Dormitory

by Kara Crawford

Content Warning: Self-Harm

In the first room by the entrance, a girl hoards pregnancy tests in bulk and takes one every morning. I just want to be sure, she says to the toilet seat as the three minutes tick by. I watch her as she slips the negative tests into empty tampon wrappers, depositing them into the trash like delivering a letter. 

Across the hall, the resident assistant holds a pair of pliers a sliver away from her big toe. She wants to rip the nail off, to watch a new one sprout up from nothing, to turn her foot into a sapling just to prove she can make something grow. She almost gathers the courage.

In the common area, three sophomores make friendship bracelets out of string and plastic beads. They exchange them like omens. 

At the end of the hallway—the very back of the dorm—a girl waits for her roommate to leave before opening up her textbook and giving herself minuscule paper cuts on the backs of both her knees. No one ever sees them, not even when she wears shorts.

The girl in the first room eventually starts keeping a plastic container of piss inside her desk drawer, the kind with a lid. Every day, she empties and refills it. That way, she can take a test whenever she wants; it’s so much more convenient.

I don’t want to be perfect, not the way these girls do. I don’t want to blossom. All I want to be is a lonely college freshman drawing pubic hairs on the moon. 

Kara Crawford is a writer from Manassas, Virginia. She is the Fiction Editor of So to Speak Journal, a prose reader for phoebe’s Incarcerated Writers Project, and a fiction reader for Ploughshares. Her work has appeared in Pinch, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. You can visit her website: kara-crawford.com.