I could see it from the top of the stairs: a few hundred undergrads in costumes, adult-sized onesies and ironic sombreros. They were crowded in the art gallery lot, milling against the side of a school bus that was supposed to take them somewhere, a party, I don’t know. I am not a student at Washington University. I could not name a fraternity or a sorority on this campus if you paid me. But there was my car, parked catty-corner to the bus’ back wheel, three girls in silver togas leaning against my trunk.

I had come to campus for a reading at the English department, Jo Ann Beard. She read a novella about a man who breaks into a woman’s house and slams her face against the wallpaper until her nose shatters.

I jogged down the stairs and across the street, past the meters and up to the one and seemingly only security guard in the crowd, sweating and waving the first people onto the bus. He glanced over his shoulder at me and begged: five minutes.

I nodded, pissed but civil. I got in my car, rolled down the window so I could hear the sound of the bus motor over the roar of the party.

I think this was the first time someone yelled the word: B—-.

I graduated from Wash. U.’s master’s program in creative writing in 2013 and stayed on through May for a teaching fellowship. I made my students come to readings like these. Tonight’s had been brutal and particularly fantastic, a story about a woman whose home is invaded, who’s beaten and left for dead. She plays possum, plots how she’s going to get to the shovel in the closet and clock the guy in the head, and, really, that’s all that happens: about five minutes of narrative time, a woman lying on the floor trying to decide what to do. But those five minutes are dilated across 60 pages, stuffed with flashback and exposition and the sort of fine-boned details that make you forget how to breathe.

I leaned out my window, searched the crowd, tried to put a face to the voice.

I heard someone yell it again—a full sentence now, Good luck with that, b—-!—but I still couldn’t see where it came from.

The thing about Jo Ann Beard is her fiction isn’t really all that fictional. She talked about it in the Q-and-A, that blur between imagination and memory, how she doesn’t believe in a binary between the two. This story I read tonight, she said, it happened to me. All but the premise. No one ever broke into my house. I never hit a guy in the head with a shovel. All the details in it, though, they were all mine.

Two more women came trudging across the berm, squeezed into the aisle next to my car. They weren’t in costumes, maybe grad students. One of them leaned through the driver’s side door and lay on her horn with the heel of her hand.

Hey, it’s time to go! she screamed. You all need to move!

I didn’t see the kid that leered out of the crowd, not at first. Tall and dark-eyed, the strap on his camouflage bucket hat looped under his chin.

He didn’t yell it at her: he pronounced it, louder than speaking but calmer than a scream.

Hit me. Come on, hit me. See what happens.

He waited a beat. Then he gave a senior-photo grin: man, I’m just kidding!

I took this semester off from teaching to write, to go to readings like tonight’s without taking attendance. I just got offered another course for the spring, and I’ve been telling people for weeks how excited I am: I really missed the kids. Every class, god: I couldn’t have asked for better kids.

The bus motor roared. The cop gestured to pull out, and this is when the kid in the camouflage hat turned to me.

Time to back it up, slut!

My tongue was locked to the bottom of my mouth. I spoke anyway: you should be ashamed of yourself for talking to women like that.

He grinned.

He stared.

He didn’t break eye contact until I did, until I had to straighten out and put the car into drive. Then I heard it again: Slut, B—-. His voice, then two more voices.

I don’t need to describe to you how this felt. You have felt this or you have read a story about a woman who has felt this, and if you haven’t, I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to believe that you are not willfully avoiding the world you live in. It’s a queasiness in your throat that you think you better just swallow, better go home and wait for the heavy thing in your stomach to dissolve.

Okay, maybe not you: I. That is what I did, in my college years, probably drunk and dressed as a Valkyrie, pretending that none of it bothered me.

But by the time you are 27, you won’t want to swallow it anymore.

I dialed my phone before I was out of the lot. I made a report.

Because by now, I am old enough to know who I am. That I am not a slut, that I am not a b—-, that these words don’t even mean what we’re told they mean.

What these words are is aerodynamic.

They are the brick that is perfectly designed to smash through the window, so that once they’re inside, the person who hurled it can take what they want. Maybe just that space in your thoughts as you walk down the street. The sleep you could have had if you weren’t too angry to sleep.

Or maybe something more. Your nose against the wallpaper.

The rest of your body, in ways that I am too tired to enumerate.

I had been in the lot for five minutes. But minutes like these can dilate. They can thicken and spread and map across the brain, obsess you, make you sick. They can turn the chapter you owe to your agent that you planned on writing this morning into something else despite you. An essay about rape culture. Something you didn’t wish you had to write.