The Stupidest Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Part Two

The tiny altar of my old desk: Dexter the Emotional Support Peacock, "Oprah Rules" on a light-up marquee, a baby eevee that a student drew, a paper snowflake another student made me, Garnet being made of love, My Little Ponies saying "Friendship is magic," the times I met Cecile Richards, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton. Dear Prudence is on the monitor, as he always was when I had a spare moment.

My coworker and I went outside for a while and decided we would just lock up the store until Amy got there, but when I went in to lock up, 7-10 members of the security staff and the maintenance staff had formed a concerned circle alongside the fire chief. A member of the public safety staff, a young woman I’d never met before, said “Miss, you can’t talk to the chief like that.”

So, it was fine for him to come in reprimanding a grown-up citizen and to have to be cajoled into doing his actual job, but I was a serious problem for cursing. And it was more important to soothe this dude’s dignity than to make sure that the other dudes’ mistake had been fixed. Confronting this many uniformed people at once about this cascade of lunacy was too much. My coworker and I left the store with the ego-soothers and went to breakfast, which we admittedly should have done in the first place.

My wonderful treasure of a coworker took this opportunity to direct me to a nearby old-timey diner she’d been wanting me to try. While we ate a big, bacony breakfast and waited for Amy to arrive, my friend gave me some insight about the workings of the campus. She explained that campus public safety often tried to limit and even suppress calls to emergency services outside of campus, including in cases of sexual assault. In other words, the college was completely willing to put their students at risk if that meant fewer official incidents to report. The students and their families were paying thousands of dollars for students to live on a campus that prized its reputation over their safety. Including, it seemed, being willing to sacrifice their own property.

It has taken me a long time to write this down, partly because institutional horrors like this are hard for me to process. Anxiety brain connects the dots, and somehow, the whole world is conspiring against bodily safety for the stupidest of reasons: money, men who are scared to admit they’re wrong, preserving ancient gender, race, and class oppressions and most of all, protecting the institution itself.

In times when I tangle with authority, I tend to self-gaslight, so at the diner, my friend reassured me again and again that I wasn’t crazy, that there hadn’t been a better course of action, that it wasn’t my fault. Amy agreed as she sat down with us and ordered, but the (Rush Limbaugh listener) campus liaison had been on the phone and things didn’t seem good. I knew that Amy wouldn’t want to fire me, but I knew I was probably in trouble. Isn’t it weird as an adult, feeling the same in-trouble feelings you might have felt when you were seven or sixteen? The emotions of a traumatized kid never really leave me, they just find different ways to fight.

            The three of us finished our breakfast and went back to the store, where public safety was guarding the door I hadn’t been able to lock. The smoke smell had dissipated so I guess there wasn’t a fire. But that didn’t make me feel safer on a campus where I now knew that calling for emergency services was restricted, and, as I was about to find out, punishable.

I made some detox tea and turned to Dear Prudence for a few minutes, happy that after that I could finally turn to the online orders and other first-thing-in-the morning tasks, but soon, the Rush Limbaugh listening campus liaison was on the phone again. “I want her off campus,” he said, “Now.”

Amy couldn’t do anything about it. Security would be on the way soon. I lingered for a while, in denial, finishing my tea, my coworker determined to cheer me up with surprisingly hilarious old Veggie Tales episodes. (Rhyming “manatee” with “humanity”!! I can’t even!)

I packed up my pen cup, took some of my favorite employee art and customer thank-you cards off the wall. I left the sticky notes with happy faces and spangle-heart emojis. I’d posted one for each time I snuck some art or writing into my work days. There were so many sticky notes, in rainbow colors. When the store was packed up a few months later for Amy-swears-unrelated reasons, the ladies just left all the sticky notes there.

I wrapped up my archetypical work coffee cup, (Charlie Brown saying “Good grief!”) and all of my brightly colored pens. I would miss (until my next store) checking off purchase orders and dispositions in neon pink and light blue, writing thank-you’s on the online orders so we could all feel (okay, so I could feel) less like cogs in a heartless corporate machine.

The head of security, whom I’d known only as kind and helpful, was there to escort me off campus. I was afraid to tell anyone the story because I was worried that it seemed implausible—it still kind of does. I didn’t want anyone to know (and also I wanted EVERYONE to know) how poorly I was getting along with others, how I hadn’t been able to stop myself from letting a stupid mean man take away yet another thing I liked.

What scared me most, and still does, was that in the moment I called the unwilling fire chief a sexist piece of shit, it didn’t feel like a conscious decision. It felt like a pulse from deeper inside, from all the way in the center of the earth, like it was bigger than me and also totally stupid and mundane. I want to give myself a little time before the next installment, to think about what this all really means.