The Collective by Don Lee Page A

“They could geek out in Chinese.”
    “That rice-chaser comment still burns me,” Jessica said. “Fucking Joshua.”
    I had let that comment slip. I considered myself a discreet person, yet it was sometimes difficult for me not to let a few things leak. I was in an awkward position, being between Joshua and Jessica. From time to time, each would criticize the other, and they would make me promise to keep it private, but did they really expect such things to remain submerged? Frequently I felt that these confidences were a sneaky stratagem, ensuring that their scorn would be conveyed, but allowing them to avoid confrontation. We were friends, we were the three amigos, the 3AC, yet occasionally I wondered if we even liked each other.
    On each dorm-room door was a small chalkboard for messages. The Saturday morning before finals week, we arose to find communiqués scrawled on all three of our boards. Joshua’s read GOOK PIG. Mine read DINK WEENIE. Jessica’s read CHINK COIN SLOT.
    First the RA came. Then the Dupre Hall director. Then the residential life director. Then the dean of students, Bob Nordquist. They each looked at the chalkboards, pursed their lips, and shook their heads mournfully. At another college, this might have been dismissed as a regrettable yet relatively minor act of vandalism. But not here. At Mac, this was sacrilege. This was the worst kind of profanation, an affront to every belief held dear. Nordquist asked the residential life director to have a custodian wash the boards clean, making sure no remnants were visible.
    “Wait a minute,” Joshua said. “What about fingerprints?”
    “Pardon?” Nordquist said.
    “You’re not going to call the St. Paul police?”
    “Why don’t we talk about this.”
    We sequestered ourselves in Jessica’s room, just the four of us. “I’m so sorry this has happened to you,” Nordquist said. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry. We’re a college that respects each other’s differences, that’s committed to tolerance and understanding. When something like this happens, it’s an attack on our entire community.”
    We were all standing, huddled in a cramped circle. For a moment, Nordquist was distracted, looking over our heads at Jessica’s sketches, drawings, watercolors, and oils pinned to the walls. He had wavy reddish blond hair and rimless eyeglasses, and he was dressed neatly in a mango-orange Mac polo shirt and pressed khakis. “These are very good,” he said to Jessica.
    “Thank you,” she said tentatively.
    “My immediate concern is the three of you. I want you to know, we’ll do everything within our power to meet your every need.” He told us that if we felt threatened and wanted safety escorts, even round-the-clock security, they would accommodate us. The head of Campus Security, the nurse and counselor from Health Services, the minority program director, the provost, the president—they would all come to visit us soon. “So will the chaplain, if you so wish. I don’t know your spiritual affiliations.” He would talk to our teachers. If we wanted to leave campus right now and postpone our final assignments and exams, we’d be free to do so without academic penalty. They’d make special arrangements, and we could worry about the makeups later. “I’ll talk to your families as well, if you so wish. Our biggest concern is that you don’t suffer the aftereffects of this trauma any more than you have to. So my question to you at this point is, how do you want to proceed? You said you want to call the St. Paul police?”
    “Damn straight,” Joshua said. “I want to find the son of a bitch who did this.”
    “Let me assure you, we all do,” Nordquist said. “But in incidents like these in the past—”
    “What incidents?” I asked. “Things like this have happened a lot?”
    “I wouldn’t say ‘a lot,’ but unfortunately, yes, there have been a few in the twelve years I’ve been here.” He mentioned a noose found in the library, a swastika drawn on the wall outside Doty Hall, KKK