Innocence

Innocence

College Nights

Book One

By

Lucy St. John

 

Chapter 1

We became fast friends that freshman year, the five of us did. Everything was so shiny and new. Everything was right there, in front of us. Our whole lives. Our loves. The men who would come into our lives at the leafy paradise that was Old State, amongst the mountains of central Pennsylvania. A fantasy land, really. A place to learn, sure. But a place to experiment. A place to be bold. A place to find ourselves -- and each other. A place to become the women we were meant to be.

What a journey! What an experience! What a time in all of our lives!

I won’t bore you with a lot of preliminaries. Suffice it to say that the five female freshman from various parts of Pennsylvania and beyond came together like all coltish freshman women do. We had wobbled out of the nest of home and flown off to the big, wide open and inviting skies of Old State, intent to spread our wings. And how did we find each other? How did we form the friendship -- the fierce alliance – that would become The Five?

Well, I guess you could say we gravitated toward one another because we were the same. And because we were so different, too.

The parts of personality that we lacked in ourselves, we found in one another. And that made the five of us strong. It made us smart. It made us bold. It made us confident. So much more so than we could have ever been alone.

Together, we were more than the sum of our parts. We were The Five. And our classmates, both the college men and the other coeds, came to know and accept us as such.

To borrow a phrase from the guys, we had each other’s backs. Or at least we thought we did. Until terrible things happened to one of our own, changing everything and each one of us in ways we could never hope to understand in the heat of the moment. Nothing less than our very futures were altered that night. But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? I have a tendency to do that. It’s part of what college is all about. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t going fast enough. You aren’t learning. You aren’t growing.

And from the very day I stepped foot in my college home in what they called the dorms of East Halls, I was determined to grow.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Monica Creed. I hail from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I guess you’d call me a Daddy’s Girl. My father was chief of police of our safe, little borough in the western suburbs. I thought he was a god – tall and lanky and always so handsome in his uniform. I loved riding in his unmarked Chevy Blazer, which the borough let him take home at night. This, because Daddy was always on the job, always on the clock. One never knew when tragedy would strike and his handheld radio would squawk with a call. A rape. A murder. An armed robbery. A domestic violence situation. A fatal accident. A drowning. You name it.

Our town was idyllic, to be sure. A slice of middle- to upper-class American suburbia that seemed a safe haven, especially when your father is chief of police. But bad things happened. Bad things happened everywhere. I learned this lesson from my father, always such a careful man. And he had schooled me on being careful, too. The lessons stretch back as far as I can remember to when I was a little girl. Daddy knew all the dangers that could befall us in the big bad world. He saw the invisible piano that dangles so precariously over all our heads, held there by the thinnest of strings. He sought to protect me from this. He sought to teach me to protect myself. He sought to keep me safe.