The Things That Brought People Together

emma estridge

She should go down to the quad where people were shouting each other’s names. It was her first night at college, and it was her right to go down there and shout her name at them, then her favorite TV show (The X-Files), then why she thought it was so great (because it exposes real issues relevant in current-day society, like the existence of a deep state government). Then she’d tell them her biggest issue in life (not being able to get out of bed in the morning, which may or may not signal a depressive episode) and a wild but endearing fact about herself (that she once read War and Peace backwards). Then the others would supply similar information, and they’d basically all be joined at the hip. To her hip. She’d be like the protagonist in a coming-of-age novel, all of the side characters there to offer her insight into the world around her and into her own mind.

Had they already gotten started on that in the quad? She bent closer to the open window to catch what they were saying, but the screen made their laughter and whoops tinny and garbled, like they were flies bumbling in the frame.

The roommate was still talking. “And I brought this rug, but we don’t have to put it down if you don’t like the color. Anyways, were you surprised when you got in? I was surprised.” The roommate was a math or science major and plain. The roommate had unpacked a stack of sci-fi books (“You can borrow whatever you want,” the roommate had said) and Monopoly, which the roommate left in the middle of her bed. She must’ve envisioned them playing it together once they got unpacked.

She had to get down to the quad. “Going out.” She snatched her keys from the dresser.

She got a few steps down the hallway and had already started thinking too hard about it. It was her worst trait, always ruining the simplest things for herself by realizing their secret badness. What if the people on the quad weren’t bold and sophisticated and innovative like the postcard the college had mailed to her said they would be? What did those words even mean? They bounced around in her head like target-practice pigeons. She’d read online that this was a party school, and the people on the quad probably already had beers in their hands and were rolling joints against the park benches. Why wouldn’t they be just like the kids at her high school had been—caught up in lacrosse, gas money, and messaging strangers on the internet? These were the people she was supposed to be figuring out the path of her life with? She’d barely been able to find the will to drive there that morning. She’d sat in her driveway for an hour trying to turn the ignition, the tire pressure light teasing her, her parents’ dog barking sharply on the grass. When she tried to picture what her life at college would be like, picture her classes or picture herself going to campus events, she couldn’t see anything but a blank wall. And she was supposed to fix this issue while surrounded by a bunch of gas money monkeys? She felt like she was going to throw up. She had no reason to go to class tomorrow. She had no reason to get out of bed.

Holding herself up against the wall, she noticed the hall bulletin board. The only thing on it was a red piece of paper with THE ANTI-COMMUNIST CLUB scrawled across the top, and, below that, TYRANNY, a slashed circle, and a phone number.

She didn’t know what an Anti-Communist was, exactly (Someone who was anti-terrorist? Anti-inorganic-pharmaceuticals?), but the ad told her everything she needed to know about the sentiment of these people. First of all, the ad was vague, snarky, dripping with inside jokes from last term (Tyranny! Slashed Circle!). These people knew something she didn’t. These people would give her a nickname that encapsulated her whole existence better than she could herself in 300 pages double-spaced and double-sided. The 300 pages would be blank if she had to write them herself! Ha Ha! But never mind that now. Second of all, the Anti-Communists were united under one purpose (Anti-Communism), and that purpose was the first thing in their heads every morning when they woke up. The purpose made them get up and shower and not leave water on the bathroom floor! The purpose kept them from lying against the wall for an hour instead, brain flitting from the trigonomic function that gives them a burst of frustration they sometimes misinterpret as a bit of happiness to the semi-sexy man at the gas station (accompanied by intense self-loathing for thinking about the pointless animalistic action that is sex) to The Outsiders, which they read in the eighth grade, the chapter of Ponyboy and his brothers sitting on that grassy hill being their last distinct moment of carefree joy!

Laughing, she ripped the ad down, folded it until it was small and dense like a pill, then tucked it into her shirt pocket. She turned back for the room, where she would lock herself in the bathroom until the roommate fell asleep.

Of course, she couldn’t just call the number on the ad. The selection had to be authentic. The Anti-Communists had to observe her Anti-Communist behavior from afar and choose her to be one of them based on merit. 

Upon learning that red was a communist’s favorite color, she burned all of her red clothes in the parking lot behind the dorms and hoped the Anti-Communists were peeking through their blinds. They would all be in one room for an Anti-Communist meeting, packed against the window so that they touched elbows, shoulders, hips. The Anti-Communists were familiar with each other’s bodies and didn’t sweat with fear and excitement when a stranger on the bus accidentally brushed their hand. 

She poked the smoldering t-shirts with a stick. Another bonfire was happening ten feet away, the participants holding high-alcohol-content beverages and talking about the school basketball team. She scoffed. If only they knew how vapid their little bonfire would look in comparison to an Anti-Communist bonfire, which involved Anti-Communist trivia and secret handshakes and perhaps even live Communist sacrifices! It was so beautiful, the things that brought people together! She liked to think that she teared up a little, but that may have been due to the smoke! She tried to imagine the kinds of things they’d talk about at an Anti-Communist bonfire and came up blank. But of course she did! What the Anti-Communists discussed was so important, so intelligently abstract, it would make sense that she (an aspiring-yet-unindoctrinated-Anti-Communist) wouldn’t be able to conceptualize the topics!

The other bonfire’s laughs echoed against the dorm building.

She went to class and milled around in the hallways, but only in case she ran into an Anti-Communist. She even said hello to people, lots of people, all of whom she vaguely hated.

“Hi,” a girl she had Literature with said. “Have your classes been good so far?”

But she was walking away from the girl, smiling to herself. If the girl had been an Anti-Communist, the connection would’ve been immediate, intense, telepathic. The hair on the back of her neck would’ve stood and her aura would’ve sizzled to be in the vicinity of such enlightenment. The girl would’ve pulled her aside into a window alcove and said, “You know that X-Files episode you’ve always been confused by? The one with Nick Chinlund as the serial killer? Well, you actually missed a major plot development by getting up to go to the bathroom, but your recognition of a supposed plot hole proves that you are indeed someone who thinks deeply as well as an overall interesting person with a compelling internal dialogue.” Then they would’ve exchanged life path numbers (they were both sevens) and set up a meditation date for that evening. The anticipation of the meditation date and the subsequent good memory she would have to savor afterwards would alone be enough to keep her from thinking about killing herself for a few days.

How had she operated before her discovery of the Anti-Communists? How had she existed? The summer before had been working for minimum wage in a drive-through and dreading school and coming home late in the evenings to watch hours of Animal Planet with her parents, that herd of hippos sludging through the savanna like they’d never reach the stream on the other side. And it seemed even more pathetic now than it had then.

She stood under the English building’s awning while everyone was on the quad after lunch. The Anti-Communists would stand out with their heads ducked close together, close enough to smell each other’s breath and not care. They would be whispering lines from an art house film they’d watched last night or telling vulnerable stories of how communism had impacted their lives. Or they’d be discussing the real thing, the deep subjects, the topics she’d already established that she’d be unable to comprehend in her unenlightened state!

But none of the clumps of people on the quad were Anti-Communists. The dance majors sat in a circle but looked down, picked at their pink tights, and looked exactly like dance majors. Two girls in science sat on opposite sides of a bench, only speaking to call out answers to chemistry homework, the breeze blowing hair into their mouths. They looked, like the dancers, exactly like science majors. The hippies were laughing, darting in a game of frisbee, but she squinted and saw that their pupils were wide. The only one actually talking grabbed at the muddy hem of his bell bottoms and babbled about his elementary school art teacher.

She heard a jumble of conversations. They were about the semi-sexy drafting teacher, the clumpy rice in the dining hall, who was giving who gas money and when they were giving it to them. The roommate was laughing with the economics teacher that everyone liked. The roommate waved at her, and she did not wave back. Didn’t she know that the calories required to raise her hand and rotate it from side to side were better spent on something else? (But what else?)

How did they all seem content in their fakery? Why weren’t they searching desperately for something meaningful and real like she was, heads down and insomniatic?

She took another bath. It was Friday night, and she could again hear people laughing and talking down on the quad.

Isn’t connecting with people a God-given right? Shouldn’t there be someone (or a club of people) assigned to us at birth to ensure we meet a suitable daily quota of connection, which then provides us with an unshakable reason to live? She got soap in her eyes and tried to skim a page of Marx through the sting. Shouldn’t she read this page of Marx and feel something about it, either hatred or hope? The thing was, she couldn’t quite make herself cry over being snubbed by the Anti-Communists, which then made her cry because even her emotions were phony. Though it was hard to admit, most of the time she felt nothing at all, felt pointless and like her life would be better if it were happening in some Soviet state where her ribs poked out but she roamed with a band of sibling-like orphans she could lay her head next to at night under the moldy tarp they used as a tent. Every day there would be distinct tasks to do—forage in dumpsters for food, lament the deaths of her parents, shake a stray cat from the tarp—and each of these actions would be diffused with nuance due to their necessity to survival, and she and the other sibling-like orphans could communicate through only grunts, which they infused with passionate inflections and set off with stanza breaks, intoning their despair throughout the night.

God, it sounded pathetic.

The roommate knocked on the door. “Are you okay?”

Though the bathtub hadn’t filled yet, it was already cold, soap melting around her ankles. “They won’t let me in the Anti-Communist Club,” she said for some reason.

“That’s because it’s not real.” The door settled as the roommate leaned against it. “Dan from economics told me. It’s just some communist guy who wears a coonskin hat and puts the flyers up as a joke.”

She turned the faucet off so the roommate didn’t have to shout. She knew it was her turn to speak, but she was already so tired and didn’t understand why. Then she hated herself. Why couldn’t she just try?

“Hey,” the roommate said, “are you okay?”

Sometimes when she was especially depressed, she stared at a stain on the carpet for hours and had no thoughts or feelings. She thought of the girl from Literature’s small talk, the dance majors sitting silently in a circle. She thought of eating rice in the cafeteria and saying hello and saying goodbye and gas money and asking how classes were going and smiling at someone across the room and almost running into someone on the stairs and apologizing and making eye contact with the janitor and wondering what her roommate was thinking about. It seemed like if this was all there was, she should feel more about it. But no one had told her how to feel.

After the hours without thoughts or feelings, her mind was clean and open, like a bowl.

“Can I come in?” the roommate asked, tapping gently on the door.

“Yes,” she said and started crying again. “Hello.”

Emma Estridge is a junior at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, SC. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and she gets her best ideas while walking in the woods.