Covenant University’s one-year reunion banners littered the town of Eden, Vermont, like clumps of trash on the beach. They were hanging on fences above overpasses next to homemade and faded Welcome Our Troops Home flags and padlocks that overzealous virgins carved their initials into.
The signs were dangling from light posts down Main Street, advertised on full pages of the local newspaper, and handed out as fucking coasters at the diner where I was sweating my ass off working, making sure some fat fuck with a motorcycle helmet got his coffee and feta egg scramble on time.
After Ruthie disappeared, I took most of her clothes, stuffing them into my plastic mattress cover to hide them from her mom and stepdad when they came to campus to collect her things. They were convinced she’d simply run away. She’s done it before and she’ll do it again, her stepdad kept saying, unsuccessfully assuaging her mother’s frustration. She’s desperate for attention, he told Brigid, who oversaw their move-out—shoulders back, stomach in, like a drill sergeant disappointed in her trainee’s inability to shut up and take it.
But Ruthie wasn’t coming back. I knew it. She would never leave me. She knew that if she went anywhere, I would go with her.
When I came back to campus after curfew alone, I tried to tell Brigid what happened—“Ruthie’s gone, we have to go get her. Can you drive?”—but I was promised a violation and a fine and then stuffed into my room to think about how Jesus would feel that I was out so late. As if I wasn’t already thinking about how Jesus would feel that I wasn’t a virgin anymore. This man needed to mind his own fucking business.
Then I tried to convince Dr. Theresa Bregg, the head of Covenant’s Office of Equity and Inclusion. Her windowless office was located in the basement of the Student Center, underneath the main dining hall so it smelled like oregano and burned cheese, and while she and I sat at a conference table discussing Ruthie, debris occasionally fell from the ceiling tiles, spraying us with powdery insulation every time a football student ran toward the pizza line upstairs.
I told her we went to a party. That Ruthie and I snuck out, drove to a mountain with a big red barn, drank radioactive pink alcohol, and that she followed a boy into the woods and never came out. I tried searching for her. I yelled her name until my throat ached and my toes were numb in the snow. I ran up and down the forest, trees grating against my body, puncturing holes in my jacket, scraping my face, until I wasn’t sure which way was out. Until I was so deep in the evergreens, I couldn’t see the moon. Until it was so dark, I wasn’t sure whether my eyes were open or closed.
When I found my way back to the barn, it could have been an hour later, I had no idea, everyone was inside, dancing to a Lady Gaga song I’d never heard before but would never be able to forget. All but two of the boys were there, talking to that dark-haired annoyed girl, drinking like nothing happened.
I stormed up to them and slapped the red cup from one of their pale hands. “Where are your friends?” I asked. “The ones who live here?”
The kid looked around at his friends, like I was joking, like he was waiting for them to start laughing so he could, too. But the laughter never came. They were all too shocked by the bloody scrapes on my face.
“Where’s Ruthie?” I asked. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said.
“Where are the other two?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” He laughed to his friends, uncomfortably, stiffly.
“She’s wasted,” the girl said to her friends. “That’s really embarrassing,” I heard her add as I walked away.
Dr. Bregg’s pen moved furiously over her notebook while I spoke, like she was writing down every single word I said, a record of the night, step-by-step, that we could use to call the police, to find Ruthie. To figure out what happened to her. To get her back.
When I was finished, explaining that I tried to talk to Brigid but was stonewalled, she capped her pen and sat up straight. She glanced down at her notebook, still cradled against her chest like a small child. Then she looked at me.
“You’re aware that parties go against the Covenant Code?” she asked.
I sat back in the chair and let out the kind of breath that makes you light-headed. Fuck.
“And you were drinking?” she continued. “How much did you have to drink?” She sighed, disappointed in our behavior. “This is a wily accusation, Elizabeth. That your roommate, who had also been drinking, is in danger. Do you think it’s possible she just went home? That she needed some time to think about the violations she’d committed? Drinking, premarital sex, being alone with a member of the opposite—”
“She didn’t go home. Her parents don’t know where she is,” I started to yell. “Something happened to her.”
Dr. Bregg put her notebook on the table and leaned over it, toward me. She knew exactly what to do to make me think she cared—get on my level, speak softly, calmly. If I didn’t hear what she was saying, by the looks of this meeting, I’d think it was going well.
“I understand you’re concerned for your friend. But I need you to understand that by filing this report, by getting the university involved, you could be found to have broken the Covenant Code yourself. We’ll have a proper trial, of course, like we do for every large-scale violation, but by making this report official...well, you remember what happened to Lucy and Isabella? They were in your dorm, right? And I believe you and your dormmates were also penalized for their transgressions?”
I might have nodded but I couldn’t tell. It was like my entire face was numbed by her unwarranted reaction.
She leaned just an inch closer. “If you’re found guilty, you could lose your scholarship or, more likely, be expelled. Ruthie as well. And obviously your parents would be notified of...everything.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I pictured my father, intercepting the letter from the school, then slapping my mother across the face with it until she was cowering on the floor, her nose bleeding down her apron. How dare you encourage this? he’d repeat over and over. How dare you encourage her?
I looked at Dr. Bregg, the way her eyebrows scrunched in the middle, as if she was genuinely concerned. As if she’d heard my every word.
When she finally leaned back and I could see the contents of her notebook, the only thing in it was a write-up of accrued violations, like an algebra problem showing all her work.
Two days later, I tried to convince Dean Gerwig. I ran to his office Wednesday morning, waiting outside the speckled glass doors for him to stroll in without a worry in the world at 10:15 a.m., a giant iced coffee in hand, telling someone via Bluetooth headphones that his assistant will send the papers over this afternoon, thank you for your donation, Doug.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
He towered over me, swishing his iced coffee around like it was part of a fucking symphony. “My roommate is missing,” I said. It had been seventy-two hours. She’d missed three days of classes, three days of homework, three days of curfews. She missed a convocation. She missed breakfasts and dinners. She was gone.
After waving off his assistant, and two other concerned office workers—he invited me to take a seat in his office, in one of the tall leather chairs opposite his gargantuan mahogany desk. The room was covered in floor-to-ceiling amber bookshelves, filled with leather-bound classics and an entire shelf dedicated to all three hundred translations of the Bible. As if this stupid man could speak anything other than English.
I explained to him exactly what I told Dr. Bregg. We snuck out. We went to a party. It was on a mountain. I don’t remember the address, but I’d memorized everything about it that night and on the drive home. I could take him there by memory. The windy street, the wooden sign hanging over the entrance to it, near where we parked our car. It was a big house with glass walls and a firepit. There was a lake, I think, I could hear water moving when I was deep in the woods, her name echoing off each tree as I said it over and over again. Behind the house was a big red barn. It was the only thing on the entire mountain.
He put his coffee down and leaned back into his chair, resting his hands behind his head like he was getting comfortable to watch a movie.
“I believe I know the house you’re talking about,” he said, calmly. “I’m friends of the family. Douglas Walker and I went to Yale together. That’s where his boys go. They’re good kids, the two of them. And I know for a fact that they were away on a family trip to Beaver Creek this week. They’re still there, in fact. I received this picture of them this morning.”
He pressed some buttons on his computer and flipped the thin screen around to face me. Four people were in the photo, covered from head to toe in black-and-white ski gear—orange goggles, beanies, gaiters—standing next to a sign, listing three black diamond courses: Spider, Cataract, Keller Glade. Not an inch of skin was visible. They could have been anyone.
“Actually,” Dean Gerwig continued, “I know their house very well. I’ve been there many times for fundraisers and sponsor dinners. Things of that nature that the Walkers are generous enough to host for the school. And I don’t believe there is a barn in the back, as you’ve described, Elizabeth. They don’t have any animals or cattle. Never have.” He pulled his computer back, clicked a few more buttons, then turned it around. The picture now enlarged on the screen was of an expansive yard. In the daylight, it was hard to connect it to what I remembered. The evergreens looked the same in the back corner, but they would anywhere, I guess. It was just the snowy grass and trees. No barn. No hay. No Ruthie.
He turned the computer back, then leaned toward me. “I encourage you to take a day or two and rethink this accusation, Elizabeth. There are consequences for both of you if you come forward. Especially when your memory has clearly been affected by your inebriation.” He nodded toward the computer, toward the photos that seemed to debunk everything I knew for sure. “Seriously think about that.”
I’d thought about it every day for over four years since.
At the diner, I still wore Ruthie’s clothes. I gained thirty pounds so the Abercrombie T-shirt was stretched to the point of breaking at the seams, and I used a large safety pin to get her jeans closed around my waist. The Eden Diner apron covered it all anyway with its red-and-white horizontal stripes, something Ruthie would have told me never to wear, especially now. Horizontal stripes were a fashion faux pas, she’d say, and I’d have pretended to know that, too.
I didn’t want to celebrate the one-year reunion at a college I hated. One that I barely graduated from, but for some reason couldn’t leave. I couldn’t go back to my parents’ farm; I knew my ties with them were broken, unrepairable. And frankly I didn’t want to return home. I knew from the day I left that I’d never see them again. I wanted to move to New York City, create the life for myself that Ruthie had always dreamed of. But as much as she would have pushed me, encouraged me to get as far from here as possible, she was also pulling me back, tying me to this place like a rope around my neck.
The more the years passed, the less I remembered the details of her face, of our time together. One morning I woke up and couldn’t recall her smell anymore. Frantically, I ran to my dresser and pulled out her perfume, the bottle of Victoria’s Secret’s Very Sexy Now, the name still duct-taped over from when she hid it in our room in college, and pressed the snuffer cap against my nose until I started breaking out in a rash.
If I had brownouts in my memories of her here, it would only get worse if I moved away.
The ding of the diner’s bell pulled me back, as two women entered, ignoring the Please Wait Here to Be Seated sign and claiming a booth against the window.
They looked different, but not different at the same time. It’s incredible what one year in the real world can do. Catherine’s hair was long and blonder now, in perfect beachy curls around her thin and blushed face. Annie wore a black beanie and dark eyeliner that accentuated her thick eyebrows and blue eyes. They looked like adults. Like people with real jobs in real cities who had forgotten everything that happened here and built new lives for themselves.
They weren’t in my section—I was assigned to the counter today, waiting on mostly regulars and very few alumni, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t ready to talk to them yet, so I just watched. I stood at the counter as Lisa took their order—an omelet with home fries, blueberry pancakes with extra syrup—and I found myself jealous that they could eat like that in public. I was still delicately crunching on arugula whenever I was in front of anyone, keeping the real food for after. They didn’t recognize me at all, I was sure of it. I hardly recognized me either.
After that party, we fell out of touch. I stopped talking to almost everyone. I got a new roommate, a soccer player named Inez who created a cloud of body odor in our room every day after practice. I became reclusive. I went to class and back, that was it. I stopped seeing Timothy or answering his calls. When I spotted him a few weeks later walking with his arm around another girl I felt relieved. Maybe we could pretend that losing my virginity never happened. Maybe if I could have that night back, Ruthie could, too.
I didn’t answer Catherine’s and Annie’s texts. I didn’t open the door when they knocked to invite me to dinner and eventually the knocks stopped coming. I didn’t meet them in the forest one more time. Instead, I lofted my bed and created a childish fort underneath, pulling my sheets over the wood siding until I could sit on the floor unseen. Down there, I’d eat fistfuls of Doritos and drink queso straight from the jar. I’d let ice cream melt in the gallon and then lap it up like a cat with milk. I’d buy family-sized bags of caramel M&M’s and eat them one by one until my jaw was throbbing, until I’d counted every single piece.
God didn’t exist. I didn’t care about looking good for Him, about treating my body like a temple, like something He created in His likeness. I didn’t want anything to do with this place, these people, this religion.
Ruthie was the only person I wanted to see. The only person I wanted to talk to.
But she was gone. And no one would listen to me.
I’d taken a double shift at the diner that day, figuring it was better to have something to do as all my former classmates strolled back into town. I didn’t leave until after 2:00 a.m., when we closed for a few hours so a cleaning crew could come in and scrub the grease from the floor. I locked up quickly—it’s routine at this point, transferring the cash from the register to the safe, making sure appliances are off, the freezers are shut, the lights dimmed. Then I stopped just inside the door and looked at the poster on the community bulletin board, which I also did every night. MISSING: BERNADETTE WARD. I noticed the one-year reunion poster hanging next to it and tore it down, letting it crumple to the floor and get swept up with all the day’s other garbage.
I walked outside with two to-go containers filled with enough chicken tenders, French fries, and onion rings to last a normal person four or five days, but that I would eat in the span of fifteen minutes, until my belly was protruded and bloated, until I’d wake up in the middle of the night so full with food I couldn’t roll over. So full with shame I’d start to cry.
When I rounded the corner into the parking lot, I stopped short when I saw Catherine and Annie there, sitting on the trunk of the navy Suburban I bought for five hundred dollars from a Craigslist ad, the only car left in the diner’s lot.
“Hi,” they said in unison, like two people possessed.
“Hi,” I responded, walking the gap between us like a plank.
Catherine looked me up and down, a disaster covered in ill-fitting clothes and grease stains. I could see her reading my name tag, staring at it on my chest for too long.
“You still go by Elizabeth?” she asked. It wasn’t judgmental, just surprised. Like she assumed I’d want to leave that world behind. But I couldn’t. It was all Ruthie knew.
I nodded and shrugged.
“My real name is Molly,” she said. “I don’t do the saint’s name thing anymore. It was kind of bullshit, if you ask me. A way to strip us of our identities, create new God-fearing personas—”
“—that’s enough.” Annie nudged her and Catherine—Molly—stopped talking. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re just—I’m Jess. In real life.”
Of course, I already knew their real names. I’d been following them since graduation. Molly moved to New York and created a cheese board business on Instagram, which didn’t sound like a real job but according to Forbes’s “30 Under 30,” her net worth was over half a million dollars. And Jess was a lesbian now. She’d discovered herself at NYU while getting her masters in computer engineering. She calls herself an Ethical Hacker on her LinkedIn.
I shook their hands and it felt like a reunion with strangers.
“That poster in the diner—” Molly nodded toward the entrance, as if I didn’t know where it was. “Got any more?”
I waved them off the trunk and they jumped down, standing next to me as I push the key into the cylinder and open it up.
I printed out ten posters every morning. Sometimes I’d find ten places to put them, scattering them around town so everyone has as hard a time forgetting as I did. Sometimes I’d find they’d been ripped down or graffitied on, or had crumpled in a rainstorm, so I replaced them, good as new. But sometimes I didn’t and they ended up here. In my trunk. Like having three hundred Ruthies staring up at me.
“Bernadette...” Molly muttered, taking a poster in her hands. “I wouldn’t have pegged her for a Bernadette.”
“I wonder if she ever had a nickname,” Jess posited. “Betty or Bernie or something.” I didn’t answer her, but I wasn’t sure she was speaking to anyone but herself anyway.
“Want to take a ride?” I asked, instead.
We arrived at the edge of the mountain thirty minutes later, and I parked the car on the side of the road, the same place we had been dropped off all those years ago, and we trudged up the wooded mountainside, avoiding the one paved road in case anyone from the house was home.
I’d been watching this family for almost four years now. I’d drive up here, stake out the spot in the woods where I kept a Styrofoam cooler painted black and stuffed with blankets and binoculars and a Nikon D810 Full-Frame DSLR. And I’d sit there for hours, watching them. The parents, Douglas and Cheryl, ate dinner in the dining room on opposite sides of the long table, with large glasses of wine. The younger son, Graham, brought home girl after girl, introducing these brunette bombshells to his parents, who seem disinterested at best, fucking them with the windows open in his second-floor bedroom, leaving the lights on as he fell asleep. Then the older one, Reed. He hardly ever came home. But when he did, he was angry about it, putzing around the yard, walking in circles around the firepit as he talked on the phone with his girlfriend, Veronica. He never wanted to be there.
And I understood why.
I led Molly and Jess through the woods the long way, around the house and yard and lake. Though the Walker family always goes on vacation this time of year, the risk of taking a shortcut wasn’t worth it.
We moved in silence until we reached my spot, a slight valley in the woods where my cooler sat camouflaged by branches I’d broken down. I pulled the cooler to the edge of the woods, to the place Ruthie disappeared into. To the last place I saw her.
“They all said there wasn’t a barn here, but look at that.” I pointed to the grass in the nearest corner of the yard, still slightly yellowed and flattened four years later. “It was more obvious in college. But what was I supposed to say? That a barn mysteriously disappeared? And I realized because I was trespassing?” I took a photo of the progress then, as I had every single time I stood there. “And look at what else—” I opened the cooler and pulled out a large freezer bag filled with smaller baggies. “These are fibers from my jacket that night. I found them on the trees. They match the holes perfectly. And this—”
“Is that a—”
“It’s the condom from when I lost my virginity. Timothy threw it on the ground and I didn’t think about it again until I came back here a few weeks later. The barn was gone, but there was the fucking condom. It must have been covered in snow that night. That’s probably why they didn’t trash it.”
I stuffed everything back into the cooler. “I’ve searched this mountain for four years looking for her...” I turn to face them, my back to the house and the memories. “I know she’s dead. But if they buried her in these woods, I would have found her by now. I would have—”
“Someone’s in the house.” I looked at Molly, who was staring behind me, completely frozen. “There’s someone in the window.”
I spun around quickly, just as the shadow of a petite woman disappeared through the swinging curtains. How long had she been there for? How much had she seen?
“We have to go.”
There’s a hill five miles off campus called Covenant Landing. It’s rumored to have been where seniors used to go to make out. That is, until Dr. Felix Chastain got word of it and started having security patrol the area for students’ cars. Now it’s just an abandoned lot, covered in overgrown trees and weeds breaking through the gravelly ground.
Molly, Jess, and I sat on the hood of my car, drinking Bud Light and looking over campus as the sun set. For what it’s worth, Covenant is a campus straight out of a movie—brick buildings covered in green ivy; pristine lawns and quads, not one piece of mulch out of place. From the outside it was the perfect school, a small haven cut out of a gorgeous forest. But from the inside...
“You know Tim still lives up here, too?” Annie said. “We still talk sometimes. His real name is Gregory. Greg. I think I’m going to see him tomorrow.”
I hadn’t spoken to him, but I looked him up online a few times. Gregory Greene. Engaged. A police officer. Living thirty minutes outside of town in a trailer on a lot where he was building his own house, stone by stone. He’d figured it out. He’d moved on. They all did.
“Have you been in touch with him at all? Seen if he can help?” Catherine asked.
“He can’t. They’re impenetrable,” I responded, about the Walkers. “At first, I just figured they were big donors to the school, that’s why Gerwig didn’t do anything. And why Bregg convinced me not to file a report. But then the more I researched... They know everyone. Literally everyone. And every single person helped them cover it up. I just don’t know how. Finding a barn in Vermont is worse than finding a needle in a haystack.”
I threw my empty bottle onto the dirt and slid another from the six-pack beside me, opening it with my apartment key in one swift move.
“Maybe you need to think about getting out of here. This place wasn’t good for any of us, Elizabeth. Maybe you need to start over, too.”
“I can’t bring myself to leave,” I finally admit. “I feel like leaving Eden is leaving Ruthie. And I just... I’m the reason she went in there. I have to get her out. I have to make this right.”
I looked down at the campus, getting brighter as the sun slowly fell behind the mountains and the sky went from blue to orange to purple to black.
“I also have this...” I stood up and moved around the car to the passenger’s seat, sticking my hand through the window and into the glove compartment until I pulled out a green fuzzy sock covering a digital camera.
“Oh shit,” Molly said when I handed it to her.
“Is this real?” Jess moved it around in her hand like it was a technological relic. Which, at this point, just four years later, it kind of already was. “Do you know what’s on it?”
“Pictures of us climbing up to the party,” I said. “Those are all I remember taking.”
“And some in the pool house bathroom,” Molly added.
“Can I take this?” Jess asked.
“I don’t want it anymore,” I said. “I never should have kept it in the first place.”
They say you can see Covenant University from a satellite in space. That’s something the student tour guides brag about when walking prospective families around. Our campus is so brightly lit, so safe at night, that astronauts can use it as a guide to tell which hemisphere they’re looking down on. Nothing bad happens here, because there’s no darkness, they’d claim. You can see our prayers from space.
Well, prayers don’t mean shit if they’re not followed by action.
“Okay then,” Molly said, standing between me and campus, looking at me with a wry smile on her face. “It’s settled. If you want to bring them down, you have to become one of them. We all do.”