Free Adelaide Piper by Beth Webb Hart Page A

know?”
    â€œI sure hope so,” I said, unable to fully sense his anxiety over shelling out thousands of dollars to a place that already threatened his daughter’s innocence. “I mean, that’s why I’m here, right?”
    Meanwhile, someone had mistaken Dizzy for a freshman and handed her a pink bag too. She pulled out the condoms in great delight, waved them between Daddy and me, and said, “Guess you’re not in Kansas anymore, big sis!”
    Daddy grabbed the bag from Dizzy with his metal pinchers and threw it into the trash can at the bottom of the stairwell. Then he gently grabbed my shoulders with his hands (one metal, one bone) and said, “We’re trusting you to keep your head on, sister.”
    â€œYes, sir,” I assured him. “I’ve kept it on so far, and I’m not about to lose it now.”
    He nodded in relief and patted my back. Just behind him Dizzy was making a gagging gesture and pointing to a sign with rainbows and pink triangles that read, “Harmony, the NBU Gay and Lesbian Society, welcomes you to our campus.”
    She came over and whispered, “I’ll tell Papa Great they have a society for you.”
    I rolled my wide eyes. Even her teasing couldn’t stop the gnawing that had begun in my gut. I was overwhelmed by the new names and faces; the boys cut out of granite, lugging my belongings up three flights of stairs; and the talk of politics and sex at every turn. Was someone burning incense? I peered into an open dorm room where a girl and a guy were smoking cloves and tapping their feet to a folksy-sounding song. There was a black tapestry over the window, with a picture of a grinning skeleton wearing a top hat, and it blocked out the afternoon sunlight.
    Suddenly I was afraid to climb the three flights of stairs to my new home. I stood at the bottom of the stairwell as if paralyzed and watched my family clomp up ahead of me. Was I up for this? Should I run back to the University of South Carolina and beg them to return my scholarship? Cousin Randy, here I come! Football, cockfighting— don’t start without me!
    Dizzy looked back and then ran back down and squeezed my elbow.
    â€œYou can do this, Ad,” she said. “You’ve been waiting your whole life for this.” I looked my sister in the eye and bit my bottom lip to ward off the fear. When she offered her arm, I took it and held it all the way up the cold concrete stairs.
    The cinder-block walls in my dorm room seemed gray and sad. Twenty-six thousand dollars a year in tuition for cinder-block walls? Ruthie and I had coordinated our room in a soothing periwinkle and white, and Mama had made some adorable curtains that she draped around our one and only window to brighten the place up. After we frantically hung posters and pictures and piled notebooks and pens on our little wooden desks, the room warmed up a little. Mama, Dizzy, and Lou spent time fussing over the organization of my closet drawers, racing to get me settled before the convocation ceremony, while Ruthie hung pictures around the room of prom and college parties she and her boyfriend had attended together.
    Ruthie’s hometown boyfriend, Tag Eisley, had come along with her parents to settle her in. Tag was a junior at the University of North Carolina, and Ruthie had already circled in red on her desk calendar all of the game weekends during which she would drive down to Chapel Hill to visit him. They had dated since her freshman year in high school. Now he and Daddy paced and bristled at the invitations to fraternity rush parties that upperclassman boys were handing out up and down the halls.
    â€œCome on by tonight,” they would say as they slid the flyers under the doors.
    Ruthie hugged Tag hard after crumpling each invitation and tossing it into the trash.
    â€œI won’t be needing these,” she said.
    Great, I thought. Ruthie’s going to be no fun.
    A bulky upperclass girl