A Secret Rage by Charlaine Harris

and term papers of one kind or another.
    I dated a friend of Charles’s once or twice. He was nothing worth working at, just good for a mildly pleasant evening; for one thing, he talked about duck hunting too much. But our double dates gave me a chance to observe Mimi with Charles. To my relief, she showed distinct signs of finally having developed a streak of caution and a sense of her own rights.
    Sometimes she sang in a fair-to-middling alto as she got ready for a date, and sometimes she had that exalted, melted, ‘in love’ look. But more often she seemed thoughtful. I was glad to see that; I hadn’t brought myself to like Charles yet though I was trying. And I did not, repeat did not, criticize him to Mimi. But perhaps she sensed my anxiety. He was courting her at such a furious clip that I’d become semiseriously concerned about finding another place to live in Knolls, in case Charles really did succeed in sweeping her off her feet and to the justice of the peace. Housing in Knolls was no idle concern. Because of the shortage of dormitory space, every doghouse and garage in town was rented during the college year. Barbara Tucker had had an awful time finding a place to live after she got raped. She just hadn’t been able to stand her garage apartment any longer.
    Poor Barbara. She was the only specter on a horizon I found full of promise, and she was becoming a very faint wraith. I was truly busy, desperately busy; and the tiny tremor in her voice reminded me that I should, must, treat her specially. She was of the walking wounded. She marched down the sidewalks of Houghton very swiftly, and very alone. Stan’s defection had proved permanent. From a comment she dropped during one of our rare meetings, I got the idea she was seeing Cully professionally, and I hoped my surmise was correct. Cully’s calm, restraint and precision would be comforting to a woman in Barbara’s situation, I thought.
    Talk about Barbara’s rape was no longer current in Knolls, partly because neither Heidi Edmonds (the first victim) nor Barbara had ever been figures in the mainstream of town life. According to Mimi, the feeling prevailed that the rapes were a campus problem – though plenty of residents strolled through the gardens, and of course Barbara’s rape had happened off-campus. The scare had hit hard only among faculty wives and town women who worked at the college. These women watched what went on around them more carefully, and many installed extra locks. The female students went in pairs after dark, at least while the fear was fresh.
    Mimi and I were conscientious about locking the doors every night and I tried to do all my library work before I came home to supper. We decided we were doing everything we reasonably could to make ourselves safe. I distinctly remember the phrase ‘fortress mentality’ coming into our conversation when we discussed security measures.
    On the whole, this was a pleasant and rewarding period in my life. I loved it. I was living in a place I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, spending time with a friend I cherished. I was slowly making more friends. The ladder was gone; I didn’t have to climb it, or scrabble to keep my place on it anymore. I seldom turned on the bulbs of my mirror for that dark close examination.
    Late October had never seemed so full of golden light.

7
    I WAS JERKED OUT of sleep so suddenly and violently that the shock robbed me of breath. A hand was clamped over my mouth. If I had had any air, I would have screamed.
    ‘Don’t make a sound,’ whispered the figure that was only a darker part of the darkness filling the room.
    That figure was not Mimi or Cully or anyone who had a right to be there. In the worst moment of my life I knew clearly what was going to happen.
    I couldn’t breathe, I had to breathe. I lifted my hand to knock his away, let me
breathe!
    ‘Don’t move, I have a knife,’ he whispered.
    He held it up into a shaft of moonlight he was careful