Unspoken (The Woodlands) by Jen Frederick Read Free Book Online Page B

bedroom, where I picked up a pair of discarded skinny jeans and a loose silky top. I pulled on a pair of heavy socks and a battered pair of riding boots. My heavy felt, navy-blue peacoat completed the outfit. I looked a lot less like Dockers layaway and more like hip young person. I felt better, too.
    The past year had taught me that sometimes the best defense in the world was a stony glare and the right attire. Going into the lion’s den dressed like I was dressed for church was bound to create even worse talk than looking like a prostitute. The latter they expected, the former said I was trying too hard. The vultures never liked anything more than cutting down people who set themselves up.
    I picked up my phone and ID card and headed out to meet Ellie. She was putting on the last touches of makeup. The au natural look required as much effort as the heavily made-up look. Guys never knew the difference, but the cosmetic industry didn’t have fifty shades of natural and blush lipstick because girls could run around with bee-stung lips just by biting them heavily. Biting led to chapped lips and teeth marks.
    We didn’t talk as we walked toward the commons. Ellie seemed to instinctively understand that I didn’t have much to say. The campus looked magical in the evening light. The snow sparkled where it was illuminated by the lampposts that marched along the sidewalks, intersecting the campus lawns. Central was an old campus, over one hundred years old, and even though it had been modernized, the feel of it was nostalgic. The streetlights were made of wrought iron instead of hard steel. The callboxes looked like old-fashioned telephone booths. Even the sculptures positioned throughout had an old-world charm to them.
    Maybe the student body took cues from it. For all the modern, liberal thinking that was preached from the professors’ podiums, the men and women who took classes here had some deep-seated, old-fashioned views. Girls who hooked up a lot were sluts. Guys who did the same were studs. Girls who wore their hair short and their pants long were lesbians. Guys who used too much product and cared too much about their appearance were gay. And those who didn’t conform were weirdos and easy objects of scorn.
    During my freshman year, I’d have given anything to be thought of as a weirdo or gay. Being deemed a slut meant that you were fair game to every asshole on campus. They could slap your ass or casually grab your boob during the sober, daylight hours. Once the sun went down and the beer came out, the groping was more obvious. Then it was a full body press, trying to corner you in a dark spot and stick their hand up your skirt. If you said no at any time, you were a bitch or cock tease or cunt. And because no one wanted to admit being turned down by the class bicycle, rumors started anew.
    I remember one guy whom I’d never met, never talked to, bragging in the library to a few others in his study group about how he had to force me off his dick so he could get another beer, that I was just so hungry for him. Another guy regaled the group with how he’d poured beer on his penis and then forced me to suck him off. They all laughed when he described, graphically, how he had held my hair in place and how the gagging noises I made only made him harder.
    None of it had ever happened, but it didn’t stop me from feeling violated, used, and dirty. It wasn’t one thing that drove me off campus, but a hundred wounds both large and small. I felt that if I spent one minute more than necessary there, I would be nothing more than a dried honeycomb, all the life sucked out of me, exposed and used.
    As Ellie and I walked down the sidewalk, no one stared at me. The cement at our feet didn’t crack in half. We were just two students in a big crowd, some moving toward the commons and some away. I felt anonymous for a moment, and I almost stumbled when relief poured through me.
    The commons looked the same. It was a squatty brick