Back to Chapter 01
Chapter 2 - Ruthie's
evening
Ruthie left her classmate with very mixed emotions. At the very
beginning her reaction towards him was resentment. Because of him, she
was about to lose one of the few small pleasures she had in life, the
quiet two hours she spent in the nude under the shade every afternoon.
However, once Ruthie calmed herself down, she understood that Mike had
to do his job, just like she had to do hers. He was totally unaware of
the consequences of his actions in her life and she had to remind
herself that he was not acting out of malice, at least not towards her.
In fact, he had offered her the small favor of not ticketing her car,
assuming that she had one. He cared about her enough to offer a
privilege that apparently he would not grant anyone else.
No, he was not acting out of malice towards her, but most definitely he
was acting out of malice towards the rich crowd that was abusing the
lot. The truth was that Ruthie hated the spoiled elites every bit as
much as Mike did. It would be nice to see them get theirs for once.
Because of Mike Sinclair, the free parking the �beautiful people� on
campus felt that they were entitled to would turn into an expensive
hassle. Yes, it would be nice to watch the parking guy stick it to them.
She especially loved that moment when that frat guy had called Mike an
�asshole� and he had a come-back that forced the other guy to shut-up.
There were so many times that she would have wanted to do the same thing
at her job, to tell those miserable sorority bitches, and the disgusting
sluts with fake tits who fucked the football players, and the arrogant
TA�s who treated her like dirt�all of them�what she really thought of
them.
Ruthie�s mind replayed her interactions with her classmate several times
over as she tried to figure him out. He was willing to talk to her,
something that meant a lot to a person whose only other conversations
that day had consisted of taking coffee orders and answering questions
in class. Speaking to him, however briefly, had made her feel slightly
less isolated. She had not been nice to him in class, but from what she
could tell, he did not hold that against her. In fact, he had taken her
advice and read the story she recommended. That was nice, having someone
listen to her for once and care enough about her opinion to actually do
something she wanted.
Suddenly Ruthie stopped in her tracks. She remembered the slip she had
made about not having any friends. It was true, but why did she have to
admit that, without even being prompted? Mentally she castigated
herself, because she was always saying idiotic things like that. That
slip was only the latest out of many that she made out of habit, the
stupid things that came out of her mouth that made people roll their
eyes and kept her isolated. What a stupid thing to say�I don�t have any
friends�
Ruthie�s concentration began to drift. She was only partially in the
real world as she walked to her afternoon class. Like a flock of
agitated birds, thoughts circled around her mind, diving in and out of
her consciousness. Her memory drifted to a customer who had snapped at
her that morning, before shifting to a news story of a child�s murder
that had upset her. She noticed a flier for an evangelical group, which
prompted her to think about religion. Her mind wandered to an assignment
she had due the next week, and then to wondering what was for dinner
when she got back to the dorm.
She entered the building and made her way to class. Being forced to
focus on a lecture and class discussion forced Ruthie to clear her mind
somewhat, but the background noise of her other thoughts did not go away
entirely. It never did.
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Ruthie was a geology major, but the class she was attending that
afternoon was a third-year literature course with the Spanish
department. She had entered college speaking fluent Spanish and
immediately tested into the third year of the program. She realized that
she could take advantage of her language skill to get an easy
double-major. She would take all of the literature classes offered by
the department, throw in some Latin American history and political
science classes, and that would take care of all her language and
humanities requirements, plus getting her the extra major.
From the time that she was twelve up until the previous summer when she
graduated, Ruthie Burns had been surrounded by Spanish. Her mother and
her uncle�s family originally were from Culiacan, Mexico and usually
spoke Spanish at home and among themselves. Many of her classmates in
high school spoke Spanish as their first language. At the insistence of
her mother, Ruthie had taken the entire Spanish program in high school,
which gave her a more formal knowledge of the language and compensated
for the uneducated accents that surrounded her. As much as reading texts
and conjugating verbs might have irritated Ruthie at the time she was
doing it, she had to admit that all those classes in high school had
benefited her upon entering college.
Ruthie�s mind wandered again. The window of the classroom faced towards
the south and she could see the hills the coastal range. Beyond those
hills lay Santa Cruz and the elite suburbs that surrounded it. Further
south the land flattened out and a person driving down Highway # 1
entered a totally different world once he hit Watsonville. Highway # 1
passed through miles of vegetable fields: asparagus, cabbage, and of
course, artichokes.
Past all those fields lay Salinas. Salinas� claim to fame was calling
itself �the artichoke capital of the world� and �the salad bowl of the
nation�. Wow, what a thing to be proud of, thought Ruthie to herself.
Just north of town there was a big statue of an artichoke. She rolled
her eyes every time she passed that stupid thing.
The only other brush with fame that Salinas could lay claim to was the
author John Steinbeck. Steinbeck had written about the area in the
1930�s and there was a museum dedicated to him in town. Unlike most of
her classmates, Ruthie Burns actually knew who Steinbeck was and had
read several of his books. When her class visited the museum, she was
the only person in her group who showed any interest whatsoever in the
displays. As for her classmates, Steinbeck was irrelevant. Central
California was a very different place back when he had written from what
it was in the 21st Century. The area now was populated by people who had
come from a totally different place and lived a totally different reality.
Ruthie�s mind continued to drift. She thought about her mother, vaguely
wondering if she already had gotten home from work. She had promised to
call on Sunday, but already it was Wednesday and Ruthie still had not
talked to her mom that week. She couldn�t put it off any longer. As much
as she dreaded calling home, she�d have to call that night.
I guess I shouldn�t be so hard on her, thought Ruthie to herself. She
did help me get out of Salinas. I suppose the least I can do is call.
Ruthie�s attention finally returned to where it needed to be: the class
she was sitting in. She was among students that were two or three years
older than she was, but her knowledge of Spanish put her at ease with
material that many of her non-native speaking classmates struggled with.
For her, reading in Spanish was every bit as easy as reading in English.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo, Ruben Dario, Jorge Icaza�it didn�t
matter�she knew the material, some of which she had read for recreation
when she still was in high school. For example, as a junior she had
discovered �Pedro Paramo� and spent days reading and re-reading a novel
that seemed to speak directly to her.
Ruthie raised her hand and chatted in Spanish when the professor posed a
question about Mario Vargas Llosa. Spanish literature was one place
within her comfort zone, where she was on familiar territory. She had no
hesitation showing off and embarrassing the rich, lazy gringos whenever
she could. As she listened to a classmate with a very thick accent
struggle to answer the next question, an interesting thought occurred to
her. In the English literature class it was Mike Sinclair who dominated
the class discussion, but in the Spanish literature class the obnoxious
show-off was Ruthie Burns.
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When Ruthie stepped out of the Spanish literature class she stepped out
of her comfort zone. She looked around at the people surrounding her,
all of whom seemed from a different world than the one she had come
from. She knew that she really didn�t belong in Davenport. She couldn�t
relate to these people, all these spoiled rich types with their fancy
clothes, and their fake tits, and the car that daddy gave them, and
their drinking, and all their money. She couldn�t relate. She had
nothing in common with them.
And yet, if anything her ability to relate to Salinas was even less. As
she always put it: �Maybe I lived in Salinas, but I�m not from there.�
Even though she was half-Mexican, the tough-guy machista culture of her
family�s homeland elicited nothing from her but disgust. She had been to
Sinaloa several times to visit her grandparents and found the ingrained
violence and oppressiveness of the culture there repugnant. The salsa
erotica and narco-corridas that were popular in Culiacan offended and
nauseated her, every bit as much as the rap music that assaulted her
ears in Salinas.
What Ruthie really hated, more than anything else, was the gang culture
that had permeated both Culiacan and Salinas. She resented having to be
afraid of being beat up in her school, of always having to seek the
protection of her older cousin when walking in the hallways. She hated
the graffiti, the bandanas, the tattoos, the drugs, and the sneering
expressions of the gang members. She hated the way those guys treated
her female classmates, and she hated the girls for putting up with it.
For Ruthie�s mother, her escape and her defense against the hostile
world of Salinas was evangelical Christianity. Ruthie accompanied her
mother every time she went, but over time religion became every bit as
disgusting in Ruthie�s mind as the gang culture at school. She was an
outsider at her mother�s church, just as she was an outsider in school.
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Ruthie�s only escape was reading. From the time she moved to Salinas
until she graduated from high school, she locked herself in her room
whenever she could and read voraciously. Before she was twelve, she had
lived in Nebraska, so she was well-aware that a world existed beyond the
one inhabited by her mother and her cousins. She also knew that there
were places and times when drugs and gangs had not been a feature of
everyday life. She was fascinated with literature that covered different
eras from the one in which she was trapped and reading about people who
led lives that contrasted with the grim one that she knew. She started
with C.S. Lewis (recommended by her Bible study leader) and from there
branched out into science fiction and mid-20th Century British fiction.
When details of the stories did not make sense to her, she returned to
the library to look up answers to her questions, which led her to read
histories and biographies. The past interested her, so she explored
further and further back, teaching herself about ancient civilizations.
Her curiosity led her to pick apart the Bible. She read several
scholarly studies on how it was created and what the passages actually
meant in the context during which they were written. The Biblical
studies had a profound effect on her, because placing the Bible in its
historical context took away most of the mystique that her mother�s
church had ascribed to it. Ruthie memorized the entire New Testament and
a large portion of the Old Testament, but the more she learned, the less
divine the book seemed to her. Of course, she had to keep her growing
doubts to herself. She was rebelling, but she rebelled in secret.
Finally, she started reading about most forbidden topic of them all:
evolution. Precisely because her maniacal preacher so vociferously
condemned evolution, Ruthie was determined to find out everything she
could about it. Anything that preacher hated had to be good. By the time
she graduated from high school, she was reading professional-level
studies concerning paleontology and the various theories surrounding
evolution. That interest was what led her to declare geology as her
first major.
She was totally isolated from her classmates in high school. The more
she read and the more knowledgeable she became, the greater were the
differences between her and the others. Her social skills quit
developing because she felt that in the hostile world of Salinas she had
no use for them anyway. She was disgusted by the teenagers that
surrounded her at school and scared by their belligerent behavior. They
rejected her and she rejected them. The few times she did go out she
went with either her cousins or her mother.
Ruthie�s continuous reading was destined to determine the course of her
life. She mastered a broad range of topics, so class assignments were
very easy for her. If given the chance to do extra-credit work, she�d do
it, in part because she really had nothing else going on in her life.
She got straight �A�s� throughout the entire time she was in high
school. Her grades, coupled with the fact she could claim a Hispanic
background because of her mother, resulted in the grant she had received
to attend Davenport State University.
Ruthie�s uncle brought her to Davenport at the end of August and dropped
her off at her dorm. At the beginning she was elated to have escaped
Salinas. She fully expected to make friends with people whose intellect
matched hers, but very quickly she found out that was not to be. No one
except her professors cared anything whatsoever about the book knowledge
stored in her brain. Instead what mattered was that her social and
conversational skills were non-existent. She could not talk about light
topics at all and had no interest or knowledge of popular culture. She
tended to be quiet, but suddenly would become emotional and have an
opinionated outburst. Then she would realize she had just made a fool
out of herself and sink back into sullen silence. She felt that she was
incapable of articulating what she was thinking in speech, that she
really could only express herself in writing. Because she had spent so
much of her life as a teenager alone, her gestures and mannerisms were
not �normal� and she had no concept of what it was to have fun. On top
of everything else, subconsciously many of her university classmates
rejected her because she was an impoverished person from Salinas.
In Davenport, she no longer had to be afraid for her physical safety,
but she found herself even more isolated than she had been before she
graduated high school. It seemed that everyone with whom she interacted
disliked her and wanted her out of their presence. Her big dream to get
out of Salinas had been realized, but the disappointment that followed
had come close to totally breaking her spirit.
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Ruthie walked to her dorm just as it was getting dark outside. She was
shivering, because the evening had turned cool. The breeze blowing from
the hills whipped across her bare legs and flowed right through her
light dress. The backpack protected her bare back from the cold, but the
contents pressed uncomfortably and the canvas scratched at her skin. She
dumped the backpack in her room. She extracted a book to take with her
to the cafeteria.
She got her tray and silently sat down. No one was interested in talking
to her, which was why she brought the book. She was not really going to
read, but she calculated that it would not be so obvious that no one
wanted to sit with her if she was pretending to be studying while she
ate. Eating in the cafeteria at night was always the hardest part of the
day for her. During lunchtime she didn�t have any time to talk, but in
the evenings she was forced to confront the hard reality that she had
made no friends whatsoever during the two months she had been in
Davenport. She knew it and everyone else knew it. Whatever chance she
had to make friends at the beginning of the semester had long since
passed. She failed to connect with anyone, the dorm cliques formed, and
by the end of September she was completely shut out of the dorm�s social
life.
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After eating her joyless dinner, Ruthie returned to her dorm room. Her
roommate still had not returned. That meant that she could call her
mother and talk to her in private. She took a deep breath and nerved
herself to dial home. Ruthie always found talking to her mom very
stressful. The conversation, after a brief exchange of personal news and
gossip about family members, fell into the usual dialogue:
�Ruthie, have you found a good church yet?�
�No mom, not yet�really��
�But, why not? Love, you can�t tell me there�s no decent churches in
Davenport.�
�Really, Mom�there�s nothing here. Everything�s down in Santa Cruz.�
�Ruthie, honey, you are lying to me and you know it is a sin to
lie�Lourdes Rosales� daughter is up in Davenport too, and she found a
church the first week she got up there. Why can�t you?�
�Mom�I don�t know�I haven�t found anything�and I haven�t talked to
Cristina.�
�Well, why don�t you just give her a call?�
�Yes, mom�I�ll call her��
�Honey, please don�t forget this time. Call the Rosales girl. I�m very
worried about you. You know that Satan is watching and he�ll get you if
you�re not careful. You can�t fight Satan alone, dear�you have to find a
church.�
�Yes, mom�I�ll try�I promise��
Ruthie tensed up during the conversation, resisting the urge to scream
into the phone:
�Look Mom, I�m not going to find a church because I don�t want to find a
church! I don�t believe in that shit! I�m a fucking atheist, OK? Deal
with it! I�m a fucking atheist!�
She knew that the moment was coming when she would lose control of
herself and actually say that, but she figured that the longer she could
put it off, the better. Her mother would be devastated when she found
out that Ruthie had rejected her faith.
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Ruthie hung up the phone and calmed herself down. Just in time, because
her roommate Shannon came breezing into the room with her boyfriend.
With not so much as a �hello� the pair settled in and started spreading
their books on Shannon�s bed. They had brought a box of pizza with them.
They did not offer Ruthie a slice.
Ruthie was extremely uncomfortable with the invasion into her space,
which was Shannon�s intention. It was only 7:15, so she could not
complain that her roommate was preventing her from sleeping. Nor did the
no-sex-in-the-dorm room-rule apply, because Shannon had brought her
boyfriend over to hang-out and watch TV. The point was that Shannon
wanted the room and Ruthie needed to leave.
At the beginning she had hoped to be friends with the other student, but
Shannon quickly put an end to that hope. Shannon sized up her roommate
within a couple of days and decided that she was a nerd who could easily
be pushed around. She cut at Ruthie with several hurtful remarks and
then proceeded to take over the room. She bullied Ruthie with her TV and
her CD player, using the noise to spoil her concentration and chase her
out of the room. She continuously invited guests over; people who were
every bit as inconsiderate as she was. In Shannon�s mind, Ruthie was the
sort of person who deserved to be walked on, because she was such a nerd
and such a creep.
Burning with resentment, Ruthie put on a jacket and stuck some notebooks
in her backpack. She�d have to go to the library and stay there
throughout the evening. Probably it was just as well, because she�d be
forced to study and would have time to take some notes for class the
next day. She left without saying goodbye.
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As she walked along the dark sidewalks to get to the library, Ruthie�s
thoughts returned to religion. Nearly every religion imaginable was
present on campus: evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims, Scientologists,
Hare Krishnas, Moonies�everything imaginable. Ruthie hated them all. As
far as she could tell, all the religious groups wanted the same thing
from her: her brain and her money. Well, Ruthie Burns had no money and
her brain was messed up, so guess what? She had nothing to offer them.
Anyhow, the idea of believing in something that she couldn�t see or
experience with her physical senses was something that she was incapable
of doing. She knew the natural history of the earth and knew that the
Bible could not have possibly been written by God. Her reading in
history had convinced her that the most fervent religious believers were
nothing but a bunch of psychotic killers, misogynists, and
megalomaniacs. God�s love? Yeah, right. Tell that to the nine million
women who were tortured and murdered for witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
If Ruthie had her way, all religion would be illegal, or at the very
least it would be illegal to practice any religion in public. All those
obnoxious street preachers and Hare Krishnas would be going to prison.
Fuck the First Amendment.
The root of Ruthie�s hatred towards the world of religion was
straightforward enough; she had it shoved down her throat from the
moment she moved to Salinas. Until she was twelve, she had no opinion of
religion whatsoever, because her father was a Christian in name only. He
was the sort that believed in God and defended religion, but did not
practice himself nor forced it on anyone.
Ruthie�s mother was very different from her father when it came to
faith. Her family had grown up Catholic, but like so many other Latin
Americans during the 1980�s and 1990�s, she converted to Pentecostalism
as a teenager when still living in Culiacan. When she and Ruthie�s dad
split up, she joined a local non-denominational church. The oversized
t-shirt she normally wore pretty much said it all: �the radicals for
Jesus�.
Twice per week Ruthie�s mother dragged her to a �Temple of the Lord�
that had been set up in an abandoned store in a dilapidated shopping
center. Twice per week she was forced to listen to a demented preacher
as he screamed, cried, and sweat at the podium, his voice transmitted
over a defective set of speakers that screeched and made the girl wince.
Her mother and some of the other women spoke in tongues, which totally
gave her the creeps. The first time she attended worship Ruthie was
terrified by the spectacle and did everything she could to get out of
going a second time. It took several hard slaps across the face to get
her to change her mind.
Ruthie reflected that her mother was by no means a bad person, but she
was dealing with a lot of personal issues (including a brief and very
dysfunctional marriage to her father). She had little education, so the
only frame of reference she had to see the world and judge the people
who surrounded her came out of the preacher�s interpretation of the
Bible. Ruthie hated that preacher, in part because he was such a tyrant
over his small kingdom of believers, including her mother, and in part
because he was such a demented freak.
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The chilly breeze whipped around her as she took a short cut across a
playing field that separated the dorms from the academic buildings. She
was adequately protected from the waist up, but her legs had goose bumps
from the chill. The wind blew up her skirt and felt cold on her bare
bottom and vagina. She loved the feeling of exposure, especially when
her skirt blew up and she was momentarily uncovered from the waist down.
Ruthie was not exactly an exhibitionist, because she did not want other
people to see her when her body was exposed, but she did enjoy being
naked in places where she normally would be expected to be clothed.
Along with studying evolution, Ruthie�s obsession with being naked was
another form of rebellion against the values of that preacher she so
hated. God had commanded people to cover up, so Ruthie made it a point
to wear as little as possible, even if the weather was chilly.
Ruthie�s fascination with being naked started shortly after she moved to
Salinas. Her mother could not afford to turn on the air conditioning and
Ruthie was complaining about how hot her room was. Her mother responded
that she should sleep in her underwear. She followed that advice for
several nights, but then realized it would be even more comfortable to
sleep completely nude. At first the thought frightened her, but then she
saw it as a daring adventure. She knew that if she were caught, at the
very least she would get several slaps across the face and be forced to
sit at the kitchen table for a couple of hours, but to her the risk was
worth it.
About six months after Ruthie moved in, her mother managed to change her
work schedule so that she would be home when Ruthie got out of school.
She left for work at 3:00 am and returned to the apartment at noon. She
was concerned about keeping the girl out of trouble, forcing her to do
her homework, and making sure she spent less time with her cousins, who
she did not consider a good influence.
The change of schedule did keep Ruthie under control in the afternoons,
but what her mother did not realize was that it also gave her four hours
of free time in the mornings. The girl referred to those hours as her
�me time.� The moment her mother left for work, Ruthie got up and ran
around the apartment naked. She enjoyed her own body, spending hours
looking at herself in the mirror and taking self-portraits with a
digital camera. She read, cooked breakfast for herself, listened to
music, and masturbated in the living room. When she got a little older,
occasionally she went outside when it was still dark and streaked around
the apartment complex.
Ruthie�s �me time� in the early morning hours affected her life in the
afternoons. By the time she got home from school she was dead-tired. She
studied and had dinner, but on the nights she did not have to go to
church she was in bed asleep by 8:00. Her mother sometimes wondered
about the girl�s constant sleeping, but had no problem with it because
she was worried that if Ruthie were out on the street she would get in
trouble or get beat up. She bragged to her fellow churchgoers that
Ruthie was a �good girl� who never gave her much trouble. Had she known
about her daughter�s �me time� she would have been horrified.
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Ruthie entered the library, went to the basement and found an open table
all the way in the back. She unloaded her backpack and began searching
among the Spanish literature collection for some titles that she needed
for a report.
After several hours, Ruthie had taken most of the notes that she needed.
She looked around and realized that all of the other desks and tables in
the basement were empty. When she looked at her cell phone she knew why:
it was 10:15. She knew from experience that after 10:00 no one came into
the basement and anyone wanting a study desk could get one on the main
floor.
The student took off her dress and returned to her seat to take some
final notes. She planned to spend the final hour at the library nude.
She calculated there was very little danger of being caught because she
could hear the elevator if anyone came down at such a late hour.
At 11:00 she got up and, still naked, re-shelved the books she had been
taking notes from. She felt extremely daring walking up and down the
aisles of bookshelves with nothing on. She loved the sensation of the
cool air blowing on her exposed skin and the silence that surrounded
her. When she got up and left her dress behind at her study desk, her
heart pounded at the beginning, but the longer she stayed away the more
confident she became. She never allowed herself to return to the safety
of her desk before she was completely relaxed and comfortable with being
naked in the library.
She heard the bell of the elevator and scrambled back to her seat. She
slipped her dress over her head just in time, because the person who had
entered the room was a library employee. The man gave Ruthie a
suspicious look, apparently having realized that she was doing something
she wasn�t supposed to. Ruthie was disappointed, because she�d have to
re-shelve the last two books with her dress on. She didn�t like to do
that because she considered that her naked time in the library was not
complete unless she could re-shelve all of the books she had taken to
her desk that night before getting dressed. But with that guy in the
basement she had no choice. She knew better than to leave immediately,
because that would arouse more suspicion. She�d re-shelve the books,
then get her backpack and depart.
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When she stepped outside, the chilly air hit her bare legs and a feeling
of cold reality hit her soul. She began to feel resentful and morose as
she walked past the engineering building and the computer center on the
sidewalk that exited the main section of campus. She left the
well-lighted sidewalk and plunged into the darkness to cross the playing
field that separated the academic buildings from the dorms. The field
was empty and silent. The silence was not peaceful to Ruthie; rather it
had a sinister and desolate feeling for her. She knew that what she was
doing was not safe; because a student had been raped on that same field
just a month before, doing exactly what she was doing. She didn�t care.
If it�s gonna happen, it�s gonna happen, and my life sucks anyway. When
she got to the middle of the field she stopped to stare up at the stars.
Her thoughts wandered as her mood deteriorated. She thought of writers
such as C.S. Lewis who romanticized about the stars and created
something out of them that was not based on reality. For C.S. Lewis the
stars were living beings, something similar to angels. She then thought
about astronomer Carl Sagan�s speculation that it was the stars that
first gave people the idea of supernatural beings, perhaps because
ancient humans thought the stars were far-off campfires in the sky.
Her mind shifted to the other science fiction writers that she had read
as a teenager, and all those fictitious trips to �other worlds�, trips
that in real life never would, and never could happen. Perhaps there is
other life out there, but if there is, so what? It�s not like we�re ever
gonna get out there�everything�s too far away. She thought about all the
work-arounds that writers had come up with to cover those vast
distances�warp drive�worm-holes�irregularities in space�time travel�but
it was all fantasy, just like supernatural beings, alternate worlds, and
the afterlife. The cold hard reality was that E=mc2 and there never
would be anything anyone could do about that. We�re stuck here on this
planet�we�ll never go to any of those other neat worlds�and the best we
could ever do might be to get a few astronauts on Mars. That�s it.
Science fiction and the whole idea of inter-stellar travel was BS, just
like angels, ghosts, demons, pixies�whatever. It�s all crap. All of it.
It doesn�t matter. In a few years we�ll run out of resources and all
starve to death and go extinct. We�ll be gone just like the passenger
pigeon, and then something else�rats, probably�will take over the
planet.
Not that any of that matters, thought Ruthie to herself. The planet
eventually will perish, burned up by the sun in a few billion years. Or
maybe earlier�because if plate tectonics were to quit, the planet will
become frozen and dead, like Mars. She had read an article that plate
tectonics already was slowing down. If that speculation was true, the
natural processes that maintain the atmosphere were coming to an end and
eventually all water and air would freeze and evaporate away. We don�t
have to wait five billion years�the end of all life is coming a lot
sooner.
Ruthie reflected on the futility of her life, the uselessness of her own
existence. In a planet that sooner or later was destined for oblivion,
and being a particularly unhappy member of a species that was doomed to
extinction much sooner than the planet, what was the point? Why bother
to study? Why bother to open the coffee shop? Why bother to continue
living? Everyone hates me�even that Parking Nazi�even he�ll see me for
what I am and ditch me� There�s no hope�no hope for anything or anyone.
It�s stupid to stay alive�for what? So I can spend the next 60 years
taking shit from everyone? Fuck �em. I don�t want to take shit. I�ve had
it. Fuck it.
Suddenly she took off walking. No longer was she walking towards the
dorms, but instead towards the path that exited campus, eventually
descended a hill, crossed under Highway 1, and led onto a vegetable
field that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of the field
there was a cliff that fell straight into the Pacific Ocean. A good
fifty-foot drop onto rocks that were covered by roaring surf. Her body
would get torn up in the waves and they�d never find her. Fuck �em. Fuck
all their insults and their money and all the rest of their shit�
Ruthie ended up not going very far. She never did. She made it to the
gate that exited campus, only to find it was locked. Had she really
wanted to, she could have scaled the fence or gone through the main exit
and then walked around to the trail, but to do all that would have taken
more exertion than she was capable of putting forth at that moment. She
was not scared of dying, but sheer effort that she would have to put
into getting out to that cliff suddenly became overwhelming. Had she
already been close to the edge, she might have worked up the courage to
jump or fall off, but to actually get out there was too much. Her anger
turned into depression, and once she was depressed, inertia took over
and she was capable of doing very little.
Depression shrouded the unhappy girl like a thick heavy cloak. She felt
weighted down. Slowly she walked back, trying to shake off the numbness
just so she could move forward.
When Ruthie returned to her room, Shannon already was asleep and all the
lights were out. She entered as quietly as possible, scared to wake up
her roommate and risk an ugly confrontation. Her gaze fell upon
Shannon�s head, which was turned away from her. She resisted the urge to
take her roommate�s CD player and use it smash that bitch�s nasty face.
After having withstood two months of mistreatment at the hands of
Shannon, Ruthie hated her.
She fantasized about somehow getting revenge. Unfortunately, life rarely
gives people like Ruthie the chance to get even with those who have
treated them badly.
