terrifying at first, but once you understand how to outsmart them you realize how little effort it took in the first place.
We had a lot of rules growing up, and I spent a long time not questioning any of them. Mostly because they were all formed out of the three basic principles—poverty, chastity, obedience—that I had been taught since the day I was born. I didn’t know any better or any other way. So I did what my parents told me to do.
Throughout the years, my parents also formed the habit of publicizing their punishments. A slap across William’s face for talking back. A night without dinner for Elin after staying out too late. Two days behind a locked bedroom door for Adam after being caught with a playing card that had a naked woman on it. The punishments only got worse as my brothers got larger, stronger, smarter.
But I grew up thinking I knew everything. I studied—hard. I followed every single rule. I watched my brothers carefully and learned how to not do what they did. I knew how to mow the grass and clean the troughs, and also how to tend to the sourdough starter and tell if a squash in the garden is ripe enough to pick. I knew the Bible back and forth, and sometimes after dinner my father would perch me on a chair and question me in front of my brothers, like I was the biblical encyclopedia he always wanted. When I was little, I thought I knew everything.
I didn’t realize my family was different from others until I was eleven. It was the first time I was allowed off the farm besides to go to church: to accompany my mother to the grocery store. She had hurt her back and right shoulder in a fight with my father and couldn’t even open the oven herself. There was no chance she could push a cart or pull bags of rice from the shelf without making a scene. Before we left, my father examined my clothes—loose hand-me-down corduroy pants held at my waist with some thick leftover rope; a long-sleeved white shirt squished beneath a too-small navy sweater. I wasn’t used to wearing shoes. I was uncomfortable, too hot and too cold at the same time, and everything felt itchy against my skin, like there were invisible bugs all over my body. I couldn’t stop fidgeting. But I didn’t care. I was going somewhere.
At the grocery store, my mother told me to keep my head down and my mouth shut, which was impossibly difficult to do in a new place, seeing new things for the first time. I snuck a few glances here and there—a woman in tight blue pants (jeans, I later learned) and a red sweater standing in line with a cardboard box called Bud Light; a girl my age with short yellow hair asking her mother for a book of stickers: “If you get me this, then I’ll have something to do at Kevin’s soccer game and I won’t complain, not even once”—but it wasn’t until we were at the checkout counter, transferring our haul from the wiry cart onto the moldy black conveyor belt when my mother realized she’d forgotten pinto beans.
She looked up and down the grocery store, then let out a deep sigh. “Stay with the cart,” she told me. “Don’t move.”
When I looked up—my mother now gone—a magazine was an inch away from my face. Cosmopolitan. Staring back at me was a brunette in a blue polka-dot bra and underwear, her curly hair blowing in the wind, her eyes huge and outlined in black-and-blue makeup. Her belly button was long, unlike mine, which squinted when I sat down.
This woman did not look like me or my mother. None of the women on the covers did. Their big eyes, long torsos, wind-swept hair. There were no lines around their eyes. No red acne scars on their chins. No itchy fabric hanging over their makeshift belts. Is this what beautiful was supposed to look like? And, if so...how?
I was mesmerized. I couldn’t believe real women looked like that. Maybe one day I could look like that. That’s when I saw the headline tucked under my thumb: Your Period: All the Questions You’re Too Afraid to Ask was bolded on a pink background.
It may as well have been written specifically for me. I was spotting at the time, but I didn’t know it. I thought I was dying. I thought I was slowly bleeding out like Jesus on the cross. It was my penance for something. Or maybe I was eliminating the sins of the world one blood-coated pair of underwear at a time.
It wasn’t until I saw that headline that I realized I had my period, a word I only recognized because I heard Lucy Gibbons whisper it to her mother after she attended a church session called “The Role of a Woman” that you were allowed to attend when you turned thirteen, apparently the acceptable age to start menstruating in the eyes of the church.
In that moment, I devoured every other headline I could see. White Lies Every Guy Tells Their Girl. Thirty Days until Your Best Abs Ever. Deep Sex: What Is Vaginismus and What Our Experts Recommend. New Facts about Your Va-Jeen! Ten Workouts to Burn Off That Donut—FAST! The Hottest Hair Trends This Summer. Should the Drinking Age Be Eighteen?
There was so much I didn’t know. So many questions I didn’t understand and answers I never could have come up with. It was then that I realized how small my world was. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d slipped the magazine into the waist of my pants, pulling my shirt loose over it. Then I grabbed another and did the same. I loosened the belt a little bit, found a third, and stuffed it into my pants just seconds before my mother came back, rushing to the conveyer belt to continue with the groceries.
Accompanying my mother to the grocery store became my newest chore, and shoplifting magazines my new favorite hobby. Cosmopolitan. Seventeen. Teen Vogue. Glamour. Self. Lucky. InStyle. People. One by one, each magazine made its way into my pants, then under my mattress until I knew I had a moment to myself; until I could open its pages in the dark and read it cover to cover with more vigor than I’d ever read the Bible.
I treated the magazines like another homeschool course, one I could only teach myself. It was everything I had been missing—opening up my world to things like sex and style and exercise, to trends and boys and celebrities; things my parents never would have taught me. It’s also where I learned about college. Not from Cosmopolitan—though the idea did first show up there, in a column about “how to protect yourself from party rape and the freshman fifteen”—but in a local newspaper tucked within the magazine’s glossy pages. In my haste to not get caught, I didn’t notice until I got home that I had accidentally grabbed The Weekly Woodchucker along with my magazines. Right before I threw it out, I noticed an advertisement on the back: Apply To Covenant—Where Christian Leaders Are Made.
When I told my parents I wanted to go to college, they reacted as I imagined they would, by detailing all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. Massive debt, authoritarian schedules, wavering morals. My mother lingered on that last point, looking at me with her gray braided head cocked to the right, her fiery brown eyes thin and leery. I was their only daughter and that made my parents suspicious of everything I did. My motivation for traditional schooling was no exception.
I filled out the application. I worked with my homeschool curriculum office to submit my transcript. I applied for FASFA and scholarships. And when the oversized envelope from Covenant University appeared in my PO Box, like water in the desert, I convinced them I needed to go by showcasing the honest, decent, Christian education I could get. A curriculum formed by people who shared their beliefs and who, like my parents, strived to create the next generation of good Christians.
At least, that’s what I told them.
Because I knew Covenant could do that. I knew Covenant required weekly convocation. I knew Covenant had a code of conduct more complex than the bridges and tunnels in New York City. I knew Covenant would keep my parents’ cross snug around my neck. If I let it.
But I also knew people like the ones in these magazines existed there. In-betweeners.
People like Ruthie.
Ruthie and her family went to church—an unofficial requirement for admission at Covenant—but she didn’t pray. There’s a difference. She didn’t start each day on her knees thanking God for waking her up, and each night asking him to do the same tomorrow. She never spent one Saturday a month with her church’s teen group, standing outside the fancy grocery store in town, asking people, “What’s your relationship with Jesus Christ?” only to be hurriedly waved away or smiled at with pity.
Ruthie was everything these magazines told me I needed to be. And now Ruthie was my roommate and friend, my ticket to learning how to live in the real world. How to get out and never go back.
For the first month on campus, I followed Ruthie around like a shadow. She was tan from her summer working as a lifeguard and the boys seemed to like that based on how many of them stared at her while we walked from the dining hall’s entrance to our table, so I snuck to the CVS in town and started slathering myself in Jergens Natural Glow after every shower until my sheets were stained brown and our room perpetually smelled like sunscreen. Ruthie used the school’s “look good for God” mantra as an excuse to never leave the dorm without mascara and blush, so I never left the dorm without mascara and blush. Ruthie ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich and chocolate Froyo for dinner, I ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich and chocolate Froyo for dinner.
Ruthie carried a camera around with her everywhere, snapping photos of ivy spiraling up the side of our dorm, of students piling into the dining hall, of me laughing at something she’d said. Then she’d print them in the library and hang them one by one on the cement walls of our room.
“Let me take a picture of you,” I said once at dinner.
She shook her head and pulled the camera back. “A true artist is behind the camera, not in front of it,” she said. I didn’t think she was giving herself enough credit. She was a much prettier subject than anything she took pictures of.
By the end of the month, I’d lost a disappointing one pound, but I was more like Ruthie by the day and had memorized all of her stories the same way I did with the magazines. Stories of sneaking out of her second-floor window in high school to go to parties in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven; of sipping six-dollar vodka mixed with pomegranate-flavored Crystal Light hidden in Poland Spring water bottles; of kissing her older brother’s friends and almost getting fingered in the back seat of a light gray Toyota. She was worldly and beautiful—the epitome of the person I wanted to become. As long as Ruthie was friends with me, I would know everything.
Once we realized the purpose of the white boards next to everyone’s door, Ruthie and I made a habit of going on what we called Violation Rotations. After dinner but before curfew, we’d walk up and down the halls of Willits, and Ruthie would count all the newest violations.
“Fresh meat,” Ruthie said as she beelined toward the postcard taped to 609’s door, the Dean’s Office coat of arms branded to the top. In the body of the note, meant to be kept “for your records” was a handwritten violation, detailing what you did, the date you were caught, and how many points you have received. Brigid’s bubbly cursive made the whole thing worse, like she was mocking you while punishing you. In the bottom right-hand corner was a small box where your violation total was scribbled in red. It never refreshed. It carried over until graduation. If you made it that far.
“Her second time late for curfew this week,” Ruthie said, her eyes flickering with suspicion as she put the postcard back. “What are you doing out so late, missy?” she asked more to herself than to me.
While Ruthie peeked at the points—counted what Margaret in 515 got for watching Mean Girls in her room, and what Rachel in 102 received for being tardy for convocation—I stared at the other numbers. The log of our weigh-ins. Most girls were closer to me than to Ruthie, and Ruthie seemed to be the only one receiving affirmations instead of goalposts each week.
I can do better, I thought. I can be like Ruthie.
“I still can’t believe all of this is just on the wall for everyone to see,” Ruthie said outside 805, Christina and Jane, who got caught wearing inappropriately tight and short outfits last night. “Where were you guys headed?” she asked under her breath again.
“It’s public to be a warning,” I said, focusing not on the violation but on Christina’s plus-one-pound change this week. Don’t do what she did. Don’t let everyone know you’re failing.
“I think...” Ruthie began, flipping over their postcard again, showing me the violation, bringing my focus out of my own head. “If you pay enough attention,” she continued, “it’s less of a warning and more of a guide on how to not get caught.”
Ruthie collected and hoarded this information, and it wasn’t until then that I knew why. She was scouting—who was being careless, who was fearless, who was in the pocket of Brigid and the RAs, who was worth looking into a little further. She was shadowing others in the way I was shadowing her.
I found it ironic that we called them points, like in a game. One big, manipulative game. Only here, the more points you have, the more you stand to lose. Brigid may have run Willits Hall like a better-fed and better-dressed women’s prison, but she was just following the guidelines of the entire school. Where one is presumed guilty (and untoward) until proven innocent. Or until graduation. Because, we’d later learn, it was impossible for women to prove any kind of innocence.
Later that night we sat in our beds, using our phones as flashlights after curfew. We looked like kids trying to be spooky, underlighting our faces, creating unnatural shadows.
“If we’re going to party at this school, we’re going to do it right,” Ruthie mouthed into the light. We learned early on, during one of our very first Violation Rotations, that if Brigid heard even a peep coming from your room after lights-out—a light switch flicking, a page turning, a bottle of water being squeezed—you’d wake up to a violation on your door the next morning. So we became masters at lipreading. We honed our craft until it became second nature. Until we’d be sitting at dinner, talking for half an hour before realizing we’d only been moving our lips. Our first loophole of many.
“Kids are getting in trouble for it,” she continued. “So it exists. We just need to figure out how to get invited...”
Ruthie had been determined since the day we met to go to a party. I figured maybe it was a phase; maybe if I kept her entertained enough, if I filled our evenings with movies and games, she’d realize there are other things to do here that don’t involve getting enough violations that could send me home. I needed to make it the full four years, so I’d never have to go back. I didn’t have other options like Ruthie.
“That’s all we need. An invite or a hint or something—”
“That’s all you need,” I interrupted. Ruthie looked up, squinting through the flashlight. “I—I don’t know, Ruthie. I can’t get caught at a party,” I said. “If I get sent home, that’s it for me. I’m done. I’ll never get out.”
“We’re not going to get caught!”
“You don’t know that. You just said other people have been. I don’t know if that’s worth it to me—”
“I didn’t come to college to sit in my dorm and play cards or whatever every night. That’s not the college experience. The whole point is to do things—to drink and dance and date. To...to have sex,” she said, out loud.
Our heads bolted toward the door. I wasn’t sure what the violation was for talking about sex, but having premarital sex was impossible to come back from—in every way, I guess. I wasn’t afraid of sex because of all the reasons I was told to be—that I would descend straight to the fiery gates, that I’d get an STD and then get sent straight to the fiery gates, that I’d get an STD and pregnant and it would hurt and I’d bleed and no one would want to marry my impure body and then get sent to the fiery gates.
I was afraid of sex because of the violations.
Big things like that are often covered by multiple violations and you better believe they give you all of them. Premarital sex? Well, you were inappropriately dressed (five points) + you entered, or allowed someone to enter, the residence of a person of the opposite sex (ten points) + you deceived (ten points) + you participated in inappropriate contact with the opposite sex (twenty points) + you created a disruption to the community (twenty points). They’ll also probably throw in a couple bonus violations like late for curfew (one point), falsification of information (twenty points), failure to identify oneself (twenty points). And next thing you know, you’re expelled, paying the school almost a thousand dollars in violation fines, and living on the farm with your parents going on chaperoned dates with an older man they’ve arranged for you to marry in exchange for a few farm animals.
“Why did you come here?” I finally asked, after a few seconds of silence. “Why didn’t you go to a normal school?”
Ruthie sat up straighter, her head resting on the wall behind her. “My stepdad thinks I’m a fuckup,” she said. “He’s from all this—” she waved her arms around “—and he thought it would be good for me. Some discipline or whatever.” She got quiet and looked down at her hands, nails bitten down to their core. “I’m not a fuckup. I’m just not like his other kids...”
Ruthie didn’t talk about her home life much, which I appreciated because I didn’t want to talk about mine. Everything I could possibly say about my parents or siblings would only add to the arrow over my head—the loud, neon, pulsing arrow that told everyone around me that I was different, that I wasn’t like them. But I guess Ruthie had a little arrow over her head, too.
She rubbed her eyes before she looked up, a redness forming on her cheeks. “We need to experience things, Elizabeth. You wanted so badly to get out, well, you’re out. If you don’t do anything with it, then what’s the point?”
She wasn’t wrong. I also came to college to do all those things. To put all my magazine knowledge to the test. But a party still scared me. It felt like another easy way to get one hundred points and expelled—how could a party possibly be planned on campus? It seemed like a ticking time bomb. A risk I didn’t want to take just yet. We had four years. There was no need to rush it.
Right?
After my first weigh-in, I started jogging. Well, it was more like walking with an occasional gallop if no one was looking. I’d never exercised before. My father didn’t think it was something a woman should do. Working out meant you wanted your body to look a certain way and, by wanting your body to look a certain way, that meant you wanted people to look at your body in the first place. But they had an entirely different approach at Covenant.
The weight was not coming off fast, no more than one pound a week, if I was lucky, but it was happening slowly. The weekly weigh-ins, at first embarrassing and awkward, full of shame and void of eye contact, had morphed into something more competitive. Girls pretending to be encouraging and helpful, smiling as you walked the plank to the scale. But you were only praised when you lost the most of the hall that week. And everyone salivated for those claps.
A bigger motivator for me was that Ruthie’s clothes started fitting me better. The halo of fat around my belly that stuck out above her jeans was slowly shrinking, which opened up her entire closet to me. I hadn’t touched my old khakis in weeks.
During one of my “jogs,” I stopped behind the football stadium, on the edge of the wooded area, at the top of a long and shallow staircase flanked by overgrown weeds and the flowers you blow and make a wish on. I bent over and tried to catch my breath, my hands desperately clutching my knees. It was pathetic how little I could go before feeling like my chest was closing in on me. I hated every second of it.
“Um, hi—” a deep voice echoed in the trees, forcing from me a scream so shrill I wasn’t sure it had actually come out of my mouth.
I spun around, out of breath and shaking, as a man appeared from behind a thick tree that was white and peeling and leafless. His eyes were wide and his hands up—I’m innocent. He was here first, I guess.
He was tall and lanky, his saggy brown hair highlighting his long face and drooping features, like gravity had an extra-hard hold on him. He was wearing jeans and a plaid button-down and as sure as I was that I’d never seen him before, he looked familiar in that way everyone on campus could—like we’d probably passed each other on the grounds one hundred times without noticing.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. I didn’t respond. I tried to slow my breathing, not make it known how scared I was, but the air was so cold going into my nose and down to my lungs that it made me cough. He backed up a few steps. “There’s never anyone back here, so we, um...” He trailed off as four people appeared behind him, static, like they weren’t sure they could trust me. I didn’t recognize the two guys—dressed in jeans and button-downs just like every other man in this school. But the girls I knew. I’d seen them before, but I didn’t know where. Or why.
From behind his back, the guy closest to me pulled a lit cigarette. “We come here to smoke,” he said, sticking it between his lips, breathing in deeply, waiting a moment before the smoke started waterfalling from his mouth, dense and white. The others stepped two feet closer to me, their eyes squinting, skeptical, like if I turned to run, they’d attack and pin me to the ground until I promised to keep my mouth shut.
He reached his hand toward me, the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “You want some?”
I’d never smoked in my life—I was never offered the opportunity, and then vowed I would never after Seventeen magazine partnered with the American Cancer Society to sell Kiss Me, I Don’t Smoke T-shirts. I’d never seen a cigarette until I saw a pile of orange butts in the dirt next to the sugarhouse. I picked one up, felt the damp paper shred in my fingers, then dropped it when William appeared behind me and said, “Tell and you’re dead,” in a kind of whisper that gave me chills even thinking about it ten years later.
But this cigarette didn’t smell the way my brother smelled that day, his breath burning against my ear with the threat. This smelled like skunk, familiar but I couldn’t place why.
I could feel them all looking at me and I knew my decision would determine how they viewed me forever. It wasn’t so much peer pressure as it was opportunity. I’d never been given the opportunity to smoke, but God did I want to try. They’d clearly been doing this here for months and, look at them, still alive, no Devil in sight.
I stepped forward and took it in my fingers, suddenly remembering why the skunky smell was so familiar—it wasn’t a cigarette, it was weed. Surprisingly, that made me want to try it more.
He put the joint between my lips and held it there as I took a deep breath, quickly flipping through the Rolodex of magazine articles in my brain until I found the one I was looking for: a letter to the editor in Cosmo. Take a deep breath, let the smoke seep into your lungs and your esophagus. Do not swallow. Then let it out slowly to avoid coughing.
When I finished, he nodded, one side of his mouth lifted into an impressed smile, as he took the joint back and put it in his mouth. I liked the idea that we both tasted the same thing, our lips against the same paper. It was the second closest thing to sex I’d ever done.
The whole group of them seemed to relax, but that was easy to do as the bank of knowledge just became equal; I had something on them, but they had something on me now. We were partners in crime.
“I should get back to it,” I said, motioning up the hill.
“We come here every once in a while,” one of the girls in the back said. There was something about her hair—the dark straight bob—that I couldn’t quite get out of my head. “If you’re ever around and want to join us again...”
“Don’t tell anyone,” the other girl said, backing away. “If you tell, we tell.”
I watched them disappear into the forest, then stared at the trees for a while after they were gone. I was waiting to be punished. To be struck by lightning or visited by the Devil or shamed by Jesus. Maybe I was just adding to the list of reasons Saint Peter will reject me at the pearly gates, but for now, on Earth, I was starting to think nothing was quite as bad as I’d been taught.
Then I threw up right there on my own shoes.
When I got back to Willits, I was rejuvenated. Maybe it was the excitement of getting away with something, maybe it was the weed, maybe I was getting better at running. Either way, when I sprung our door open, ready to tell Ruthie all about it, I was shocked to see our room was empty.
I checked my cell phone, which I’d left charging on my desk while I worked out, and saw a text from Ruthie: grabbed dinner with some kids from class. see you later.
My stomach fell. We always ate dinner together. It felt like I messed up. Like this simple text might be the start to it all. Like I might be losing her.
That night, I was lying in bed in the dark. It was ten minutes to curfew but Ruthie wasn’t back yet and I had started planning for what I would do—how I would prove myself by covering for her. I could say she’s in the bathroom. That she’s not feeling well and needed some fresh air. I could bat my eyes and smile and Brigid would believe me. As much as I didn’t want to be, I was just like her. I was very believable.
I rolled around when I heard keys jostling in our door, pretending I was asleep. With two minutes to spare, Ruthie walked in. She attempted to be quiet, to find her pajamas, her toothbrush, her glasses case, but she wasn’t. It bothered me at first—if I were really sleeping this would be very annoying—until I saw some movement out the window. I leaned in closer, tried to get my eyes to separate darkness from objects, until, somehow, I recognized it: the two girls from the forest, snaking between the trees. Camouflaged by the darkness, their limbs blended in with the trees, moving leafless, lifeless, with the light wind. If I didn’t recognize them, I’d assume I was dreaming. But there they were, heading away from the dorm, and disappearing into the night.
For the next few days, I listened to the campus gossip carefully, waiting to hear about two girls who were defending themselves to the Student Court of Appeals for sneaking out after curfew to drink and smoke and dance and have sex and do all the other things I realized I also went to college to experience. I did extra Violation Rotations, looking for something that would have exposed them. But there was nothing. They didn’t get caught.
So neither would we.
“I found our party group,” I finally told Ruthie as we were getting ready for bed one night. “We got that invite you wanted.”