The smallest and weakest of those in your dorm room is a girl called Jessica Katz. She looks the type who would be excluded and bullied, like a high-school movie nerd archetype, and yet she is invited to parties, and yet she has a boyfriend and a cluster of close friends. She has always seemed to you unbearably bland, though upon meeting her the first hard day in the dorm, taking in her looks and squirrely demeanor, you had sensed some kinship. You had hoped to be friends. That evening, in front of the other folks of your dorm in your shared living room, she had smirked at you and loudly told you that you looked like you had no friends. With that, Jess Katz had turned away and joined her wide-eyed, giggling friends. In an academic setting, it was difficult to remember you were all adults. You felt catapulted back to school. Inexplicably wounded, you had cried yourself to sleep, and every meeting with Jessica in hallways and classrooms and the communal kitchen had earned you that same sneering expression.
Jessica never did anything overtly cruel--but her sneering and her eyebrow-raises and her catty comments loaded with plausible deniability sent you insane. Sometimes you had guiltily fantasised about her failing and dropping out. Or dropping out a window. Now that time of anger and resentment seemed so far away, so long ago, as if the feeling had been clutched like a pet by another, pitifully lonely man. Now, considering Jessica Katz, you saw her as equally worthy of pity. She needed saving. She was like a lost duckling seeking its mother.
You knock on her door. She lets you in, though she makes a face upon seeing it was you. You ask her to check out a mould situation in your own ensuite bathroom. Her own room is painted blue, hung with a vague beaded tapestry, and stuffed with contraband scented candles. It smells like a newborn, or like laundry. Jessica rolls her eyes behind her glasses (her eyes and her glasses, you realise serenely, are rather like your own) but follows you. She asks, with no emotion, how your degree is going. She enters your room, and you follow. Emotion only enters her voice when the door is closed, the lock clicked shut. She panics, of course. She calls you a freak and a pervert, though you reassure her it isn't like that. And hadn't she called you a faggot only two weeks ago? It seems contradictory.
You tell her it won't sting for more than a second or two if she stays still. Her body is weak and bony even under your weak and bony form. She writhes and screams for the second before you carefully but firmly close your hand over her mouth. Quickly and efficiently, you jab your cleaned, emptied needle into her dominant right arm, replicating the pattern with ease. Her fighting does not interrupt the process--you press her arm firmly, effortlessly still. When it is done you let her go--her eyes go wide. She asks in a voice as tiny as her frame what you've done to her. She gapes at her arm, which you are gently swabbing. The marks only seep a little.
You ask her if she can hear him. If he is inside her too now. She won't answer, so you keep asking, gently encouraging her to really listen. It takes eight minutes for her to say yes. And then you let her go.
WELL DONE
WHAT NOW
More people have to know. More people have to see.