The Outsider
Copyright 2009 by EC
EC's Erotic Art & Fiction - http://www.ecgraphicarts.com/
EC's deviantART collection - http://caligula20171.deviantart.com/ 

(warnings: language, adult themes, public nudity, sex between adults)

Chapter 2 - Ruthie's evening

Ruthie left her classmate with very mixed emotions. At the very beginning her 
reaction towards him was resentment. Because of him, she was about to lose one 
of the few small pleasures she had in life, the quiet two hours she spent in the 
nude under the shade every afternoon. 

However, once Ruthie calmed herself down, she understood that Mike had to do 
his job, just like she had to do hers. He was totally unaware of the consequences 
of his actions in her life and she had to remind herself that he was not acting out 
of malice, at least not towards her. In fact, he had offered her the small favor of 
not ticketing her car, assuming that she had one. He cared about her enough to 
offer a privilege that apparently he would not grant anyone else.

No, he was not acting out of malice towards her, but most definitely he was acting 
out of malice towards the rich crowd that was abusing the lot. The truth was that 
Ruthie hated the spoiled elites every bit as much as Mike did. It would be nice to 
see them get theirs for once. Because of Mike Sinclair, the free parking the 
“beautiful people” on campus felt that they were entitled to would turn into an 
expensive hassle. Yes, it would be nice to watch the parking guy stick it to them. 

She especially loved that moment when that frat guy had called Mike an 
“asshole” and he had a come-back that forced the other guy to shut-up. There 
were so many times that she would have wanted to do the same thing at her job, to 
tell those miserable sorority bitches, and the disgusting sluts with fake tits who 
fucked the football players, and the arrogant TA’s who treated her like dirt…all of 
them…what she really thought of them. 

Ruthie’s mind replayed her interactions with her classmate several times over as 
she tried to figure him out. He was willing to talk to her, something that meant a 
lot to a person whose only other conversations that day had consisted of taking 
coffee orders and answering questions in class. Speaking to him, however briefly, 
had made her feel slightly less isolated. She had not been nice to him in class, but 
from what she could tell, he did not hold that against her. In fact, he had taken her 
advice and read the story she recommended. That was nice, having someone listen 
to her for once and care enough about her opinion to actually do something she 
wanted. 

Suddenly Ruthie stopped in her tracks. She remembered the slip she had made 
about not having any friends. It was true, but why did she have to admit that, 
without even being prompted? Mentally she castigated herself, because she was 
always saying idiotic things like that. That slip was only the latest out of many 
that she made out of habit, the stupid things that came out of her mouth that made 
people roll their eyes and kept her isolated. What a stupid thing to say…I don’t 
have any friends…

Ruthie’s concentration began to drift. She was only partially in the real world as 
she walked to her afternoon class. Like a flock of agitated birds, thoughts circled 
around her mind, diving in and out of her consciousness. Her memory drifted to a 
customer who had snapped at her that morning, before shifting to a news story of 
a child’s murder that had upset her. She noticed a flier for an evangelical group, 
which prompted her to think about religion. Her mind wandered to an assignment 
she had due the next week, and then to wondering what was for dinner when she 
got back to the dorm. 

She entered the building and made her way to class. Being forced to focus on a 
lecture and class discussion forced Ruthie to clear her mind somewhat, but the 
background noise of her other thoughts did not go away entirely. It never did. 

----------

Ruthie was a geology major, but the class she was attending that afternoon was a 
third-year literature course with the Spanish department. She had entered college 
speaking fluent Spanish and immediately tested into the third year of the program. 
She realized that she could take advantage of her language skill to get an easy 
double-major. She would take all of the literature classes offered by the 
department, throw in some Latin American history and political science classes, 
and that would take care of all her language and humanities requirements, plus 
getting her the extra major.

From the time that she was twelve up until the previous summer when she 
graduated, Ruthie Burns had been surrounded by Spanish. Her mother and her 
uncle’s family originally were from Culiacan, Mexico and usually spoke Spanish 
at home and among themselves. Many of her classmates in high school spoke 
Spanish as their first language. At the insistence of her mother, Ruthie had taken 
the entire Spanish program in high school, which gave her a more formal 
knowledge of the language and compensated for the uneducated accents that 
surrounded her. As much as reading texts and conjugating verbs might have 
irritated Ruthie at the time she was doing it, she had to admit that all those classes 
in high school had benefited her upon entering college.

Ruthie’s mind wandered again. The window of the classroom faced towards the 
south and she could see the hills the coastal range. Beyond those hills lay Santa 
Cruz and the elite suburbs that surrounded it. Further south the land flattened out 
and a person driving down Highway # 1 entered a totally different world once he 
hit Watsonville. Highway # 1 passed through miles of vegetable fields: asparagus, 
cabbage, and of course, artichokes. 

Past all those fields lay Salinas. Salinas’ claim to fame was calling itself “the 
artichoke capital of the world” and “the salad bowl of the nation”. Wow, what a 
thing to be proud of, thought Ruthie to herself. Just north of town there was a big 
statue of an artichoke. She rolled her eyes every time she passed that stupid thing. 

The only other brush with fame that Salinas could lay claim to was the author 
John Steinbeck. Steinbeck had written about the area in the 1930’s and there was 
a museum dedicated to him in town. Unlike most of her classmates, Ruthie Burns 
actually knew who Steinbeck was and had read several of his books. When her 
class visited the museum, she was the only person in her group who showed any 
interest whatsoever in the displays. As for her classmates, Steinbeck was 
irrelevant. Central California was a very different place back when he had written 
from what it was in the 21st Century. The area now was populated by people who 
had come from a totally place and lived a totally different reality. 

Ruthie’s mind continued to drift. She thought about her mother, vaguely 
wondering if she already had gotten home from work. She had promised to call on 
Sunday, but already it was Wednesday and Ruthie still had not talked to her mom 
that week. She couldn’t put it off any longer. As much as she dreaded calling 
home, she’d have to call that night. 

I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on her, thought Ruthie to herself. She did help me 
get out of Salinas. I suppose the least I can do is call. 

Ruthie’s attention finally returned to where it needed to be: the class she was 
sitting in. She was among students that were two or three years older than she 
was, but her knowledge of Spanish put her at ease with material that many of her 
non-native speaking classmates struggled with. For her, reading in Spanish was 
every bit as easy as reading in English. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo, 
Ruben Dario, Jorge Icaza…it didn’t matter…she knew the material, some of 
which she had read for recreation when she still was in high school. For example, 
as a junior she had discovered “Pedro Paramo” and spent days reading and re-
reading a novel that seemed to speak directly to her. 

Ruthie raised her hand and chatted in Spanish when the professor posed a 
question about Mario Vargas Llosa. Spanish literature was one place within her 
comfort zone, where she was on familiar territory. She had no hesitation showing 
off and embarrassing the rich, lazy gringos whenever she could. As she listened to 
a classmate with a very thick accent struggle to answer the next question, an 
interesting thought occurred to her. In the English literature class it was Mike 
Sinclair who dominated the class discussion, but in the Spanish literature class the 
obnoxious show-off was Ruthie Burns.

----------

When Ruthie stepped out of the Spanish literature class she stepped out of her 
comfort zone. She looked around at the people surrounding her, all of whom 
seemed from a different world than the one she had come from. She knew that she 
really didn’t belong in Davenport. She couldn’t relate to these people, all these 
spoiled rich types with their fancy clothes, and their fake tits, and the car that 
daddy gave them, and their drinking, and all their money. She couldn’t relate. She 
had nothing in common with them.

And yet, if anything her ability to relate to Salinas was even less. As she always 
put it: “Maybe I lived in Salinas, but I’m not from there.” Even though she was 
half-Mexican, the tough-guy machista culture of her family’s homeland elicited 
nothing from her but disgust. She had been to Sinaloa several times to visit her 
grandparents and found the ingrained violence and oppressiveness of the culture 
there repugnant. The salsa erotica and narco-corridas that were popular in 
Culiacan offended and nauseated her, every bit as much as the rap music that 
assaulted her ears in Salinas. 

What Ruthie really hated, more than anything else, was the gang culture that had 
permeated both Culiacan and Salinas. She resented having to be afraid of being 
beat up in her school, of always having to seek the protection of her older cousin 
when walking in the hallways. She hated the graffiti, the bandanas, the tattoos, the 
drugs, and the sneering expressions of the gang members. She hated the way 
those guys treated her female classmates, and she hated the girls for putting up 
with it. 

For Ruthie’s mother, her escape and her defense against the hostile world of 
Salinas was evangelical Christianity. Ruthie accompanied her mother every time 
she went, but over time religion became every bit as disgusting in Ruthie’s mind 
as the gang culture at school. She was an outsider at her mother’s church, just as 
she was an outsider in school. 

----------

Ruthie’s only escape was reading. From the time she moved to Salinas until she 
graduated from high school, she locked herself in her room whenever she could 
and read voraciously. Before she was twelve, she had lived in Nebraska, so she 
was well-aware that a world existed beyond the one inhabited by her mother and 
her cousins. She also knew that there were places and times when drugs and 
gangs had not been a feature of everyday life. She was fascinated with literature 
that covered different eras from the one in which she was trapped and reading 
about people who led lives that contrasted with the grim one that she knew. She 
started with C.S. Lewis (recommended by her Bible study leader) and from there 
branched out into science fiction and mid-20th Century British fiction. When 
details of the stories did not make sense to her, she returned to the library to look 
up answers to her questions, which led her to read histories and biographies. The 
past interested her, so she explored further and further back, teaching herself 
about ancient civilizations. 

Her curiosity led her to pick apart the Bible. She read several scholarly studies on 
how it was created and what the passages actually meant in the context during 
which they were written. The Biblical studies had a profound effect on her, 
because placing the Bible in its historical context took away most of the mystique 
that her mother’s church had ascribed to it. Ruthie memorized the entire New 
Testament and a large portion of the Old Testament, but the more she learned, the 
less divine the book seemed to her. Of course, she had to keep her growing doubts 
to herself. She was rebelling, but she rebelled in secret. 

Finally, she started reading about most forbidden topic of them all: evolution. 
Precisely because her maniacal preacher so vociferously condemned evolution, 
Ruthie was determined to find out everything she could about it. Anything that 
preacher hated had to be good. By the time she graduated from high school, she 
was reading professional-level studies concerning paleontology and the various 
theories surrounding evolution. That interest was what led her to declare geology 
as her first major.

She was totally isolated from her classmates in high school. The more she read 
and the more knowledgeable she became, the greater were the differences 
between her and the others. Her social skills quit developing because she felt that 
in the hostile world of Salinas she had no use for them anyway. She was disgusted 
by the teenagers that surrounded her at school and scared by their belligerent 
behavior. They rejected her and she rejected them. The few times she did go out 
she went with either her cousins or her mother.

Ruthie’s continuous reading was destined to determine the course of her life. She 
mastered a broad range of topics, so class assignments were very easy for her. If 
given the chance to do extra-credit work, she’d do it, in part because she really 
had nothing else going on in her life. She got straight “A’s” throughout the entire 
time she was in high school. Her grades, coupled with the fact she could claim a 
Hispanic background because of her mother, resulted in the grant she had 
received to attend Davenport State University.

Ruthie’s uncle brought her to Davenport at the end of August and dropped her off 
at her dorm. At the beginning she was elated to have escaped Salinas. She fully 
expected to make friends with people whose intellect matched hers, but very 
quickly she found out that was not to be. No one except her professors cared 
anything whatsoever about the book knowledge stored in her brain. Instead what 
mattered was that her social and conversational skills were non-existent. She 
could not talk about light topics at all and had no interest or knowledge of popular 
culture. She tended to be quiet, but suddenly would become emotional and have 
an opinionated outburst. Then she would realize she had just made a fool out of 
herself and sink back into sullen silence. She felt that she was incapable of 
articulating what she was thinking in speech, that she really could only express 
herself in writing. Because she had spent so much of her life as a teenager alone, 
her gestures and mannerisms were not “normal” and she had no concept of what it 
was to have fun. On top of everything else, subconsciously many of her university 
classmates rejected her because she was an impoverished person from Salinas. 

In Davenport, she no longer had to be afraid for her physical safety, but she found 
herself even more isolated than she had been before she graduated high school. It 
seemed that everyone with whom she interacted disliked her and wanted her out 
of their presence. Her big dream to get out of Salinas had been realized, but the 
disappointment that followed had come close to totally breaking her spirit. 

----------

Ruthie walked to her dorm just as it was getting dark outside. She was shivering, 
because the evening had turned cool. The breeze blowing from the hills whipped 
across her bare legs and flowed right through her light dress. The backpack 
protected her bare back from the cold, but the contents pressed uncomfortably and 
the canvas scratched at her skin. She dumped the backpack in her room. She 
extracted a book to take with her to the cafeteria.

She got her tray and silently sat down. No one was interested in talking to her, 
which was why she brought the book. She was not really going to read, but she 
calculated that it would not be so obvious that no one wanted to sit with her if she 
was pretending to be studying while she ate. Eating in the cafeteria at night was 
always the hardest part of the day for her. During lunchtime she didn’t have any 
time to talk, but in the evenings she was forced to confront the hard reality that 
she had made no friends whatsoever during the two months she had been in 
Davenport. She knew it and everyone else knew it. Whatever chance she had to 
make friends at the beginning of the semester had long since passed. She failed to 
connect with anyone, the dorm cliques formed, and by the end of September she 
was completely shut out of the dorm’s social life.

----------

After eating her joyless dinner, Ruthie returned to her dorm room. Her roommate 
still had not returned. That meant that she could call her mother and talk to her in 
private. She took a deep breath and nerved herself to dial home. Ruthie always 
found talking to her mom very stressful. The conversation, after a brief exchange 
of personal news and gossip about family members, fell into the usual dialogue:

“Ruthie, have you found a good church yet?”

“No mom, not yet…really…” 

“But, why not? Love, you can’t tell me there’s no decent churches in Davenport.”

“Really, Mom…there’s nothing here. Everything’s down in Santa Cruz.”

“Ruthie, honey, you are lying to me and you know it is a sin to lie…Lourdes 
Rosales’ daughter is up in Davenport too, and she found a church the first week 
she got up there. Why can’t you?”

“Mom…I don’t know…I haven’t found anything…and I haven’t talked to 
Cristina.”

“Well, why don’t you just give her a call?”

“Yes, mom…I’ll call her…”

“Honey, please don’t forget this time. Call the Rosales girl. I’m very worried 
about you. You know that Satan is watching and he’ll get you if you’re not 
careful. You can’t fight Satan alone, dear…you have to find a church.”

“Yes, mom…I’ll try…I promise…”

Ruthie tensed up during the conversation, resisting the urge to scream into the 
phone:

“Look Mom, I’m not going to find a church because I don’t want to find a church! 
I don’t believe in that shit! I’m a fucking atheist, OK? Deal with it! I’m a fucking 
atheist!”

She knew that the moment was coming when she would lose control of herself 
and actually say that, but she figured that the longer she could put it off, the 
better. Her mother would be devastated when she found out that Ruthie had 
rejected her faith.

----------

Ruthie hung up the phone and calmed herself down. Just in time, because her 
roommate Shannon came breezing into the room with her boyfriend. With not so 
much as a “hello” the pair settled in and started spreading their books on 
Shannon’s bed. They had brought a box of pizza with them. They did not offer 
Ruthie a slice.

Ruthie was extremely uncomfortable with the invasion into her space, which was 
Shannon’s intention. It was only 7:15, so she could not complain that her 
roommate was preventing her from sleeping. Nor did the no-sex-in-the-dorm 
room-rule apply, because Shannon had brought her boyfriend over to hang-out 
and watch TV. The point was that Shannon wanted the room and Ruthie needed 
to leave.

At the beginning she had hoped to be friends with the other student, but Shannon 
quickly put an end to that hope.  Shannon sized up her roommate within a couple 
of days and decided that she was a nerd who could easily be pushed around. She 
cut at Ruthie with several hurtful remarks and then proceeded to take over the 
room. She bullied Ruthie with her TV and her CD player, using the noise to spoil 
her concentration and chase her out of the room. She continuously invited guests 
over; people who were every bit as inconsiderate as she was. In Shannon’s mind, 
Ruthie was the sort of person who deserved to be walked on, because she was 
such a nerd and such a creep.

Burning with resentment, Ruthie put on a jacket and stuck some notebooks in her 
backpack. She’d have to go to the library and stay there throughout the evening. 
Probably it was just as well, because she’d be forced to study and would have 
time to take some notes for class the next day. She left without saying goodbye.

----------

As she walked along the dark sidewalks to get to the library, Ruthie’s thoughts 
returned to religion. Nearly every religion imaginable was present on campus: 
evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, 
Moonies…everything imaginable. Ruthie hated them all. As far as she could tell, 
all the religious groups wanted the same thing from her: her brain and her money. 
Well, Ruthie Burns had no money and her brain was messed up, so guess what? 
She had nothing to offer them. 

Anyhow, the idea of believing in something that she couldn’t see or experience 
with her physical senses was something that she was incapable of doing. She 
knew the natural history of the earth and knew that the Bible could not have 
possibly been written by God. Her reading in history had convinced her that the 
most fervent religious believers were nothing but a bunch of psychotic killers, 
misogynists, and megalomaniacs. God’s love? Yeah, right. Tell that to the nine 
million women who were tortured and murdered for witchcraft in the Middle 
Ages.

If Ruthie had her way, all religion would be illegal, or at the very least it would be 
illegal to practice any religion in public. All those obnoxious street preachers and 
Hare Krishnas would be going to prison. Fuck the First Amendment.

The root of Ruthie’s hatred towards the world of religion was straightforward 
enough; she had it shoved down her throat from the moment she moved to 
Salinas. Until she was twelve, she had no opinion of religion whatsoever, because 
her father was a Christian in name only. He was the sort that believed in God and 
defended religion, but did not practice himself nor forced it on anyone. 

Ruthie’s mother was very different from her father when it came to faith. Her 
family had grown up Catholic, but like so many other Latin Americans during the 
1980’s and 1990’s, she converted to Pentecostalism as a teenager when still living 
in Culiacan. When she and Ruthie’s dad split up, she joined a local non-
denominational church. The oversized t-shirt she normally wore pretty much said 
it all: “the radicals for Jesus”. 

Twice per week Ruthie’s mother dragged her to a “Temple of the Lord” that had 
been set up in an abandoned store in a dilapidated shopping center. Twice per 
week she was forced to listen to a demented preacher as he screamed, cried, and 
sweat at the podium, his voice transmitted over a defective set of speakers that 
screeched and made the girl wince. Her mother and some of the other women 
spoke in tongues, which totally gave her the creeps. The first time she attended 
worship Ruthie was terrified by the spectacle and did everything she could to get 
out of going a second time. It took several hard slaps across the face to get her to 
change her mind.

Ruthie reflected that her mother was by no means a bad person, but she was 
dealing with a lot of personal issues (including a brief and very dysfunctional 
marriage to her father). She had little education, so the only frame of reference 
she had to see the world and judge the people who surrounded her came out of the 
preacher’s interpretation of the Bible. Ruthie hated that preacher, in part because 
he was such a tyrant over his small kingdom of believers, including her mother, 
and in part because he was such a demented freak.

----------

The chilly breeze whipped around her as she took a short cut across a playing 
field that separated the dorms from the academic buildings. She was adequately 
protected from the waist up, but her legs had goose bumps from the chill. The 
wind blew up her skirt and felt cold on her bare bottom and vagina. She loved the 
feeling of exposure, especially when her skirt blew up and she was momentarily 
uncovered from the waist down. Ruthie was not exactly an exhibitionist, because 
she did not want other people to see her when her body was exposed, but she did 
enjoy being naked in places where she normally would be expected to be clothed.

Along with studying evolution, Ruthie’s obsession with being naked was another 
form of rebellion against the values of that preacher she so hated. God had 
commanded people to cover up, so Ruthie made it a point to wear as little as 
possible, even if the weather was chilly.

Ruthie’s fascination with being naked started shortly after she moved to Salinas. 
Her mother could not afford to turn on the air conditioning and Ruthie was 
complaining about how hot her room was. Her mother responded that she should 
sleep in her underwear. She followed that advice for several nights, but then 
realized it would be even more comfortable to sleep completely nude. At first the 
thought frightened her, but then she saw it as a daring adventure. She knew that if 
she were caught, at the very least she would get several slaps across the face and 
be forced to sit at the kitchen table for a couple of hours, but to her the risk was 
worth it.

About six months after Ruthie moved in, her mother managed to change her work 
schedule so that she would be home when Ruthie got out of school. She left for 
work at 3:00 am and returned to the apartment at noon. She was concerned about 
keeping the girl out of trouble, forcing her to do her homework, and making sure 
she spent less time with her cousins, who she did not consider a good influence. 

The change of schedule did keep Ruthie under control in the afternoons, but what 
her mother did not realize was that it also gave her four hours of free time in the 
mornings. The girl referred to those hours as her “me time.” The moment her 
mother left for work, Ruthie got up and ran around the apartment naked. She 
enjoyed her own body, spending hours looking at herself in the mirror and taking 
self-portraits with a digital camera. She read, cooked breakfast for herself, 
listened to music, and masturbated in the living room. When she got a little older, 
occasionally she went outside when it was still dark and streaked around the 
apartment complex.

Ruthie’s “me time” in the early morning hours affected her life in the afternoons. 
By the time she got home from school she was dead-tired. She studied and had 
dinner, but on the nights she did not have to go to church she was in bed asleep by 
8:00. Her mother sometimes wondered about the girl’s constant sleeping, but had 
no problem with it because she was worried that if Ruthie were out on the street 
she would get in trouble or get beat up. She bragged to her fellow churchgoers 
that Ruthie was a “good girl” who never gave her much trouble. Had she known 
about her daughter’s “me time” she would have been horrified.

----------

Ruthie entered the library, went to the basement and found an open table all the 
way in the back. She unloaded her backpack and began searching among the 
Spanish literature collection for some titles that she needed for a report.

After several hours, Ruthie had taken most of the notes that she needed. She 
looked around and realized that all of the other desks and tables in the basement 
were empty. When she looked at her cell phone she knew why: it was 10:15. She 
knew from experience that after 10:00 no one came into the basement and anyone 
wanting a study desk could get one on the main floor.

The student took off her dress and returned to her seat to take some final notes. 
She planned to spend the final hour at the library nude. She calculated there was 
very little danger of being caught because she could hear the elevator if anyone 
came down at such a late hour.

At 11:00 she got up and, still naked, re-shelved the books she had been taking 
notes from. She felt extremely daring walking up and down the aisles of 
bookshelves with nothing on. She loved the sensation of the cool air blowing on 
her exposed skin and the silence that surrounded her. When she got up and left her 
dress behind at her study desk, her heart pounded at the beginning, but the longer 
she stayed away the more confident she became. She never allowed herself to 
return to the safety of her desk before she was completely relaxed and 
comfortable with being naked in the library.

She heard the bell of the elevator and scrambled back to her seat. She slipped her 
dress over her head just in time, because the person who had entered the room 
was a library employee. The man gave Ruthie a suspicious look, apparently 
having realized that she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Ruthie was 
disappointed, because she’d have to re-shelve the last two books with her dress 
on. She didn’t like to do that because she considered that her naked time in the 
library was not complete unless she could re-shelve all of the books she had taken 
to her desk that night before getting dressed. But with that guy in the basement 
she had no choice. She knew better than to leave immediately, because that would 
arouse more suspicion. She’d re-shelve the books, then get her backpack and 
depart.

----------

When she stepped outside, the chilly air hit her bare legs and a feeling of cold 
reality hit her soul. She began to feel resentful and morose as she walked past the 
engineering building and the computer center on the sidewalk that exited the main 
section of campus. She left the well-lighted sidewalk and plunged into the 
darkness to cross the playing field that separated the academic buildings from the 
dorms. The field was empty and silent. The silence was not peaceful to Ruthie; 
rather it had a sinister and desolate feeling for her. She knew that what she was 
doing was not safe; because a student had been raped on that same field just a 
month before, doing exactly what she was doing. She didn’t care. If it’s gonna 
happen, it’s gonna happen, and my life sucks anyway. When she got to the middle 
of the field she stopped to stare up at the stars. 

Her thoughts wandered as her mood deteriorated. She thought of writers such as 
C.S. Lewis who romanticized about the stars and created something out of them 
that was not based on reality. For C.S. Lewis the stars were living beings, 
something similar to angels. She then thought about astronomer Carl Sagan’s 
speculation that it was the stars that first gave people the idea of supernatural 
beings, perhaps because ancient humans thought the stars were far-off campfires 
in the sky. 

Her mind shifted to the other science fiction writers that she had read as a 
teenager, and all those fictitious trips to “other worlds”, trips that in real life never 
would, and never could happen. Perhaps there is other life out there, but if there 
is, so what? It’s not like we’re ever gonna get out there…everything’s too far 
away. She thought about all the work-arounds that writers had come up with to 
cover those vast distances…warp drive…worm-holes…irregularities in 
space…time travel…but it was all fantasy, just like supernatural beings, alternate 
worlds, and the afterlife. The cold hard reality was that E=mc2 and there never 
would be anything anyone could do about that. We’re stuck here on this 
planet…we’ll never go to any of those other neat worlds…and the best we could 
ever do might be to get a few astronauts on Mars. That’s it. Science fiction and 
the whole idea of inter-stellar travel was BS, just like angels, ghosts, demons, 
pixies…whatever. It’s all crap. All of it. It doesn’t matter. In a few years we’ll run 
out of resources and all starve to death and go extinct. We’ll be gone just like the 
passenger pigeon, and then something else…rats, probably…will take over the 
planet. 

Not that any of that matters, thought Ruthie to herself. The planet eventually will 
perish, burned up by the sun in a few billion years. Or maybe earlier…because if 
plate tectonics were to quit, the planet will become frozen and dead, like Mars. 
She had read an article that plate tectonics already was slowing down. If that 
speculation was true, the natural processes that maintain the atmosphere were 
coming to an end and eventually all water and air would freeze and evaporate 
away. We don’t have to wait five billion years…the end of all life is coming a lot 
sooner. 

Ruthie reflected on the futility of her life, the uselessness of her own existence. In 
a planet that sooner or later was destined for oblivion, and being a particularly 
unhappy member of a species that was doomed to extinction much sooner than 
the planet, what was the point? Why bother to study? Why bother to open the 
coffee shop? Why bother to continue living? Everyone hates me…even that 
Parking Nazi…even he’ll see me for what I am and ditch me… There’s no 
hope…no hope for anything or anyone. It’s stupid to stay alive…for what? So I 
can spend the next 60 years taking shit from everyone? Fuck ‘em. I don’t want to 
take shit. I’ve had it. Fuck it.

Suddenly she took off walking. No longer was she walking towards the dorms, 
but instead towards the path that exited campus, eventually descended a hill, 
crossed under Highway 1, and led onto a vegetable field that overlooked the 
Pacific Ocean. On the other side of the field there was a cliff that fell straight into 
the Pacific Ocean. A good fifty-foot drop onto rocks that were covered by roaring 
surf. Her body would get torn up in the waves and they’d never find her. Fuck 
‘em. Fuck all their insults and their money and all the rest of their shit…

Ruthie ended up not going very far. She never did. She made it to the gate that 
exited campus, only to find it was locked. Had she really wanted to, she could 
have scaled the fence or gone through the main exit and then walked around to the 
trail, but to do all that would have taken more exertion than she was capable of 
putting forth at that moment. She was not scared of dying, but sheer effort that she 
would have to put into getting out to that cliff suddenly became overwhelming. 
Had she already been close to the edge, she might have worked up the courage to 
jump or fall off, but to actually get out there was too much. Her anger turned into 
depression, and once she was depressed, inertia took over and she was capable of 
doing very little.

Depression shrouded the unhappy girl like a thick heavy cloak. She felt weighted 
down. Slowly she walked back, trying to shake off the numbness just so she could 
move forward. 

When Ruthie returned to her room, Shannon already was asleep and all the lights 
were out. She entered as quietly as possible, scared to wake up her roommate and 
risk an ugly confrontation.  Her gaze fell upon Shannon’s head, which was turned 
away from her. She resisted the urge to take her roommate’s CD player and use it 
smash that bitch’s nasty face. After having withstood two months of mistreatment 
at the hands of Shannon, Ruthie hated her.

She fantasized about somehow getting revenge. Unfortunately, life rarely gives 
people like Ruthie the chance to get even with those who have treated them badly.

