Freshman Year

Theodosia Cosgrove sat on the 18th floor of the Sciences Library facing down a big fuzzy gray monster... in her mind!

Problem: Anthropology paper due in two days. Eight pages, double-spaced, with citations.

Pages written so far: 0.

For a while, Theo was up to nearly one whole page, but then she realized what she was writing was crap, so she hit Delete and started over. She freely acknowledged that the problem was all in her head. Her friends from class had cranked out this paper without any trouble, but Theo just couldn't get started. No matter where she went or what she did to try to concentrate, there was always something to distract her. When her laptop was open, she found herself web surfing. When she closed the laptop in favor of a legal pad, it was the snow outside that drew her thoughts. The third of a series of February storms was hitting New England. Big, fat, sticky flakes passed her window on the way to the ground, and her mind drifted with them.

Aggggh! Must. Concentrate.

It wasn't like the assignment was a killer: "Choose an isolated indigenous culture and describe their first contacts with European society. Discuss what you regard as the positive and negative effects of this contact on the local population." Like a lot of things at Brown, it was pretty free-form. There were a million things you could write about within that assignment -- but that was part of the problem. How to choose?

She could write about the Maori of New Zealand encountering Abel Tasman at Golden Bay, or about the Hawaiians and Captain Cook at Kealakekua. Of course, the obvious essay topic, chosen by several of her friends, was the Native Americans, subjected to genocide over the course of five centuries of progressive European invasion. But there was the problem with that topic, apart from everyone else doing it: Theo couldn't think of even a single benefit the American Indians derived from European contact -- unless you count the ability to sell tax-free cigarettes and open gaudy casinos in the 20th Century.

And selecting the topic was only part the problem. The other part was actually writing the damn paper. For a while, Theo thought she would be writing about Captain Cook and the Hawaiians. It was a safe topic and interesting enough. In that first encounter, the natives actually came out on top, and Cook himself died of blunt trauma to the back of the head. Theo knew the story well from her own visits to Hawaii with her dad. All she had to do was write down what she knew already then do some research to backfill the citations. But she stared at the blank screen and nothing came. Not a word. There was some little switch inside her brain that wouldn't turn on.

Theo had been at Brown for barely six months, and already the bloom was off the rose on the whole college thing. It wasn't quite what she expected. The social experience of college was fine. The food was good, and there was always plenty of entertainment. It was just the part about going to class and doing the assigned work that didn't seem to agree with her.

And even the social part was getting a little tired. Back before the school year began, Theo made a critical decision: She chose a co-ed dorm over a single-sex dorm. That meant, effectively, that she found herself in a party house, Perkins Hall. Oh, it was fun enough; it just never stopped.

She was also finding it difficult to find her own physical space. As the only girl in her family, she always had her own room. At Brown, however, all freshmen were required to live on campus and virtually all had to share double rooms. On Day One, you were thrown together with someone you knew nothing about. Theo was paired with Cokie, a nice Jewish Princess from the Philadelphia suburbs. In the beginning, Theo saw Cokie as the sister she never had. They went to all the orientation events together and were pretty much inseparable for the first week or two. But over the following months, Theo got a crash course on all those other sisterly issues, like defining one's boundaries, protecting one's possessions and getting on one another's nerves. Cokie soon had a boyfriend -- Don O'Toole from down the hall -- and he hung out in their room a little too much. He was always under foot. Bottom line: Theo's room wasn't really hers. She could sleep there but couldn't really study or relax there.

None of this tension was evident in the beginning. Freshman Orientation and the first few weeks of classes were euphoria in motion. Nearly everyone in the dorm was in the same boat: liberated from mom and dad for the first time in their lives! Within a short period, they all experimented with a million ways of cutting loose: partying, drinking, mild drug use, males showing off, females laughing at them, scary midnight movies at the Avon Cinema, playing music too loud, staying up all night for no good reason, using amazingly dirty and graphic language just because you could, toga parties, costume parties, pizza parties, drink-'til-you-vomit parties. And on top of all this, you were expected to go to class!

Most of those activities weren't Theo's bag. She drank very little -- especially after Derek's death -- and she preferred her sleep over partying, but even she got caught up the joie de vivre for a while. At least it lifted her out of her summer funk. Everyone in Perkins Hall felt special. Admission to Brown was highly selective, and the freshmen all felt they had been specially chosen to save the world. Kids from all walks of life and several different countries were thrown together in one dorm, with no barriers between them. Scholarship students from the inner city were rooming with blue-blood preppies. Perkins was like one big boisterous family, united in the delusion that they were going to make a difference.

As the weeks went by, though, the euphoria and cohesion dissipated. People began to form cliques, where the inner city kids hung out with other inner city kids and the preppies hung with preppies. Joyous experimental drinking began to turn into real alcoholism for some. Casual sex for some turned into various forms of self-abasement. Suicidal gestures were common, and a few kids went home for the weekend and never came back. Being thrown together with a cross-section of humanity -- albeit an overachieving one -- was a chance to learn about human dysfunction and how some people just can't handle freedom. It began to get tedious, the non-stop commotion and especially the drinking. It was a drag open the door in the morning to the fresh smell of vomit in the halls or some sort of obscene graffiti on the restroom walls. Theo felt bad for the janitorial staff who had to clean up after these freshman assholes.

Their idealism and urge to save the world also began to fade. Petition drives and student protests were de rigeur in September but petered out by mid-year. Marching on the campus green with signs and banners came to seem no more effective than goldfish going on hunger strike inside their fishbowl. Who really cares? One by one, the noble gestures of freshmen were whittled away by the demands and temptations of the real world.

Theo's idealism faded, too. For example, in those heady early days, she decided she should become a vegetarian, because her neighbors in the dorm were already doing it and it seemed like the moral and healthy thing. How can you eat a creature who might be conscious and feel pain? A few hours later, she went one step further and became vegan, because cows and egg-laying chickens were suffering, too. Someone showed her a video about the appalling treatment of cows in the dairy industry, and she had to agree that any product of that suffering was wrong. Previous generations of student activism assured that vegan options were available in the dining halls, and that worked for a while. Theo stuck with the program until one little slice of pepperoni ruined it all. She found it on a piece of pizza she happened to be eating -- which, come to think of it, wasn't a vegan pizza. It was good pepperoni! In no time at all, she was back to eating thick slices of juicy steak, rare, dripping with blood.

Theo also tried to go without jumping -- you know: flying without wings. After the falling out with her dad, she didn't go anywhere all summer. She just stayed in her room and read. She figured she would do the same at Brown: She would travel the legitimate way -- by car or plane -- or not at all. There was something tainted and wrong about going from place to place with hardly effort. It wasn't something others could do, so it wasn't fair for her to do it either.

There was also something spooky and disturbing about the skill, especially the way her father used it. Killing people is not cool! Her father said he killed a dictator once -- shot him as he slept. How many other people had he murdered in cold blood? Whatever he was involved in, she wanted no part of it, and maybe the best way to avoid any possibility of being sucked in was to never jump at all.

But that resolution fell by the wayside, too. One of her first semester classes was German. Students sat in a fluorescent-lighted classroom and tried to speak simple sentences to an instructor who had only visited Germany as a tourist. This was no way to learn a language! She learned French in high school by actually going to France, by hanging out in public places, listening to people talk and eventually solving simple real-world problems. She had little patience for the plodding didactic methods they used in class: vocabulary, grammar, verb forms incorporated in dull, lifeless exercises. That wasn't the way German children learned German. They just listened and imitated what they heard to get what they wanted.

One day, in her preferred corner on the 18th floor of the SciLi, she was staring at her German grammar assignment, unable to even pick up a pencil to start it. Something inside her was rebelling. "This is so stupid!" she said to herself.

And then she said, "Fuck it!" and she was gone.

She found herself in a city park in Düsseldorf. She sat down on a park bench near where some preschool children were playing on a jungle gym. She smiled at them in response to their antics and pratfalls, and this was as good as throwing breadcrumbs to the pigeons. In no time at all they were crowded around her, eager to talk.

"Was ist das?" she said to a little boy, pointing to his shoe.

"Meine Schuhe!" he said proudly.

She smiled and repeated, "Mine shoe."

"Nein! Meine Schuhe!", he said, correcting her inflection.

That correction was worth more than any she could receive in class, and she would remember it because she lived it.

From then on, instead of doing her German homework, she went the same park at the same time almost every day. She made friends there, albeit pint-sized ones. Their parents seemed to feel comfortable with her, recognizing her as a visiting American student trying to learn the language, so she could talk with them all she wanted. Soon, she was speaking German at a four-year-old level -- which was a hell of a lot better than her classmates trying to speak adult German.

The only trouble, now, was her German grades were slipping, seeing as they were partially based on the homework assignments, which she wasn't doing. She eeked out a passing grade at the end of the semester only because she did reasonably well on the tests. Like any other preschool child, she still didn't know much about the grammar, spelling or verb forms of the language. All she knew was how German sounded and felt.

And that, she decided, would be the last foreign language class she would ever sit through. Although she still enjoyed languages, the class itself was intolerable.

As soon as she started jumping to Germany, she began heading down a slippery slope to the way things were before. The next instance was when Cokie asked her ever-so-delicately whether she would sleep in someone else's room for the coming weekend so Cokie and Don could sleep together. They had arranged another bed for Theo down the hall, that of a local girl who went home on the weekends. Would it be too much problem if Theo slept there?

"No problem at all!" said Theo cheerfully, and indeed it wasn't. She had no intention of sleeping down the hall, however. Instead, she just jumped back to her own bedroom in Colorado and spent the weekend there. She preferred it there anyway.

"Hi, Mom!" said Theo, coming downstairs to the kitchen.

"Teddy!" said Mom, with joy but not much surprise. "What are you doing here? Is everything okay at school?"

"Oh, fine. Things are getting pretty noisy at the dorm. There are a lot of parties this weekend, so I thought I'd just come back here so I can get some work done. Is that okay?"

Theo left out the part about Cokie wanting her to sleep elsewhere, knowing her mom probably wouldn't understand.

"Sure!" said Mom. "Your room is just as you left it. Can I fix you something to eat?"

"No, I'll do it myself," said Theo.

And from then on, Theo went back home almost every weekend. Cokie and Don were happy. Theo was happy. It all worked out.

On the weekdays, watching Cokie and Don's relationship develop was a little disgusting. As a couple, they were a little too perfect! They were both dedicated students, eager to follow orders, without an ounce of imagination between them. Together, they were exceedingly lovey-dovey and their conversation bored Theo to death. She could see them getting married upon graduation, having 2.5 children and living happily ever after.

Their love also annoyed her because it rubbed in the fact that she didn't have a boyfriend. Officially, she was still mourning Derek, but of course it was much more complicated than that. Although falling in love was nice, there were parts of her relationship with Derek she didn't like -- the loss of freedom and control, the careful watching of words to avoid upsetting a fragile ego. And then there was also the bigger problem of trying to explain her life honestly to an outsider. How, for example, would she tell a new boyfriend about her dad? "If you get involved with me, my father might kill you." Bet that would put brake on the relationship!

Okay, so that might not be totally fair to her dad. He didn't cause the accident on Greyloft, only "rearranged" it -- "opted for another roll of the dice," as he said. It was still a lot to explain and a lot to swallow, and right now she wasn't up to the huge investment required.

It seemed so much easier to play the martyr. She didn't just withdraw from sexual relations; she rejected them with revolutionary fervor! She cut her hair formerly luxurous hair extremely short. She dressed in baggy clothes that showed off none of her figure. She wore hiking boots and leather jackets and not a spot of make-up. She pretended that there were no genders and carefully avoided reacting to men and women any differently based on theirs. People assumed she was a lesbian, which was fine by her. She did nothing to dispell that theory, although letting a woman into her life would have been just as complicated as a man.

Aggggh! Must! Concentrate!

None of her daydreaming was helping with the problem at hand: namely, this stupid antropology paper. Easy assignment. Blank screen in front of her. No words coming out.

On the 18th floor of the SciLi, snow coming down, Theo wondered if she was going crazy. Now there's a topic she could write a paper on: "The Progressive Insanity of Theodosia Cosgrove." After all, schizophenia was supposed to strike at just about this age, 18 to 25, and Theo wondered if she had it. She imagined herself committed to an institution, a very comfortable one that Howard would pay for. The doctors would all gather around her because her case was so incredibly unique. She would be the subject of important studies, but very little work would be required of her due to her delicate condition.

Unfortunately, she didn't have full-blown schizophenia yet. In fact, she could only count one symptom: auditory hallucinations. It wasn't serious, just a more-or-less constant murmer in the background of her thoughts. She sensed voices but couldn't make out what they were saying. They weren't happy voices, but they were manageable. They certainly weren't ordering her around. It was more of an annoyance, like hearing the sound of a crowd even when you were all alone. It seemed to get worse when she had her headaches.

Oh, and that was another symptom: the headaches. She started getting them over the summer, in the middle of her forehead, right between the eyes. They weren't properly a symptom of schizophrenia, just a pain in the ass mostly. Yeah, a pain in the ass in her head. She went to University Health Services and they gave her some migraine pills. They didn't help. They pills numbed her senses without reducing the pain. She failed to mention the auditory hallucinations when she saw the nurse. That would have made things too complicated. She felt that she could manage the voices on her own, and after trying the pills, she became resolved to the headaches as well. Eventually, she might go back to Health Services and try again, but right now, quiet martyrdom seemed the best way to go.

Fuzzy thinking, was that a symptom of schizophenia? She could think clearly about everything except the damn anthropology paper, so she must be suffering from "selective fuzzy thinking." Who was she fooling? The real obstruction -- the core reason she couldn't bring pen to paper -- was that the assignment was a waste of time. Her body knew it and was rebelling. Theo would write the paper, the professor would give it a cursory read and a grade, then it would go into the trash bin. So what was the point in doing it at all?

It might have been different if Theo respected her professors and wanted to impress them, but she didn't. To her, they were merely older children who had spent their whole lives in the protective womb of academia and hardly ever stepped outside. There was no one on the faculty who had been half the places she had and seen so many slices of humanity -- negotiated with street vendors in Malawi, talked in gestures with miners in Siberia, tasted the spiritual waters in Tibet. The funny thing about Anthropology is that Theo felt she knew more about it than the professor did, so what was the point in her writing a paper for him?

So there you had it, the reason for the block. And if that wasn't excuse enough to procrastinate, there were the headaches. Damn piercing headaches! And the whispers in her head. Sometimes they were whispers, and sometimes they were more like screams. They didn't tell her what to do, but sometimes they warned her of things.

Like one day she was walking from the SciLi back to her dorm on East Campus, a distance of about five blocks. There was a paved path that ran between them crossing several city streets. Theo was following this walkway when a headache pierced her skull and she heard a scream. It wasn't a human scream and she didn't hear it with her ears.

She broke into a run!

She went faster and faster, racing toward her dorm, but just before she got there, she heard a screech -- a real one: the sound of tires on pavement. She was too late! In the street in front of her dorm, a car was blocking her path, a dazed woman at the wheel. The car had stopped in the middle of the street, but there was no crash. There was no damage to the car and no other cars around, only a strange sound from underneath.

Theo ran around to the other side of the car, and there was the victim, a little dog. He was still alive, but his hind quarters had been run over. The dog was yelping. It wasn't loud, but it was a horrible sound, a wheezing cry of pain. Theo took off her jacket and picked the dog up in it. She cradled him in her arms. It was a little Dachshund -- a wiener dog. There was a bandana tied around his neck indicating that somebody cared for him, but he must have escaped from his home. His yelps became softer and softer, and then in her arms he died. He just stopped moving, his eyes wide open but staring at nothing.

Someone had called 9-1-1, and the Providence Animal Patrol arrived. They took the body from her. Theo gathered her backpack and bloody jacket and continued to her dorm.

In the restroom, she washed the blood from her hands. Then she looked up at the mirror and wondered who the hell she was.