SSS(SS) - Part 7

It’s about 30 hours after Athena’s warning that Sal sees what she was getting at. She climbs out of her Sequoia to find utter bedlam in front of CGH House. The lawn is covered in girls and campus security. A ton of people are watching. Lots of people from the university are here.

And that includes Mauve Wickers, who spots Sal and makes her way over.

Stunned, Sal can only watch the scene unfolding, but she doesn’t understand it. You would see something like this if there had been a fire, but there’s no smoke. No fire department.

“What is happening?” she asks numbly as Wickers approaches.

“Bedbugs,” Wickers tells her briskly.

Sal absorbs that. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Bedbugs, Sal. Nobody can be here.”

“We don’t have bedbugs,” Sal says. The idea is absurd.

“You do,” Wickers replies, holding up a small plastic bag. Sal blanches and looks away; she doesn’t want to see what’s in there, but she believes her.

Athena might have more of a reputation as a smart person, but Sal does not have brain damage. This is punishment. It’s a setup. To think that Sal had controlled her anxiety by telling herself that she was dealing with academia, not the mob. What a joke.

“This is a breach of all kinds of rules. There’ll be consequences,” she promises. “You had a responsibility to this institution to uphold its dignity.”

Sal stops listening after that. Consequences. None of that matters. What matters is that a lot of girls don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight. Well, it’s not quite that bad. Most of them do have boyfriends or friends that they can crash with, but Sal has to make sure that everyone is OK. The handful who really don’t have anywhere to go have to go to a hotel, and CGH can’t pay for that because now it’s under investigation. And as far as anyone knows, this happened on Sal’s watch. She can’t ask her girls to pay, and that leaves no one but her to do it.

That would be a bad situation even if she hadn’t just bankrupted herself to pay Athena back. Now it’s truly dire.

It’s dark by the time she’s sorted out everything that she has to handle. She sits alone on the front steps of CGH House, which has been sheathed in a fumigation tent for maximum humiliation.

It’s not like she doesn’t have a credit card. Or a safety net with her family. It’s not about tonight. Tonight, she’ll be in a hotel. It’s tomorrow and what comes after that she’s trying to figure out, but it’s so much and so overwhelming that she doesn’t know where to start.

The crowds are gone and so is everyone else. There are a lot of lit windows on the block. She never paid attention to this view in the past.

Headlights appear, and a familiar Prius pulls to the curb.