Just pulling onto campus and the thought of seeing Martha sometime in the immediate future made Jayne sick to her stomach. The thought of her mother sick and hurting from scans and biopsies, coupled with the pollen accompanying the change of weather had Jayne in a perpetual feeling of reeling, of feeling as if there were a fog swirling around in her head at all times. It caused thoughts to bump into each other, get lost by themselves and be forgotten, and it was all tangled up with a lethargic sensation, making the only attractive idea that of sleeping. It was a struggle to stay awake on the drive back even in the bright light of an autumn mid-morning. Arriving, she began the process of hauling the clothes, food, and general accouterments of home into her small dorm room. She collapsed on her bed with gusto. She laid there, too tired to sleep, too tired to get up and go to the two classes she had left on her schedule for Thursday. She laid there, aware of her slightly curly blonde hair fanning out like a mane on her pillow and her generally normal frame motionless. Her thin, long legs reached to the very tip of her bed, the bottoms of her feet flush with the end of the mattress. Her left arm was straightened to let her narrow, long hand dangle over her floor, and her right arm was bent in half, with her hand in a resting curl beside her head. She felt the blood churning through her quite typically light skin; not too pale, not quite dark. Her summer tan was only beginning to fade, a fact which she would have been more cognizant of under normal circumstances. She felt the blood all of the sudden as if she were aware of it for the first time. She just laid there, aware of her blood carrying her life all around her, and listened to it for a moment. She was alone in her room, and all was silent. The desire to get up and go to class, however, won over, as the general discomfort that Jayne had with silence coincided with the pull of maintaining her real reputation and getting back to some semblance of normalcy. She went about her classes as if in a daze, however. There was a strange sensation upon seeing everyone she knew that there was something they weren’t telling her, some elephant in the room. That they were looking at her as if she had made some morbidly embarrassing mistake or transgressed something or someone irrevocably and now had the gumption to show up as if nothing happened, or that it was understood she was still regaining her former place in the order of things. Like when you make an out of the way comment to someone that they take far too seriously or that you didn’t intend to offend with but do. As if she were a stranger from a dangerous place that made everyone cautious but piteous of her at one end, and utterly divorced from her at the other. She felt besieged by people all day. No encounter was satisfying on account of that nagging feeling that people resented her in some way or other but were smiling through it.

She got her laptop back out and popped it open to start tapping away at a review of a piece for music class. It was an avant-garde, minimalist piece of piano music that sounded like something from a movie soundtrack and was intensely boring. Her focus began to wane and she started to meander to a new tab. She immediately snapped out of her stupor as she was seized by the sensation of seeing that awful picture on her newsfeed all over again. She closed her newest tab as quickly as she put it up. She had chills from the thought of seeing it again. But her newly alert mind started up and starting blowing away the fog as she got the presence of mind to start asking around a few trusted sources about these pictures. She’d love to hear from Martha how she made it, seeing as she had never even so much as tipsy, much less at a party. But she figured the best place to check first was Tina. Tina lived down the hall and she could talk to her face to face. That was probably best.

She knocked on the door, and noticed that her hands were shaking. Why were her hands shaking? But it didn’t matter. Tina’s room was the safest place she knew. Many a long night had been spent in it laughing hysterically, crying, gossiping, or studying some god awful amount of calculus or world literature or something or other. The nervous palpitation of her heart only got worse as she waited and waited. It was a jarring experience, as she stood outside of Tina’s door. She heard music from behind her door, and could have sworn she heard it get louder after her second round of knocking. Her confusion deepened and became more awful when she looked at her phone to see a new message. It was from Tina.

“you're just going to spend all night with Mark and come by here? Leave. I’m not talking to you.”

Jayne was now entirely confused. She felt like she was in a room where everyone was speaking Russian and she couldn’t do anything to keep up. Tears were starting to well up in her eyes and she had a sense of being frantic as she knocked on Tina’s door considerably harder, calling out to her, almost pleading with her to “come out,” saying, “I need to talk to you!” Tina opened the door violently and pertly snapped, with not a little exasperation, “What, Jayne?”

“I was just coming by to talk and catch up where I’ve been gone, and now you’re talking about Mark and I spending the night and I have no clue what you’re talking about and –

“Just stop Jayne,” she interrupted. “Everyone knows you’ve been having a hard time with your mom or whatever, but you can’t just do whatever you want. And you definitely can’t hang out with Mark and ‘just talk.’” She imitated a dopy male voice. Jayne was utterly stunned, speechless except for being able to stammer out “I…I … I” over and over.

“Tina, I haven’t seen Mark since the semester started, I… I… I’ve been back home for almost a week.”

“Jayne, people sawyou!” To say that that statement burst out of her is an understatement. It was full of the rage that someone gets when debated a matter of the utmost conviction. “Just go back down the hall, and don’t come near me or Mark again.” At that the door was slammed and Jayne was done for. Tears were the only appropriate response as she had so much she wanted to say. She could see herself clearing this up, sitting down and talking to Tina the way she always had, getting this figured out, but the door was shut. There were no words to explain this whole thing. The picture, the strange behavior of everyone, and now this. Her best friend. Could Martha really be spreading rumors through every avenue possible? What was she going to do? Was there anything she could do? Tina looked like she was going to foam at the mouth the more Jayne denied even looking at Mark. She was inconsolable and, more importantly, implacable. But of something that didn’t even happen. Nothing made sense about this at all. The fogginess wasn’t in her head anymore, it seemed to be all around her. She didn’t even remember getting back into her room. She didn’t remember getting in bed. She woke up with a damp spot on her pillow and all of her clothes on from the day before.

She hadn’t done that during a semester… ever. That was something she did in the summer, when no one was around. And that rarely. Luckily she woke up in time to head for class, and so she got up with what felt like no gas in the tank to go about her day. She had no way to wrap her head around what was going on around her. The way people were treating her, the way her best friends were behaving, the stories that were popping up that made no sense. She had decided, in the relative clarity of the morning, that she would just live out life as rote and as dry as possible. She would try her best to be alone and unattached as best as possible. She considered, quite ridiculously, quitting Sigma Epsilon, quitting the choir, stepping down from everything and anything that would bring her into contact with people. All of the sudden the campus was cold and impenetrable to her, and everyone had secret thoughts and ideas about her that she couldn’t discern and that slowly ate away at her. That’s how she felt. That she was being eaten by a parasite of some kind, an emotional parasite that ate away at all the best parts of her life. She couldn’t enjoy anyone. She wasn’t getting any laughter, any genuine smiles, anybody to listen to her. She could call her mother, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt at the thought of telling a person with lung cancer about her intrapersonal struggles. She felt like she was walking across campus with a thousand pounds on her shoulders, and then it melted away only for a moment. Everything melted away. Nothing mattered as a moment of clarity only deepened the confusion.

An extremely familiar laugh. Her laugh. A flash of hair. Blonde, with streaks of light blue, green, and purple with dark violet underneath all atop an orange-tan, almost as if it were spray-tanned, head. The colors of the cosmos passed by atop this strange young woman’s head, and it may as well have been the entire cosmos as far as Jayne was concerned. She was only worried, for a moment, with whoever this person was. Never mind the small entourage of two or three girls and guys around her. This seemed to be the girl that was in the photo with Martha. Her eyes got wide and intent, and she followed almost automata-like into the humanities building. She saw the flash and heard the laugh go up the stairs which were to the right and head into a hallway on the second floor. She seemed to be trailing this sound and flash of a woman at all times, unable to pin down a good look at her face. She rushed up after her and went through the double doors to follow. The big hallway yielded to her the backs of all the entourage and she nearly ran by them, attempting to seem as she were in a hurry to get by. Upon glancing sideways at the group, Jayne stopped dead. She no longer cared about whether or not she seemed normal. Nothing seemed normal to her, anyway, because the girl she was trying to see all of the sudden wasn’t there. As the entourage moved past, they all looked at her, as her utter incredulity started manifesting itself on her face, and one large guy wearing frat letters looked back and asked “You coming Jayne?”