Free Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

awake and alert at rigid attention. Walking, I held my arms
straight out in front of myself, mimicking the way ancient Egyptian mummies
walk when rising from their stony tombs in old horror films. My hands turned
palms-down, my fingers dangled the way Frankenstein's monster shambles when
brought to life in black-and-white Universal movies. This was my fallback
excuse: that I was sleepwalking. My parasomniac defense. So I walked, step by
step, farther into the falling snow, into the darkness as cold as chocolate ice
cream, my arms outstretched in the manner of sleepwalking cartoon characters,
only naked. Pelted with ice crystals and pretending to be asleep, but more
awake than I had ever felt. Every hair and cell of me alert, aching, afraid.
Alive.
    All of me felt the thrill of being touched at that same instant. You
see, I wanted to be discovered. I wanted to be seen at the very height of my
prepubescent power, my tits-out, bare-fanny, legally off-limits kiddie-porn
Lolita power.
    If a guard found me, I'd merely pretend to be ashamed. By then I had a
long history of feeling mortified and embarrassed. Reverting back to such
feelings would be like second nature. As a guard approached and grabbed my
wrist, or threw a blanket over my shoulders to protect my childhood modesty,
I'd simply pretend hysterics and insist I had no idea where I was or how I'd
come to be there. I'd reject all responsibility for my own actions... play the
innocent victim. Over the past two weeks of solitude, something within me had
changed, but I could still fake being shocked and fragile and demure.
    No, this is not how I came to die. As I've mentioned before I died from
smoking an overdose of marijuana. I did not freeze to death.
    Nor did a lustful, groping security guard catch me. Darn it.
    Arms extended like a somnambulist, I marched around the school grounds,
collecting snowflakes in my hair until my feet felt quite numb. Then, fearing
frostbite and permanent disfigurement, I sprinted back to the door of my
residence hall. As I grasped the steel handle with my damp hands, my fingers
and palms froze to the metal. I pulled, but the doors had automatically locked
the moment they'd first swung shut, leaving me naked, my hands fixed—frozen— to
the handles of a door which wouldn't open, unable to run for help, unable to
return to my safe bed, the deadly night piling up around me, ice crystal by ice
crystal.
    And, yes, I might be a dreamy, romantic, preadolescent girl, but I can
recognize a metaphor when one batters me over the head: a young budding lass
perched frozen on the threshold between sheltering girlhood and the frigid
wasteland of her impending sexual maturation, only a sacrificial layer of her
tender, virginal skin holding her captive, blah, blah, blah....
    And no, the children of wealthy families, consigned to Swiss boarding
schools, are nothing if not wily. It was common knowledge among my peers and
myself that a crafty student some years before had stolen a key to the
residence hall, a master key, and secreted said key beneath a specific rock
near the hall's main door. In the event a wanton little Miss Slutty Slutpants
sneaked away for a clandestine tryst or to smoke a cigarette and found herself
locked out, rather than face reprimand she had merely to use this key held in
common for such sinful emergencies and later return it to the usual hiding
place. As convenient as this shared key was, under the rock only a few steps
away, with my bare hands frozen to the door handles I had no means to reach it.
    My mom would tell you, "This is one of those Hamlet moments." Meaning: You need to make a
significant effort to determine whether you're to be or not to be.
    If I scream and yell until a night watchman arrives, I'll be mortified,
humiliated, but alive. And if I freeze to death I'll save my dignity, but be...
well, dead. Probably I'll be a figure of pathos and mystery for future
generations of girls at this school. My legacy will be a stringent