From the Chrysalis (14 page)

And for the love of Christ, what if Dace had gone for help instead of running away? One thing was certain: a real man wouldn’t have left his friend behind.
 

If he could just make it up to Rick.

Chapter 9

Love the One You’re With

Maitland University, September 1, 1971:

There were no pictures of Liza on campus, of the girl she was or the woman she hoped to become. But even then she knew how memories ended up layered under fresher ones or were buried in the avalanche of the past.
 

There were no photos of D’Arcy Devereux with his prison eyes, either. He never once set foot on campus.
 

But everything was young and green in September as the class of ‘75 blended into an exquisite cauldron of anxiety and hope.

Frosh Week was underway. First Years climbed sloping lawns to grey stone buildings draped in English ivy, while older students met in the cafeterias, smoked cigarettes, ate chips or dallied over coffee. Some Second Years were in the midst of bitter break-ups or were even more uncertain about their future plans than they had been the previous year, but they flaunted the self-confidence of people who knew their way around campus.

Liza had been billeted in a brand new high rise, girls on the right side of building, boys on the left, a state of affairs that would prevail for one more year, before the housemothers and the university authorities bowed to the liberalism of the seventies. Elevators provided a natural split between the sexes in 1971. Most of the whitewashed, cinder block rooms were doubles, equipped with beige covered single beds, built-in desks with bookshelves and goosenecked lamps, two orange padded chairs, a large shared dresser and a walk-in closet with more space than Liza or most girls could fill. Smoking was permitted. The ashtrays and the trash were emptied twice a week by non-English speaking maids who scorned the privileged inmates, especially the careless girls. The maids also cleaned the rooms once a week and changed the linen, reporting any damage or suspicious behaviour to the housemother, a graduate student with her own room at the entrance to the main hall.

Liza’s shared room overlooked the courtyard and the student parking lot. The rooms on the other side backed onto a married student residence, and two single rooms at one end of the hall faced a stream. Each floor had two communal bathrooms, a small study room, a kitchenette, a laundry and a public phone. There was also a student lounge on every third floor, but not on hers.
 

She had learned about Frosh Week from novels, and judging by the behaviour of the Second Years at Maitland University, she hadn’t been too badly informed. The organizers had good intentions and would have oriented the First Year students to college life if they hadn’t evolved into a drunken, giddy rabble within a matter of hours. After sacrificing half their summers to get back to university for the social event of the year, they couldn’t afford to waste any time. Most of the organizers were blond girls with long, slim legs who wanted an engagement ring on their left hand before they graduated, or else they were well-fed, handsome boys who had played on the football team last year and won. Supremely self-confident, they didn’t mind wearing homemade hats with coloured streamers, flogging monstrous paper clubs and screaming orders through cardboard cones.

The whole event might have collapsed if the new students had announced in unison:
We don’t want to play.
But of course they didn’t. Pressed to explain their complicity, they would have shrugged, acknowledged that they wanted to be accepted, they wanted to belong and besides … this was fun, wasn’t it?

The whole thing made Liza feel a little gypped, not to mention old and silly. University was supposed to be more academic. Never had she expected to feel nervous of students just slightly older than herself.

Didn’t anybody here read? Surely people had heard about the landmark Stanford University experiment where twenty-four students were randomly assigned to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks. The experiment had come to a screeching halt when the pretend guards turned swaggering and sadistic. Even Liza, an expatriate in Dublin, had come across references to the American study.

The study had focussed on the behaviour of students assigned to be guards, but what about the victims? Maybe it was an experiment, but the study showed the victims had willingly co-operated with the bullies. And here she was in Maitland, watching the experiment in action. She saw one student, a heavier girl with greenish-blond, seaweed hair and granny glasses, get down on the floor of the common room and actually lick an older resident’s shoes.
 

Liza squirmed but didn’t say anything. She knew from previous school experiences that the girl wouldn’t be grateful for her interference. So she headed back to her room, relieved to walk away, to remain on the periphery. Did Dace do this too? Was this how he survived? It was okay for her. She was an outsider, not that she minded. She was used to it. They had called her
the American
when she lived in Dublin, no matter how many times she said she was Canadian.

She couldn’t stay in her room a moment longer. It felt close and fetid, although there was a fresh coat of paint on the walls and the furniture was almost brand new. There had to be something she could do outside, but what? Drifting over to the aluminium framed window, she stared into the courtyard for inspiration and inhaled the humid evening air. A couple of disc jockeys were setting up audio equipment for a heavily promoted street dance, snaking thick black cables behind a wooden platform. She might have resisted the temptation except the outside air felt so soft on her skin and she could hear music. Just a few bars from a loudspeaker and her body wanted to dance. Before she knew it she was downstairs, dressed in the same blue jeans as everybody else.

Love the one you’re with
! was blasting from the loudspeakers when she came into the courtyard. Confronted by the flushed and triumphant faces of the Frosh Social Committee, she almost turned on her heels and ran. Good grief. Betrayed by a song. Everybody had to go to a rally before the dance started, the older students announced through their toy megaphones, their eyes sly. The First Years, all shapes and sizes, gave a collective groan, but merged into alphabetical surname order without any more protest, decked out with their name tags. Everybody except her. Oh, she was such a renegade, she thought. Her tag was upstairs on her bed. She considered leaving, pretending to fetch her badge and never coming back, but there was nothing else to do. Scanning a couple of names near the beginning of the line, she slid in between two girls, a Campbell and an Ensley.
 

A rally for what?
she wondered as she was swept along in the crowd to Alumni Hall, running to keep up. She was afraid of being crushed. The Hall was only a few blocks away, but she was crossing unfamiliar terrain. The plaintive notes of Crosby, Stills and Nash faded.

Coaching their unruly marching band to sing the school song, the Committee appeared to be taking their job as seriously as they could.

Meds we’re tops!
The words didn’t make any sense, though. Written in the nineteen thirties by a drunken student, the song had never been edited by anyone in either the English or the Music Faculty.
 

When they reached Alumni Hall, the Committee flogged everyone onstage with their mock clubs. The co-eds squealed as strong-armed young men reached down and pulled them up, and the upper class men applauded.

The First Years were no longer in alphabetical order, but nobody cared as long as they sang.
We’re tops! Rah! Rah! Our colours green and orange
… Ireland’s colours, but what the hell did the lyrics mean? Liza was diverted by the stranger beside her, the boy who had given her a hand up onto the stage.
Stuart Melville
,
Trenton, Ontario,
she read on his chest.
 

“I’m Mel,” he said.
 

He
was
cute. He had shoulder length hair, granny glasses and a tie-dyed shirt, probably purchased for the occasion, but that was the extent of his co-operation. She pegged him as a clownish middle child or perhaps the much loved baby of his family—whatever she was not. He had no qualms about altering the words to a beloved school song in an effort to entertain the girls standing on either side of him. Oblivious to Liza’s reluctance to sing for fear her Irish accent would single her out, he sang loudly enough to satisfy even the most zealous Committee member. He still held her hand as she pulled farther back into the crowd, praying for the whole ordeal to be over. She had never liked standing and she enjoyed making a public spectacle of herself even less.

Finally, to her immense relief, the Committee threw up their hands. “What a bunch of dorks,” she overheard the blondest girl complain as her makeshift choir jumped offstage and bolted through a series of double auditorium doors. “Look at ‘em. No fucking school spirit at all.”
 

Trooping out of Alumni Hall, she felt quite content to have ended up with Mel. The girl on his right had been snagged by her hometown friends and walked off with barely a wave. Music was playing again when they got back to the residence, so they danced in the darkening street.
 

It wasn’t long before he said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
 

Maybe she looked alarmed, because he hastened to assure her that he just wanted to sleep, although he still held her hand. He hadn’t slept for a couple of days, he said. It turned out they were both on the ninth floor. As they touched hands and parted at the elevator, he promised to call the next morning. Good, because she couldn’t call him. She had never called a boy in her life and she wasn’t about to start now. He looked like he wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t. Thank God, she thought, a little unnerved.

You’ve got a friend,
she hummed to herself, retrieving a bar of white Camay soap and a red towel from her room. She entered the multi-stalled washroom and was surprised to find it empty, but then again, most of the girls were still down at the dance. Too bad. She felt like talking to somebody about the boy she had just met.
 

Not Dace. She couldn’t talk about Dace.

Where the hell was her roommate, anyway? Janice Sparrow was so late in arriving that Liza wondered if she even existed, although the housemother had shown her a wallet-sized picture of a sandy-haired girl. Anxious about leaving the farm, Liza supposed.
 

The shower water was already getting cold. She lunged out of the stall, reaching for her towel. Water ran off her sharp, angled hips to the tiled floor, and she wondered what Janice was like. What if she didn’t like the hours she kept? Liza wanted a confidante, but what were the odds of having anything in common with a girl who was most likely a virgin?

Liza had made several friends in Dublin; however, they were the friends born of circumstances rather than the meeting of souls, and those friendships had faded. Her last good girlfriend had been in sixth grade at Alexander Muir Public School in Toronto. She had grown up with Linda Jones, and their relationship had solidified when both sets of parents threatened to divorce.
 

Stranded on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, Liza had soon lost track of all her friends, even Linda. She still dreamed of her, though. She had to, for it didn’t look like she would ever find anybody like her again: a girl with the physical courage to jump off the high tower at the swimming pool and the imagination to transport them both right out of Christie Pits. It had been too long.
 

She fell asleep rereading
Wuthering Heights
, having remembered to double-lock her door before she laid down. An hour into a good night’s sleep, she found herself safe and warm on a tropical island with Mel and Linda and Dace. A balmy breeze blew as they strolled along a sunny beach, but the voices were all wrong. Women’s voices—drunken, excited and high-pitched.
 

Liza’s eyes flew open. Clutching the bedding to her throat, she stared at the locked door with her heart pounding in her chest. It was the Committee. They were here, in the dorm, rallying in the narrow hall leading to her room. They were raising their fists to pound on her door. They were busting in.
 

“Come out, come out!” they carolled, as if on cue.
Oh, sure, and me in my baby dolls
, she thought, holding her breath and doing her best not to move. Stupid! Why on earth had she fallen asleep with her reading lamp on? Gran would have been appalled at her wastefulness. Her father would have roared.