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- Joined
- Aug 10, 2021
- Location
- NYC
This wasn’t in her job description.
Custodian. Janitor. Trash Technician. Rubbish Rat.
‘Vanessa, you’ll be responsible for performing a variety of cleaning, care, and maintenance functions around campus and the adjacent grounds.’
That’s what her supervisor had said in the interview.
But Mr. Lubbock had no idea what any of that really meant. He wore a jacket and tie and reported to someone who wore a jacket and tie who probably also reported to someone else who wore a much nicer outfit than her. In fact, Vanessa was willing to bet that Mr. Lubbock had never gotten his nice clothing dirty doing any of the things that she did on a regular basis. Things had to get done. Stuff had to be accomplished. And the people who wore nice clothes didn’t want to know the granular details of day-to-day tasks and activities and preventive maintenance. They needed someone to blame when things went wrong and they wanted someone to do the dirty work and they didn’t seem to care about all the little leeways and details that slipped through the cracks. And there were a lot of cracks in this campus.
The university didn’t keep expensive engineers and technicians on staff to sit idly until something broke. But they were fine with paying twenty dollars an hour for a first line of defense. When a problem arose it was Vanessa’s job to assess the situation and, if she couldn’t handle it herself, she had the authority to subcontract the work to an expert. And, provided that she stayed within her budget, no one really paid much attention to her…or all the little cracks. She didn’t do electrical work. And she definitely didn’t do HVAC. Vanessa was cute but she wasn’t a carpenter. She wasn’t a roofer. And she definitely wasn’t an engineer. But when something broke she tried to fix it - from drywall patches to roof leaks - but she wasn’t always successful. And her expense account had so many little, miscellaneous charges each week that oversight was almost impossible and lots of things got lost in the cracks. The accounting department hand-waved most of her expenses without even scrutinizing because she had a track-record of being trustworthy.
But there were things she couldn’t avoid doing - tasks that don’t require specialized trade knowledge or experience. No matter how badly she wanted to, she wasn’t allowed to call a cleaning lady to scrub vomit out of the nurse’s office carpet. A janitor could only shirk so much responsibility - or subcontract so many tasks - before someone noticed. Lubbock had admonished her not to call a plumber if she could plunge a toilet or snake the drain herself. Easy for him to say. That guy didn’t have to cram his arm up to the elbow into a pile of excrement.
All things considered, however, it wasn’t a bad job. And she got to blend-in to the campus like a window-washing wallflower. Her tasks kept her mainly out of sight and off-camera. Working in the shadows - in the boiler room - and behind-the-scenes - after class - was very comfortable for her; she traversed the empty halls after-hours or the dorms while class was in session. She had keys to almost every building and room on campus. And that meant she had the freedom to avoid attention. She purposefully avoided the spotlight. And she intentionally avoided the scrutiny. Attention was always bad - as a child from a parent, in high school from a boyfriend, in college from a teacher. She just wanted to disappear into the background and do her job and be left alone. Experience had taught her that attention was a double-edged sword that could cut her if she let her guard down. So, in her current life, Vanessa tried to avoid attention - and that meant self-performing as much of the cleaning and maintenance as she could.
The job description hadn’t said anything about plunging toilets. It hadn’t said anything about fishing tampons out of clogged pipes that caused the drains to back-up and regurgitate the last twenty-four hours of cafeteria caca from the coed crappers. The job description hadn’t said anything about all the things people try to hide or accidentally lose by flushing them down a toilet. Vanessa fished all manner of foreign matter from the pipes - from hair-extensions to pregnancy tests - and even flash drives and car keys and cell phones. Who hid a flash drive up his butt anyway? The fraternities and sororities were the worst but since they were off-campus she only had to address the aftermath of their parties - playing Goalie with all the drunk freshman pledges returning to the dorms after a night of Greek debauchery. The bathrooms were a constant source of frustration for a janitor. But they could also be a source of…intrigue. Some of her best material had come from a voyeuristic eye and the most perspicacious view on campus. There was always something going on in the bathroom and sometimes it was even better than Netflix!
Flushhhhhh.
She blinked.
Vanessa held a fistful of knotted, blond hair in her left hand and stood straddling the slumped form of a devout drunk deep in porcelain prayer. The girl had begun vomiting in the elevator car somewhere between the fourth and fifth floors. She had smeared handprints all over the walls and then dragged her entire body down the fresh coat of paint in a crumpled heap and crawled across the elevator door threshold. Somehow she had stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. And now she smelled like rotten tacos. Vanessa blinked as the acid stung her eyes.
The dorms were separated by same-sex floors and this particular floor was all girls. The Resident Advisor put the on-call request in when the sounds of retching woke her up as they passed her door. The request had come in at 0309 and Vanessa dutifully responded. It wasn’t her first call of the night but she was hoping it was the last. It was a Friday night in October. The pledges were out in full force tonight. This poor girl and her bile-dreadlocked tresses had probably blown half of Sigma Chi before her sadistic sorority sisters deposited her back on-campus to make more work for the janitor. She had completely ruined her blouse which hung loosely with wet and crusty ichor. And her skort-shorts had been torn along the hem. Her state of half-dress and wardrobe malfunction was all the evidence a forensic team would need to point the finger at…ummm…well-
“I think…I <hic> think <hic> I…I’m ready for beddd.”
“Sweetie, you’re ready for a tetanus shot and a tall glass of penicillin with a turbo shot of Tylenol. I’m surprised you refused the ambulance ride.” Vanessa had been there once. And there was a part of her that felt a little empathy. But there was also a part of her that silently hoped this stupid girl would learn her lesson.
“Hey, I’m sorry I had to put the call in,” the resident advisor was trying to be polite. She was standing just behind Vanessa at the entrance to the stall. “You saw the elevator and the hallway. There’s no way we could just leave that until the morning.” The RA was bleary-eyed and annoyed and she seemed to be apologetic. Nice gal.
“No big deal. It was my turn to be on-call. Just doing my job,” Vanessa said over her shoulder. The janitor crouched - careful not to kneel in the pool of fluids - next to the young woman stirring on the floor in a puddle of her own vomit mixed with shrapnel shards of broken porcelain. She had fallen onto the toilet and busted the saddle that mounted the bowl to the wall. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet but the force of the impact slammed the toilet bowl into the tile floor and cracked the entire water closet. There was no way she could fix this at three-AM but she had to make it safe and wasn’t allowed to close the only girls’ bathroom for the entire floor. “I’m sorry, miss, you’ve gotta get back to your room if you can walk.”
“I think…I <hic> I thiiiiiink I can walk.”
“C’mon, Jackie, I’ve got you,” the RA said quietly and positioned herself in the crook of the young woman’s shoulder.
“Hey, don’t let her fall asleep,” Vanessa sighed through her nose. Had she ever been this drunk? Once, yes, but…okay twice, but that second time...peer pressure. Fuck. “She’s covered in broken shards and she’ll cut herself really badly - especially getting that shit in her bed sheets. And she’s covered in puke too. You might wanna have her take a shower as soon as she sobers up enough not to faceplant.”
“That’s good advice. Thanks for looking out.”
“Any time,” she shrugged, “I should have this cleaned up in twenty or less and then it’s off to the next emergency.”
“You guys don’t sleep much when you’re on-call, do you?”
“Not during pledge week.”
Vanessa was no stranger to hard work. She had cleaned her fair share of houses and toilets and sinks. She had cleaned more vomit in the last few years than in a hundred college-lifetimes. She cleaned messy teachers’ offices and coffee spills from conference rooms and vacuumed cat hair out of deans’ dens and scrubbed cum stains off of leather guidance couches. A janitor saw it all. A janitor came in afterward to hide the truth. Because the only thing left behind was evidence. That was Vanessa’s job. It wasn’t the one she had signed up for but it was the one she got. And, after four years of living and working on campus, she quite enjoyed it.
The toilet bowl was heavy but she was strong enough to muscle it out of the women’s bathroom and down the hall to the mop closet until it could be carted away. V stood in the janitor’s mop closet and removed her gloves from the inside-out, taking care to avoid getting puke on her hands.
“Oh who the fuck am I kidding? I need a shower as badly as that fuckin’ kid.”
She stepped out of the closet and headed back to the bathroom to remove the mop and bucket and cleaning agents. It rankled her when she still smelled it on her person. Her nostrils burned with a mixture of bleach and ammonia and bile. Her eyes watered a bit but she blinked back a tear and finished closing off the bathroom stall with yellow caution tape.
DO NOT USE
That would get the message across.
PING.
What now?
Vanessa ignored the text. Technically, she was still on a work order until she returned all the supplies to the mop closet and opened the bathroom back up. The janitor was in no hurry to respond and fully intended to milk the clock at almost 0400a. Then she took the exit stairwell up to the rooftop and breathed deeply into the fresh autumn air. The sky was pockmarked with scattered stars and scintilla. On the sixth floor she was probably only seventy feet up in the air but sounds of the street were very far away. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of American Spirit Yellow and a little black lighter. It wasn’t cold enough for a jacket but the weather in the Northeast had transitioned away from summer. She lit the cigarette and let the smell of smoke fill her nostrils and burn away the odors of pledge week. The parapet came up to just below her bust and she leaned forward and into it to stretch her back. The gray onesie jumper was still a little moist but it shielded her from the windchill. Her dyed red and black locks fell into her face like a sheepdog…or a mop…as she looked out over the grounds. Absently, she pushed them from her eyes and took a long pull of nicotine. Far down below the campus looked quiet. It was well-lit by campus-safety streetlamps and blue light emergency phones. At this time of year the sun didn’t begin to peek for another hour. She resigned herself to finally checking the text.
CALL ME.
Fucking guy. He knew she was on-call tonight. She was just about done with his bullshit. She’d been keeping him at arm’s length for a while but that just seemed to trigger his needy, desperate, controlling behavior. And the more she pulled back the more his insecurity fed into his paranoia. He was constantly accusing her of sleeping around and being a slut and avoiding him. And maybe she was? Guys could be like that. And guys could be insecure too. But she was fucking tired of it. Couldn’t she just find someone…normal?
RING.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What’s up? Where are you?”
“I’m at Delta Sigma letting the little pricks take turns trying to knock me up.” She held her hand up over her mouth to muffle her voice. “Hold on a sec while I take a cock out of my mouth trying not to speak with my mouth full.”
“Stop fucking with me Vee!”
“Where do you think I am? I’m working, asshole.”
“You’re still working?”
“I’m on-call until 0600,” she sighed. “You know this.”
“Yeah, but usually you’re just camped out in one of the dorm lobbies and scrolling through your phone.”
“Well tonight I had to work…a lot. It’s pledge-week so I’m at the Upper Dorm cleaning up some chicken-head puke and a broken toilet bowl.”
“Oh…well…why don’t you answer my texts? You know the bar closes at four.”
Out of the corner of her eye, walking up the road, she saw movement. It caught her attention because it was the only movement on the road. Just another freshman. He was swaying a bit but walking briskly. Or was that hurriedly?
“Hello? Answer me Vee!”
“I’m fucking working, jackass!”
Something was up with this kid. He was approaching the Upper Dorm and looking around nervously. Was someone following him? He looked over his shoulder and started jogging. Something had him spooked.
“You stupid cunt. I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you and this is how you trea-”
She tuned-out. The kid’s jog had turned into a sprint. What the fuck? From her vantage Vanessa couldn’t see anyone on the street behind him. What was he afraid of?
Headlights.
A car was coming up the road very quickly. Oh shit! This was getting good. C’mon kid! Vanessa silently rooted for him. In just a few seconds he’d be under the canopy and inside the dorm - and out of her view. He seemed pretty lanky and was really moving fast.
Swerve.
“Babe, I’m sorry,” she almost choked on her own words and covered her cigarette cough with one hand. Vanessa cracked a big smile for what she was about to say and then giggled silently with an even bigger grin for the irony, “You know how I get when I have to work late.”
The car was coming up FAST. Were they going to hit this kid? Oh my god!
“Yeah. Okay. What’s up with you late-”
And that’s when it happened. The runner took a spill. It looked like his ankle buckled and he crashed into the concrete hard. The car! It was coming too fast! Fuck! I can’t watch this!!!!! She spit her half-smoked cigarette over the parapet, turned away from the impending collision, and bolted for the roof egress stairs.
“I’ve gotta go!” she shouted into the phone and slammed the END button
911
Holy shit! Did I just witness a murder? Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!!! Her feet carried her on a bed of air with wings for sneakers like a guardian angel down the emergency exit stairwell.
SQUEEEEEAL!!!!!
Rubber complained.
Fuck me!
She was taking the steps two-at-a-time and hurtled downstairs in a rush of adrenaline and fear when she almost bit it. Her foot slipped and started to fly out from beneath her when she gripped the railing for dear life and careened headlong into the landing wall. Shitshitshit!!! But she didn’t slow. These precious few seconds could mean the difference between life and death. And if this was some kind of fraternity prank-gone-wrong she wasn’t about to let that shit happen right under her nose. What if he was- Don’t think about that right now!
SLAM!!!
Double-palms burst through the emergency exit door and let her out of the stairwell and into the street. She took a quick assessment and scanned the road for signs of the fallen kid.
SQUEEEALLLLL!!!!!
Brakelights.
The car peeled out and took off the opposite way it had just come.
Vanessa saw a prone, groaning form in its wake and rushed over.
“Hello. 911. Please state your emergency.”
“Hello! Yes! I’m at-”
As she approached she could see the kid was alive and maybe a little shaken-up but he hadn’t been hit by the car. She knelt down by his head and put her hand on his shoulder gently. “Hey! Hey kid, are you okay?!?! Do you need an ambulance????”
Custodian. Janitor. Trash Technician. Rubbish Rat.
‘Vanessa, you’ll be responsible for performing a variety of cleaning, care, and maintenance functions around campus and the adjacent grounds.’
That’s what her supervisor had said in the interview.
But Mr. Lubbock had no idea what any of that really meant. He wore a jacket and tie and reported to someone who wore a jacket and tie who probably also reported to someone else who wore a much nicer outfit than her. In fact, Vanessa was willing to bet that Mr. Lubbock had never gotten his nice clothing dirty doing any of the things that she did on a regular basis. Things had to get done. Stuff had to be accomplished. And the people who wore nice clothes didn’t want to know the granular details of day-to-day tasks and activities and preventive maintenance. They needed someone to blame when things went wrong and they wanted someone to do the dirty work and they didn’t seem to care about all the little leeways and details that slipped through the cracks. And there were a lot of cracks in this campus.
The university didn’t keep expensive engineers and technicians on staff to sit idly until something broke. But they were fine with paying twenty dollars an hour for a first line of defense. When a problem arose it was Vanessa’s job to assess the situation and, if she couldn’t handle it herself, she had the authority to subcontract the work to an expert. And, provided that she stayed within her budget, no one really paid much attention to her…or all the little cracks. She didn’t do electrical work. And she definitely didn’t do HVAC. Vanessa was cute but she wasn’t a carpenter. She wasn’t a roofer. And she definitely wasn’t an engineer. But when something broke she tried to fix it - from drywall patches to roof leaks - but she wasn’t always successful. And her expense account had so many little, miscellaneous charges each week that oversight was almost impossible and lots of things got lost in the cracks. The accounting department hand-waved most of her expenses without even scrutinizing because she had a track-record of being trustworthy.
But there were things she couldn’t avoid doing - tasks that don’t require specialized trade knowledge or experience. No matter how badly she wanted to, she wasn’t allowed to call a cleaning lady to scrub vomit out of the nurse’s office carpet. A janitor could only shirk so much responsibility - or subcontract so many tasks - before someone noticed. Lubbock had admonished her not to call a plumber if she could plunge a toilet or snake the drain herself. Easy for him to say. That guy didn’t have to cram his arm up to the elbow into a pile of excrement.
All things considered, however, it wasn’t a bad job. And she got to blend-in to the campus like a window-washing wallflower. Her tasks kept her mainly out of sight and off-camera. Working in the shadows - in the boiler room - and behind-the-scenes - after class - was very comfortable for her; she traversed the empty halls after-hours or the dorms while class was in session. She had keys to almost every building and room on campus. And that meant she had the freedom to avoid attention. She purposefully avoided the spotlight. And she intentionally avoided the scrutiny. Attention was always bad - as a child from a parent, in high school from a boyfriend, in college from a teacher. She just wanted to disappear into the background and do her job and be left alone. Experience had taught her that attention was a double-edged sword that could cut her if she let her guard down. So, in her current life, Vanessa tried to avoid attention - and that meant self-performing as much of the cleaning and maintenance as she could.
The job description hadn’t said anything about plunging toilets. It hadn’t said anything about fishing tampons out of clogged pipes that caused the drains to back-up and regurgitate the last twenty-four hours of cafeteria caca from the coed crappers. The job description hadn’t said anything about all the things people try to hide or accidentally lose by flushing them down a toilet. Vanessa fished all manner of foreign matter from the pipes - from hair-extensions to pregnancy tests - and even flash drives and car keys and cell phones. Who hid a flash drive up his butt anyway? The fraternities and sororities were the worst but since they were off-campus she only had to address the aftermath of their parties - playing Goalie with all the drunk freshman pledges returning to the dorms after a night of Greek debauchery. The bathrooms were a constant source of frustration for a janitor. But they could also be a source of…intrigue. Some of her best material had come from a voyeuristic eye and the most perspicacious view on campus. There was always something going on in the bathroom and sometimes it was even better than Netflix!
Flushhhhhh.
She blinked.
Vanessa held a fistful of knotted, blond hair in her left hand and stood straddling the slumped form of a devout drunk deep in porcelain prayer. The girl had begun vomiting in the elevator car somewhere between the fourth and fifth floors. She had smeared handprints all over the walls and then dragged her entire body down the fresh coat of paint in a crumpled heap and crawled across the elevator door threshold. Somehow she had stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. And now she smelled like rotten tacos. Vanessa blinked as the acid stung her eyes.
The dorms were separated by same-sex floors and this particular floor was all girls. The Resident Advisor put the on-call request in when the sounds of retching woke her up as they passed her door. The request had come in at 0309 and Vanessa dutifully responded. It wasn’t her first call of the night but she was hoping it was the last. It was a Friday night in October. The pledges were out in full force tonight. This poor girl and her bile-dreadlocked tresses had probably blown half of Sigma Chi before her sadistic sorority sisters deposited her back on-campus to make more work for the janitor. She had completely ruined her blouse which hung loosely with wet and crusty ichor. And her skort-shorts had been torn along the hem. Her state of half-dress and wardrobe malfunction was all the evidence a forensic team would need to point the finger at…ummm…well-
“I think…I <hic> think <hic> I…I’m ready for beddd.”
“Sweetie, you’re ready for a tetanus shot and a tall glass of penicillin with a turbo shot of Tylenol. I’m surprised you refused the ambulance ride.” Vanessa had been there once. And there was a part of her that felt a little empathy. But there was also a part of her that silently hoped this stupid girl would learn her lesson.
“Hey, I’m sorry I had to put the call in,” the resident advisor was trying to be polite. She was standing just behind Vanessa at the entrance to the stall. “You saw the elevator and the hallway. There’s no way we could just leave that until the morning.” The RA was bleary-eyed and annoyed and she seemed to be apologetic. Nice gal.
“No big deal. It was my turn to be on-call. Just doing my job,” Vanessa said over her shoulder. The janitor crouched - careful not to kneel in the pool of fluids - next to the young woman stirring on the floor in a puddle of her own vomit mixed with shrapnel shards of broken porcelain. She had fallen onto the toilet and busted the saddle that mounted the bowl to the wall. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet but the force of the impact slammed the toilet bowl into the tile floor and cracked the entire water closet. There was no way she could fix this at three-AM but she had to make it safe and wasn’t allowed to close the only girls’ bathroom for the entire floor. “I’m sorry, miss, you’ve gotta get back to your room if you can walk.”
“I think…I <hic> I thiiiiiink I can walk.”
“C’mon, Jackie, I’ve got you,” the RA said quietly and positioned herself in the crook of the young woman’s shoulder.
“Hey, don’t let her fall asleep,” Vanessa sighed through her nose. Had she ever been this drunk? Once, yes, but…okay twice, but that second time...peer pressure. Fuck. “She’s covered in broken shards and she’ll cut herself really badly - especially getting that shit in her bed sheets. And she’s covered in puke too. You might wanna have her take a shower as soon as she sobers up enough not to faceplant.”
“That’s good advice. Thanks for looking out.”
“Any time,” she shrugged, “I should have this cleaned up in twenty or less and then it’s off to the next emergency.”
“You guys don’t sleep much when you’re on-call, do you?”
“Not during pledge week.”
Vanessa was no stranger to hard work. She had cleaned her fair share of houses and toilets and sinks. She had cleaned more vomit in the last few years than in a hundred college-lifetimes. She cleaned messy teachers’ offices and coffee spills from conference rooms and vacuumed cat hair out of deans’ dens and scrubbed cum stains off of leather guidance couches. A janitor saw it all. A janitor came in afterward to hide the truth. Because the only thing left behind was evidence. That was Vanessa’s job. It wasn’t the one she had signed up for but it was the one she got. And, after four years of living and working on campus, she quite enjoyed it.
The toilet bowl was heavy but she was strong enough to muscle it out of the women’s bathroom and down the hall to the mop closet until it could be carted away. V stood in the janitor’s mop closet and removed her gloves from the inside-out, taking care to avoid getting puke on her hands.
“Oh who the fuck am I kidding? I need a shower as badly as that fuckin’ kid.”
She stepped out of the closet and headed back to the bathroom to remove the mop and bucket and cleaning agents. It rankled her when she still smelled it on her person. Her nostrils burned with a mixture of bleach and ammonia and bile. Her eyes watered a bit but she blinked back a tear and finished closing off the bathroom stall with yellow caution tape.
DO NOT USE
That would get the message across.
PING.
What now?
Vanessa ignored the text. Technically, she was still on a work order until she returned all the supplies to the mop closet and opened the bathroom back up. The janitor was in no hurry to respond and fully intended to milk the clock at almost 0400a. Then she took the exit stairwell up to the rooftop and breathed deeply into the fresh autumn air. The sky was pockmarked with scattered stars and scintilla. On the sixth floor she was probably only seventy feet up in the air but sounds of the street were very far away. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of American Spirit Yellow and a little black lighter. It wasn’t cold enough for a jacket but the weather in the Northeast had transitioned away from summer. She lit the cigarette and let the smell of smoke fill her nostrils and burn away the odors of pledge week. The parapet came up to just below her bust and she leaned forward and into it to stretch her back. The gray onesie jumper was still a little moist but it shielded her from the windchill. Her dyed red and black locks fell into her face like a sheepdog…or a mop…as she looked out over the grounds. Absently, she pushed them from her eyes and took a long pull of nicotine. Far down below the campus looked quiet. It was well-lit by campus-safety streetlamps and blue light emergency phones. At this time of year the sun didn’t begin to peek for another hour. She resigned herself to finally checking the text.
CALL ME.
Fucking guy. He knew she was on-call tonight. She was just about done with his bullshit. She’d been keeping him at arm’s length for a while but that just seemed to trigger his needy, desperate, controlling behavior. And the more she pulled back the more his insecurity fed into his paranoia. He was constantly accusing her of sleeping around and being a slut and avoiding him. And maybe she was? Guys could be like that. And guys could be insecure too. But she was fucking tired of it. Couldn’t she just find someone…normal?
RING.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What’s up? Where are you?”
“I’m at Delta Sigma letting the little pricks take turns trying to knock me up.” She held her hand up over her mouth to muffle her voice. “Hold on a sec while I take a cock out of my mouth trying not to speak with my mouth full.”
“Stop fucking with me Vee!”
“Where do you think I am? I’m working, asshole.”
“You’re still working?”
“I’m on-call until 0600,” she sighed. “You know this.”
“Yeah, but usually you’re just camped out in one of the dorm lobbies and scrolling through your phone.”
“Well tonight I had to work…a lot. It’s pledge-week so I’m at the Upper Dorm cleaning up some chicken-head puke and a broken toilet bowl.”
“Oh…well…why don’t you answer my texts? You know the bar closes at four.”
Out of the corner of her eye, walking up the road, she saw movement. It caught her attention because it was the only movement on the road. Just another freshman. He was swaying a bit but walking briskly. Or was that hurriedly?
“Hello? Answer me Vee!”
“I’m fucking working, jackass!”
Something was up with this kid. He was approaching the Upper Dorm and looking around nervously. Was someone following him? He looked over his shoulder and started jogging. Something had him spooked.
“You stupid cunt. I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you and this is how you trea-”
She tuned-out. The kid’s jog had turned into a sprint. What the fuck? From her vantage Vanessa couldn’t see anyone on the street behind him. What was he afraid of?
Headlights.
A car was coming up the road very quickly. Oh shit! This was getting good. C’mon kid! Vanessa silently rooted for him. In just a few seconds he’d be under the canopy and inside the dorm - and out of her view. He seemed pretty lanky and was really moving fast.
Swerve.
“Babe, I’m sorry,” she almost choked on her own words and covered her cigarette cough with one hand. Vanessa cracked a big smile for what she was about to say and then giggled silently with an even bigger grin for the irony, “You know how I get when I have to work late.”
The car was coming up FAST. Were they going to hit this kid? Oh my god!
“Yeah. Okay. What’s up with you late-”
And that’s when it happened. The runner took a spill. It looked like his ankle buckled and he crashed into the concrete hard. The car! It was coming too fast! Fuck! I can’t watch this!!!!! She spit her half-smoked cigarette over the parapet, turned away from the impending collision, and bolted for the roof egress stairs.
“I’ve gotta go!” she shouted into the phone and slammed the END button
911
Holy shit! Did I just witness a murder? Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!!! Her feet carried her on a bed of air with wings for sneakers like a guardian angel down the emergency exit stairwell.
SQUEEEEEAL!!!!!
Rubber complained.
Fuck me!
She was taking the steps two-at-a-time and hurtled downstairs in a rush of adrenaline and fear when she almost bit it. Her foot slipped and started to fly out from beneath her when she gripped the railing for dear life and careened headlong into the landing wall. Shitshitshit!!! But she didn’t slow. These precious few seconds could mean the difference between life and death. And if this was some kind of fraternity prank-gone-wrong she wasn’t about to let that shit happen right under her nose. What if he was- Don’t think about that right now!
SLAM!!!
Double-palms burst through the emergency exit door and let her out of the stairwell and into the street. She took a quick assessment and scanned the road for signs of the fallen kid.
SQUEEEALLLLL!!!!!
Brakelights.
The car peeled out and took off the opposite way it had just come.
Vanessa saw a prone, groaning form in its wake and rushed over.
“Hello. 911. Please state your emergency.”
“Hello! Yes! I’m at-”
As she approached she could see the kid was alive and maybe a little shaken-up but he hadn’t been hit by the car. She knelt down by his head and put her hand on his shoulder gently. “Hey! Hey kid, are you okay?!?! Do you need an ambulance????”