The Outsider Ch. 02

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.