The Dismantled Alter of Life

i. the friends

Chapter One

 

During the Second World War, the State College of Washington was almost entirely devoid of male students. In the beginning it had seemed unlikely that the war would affect the small college town of Pullman at all; nearly a year passed in quiet normality, but in 1942, the needs of the war came to call. Most of the men were shipped off to war, expected to leave college without a second thought and serve their country until the war was over. The few men left on campus came later, when the military sent them for special training. The State College of Washington served to instruct and prepare for the Army Signal Corps, teach the Japanese language, and teach preflight aviation.

For the final years of the war, the university seemed to be as much an all-women's college as Barnard or Smith. After the war, a great influx of war veterans surged back into enrollment, supported by the Serviceman's Readjustment Act. By the year 1948, men once more vastly outnumbered women enrolled in the university, and a majority of the men enrolled were veterans of the war and married at twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

Thrust into an entirely new state of being, reeling from the cost of the Second World War, adjusting to the newly formed social expectations among men and women, those who were too young to serve or enter the work force at the time had great choices to face as they entered into adulthood. Those who wanted to continue forward progress sought education and upward direction. Those who hated the economic changes took to the streets with banners and to the bottle with reckless abandon.

{ tenebrous }

"We could start a reasonably-sized revolution if we start by burning this building."

"That's my building."

"Your building must be burned for the greater good."

"Your confidence in your own ability to get away with arson inspires me." Mary Griffin linked an arm through her friend's and drew her closer, both in a perhaps false sense of security and a search for warmth in the cool fall weather. It was just before midterms, the atmosphere on campus gradually ramping up from care-free relaxation to the high-tension stress that would follow the student population through the rest of the semester.

Her criminally ambitious, blonde companion shrugged carelessly and closed her hand over Mary's. "It's a necessary sacrifice." She had yet to grasp the gravity of the upcoming exams, and was still floating along peacefully in the delusion that the coursework would remain easy. It wouldn't take long for her to get her head in the game and buckle down to get her work done, her infamous choleric work ethic lying dormant until absolutely necessary.

"Of your soul or of the education building?" Mary wondered bitingly, picking her way around a rain puddle that had accumulated on the dipped sidewalk. "Either one would be easy enough to dispatch of."

Fall had descended upon the university with as much grace as an exhausted engineering student throwing himself, book bag and all, into the nearest garbage receptacle and waiting for the custodians to dispose of him.

The trees and shrubbery which lined the sidewalks and garnished the buildings were coated in an obscene shade of orange, forever shedding shriveled, dead leaves and dropping wet branches onto the walkways to be stepped on by droves of aspiring intellectuals. There were dried up maple seeds and rotted acorns littered across the yard, reminding students of the possibility of being struck in the head by falling tree parts.

The sky was perpetually gray, the air unforgivably humid, with a persistent wind which existed only to dishevel all, even those who were already held together merely by their last shred of sanity.