It was a ten-minute walk to the Alumnae House. In the winter months, the campus was brutal. Slush and ice and and whipping winds that stung your face. But in the spring and summer, it was lush and green, with blooming flowers reflected in a pristine lake. Austere 19th century buildings bathed in golden sunlight and painted with the shadows of mature trees. It was, as I remarked when I was a student, “scenic as fuck.”
On the other hand, the surrounding city was kind of a shit-hole. Having been raised on an idyllic cul-de-sac in the suburbs, walking to school through a winding path in the woods, I had briefly overreacted to the implied menace of these dirty and, I assumed, violence-riddled urban streets. I bought a small stainless steel hunting knife at a kiosk in a local mall, and wore it in a black leather sheath on my belt. Most of my friends had spent a lot of time in much bigger cities — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — and out of the corner of my eye, I could see them smirking at each other and shaking their heads.
But except for slicing apart brown tape to open care packages sent by my grandmother — home-baked, slightly burnt cookies dotted with M&M’s — I never encountered a situation where the knife actually come in handy. After a few months, the knife went missing. I never found it and I never got around to replacing it.
Until just this second, it never occurred to me that Carrie may have surreptitiously thrown it away. If so, good for her.
Now I walked, knifeless and unthreatened, down the insipidly named College Street, the black cashmere jacket over my Led Zeppelin T-shirt a bit too heavy in the lingering warmth of the day.
The corner movie theater was gone, bought by Ellison and turned into a student book store. The liquor store that had once been so cavalier about selling oversized bottles of rum to underage college students, had been replaced by a Thai restaurant with the irredeemably awful pun name, Thai & Thai Again. And something called Voodoo Tattoo stood where the Overhill Drug Store had once been.
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Bad Sex & Good Scotch: A Reunion Story
Short Story#86 in Short Story (7/11/15) Remember your "first time?" Well, I wish I could forget mine. As a Freshman in college, I met Carrie and we fell in love. We thought we were the perfect couple. We thought we would always be together. But after we decide...
