Quinn's Story

One night at twelve-thirty on a Saturday night, his phone rang. Quinn was in his room at his desk working through one of the Colonel’s assignments. He looked at the screen. Katherine.

He answered.

She was crying. “Quinn, would you come get me?” She was drunk, incoherent.

The background noise: the crowd and music from a party.

“Where are you?” he said.

She mumbled an address in Pacific Heights.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Stay where you are. Outside or inside?”

“Outside,” she said. “I’m outside.”

“Good. Stay outside. I’ll come find you.”

He was dressed in forty seconds — the clothes from the chair, shoes, jacket, keys from the desk. He went quietly through the house, which at twelve-thirty was asleep, and out the side door and into the Jeep, pulling out of the drive before the sixty-second mark.

He found her on the front steps of a house whose party was audible from the street. She made a lonely figure sitting on the top step with her knees up and her arms around them. Her eye makeup had run, giving her a raccoon face. She had her phone in one hand and her shoes in the other.

He did not say anything right away. He’d learned, from knowing her for the better part of two years, that the immediate response to visible distress was presence rather than questions.

She leaned against his shoulder.

“Hi,” she mumbled. After a long while, she mumbled again, “He said I was a bitch. That I was fake.”

She drifted off. Her eyes closed.

Quinn held still. He thought about what he knew about the boyfriend—a senior, entitled, a typical rich kid.

“Did he harm you? Mess with you?”

“No, he was just an asshole. I think I’m gonna be sick.” She staggered to her feet and vomited in the flowerbeds.

“Okay, let’s get you home and tucked in bed.”