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The
second time Angela went down to Mexico, it was to escape her
college roommate Stephanie Bowers. Although Stephanie did have
a lot of annoying qualities about her (among other things, went
to bed early, woke up early, basically screwed up any kind of
natural schedule Angela could comfortably adhere to), it was
not really anything Stephanie did but rather the fact that she
existed at all and was attempting to share the same small physical
space of a college dorm room like some kind of good-natured scholastic
parasite. It wouldn't have mattered if the two of them were perfect
twins in terms of personality and interests (which, assuredly,
they were not). Anyone would have bothered Angela to the point
of inciting a strong urge to flee the room, city, even country
in an effort to move about freely, to breathe air that wasn't
recently exhaled from another human being.
Due to an adolescent weight and acne problem that had stretched
across her teenage years, Angela never learned to be social or
even friendly. Instead she clung to the comfort of her non-judgemental
books and art, seeking solace in the stories and works of the
great thinkers and doers of the past. She had become obsessed
with acquiring information about such topics as the battles of
the American Revolution, the movements in the history of renaissance
art, as well as the entire field of astronomy. She absorbed knowledge
as if it was the sun and air and it nourished her through the
time when she had no real friends, the time when everyone she
knew thought her a hateful, pimply fat bitch and wanted nothing
to do with her.
At some point people began to treat her differently. After she
had been in college a little while, she looked in the mirror
one day and realized that she had somehow transformed from a
bumpy pumpkin-shaped girl into a smooth-skinned long-legged woman.
She had no idea when and how this had happened, but in the back
of her mind she knew it had been a long slow process, unnoticeable
in its glacier-like movement until this day when she suddenly
became aware of the change she had gone through, and she saw
herself, not as the way she remembered herself to be, but as
the person she had become. And it startled her that this had
happened without any conscious effort on her part and, in fact,
despite her complete lack of interest in her health or appearance.
This outward transformation had no bearing on her inner life,
however, and though she started to notice the newfound attention
she was receiving from the people she came into contact with,
she still wanted nothing to do with them. Her resentment for
the human race actually deepened as she saw the obvious importance
everyone she met placed upon her appearance. Her mouth curled
cruelly into a smile as she walked by the accosters, ignoring
all attempts people made to talk to her, to be friends with her.
She could not find within herself any desire whatsoever to waste
her time with people who had nothing better to do than waste
her time. There was no doubt in her mind that anyone she would
find the least bit interesting was off in a library somewhere
deep in a book about the astronomical pioneers of the eighteenth
century, if not doing first-hand research in the former battlefields
of the Potomac. She was quite content that the full scope of
her interaction with other living beings was through the medium
of typewritten words on a screen or sheet of paper. It never
occurred to her to be desirous of a human voice or touch; she
had found too much pleasure in the solace of her own mind, feeding
it with the facts and stories that she loved.
The college she was attending, Trinity College, required that
all first and second year students live on campus and initially
that thrilled her because it gave her an excuse to move away
from home even though she had decided to go to a university in
the town where she grew up. Living at home had been something
of a nightmare, continuously surrounded by attention-starved
relatives and put upon to run errands for all of them. Angela
had a younger brother, Nick, who felt it was his obligation to
jump on top of her whenever the two of them were in the same
room.
Needless to say, Angela had looked forward to moving into the
dorms and even though she was forced to have a roommate, she
was certain that at least it would be a relatively stable and
mature environment where people had a significant amount of personal
autonomy and actual choice in what they did, unlike in her suffocating
slave state at home.
Of course it was too good to be true. No matter how bad it got
at home, at least Angela could barricade herself into her room
and escape for at least a little while. In college, however,
she no longer had that luxury. The first year her roommate had
been a sickly, smelly, rotting, festering lump of a human being,
a "girl" named Ginger Hopkins who only left her bed
to order Supreme pizzas and to answer the door when they came.
No longer able to bear the stench, Angela looked under Ginger's
bed one day and discovered a pile of pizza boxes, each containing
remnants of meals eaten days or weeks in the past. Angela went
on to look in Ginger's dresser drawers (Ginger had been in the
bathroom an especially long time at that point, so Angela was
getting courageous) and was horrified to find even more old forgotten
leftovers from meals past mixed in with dark, dank clothes that
probably had not been washed since they had been bought.
It was at that point that Angela decided to spend as little time
as possible in her room, opting instead to live to a large degree
in the library among the books which provided company without
offending the senses. At the end of the first semester Angela
requested a new room (she was very proud of the fact that she
had survived four months in such olfactory hell), but she was
subsequently told that there were no other rooms to move into,
and that there was even a waiting list to fill the next vacancy.
She offered her spot up in a generous show of charity, quite
prepared to move home for the duration, but living off campus
was not an option. The school officials wanted to foster a community
among the students -- by force if necessary -- and she was told
not to worry, they were building new dorms as soon as possible
to handle the overflow, though they would probably not be ready
in the next five years. They did have an architectural image
to maintain, after all, and that takes time.
Angela spent the next semester at home anyway, much to the chagrin
of her parents who were paying quite a lot of money for the unused
bed in her dorm room. She promised that she would move out again
when the room assignments changed for the sophomore year. When
that wasn't enough for them she told a boldfaced lie: the room
and board money for this semester was going to be refunded to
them at the end of the year in the form of credit applicable
to next year's tuition. In the meantime she would sleep in her
old bed and commute the ten miles to class and not worry about
being eaten in her sleep by a roommate who had run out of edible
pizza.
Chapter
2
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CHAPTER 1
