They mostly tittered nervously and tried to ignore the way she had flown off the handle. They were leaving her a social escape route; she could still smooth it over. But she was not interested. "Listen to me good, you dumb fucks!" She had let herself go, it was the only thing she could do. In a way it felt great to bellow and cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this was the first contact with reality these women had had in years. "This is rape! And I'm entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"
She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, and several took the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. Man did not. "Sarah! Jeez, you don't have to take it so serious! You'll feel better later on. We've got some punch for you in the Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We didn't think you were going to get so upset."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it seriously because anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad problems and needs to get straightened out. If you think you're doing this because it's natural and fun, you aren't thinking too fucking hard."
"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Marl, hardly believing anyone could be so weird, "it's for the better. We've all been through it together now and we're all sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were just welcoming you in."
"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you can come and be just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, never will be, don't want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I don't want your activities, all I want is a decent place to live where I can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and not be equalized... by a mob.. . of little powderpuff terrorists... who just can't stand differentness because they're too stupid to understand it! What goes on in your heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of... of nature? Stop laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this, someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the little drops of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and suddenly felt cleansed. She clenched the fist and held it up. "Understand?"
They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared and disgusted and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood on snow. Most fled, hysterically grossed out.
"Gag me green!"
"Barf me blue!"
Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you want to give all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape. I mean, we all scream a lot and stuff, and we don't really want them to do it, if you know what I mean, but when they do it's fun after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and exciting, and for the guys, it helps them work off steam. You know what I mean?" "No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie-- she did know exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she could never let herself think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, sniffling. Sarah, alone now, washed her hair again (though it had not been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated to her room, a little ill in a gag-me-green sort of way, yet filled with a tingling sense of sureness and power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had gone out. Sarah had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.
The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent light shot out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still. The door opened a bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get out, kittycat."
Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure stepped in quickly, shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. "Spike, are you sleeping? What did you get into this time?" He found the kitten under his bed, next to the overturned rat-poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had only been dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his bed and rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny corpse down into his lap.
A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied themselves in jolts. He twisted around, breathless, hung on his elbows on the bed's edge, finally sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed it out again. He rolled onto the bed and the sobs came faster and louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and screamed and sobbed for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy little standard-issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out: Sharon, Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.
When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but curiously relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an empty calculator box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out the window. Around him in even ranks rose the thousands of windows of the towers, and to his tear-blurred vision it was as though he stood in a forest aflame "Spike," he said, "What the hell should I do with myself?
"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.