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TRANSCRIPT OF ROLLINS UNIVERSITY STUDENT RADIO STATION WVBS (“PALLAS RADIO”)

Broadcast number: Not yet assigned

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world.

Of course, every time she said it, ‘the world’ meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding onto was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again.

I was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of bubble wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me – in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus – if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal.

I tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth.

Maybe you’re thinking, bet you wish you’d listened to her now. But I think we were both right. There was something waiting for me, out here in the world. It was by chance. It wasn’t my fault. And it was never personal.

But it had teeth all the same.

***

Lucy Easting, once again, took a slightly incorrect step. Her new roommate hadn’t yet requested that Lucy avoid every one of the particularly noisy floorboards in their ancient dorm room. But judging by the way she arched her shoulders like an unhappy cat, it would, at the very least, be a future suggestion.

“Sorry,” Lucy said.

Whitney Fielding took a carefully controlled breath. “It’s fine,” she said.

Lucy took a breath, and focused on the task at hand. She had to laugh. There she was, standing in her first college dorm, the very first place she had ever lived without her mother. And yet getting ready for a night out still had the same furtive feeling as it had on nights when she’d literally had to sneak out under Jillian’s nose.

But Lucy kept the smile on her face, even as she caught the wrinkle in Whitney’s brow deepening. She had a plan. A whole host of plans, in fact – and staying civil with Whitney for the next ten months and change was one of them. Which meant that if Whitney was trying to cook up a Noble Academic vs. Frivolous Party Girl dichotomy, it was going to fall to Lucy to gracefully sidestep it.

Whitney kept her back turned, facing her computer. “You’re not coming back late, right?” she asked. “I’m a light sleeper.”

Lucy tied off the bust of her sunshine-yellow romper, then moved the important things from her purse to a small, light wristlet. Lipstick, pepper spray, keys. Insurance card and ID, because even if they were in the midst of a Cold War at the moment, she was still Jillian’s daughter. In the Easting house, whenever you stepped out the front door, you always made at least the basic preparations to be hit by a bus.

“I’ll be quiet,” Lucy said, not committing either way. She could respect Whitney’s laser-focus on her thesis, even if it seemed a bit early in the year to be so intense about it. But her arrival at Rollins University was the result of five years of working, careful planning, and an explosive, bridge-burning exit from the place she’d called home for her entire life. She wasn’t looking to reinstate a curfew her first week of college.

It had been a tremendous relief for Lucy to hear that she was being placed in a senior dorm. At twenty-three years old, she had little to no chance to blend in with the freshmen. And if nothing else, Whitney didn’t seem to care that she was two years younger than Lucy. If anything, Whitney seemed to think that she was the eldest member of the room, saddled with some callow, directionless youth.

Case in point. “If you want my advice,” she said, “you should let your first few weeks here set the tone. Do you really want your college career to be about your social life?”

“I don’t have any pre-reading for my classes,” Lucy said, which felt like a nicer answer than yeah, a little. Classes also wouldn’t start for another two days. Though that didn’t feel like the kind of argument Whitney would be sympathetic to.

Whitney glanced over her shoulder, a rare departure from her screen, and gave Lucy a rather pointed once-over. On one hand, after a five-year taste of grim adulthood, it was a bit of a novelty to be treated like a rebelling teen. On the other hand, Lucy had wavy pale blonde hair that fluffed in the humidity, and was perhaps at its peak fluffiness on this late summer Tennessee night. Her voice was a little high and a little loud in a way she knew sounded affected, though it wasn’t. She had a stick-and-poke tattoo of an asterisk on her wrist, something her high school classmate had given her at a graduation party while tipsily monologuing that it symbolized her as a ‘work in progress.’ She recognized the look of someone who wasn’t taking her seriously.

“If you wait for someone to tell you how to prepare, you’re already behind,” Whitney finally said. “Like they tell you in college coaching.”

Lucy paused in the middle of zipping up her wristlet. “There’s coaching?”

Whitney’s mouth thinned, as if unsurprised that Lucy didn’t know there was coaching. “Just be careful,” she said. “It’s a big campus. You can get turned around at night.”

Lucy zipped her wristlet the rest of the way and accepted the kindness. Rollins itself was about as small a world as one could get at a university. The grounds, spread across a plateau on the Tennessean side of the Appalachians, may have been sprawling, but the community was tight-knit and self-contained. Lucy had to take a plane, two buses, and a college-provided shuttle to get here. That shuttle went down to the nearest town a couple times a week, and on a regular schedule on weekends. Otherwise, the students, faculty and staff never seemed to look far beyond the boundaries of campus.

But the nights were dark up there on the mountain. The woods surrounding the Rollins grounds stretched for miles and miles. Jillian’s fears had always revolved around cities and civilization – never the wilderness. Though as she looked out the window in that moment, Lucy had a feeling her mother would find more than a few things to fear out there in the trees.

And speak of the devil. When Lucy picked up her phone, there was a new text from her mother on screen. Can we please talk?

Lucy allowed herself one short, painful breath. One last quick squeeze of filial duty. Then she slid her phone into her pocket. She hadn’t been the one who decided they weren’t talking.

“Good luck with your writing,” she said.

Whitney had already long turned back to her laptop screen. “I don’t need luck,” she said airily. “I have an outline.”

Lucy opened the door and stepped into the fluorescent-lit corridors of Quincey Hall. The hinge creaked behind her. The stairwell glowed ahead. Jillian’s wheel silently, feverishly spun.

And beyond all of it, the night waited.