With Honors

by Jane Copland

Lan Gao

When it snows, the freshman girls from the dorm above the soccer field steal plastic trays from the dining hall and sled down the slope to my street, landing with a crack and a thud across the raised gutter. For thirty, maybe forty yards, they’re free.

They don’t pause in pain when the tray hits the asphalt, industrial plastic on pavement reverberating the impact up their spines. In their flimsy sneakers, the girls from the warmth of the coast are puppies on wet concrete as they struggle back to the top, knees bent and ankles precarious. The local girls stride away from the landing in snow boots, trays stowed safely underarm. It’s a show of power from the inlanders over their city sisters, the first time they’ve asserted social dominance since classes began in September. Later, in the coral and white tiled communal bathroom, the bruised tailbones prove a leveller. No matter how bravely she walked away, the injury is the same.

Our house is dilapidated, a wreck of student carnage, and our chipped front window looks out to the slope and the freshman dorms. I lived in that one, I’d say and gesture up at the wide white building, a flick of the wrist with a fist around the neck of a bottle. Injuries that no ice pack ever resolved, nursed behind the single-paned glass. Your skin left numb and thick and slick like packaged meat, thawing purple to pink on a dining hall kitchen work surface. You live in the desert. A college town is an intrusion. None of the meat that makes it this far from the farm is fresh.

The bruising won’t end with the first whiteout, the first heist from the dining hall, the first semester or the last look up the hill with the question of whether those forty yards were worth the pain. The first year won’t be over before they catch the wince in some other girl’s face, a giveaway, a weak spot, an admission. I don’t want to. As the snow turns brown in the gutters and the streets glisten in the melt and the houses below look up to the dorms to replace those of us who’ve been down the hill too many times, the abrupt crashes intensify and we gloss the bruises with bottle after bottle, making even more haste to stand up too quickly, to pretend that it didn’t hurt.

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Jane Copland is the Creative Nonfiction editor at VirtualZine. Her work has been published in Ellipsis Zine, the London Independent Story Prize, Spelk, Fairlight Books, Intrepid Times, Reflex Fiction, Entropy Mag and Tandem Press. Her stories were also shortlisted in the Fresher Prize and inaugural Nobow Press short story competition. She is from New Zealand and lives in Reading, Berkshire.