Gap Year

by Level Three Princess

Rating: mature
Tags: Slice of Life, Dark, Sad
Length: 5102

“It doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life,” the campus counsellor had said. “It’s best to just let it go. Be rational. Think of the big picture. It doesn’t really matter.”

Well, I've spent a good hour or two trying to come up with a pithy blurb. You know, something to make you want to read this.

I don't really think I can. This is a story about rape.

More specifically, I suppose, about its aftermath in the life of a college student: listlessness and anomie, anxiety, eating disorders, victim blaming, and bizarre social justice guilt tripping.

Apologies in advance for the horse puns, but without them I don't think I'd have written it at all.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-04-29 23:00:02 UTC

Thirty Months in Five Thousand Words

She woke up at noon.

Instinctually, she snatched her glasses and curled herself around the laptop. A twenty-five character password brought it out of sleep. Current session uptime: twelve days, five hours, and three minutes.

Her Flankbook page had been taken down. Her school address only bounced mailer daemon noreplies to the class mailing list. Her dMail account, no matter how hard a pony named Star Drop tried, was a black hole. It had been that way for months.

But dontcryargentina@trotmail.com had two thousand six hundred and eighty-five unread emails. She only got spam. Spam and messages from Diamond Tiara.

Diamond Tiara was excited. She was going as either “Empress Theodora” or “Slut Cleopatra” for Rein Fayre.

Diamond Tiara was getting ready for her Foalbright grant trip to study the effects of psychoactive drug use on gender identity in Stutegart. She only had a few more weeks to pack before Rein Fayre.

Diamond Tiara had just scored eight tabs of acid and was totally going to make out with that hot sophomore who dyed her mane gray at Rein Fayre.

Diamond Tiara just found out Prezwalski would be sitting on her thesis orals. It was gonna be almost as wild as Rein Fayre.

Diamond Tiara would not shut up about how excited she was for Rein Fayre.

( to: tiardi@steed.edu re: Rein Fayre!!!!! )

This was the fourth time Diamond Tiara had written to Silver Spoon about it this week.

But Diamond Tiara was a graduating senior now.

And the seniors, on their way to internships and graduate school, were the focus of Rein Fayre.

And Rein Fayre only happened at Steed.

And Steed was the only place that hadn’t waitlisted Diamond Tiara.

So how could Rein Fayre possibly not be the most important thing in the world?

_____

When Silver Spoon had spent her fashionable summer at McMane, the question on the tip of everypony’s tongue had always been “And where do you go?”

She had learned to always finish her answers with a hastily murmured “it’s in upstate New Yoke.” That gave her fashionably maladjusted wardmates the option to choose whether she was being graciously modest (to Barding or Prancetown) or reverently submissive (to Unicornell).

She’d look sheepish and let them create their own story for her. It was a technique she’d honed in clean, fuzzy-blue-curtained emergency rooms with warm lighting, with doctors that demanded what business she had being upset. She let the doctor do the talking during her interview, and more often than not she could leave with the script for her pills.

_____

The counseling center didn’t cover refills over winter break. Private practice meant answering too many questions, and nopony should have to waste so much attention and time over something she could handle on her own. The counseling center knew what she had to do, and they told her just that. They’d done their job, and it was all on her now.

Her new year’s resolution was to spend three hours in the pool every day. Her pool wasn’t meant for lap swim; it had an island, and a waterfall, and a sconce for a pine tree. But going to the “Y” was out of the question. She swam in tiny zig-zags inside the perimeter. It was inferior, but she could do it by herself.

Her family bought her goggles when her eyes turned bloodshot. She didn't use them. The family upgraded to saltwater. Her eyes stayed red.

Exercise would help her mood. She’d read it in ...somewhere. Whatever it was, it cited its sources and that was good enough. For good measure, she spent another hour each day on the exercise cycle listening to her mom’s personal trainer crow about the time she used to train Maredonna. She needed to lose five pounds before she got back on campus, anyway. “At my age and socioeconomic privilege, anything over fifteen percent bodyfat is unforgivable.”

She put on a happy face for when Diamond Tiara came on a stopover from her vacation on the Arabian. Diamond Tiara was having such a good time; for her best friend’s sake, Silver Spoon could fake it.

It was only on the seventh doctor that the screams became too loud for her to stifle them with the pillow. The red spots of broken blood vessels under her eyes could not be concealed. Drowning her tears in the pool had failed. Ponies started to notice. They started to talk.

It still took her family another whole semester— Because she could do it! Totally not a big deal! —before Silver Spoon broke. She resigned herself to commit to five weeks of circle sessions in Tudor Gothic poetry clubs. Pretentious and self-absorbed, and she hated it, but idle bourgeois consternation about being too needy wasn’t impressive when she had a private chef making her meals that her dietician told her were too extreme.

_____

She didn’t merit such an indulgence. She had a common problem. She hadn’t been the first, and she wouldn’t be the last. She could deal.

And if Silver Spoon went back to the hospital, this time, she’d have to answer the question with “went” and not “go.”

No. Even worse: “went” and not “graduated.”

No, the questions she answered these days were much easier.

“No. You’d think, right? But actually, when I tried that it didn’t take. No, it’s oils on Xerox with solvent.”

She had an online gallery she updated three times a week for her twenty-six subscribers.

And a hurdy gurdy, a Hearth’s Warming gift from a friend. Never played but kept for viewing on a cloth-covered wooden bier. An instrument of this magnificence was too good for the hooves of a beginner like Silver Spoon. So she honored the gift in the best way she could.

Its beautiful, colorful inlays and the haunting scent of cedar were sealed in the black, armor-plated case. Thick, heavy steel latches seized almost every edge of the coffin-shaped thing. How the stewardesses kept on confusing it for a guitar was something Silver Spoon would never understand.

She became what all rich fillies became when they’d run out of options in the real world: an artist. A sculptor and printmaker, and nominally a musician.

It wasn’t going to impress anypony on the first day of conference. It wasn’t even for credit. It was, in fact, worse than useless; any admissions committee would see that gap on her transcript and throw it in the wastebin. Unicornell girl would have had a stroke if she saw that the two Prancetown mares were still Flankbook friends with such an underachiever. But she still did it.

It was like her body still hadn’t realized that she was dead.

_____

The creaking of the ice on the lake drew her to the shore. It was a terrible idea, and she knew it. It still happened.

Retrace every step along the peninsula. Make everything the same. Had she been facing this way or that way? It wasn’t night time, but the log bench by the bent tree was still there, only with more graffiti carved into it.

She’d just gotten out of lab, because there had been lab on Saturdays, right? She had apologized; she had a cold and didn’t want to kiss him (even though she wanted to). So just talking about napkins and folk etymologies. And she still couldn’t stop smiling. She winked at a passing friend who laughed at their PDA. It was perfect—never happier. He misunderstood the point she was trying to make about bismuth. She almost rolled her eyes, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. They lay down. She thought she was going to have to console him about changing majors again. There was a moment of confusion.

She could have sworn there were crickets out that night.

“It doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life,” the campus counsellor had said. “It’s best to just let it go. Be rational. Think of the big picture. It doesn’t really matter.” The advice came with a prescription to read a book called “The Power of Now.”

Silver Spoon couldn’t hear anything. Not a single sound. There was only the moaning from under the ice, reverberating within her. She sat staring at the walls within her mind, as her body climbed down to the shore.

The cracks dared her to press harder as her hooves caressed the perimeter of the ice. The cold felt right. Intentional, beyond what a November should be. Her heavy wool peacoat may well have been tissue paper, pathetic against the cosmos. Skittering, unearthly noises shot inward. Micro-fractures, invisible to the naked eye, spread under the strain.

The barrier sheared and shattered. She winced at the sting of the water and pulled back her dripping hoof. Every second out here was tempting fate.

She took the long way home.

_____

Silver Spoon had skipped lab to make sure nopony saw her walking to “the Office.” She trudged along the perimeter of the campus, by the ditch with tall grass and mosquitoes. There was a faster way, but it was too dangerous to go near the memorial library between two fifty and five.

And it meant taking a left turn, and keeping to the right side of the road meant she saw him less. It just worked, like how taking the easternmost set of stairs in a building did too. She didn’t question it.

And she had to avoid Centennial Hall, too.

Silver Spoon used to love studying there with Star Drop, her first college friend and the only other mare in materials science.

Fall semester of Sophomore year, they had spent the whole night making coordination complexes with marshmallows and gum drops. By three AM, they’d ended up with only two models, both the wrong isomers. They took it as a sign to just give up, and Star Drop and Silver Spoon spent the rest of the morning by eating the models and talking about how weird metallic glass was.

Silver Spoon left Centennial Hall for the last time on the 3rd of December. They promised to study for serious on the 7th. On the 5th Star Drop got a message from Silver Spoon: the study session was canceled. They wouldn’t speak again for nearly a year.

On the 4th Star Drop had liked his status on Flankbook.

_____

“I’m sorry, young lady, but your guitar is going to have to go in the storage car,” said the platform attendant.

“But it’s a hurdy gurdy. It’s very fragile and it needs to go in a climate controlled cabin.”

“A hurdy gurdy?”

“It’s like what a piano is to a harp, a hurdy gurdy is to a violin.”

It all would have been so much clearer had Silver Spoon written it down:

HARP : PIANO :: VIOLIN : HURDY GURDY

“I’m sorry, but the cabin is standing room only.”

“But I was told I could put it in the closet. They always let me—”

“It’s the week before Winter Wrap Up. I’m afraid it has to go in the storage car, miss.”

Silver Spoon didn’t normally get this kind of treatment. Did the necklace really make that big of an impression? Necklaces weren’t allowed at McMane. String instruments weren’t either, but after of a year of owning it, she was finally learning to play it, and it would take hell and high water to get Silver Spoon to let that hurdy gurdy go.

They were there to help her. They would make an exception. She’d make them.

“But I’m first class?” she said. Seem confused, furrow the brow, be sorry.  Acting submissive made her feel better when pulling rank. Body language as if to say,“Technically I’m better than you, but I'll still treat you as an equal.”

“Oh.”

The platform attendant bowed. “Right this way, ma’am.”

_____

Silver Spoon passed by a homeless mare every Wednesday morning on her way to blood tests. The mare was her age, with kohl-eyed beauty, hidden under a pair of scuffed glasses, that didn't belong in an alley. She held up a pithy quote from “This Side of Maredise.”

For the first few weeks, Silver Spoon kept herself to the other side of the street.

Then one day she felt brave. He was thousands of miles away; walking on the left sides of roads was safe. She could do it.

“Can I get a bit, please?” the mare said from behind her cardboard sign.

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“You’re no superhero.”

It struck Silver Spoon like a lighting bolt. She felt it burn into her: the scarlet letter ’S’ fixed on her saddlebag. The keepsake from her volunteer gig became a caustic emblem of hubristic naïvety. She hustled around the corner to get out of sight. She flipped the saddlebags to wear them upside down so as to hide the iron-on patch and her shame.

She felt her penitent flesh crackle and blister with the disgusting cartoon now pressed against her body. She reflected on the three weeks she had spent working on an urban farm for the developmentally disabled; the chorus to “Common Ponies” played in her mind, and the plasticky reek of burning fur overwhelmed her memories.

She hurried, taking a different route back to the apartment. She cut the horrible mark from he saddlebag and threw it into the trash. It was hideous, embarrassing, and burned onto her forever. Nothing she could do would be of any help. She called the phlebotomist to reschedule. She was sick.

____

Silver Spoon enjoyed two slices of French toast, or rather, pain perdu or maybe arme Ritter. The theme of the meal was something in between petit déjeuner and Früstück. The robust and savory bread was highlighted by just the slightest glancing caress from the syrup bottle. She lingered on whole yogurt with raspberries, and then, for a palate cleanser, non-fat plain and a glass of fresh, pulpy grapefruit juice. Next came crumpets, toasted precisely to halfway done, with marmalade that came from the jars with the gingham-print lids. At last, she cupped a bowl of café au lait to her body. It warmed her as she spent the languid, breezy morning watching the dolphins sword fight on stilts.

Food dreams were her favorite.

For breakfast, Silver Spoon meted out twenty-seven raw, unsalted almonds. She ate them one at a time, counting in reverse. When she reached “one,” she put the final almond back in the bag: a precautionary measure in case she had taken too many and hadn’t noticed.

She wanted to be perfect. She couldn’t have that. But to look perfect, at the least. To make the ponies hate themselves when they saw her, like how she hated herself when she saw them. Her petty, pathetic revenge on the stallions so achingly beautiful that she was seized with hateful, violent, shameful thoughts if she looked for more than a moment.

And the stallions not-so-handsome, but who still incited that same overwhelming, loathsome, panic-inducing desire. Gentle souls and tough guys. Mathematicians who roughhoused and giggled in the street like school-colts. The adorable naïve poet with the stubble, in the coffee shop across the street, smirking at the plebeians, proud of his three whole months of cynicism. And the dorky jerk at the newsstand whose mistakes were somehow infuriatingly endearing. All these boys she wanted.

And every single one of them wasn’t him.

_____

Buckeley was perfectly safe. But it would be better to stay inside, just in case. She was thousands of miles away, but staying inside was technically still safer. It was only logical. She’d proven that in Los Ambles.

What a wasted opportunity that had been.

“Just how much trouble could a girl get into over one summer in West Los Ambles?” she’d asked.

Turned out none. The drugs and sex and parties didn’t just come to her house. Well, that wasn’t true, but she kept to her room when they did.

Her family’s friends would sometimes be surprised by that strange little mare in oversized pajamas who crashed the party by walking around in her own house. She’d take a tiny sandwich from the caterers, inspect the champagne, wander back upstairs, and lock the door on the world.

_____

Silver Spoon sat on her futon and stared at the cracked, chipping stucco. It was a rush job, and it showed. The landlady did it after Silver Spoon complained about the yellow wallpaper, just for the sake of getting her to shut up. She’d never live like common ponies.

She scowled at her laptop. She was in another argument on the essentialism of intersectional approaches to kyriarchy on cantr. Chewing her lip, she typed:

“Are you in actuality retarded?

Did you seriously just try to criticize a portrayal of member of a protected group for not being oppressed according to the narrative, I daresay the ~*stereotype*~, you’ve decided to give them?

Ahahahaha, oh wow.

Yes, yes, darling, of ~*course*~, it’s not what you ~*meant*~ to say. Oh, poor little dear, you must be so ~*confused*~, because I guarantee you, you don’t even ~*know*~ what you meant to say. You were so ~*eager*~ for the opportunity to ~*call somepony out*~ all you did was throw together a word salad of on colloquial bastardizations of academic-sounding terms you don’t understand and reblog it.

It’s ~*painfully*~ obvious. And it’s funny because for all your squabbling, you and your little fetish cabal will ~*never*~ get anywhere because you’re still too dense (naïve maybe? no, dense) to use formal logic with your definitions.

But you’re okay with that, aren’t you, precious? You don’t care one bit, do you? You’re just here to play pretend. That’s even ~*more*~ painfully obvious. This is a worthlessly pedantic argument, but if it’s anything identity politicians like you love, it’s worthless pedantry.

I mean, wow, honey, it’s almost as if you’re intentionally facilitating a never ending Hydra that does ~*nothing*~ but start self-righteous petty arguments for the sake of preaching, group affirmation, and masturbation.

Honestly, you wrote all those ~*words*~ about what now? What was it? Erotic RuPony Kenshin fanart. Don’t you have a ~*life*~ or something?

Literally everything about you is making the world a worse place to live in.”

She attached “youtried.gif” to the post.

It made her want to bang her head on the wall when she had to deal with idiots who intentionally sought out things to get upset over.

“If something upsets you, it’s their fault. But if you know it’s there, you can avoid it, and you still seek it out, well then that’s your own fucking problem,” Dr. Cares Well had said, in their phone appointment last week. “So what are you getting out of being there?”

_____

Silver Spoon came to Buckeley to get out of her comfort zone. But the sixteen hours a day she spent in front of a laptop on a used futon in a ratty apartment weren’t much different from the sixteen hours she’d spent in front of a laptop on a Hästens bed on Saddlelaide Drive.

Reclined like an odalisque, comfortable in the sagging divot of compressed cotton of the futon, she dragged her cursor in circles. It had been two hours since she’d ragequit cantr, and she was still dragging her cursor in circles. Shaking, snarling, she muttered to herself:

“…cliques forming and reforming taking turns all of us with the knife. One turn to stab, one turn to take it in the eye…”

It was that homeless mare. Insidious and ever-present. Lurking in the back of her mind. Waiting for moments of vulnerability like this. Silver Spoon thought of the mare. It was automatic, just like his name had replaced “fuck” whenever she stubbed her hoof.

She knew they were bizarre fantasies. The thought forced its way into her mind; the mare choking on spittle and vomit, drifting in and out of consciousness, some nights from the heroin and some from the dick in her windpipe. Drool spackled, with jizz running down her thigh like she was a fleshlight or some other degenerate thing.

She knew it wasn’t real. But she wanted it to be.

She hated that bitch. She hated her disgusting purple eyes. She hated her. She still belonged in the world. She wasn’t being grandiose. She wanted her to die. She was just one of many. She was common ponies.

Worthless. There was nothing keeping Silver Spoon’s life from being like that mare’s, save the five-hundred-bits-a-month misspent allowance from her family.

Five hundred bits that she used to buy things off the internet like the dusty twenty-seven inch monitor meant for her laptop and the designer bamboo dish rack that had yet to arrive after eight weeks.

She fantasized about burning her credit card and ID. Then she’d go to the toilet of a KFS and flush the keys to her apartment along with all her meds except the Adderall, pour the whole bottle of amphetamines in her mouth and hold them under her tongue until she ran out screaming into the street, and make them bring her down with a taser. Because it would prove a point.

_____

But Silver Spoon deserved it. She had a bad attitude. She had it coming.

The secretary had never said those words aloud, but they had all but oozed from her skin the day that Silver Spoon had come to submit her petition.

Silver Spoon’s thoughts were consumed by kanshi: the legendary, bordering on apocryphal, tradition of the feudal Neighponeese, in which the brave and dutiful warrior would protest the decision of his master after all other methods of persuasion had failed; to prove his sincerity at the moment of denouncement, he would rear up, shedding his silk kimono, to reveal his inner conviction through the iconic J-shaped wound— poignant and poetic —he had carved in himself and had stoically borne throughout the meeting.

And the mare got jigai. She shoved her tail between her legs and tied it there before she offed herself so her cunt didn’t stick out.

It was an extinct tradition, and it was far too late for her.

“This happened months ago. Why did you only submit this now?”

“If I could just tell you, then—” Silver Spoon sputtered.

Her words were tortured and twisted around around Byzantine taboos. They were, of course, there for her benefit. “Don’t mention it by name, she’s not obligated to keep your privacy,” her lawyer had said.

The secretary laid out Silver Spoon’s current situation. She gave the usual lecture about grade inflation and how these were actually very competitive:

A A- B+ B+ B- A A C+ A- A- D

Retroactive withdrawals were very rare, but should a miracle happen she might expect:

A A- B+ B+ B- A A C+ W W W

Either way she was fucked.

“Why exactly do you need this? Does it really matter?”

The carefully prepared arguments about internship application cycles she had written on the train home from McMane lay fettered in her mind, and the words she spoke were stillborn.

Silver Spoon looked closely at the secretary: her fur coat, pointed nose, and long, thin back mane. The pointed nose wiggled as its owner waited for an answer.

“I— At this point… can’t I just say that I need it?” Silver Spoon said.

The secretary finally did end up taking the letter, but she nearly laughed her out the room doing it.

She saw right through her. Silver Spoon was just an inarticulate filly trying to con her way out of the consequences of her own mistake.

Just another stuck-up bitch who thought her family’s measly twenty-five thousand bit donation meant she owned the school.

_____

Her family had bent the rules for her the first time: waitlisted one day, admitted the next. Silver Spoon didn’t kid herself. She didn’t belong there.

She never belonged there. For all her “exemplary” essays, ninety-fifth percentile exam scores, and invitations to dinner at her professor’s house, it was nothing more than tinsel on a dead tree.

But maybe she could have gotten there on her own power, if her family hadn’t kept her in Ponyville—but they had rather her go to a lesser known high school: they were afraid she’d “get felt up by some moldy dyke at Horse Mann.” Maybe she could have belonged.

Deserved it.

The expectation of the cousins had always been Stanpferd. After all, she did have cousins at Stanpferd, with parents who gifted to Stanpferd. But those luminaries would laugh a petty nepotist like her right out the door. A million bits couldn’t buy a Stanpferd education. To even think of it that way was an insult to Silver Spoon’s family.

If she ever hoped to get an interview there, anywhere really, she needed this petition to go through. And even then, every semester was going to have to be perfect.

But she could still do it. She could still do it under her own power. She had the potential.

Her family therapist always told her she’d fit right in at Bale. She only ever said Bale. “It’s very different.” Silver Spoon wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but she made sure to touch her mane and glance at the ground every time it happened.

_____

The beige tassels on the rug of the Paradiso café were fascinating. Looking down on the tiny mountains, Silver Spoon had just noticed how tangled they were, and she was overcome with the urge to straighten each and every one of them.

She asked her friend to repeat what she had just said.

And Star Drop did.

This mare. Who had just now bought Silver Spoon lunch, even after she ignored her for a year. Who was a literature major still taking quantum, die besser als ihr Deutsch konnte, who had compiled three week’s worth of lecture notes for her last year without a single question beyond “Are you alright?” This wonderful, honest, compassionate, fiercely intelligent, and well-informed mare.

This mare was his girlfriend. They were in love.

She had five to ten minutes of relative function, depending on precipitating mental factors, the weather, and the proximity of Saturn. Her thoughts lurched through an eerie, cold liminal space as she tried to calculate the best method of egress.

Silver Spoon smiled. Confident and assertive. She was contrite but focused when she excused herself. An important appointment, no doubt, something Type-A like everypony would only naturally assume.

She said her good-byes while donning her heavy peacoat. Tailored, but originally from the Guard surplus store (the alteration cost more than the coat). Its shoulder pads and knife-edged plunging neckline contrasted neatly with the delicate and ethereal enamel en résille of her necklace.

“Black wool, pewter fur, and milky pearls: a triumphant grissaille,” was how Silver Spoon had put it when she tried it on. "It's got a texture that's... aggressive," she said with an emphatic hoof thrust that Star Drop said was just like Hoity Toity.

Star Drop smiled right back at her. She was a little confused, but everything seemed normal.

So either she knew but didn’t care (because it didn’t happen like that, and Silver Spoon was just a petty, lying bitch), or she didn’t know (because it never happened at all, and Silver Spoon was just a delusional, histrionic bitch).

Her imagination spewed forth fantasies as it revolved around Star Drop like the moon. Silver Spoon would forever on be entangled in both assumptions. Always watching from the corner of her eye to see if there was some tic or tell that would divulge Star Drop’s opinion. She needed a way out.

_____

Hyper-vigilance, her closest frenemy. Silver Spoon hated taking this route to Wymane House: she had seen him on a bicycle once, here. But she didn’t have time to take the bridge around, and it was just a drop in the ocean, now.

Only three cracked steps kept her from her single on the ground floor.

The cabinet from her first try at junior year didn’t quite fit right in the current room. She stepped over the suitcase she still hadn’t unpacked from winter break. Reflecting on the shelves overladen with heavy, dusty tomes on her wall, she realized Virgil had nothing more to offer.

She winked at her reflection in the closet mirror. Star Drop’s Hearth’s Warming note from last year was taped over the scratch:

She was so sorry, it was totally inappropriate for her to have brought that up. She was so ashamed that she had been so insensitive. It’s just that she didn’t know that he was her

…Ex-boyfriend.

She hoped things wouldn’t have to be too awkward forever. She hoped she’d accept this gift. Star Drop would always be there for her.

Silver Spoon didn’t have it in her to say anything.

“Feels bad, mare,” she said, chuckling.

Dr. Cares Well had once told her a story about her Residency Program Director at McMane who always said, “Any patient who retains the capacity to crack jokes is not in an acute psychiatric emergency.”

Once Dr. Cares Well had become McMane’s new Residency Program Director, she had made sure to stamp that idea out as soon as possible.

But Silver Spoon liked the idea, and she laughed a little harder.

Well, that was it, then.

Only three weeks since class started and it was already over.

Her life shrank to fit within the locked room. She administered eight milligrams of lorazepam sublingually and started calling the numbers on note taped to her wall.

For the fifteen to twenty minutes that she had, the only things she was allowed to think about were paperwork to complete, letters to write, and useless petitions to resubmit.

That was it, and that was all it ever would be.

_____

A pile of mail clogged her doorstep. Some of it opened, some of it not. Three feet tall and mixed together like concrete. On top of it all lay an opened envelope, one that had been through five mail forwarding addresses before finally arriving at Buckeley, each one with an “urgent” stamp.

It contained the terms of readmission for her leave.

She could always come back. The offer would never expire. She would always be welcome. They wished her the best. They couldn’t wait to see her cross that stage on that day in May. The dean, her adviser, the health center, the counseling office. Any time she wanted. As soon as she felt ready. A week before classes started, even. They’d sent her a letter with the official watermark and everything.

_____