‘A night for growing up’: how a terrifying college ‘prank’ taught me about fear

Afew weeks into my first fall semester of college, I left our library around 11pm to walk to my dorm. The New England campus was quiet. The air smelled like pine trees and old rain, and my mind was full of Robert Hass, the California poet whose words I had been introduced to in class that week.

His poems were full of droopy trees and fog-soaked mornings, and I was surprised how swiftly my longing for Oregon had gotten caught between his words, gathering like lint in a comb. The nostalgia flustered me, revealing a homesickness I had so far kept tamped down.

That was what I was thinking as I kicked my sneakers through the moonlit grass: how sorely I wanted a sign. A sign I belonged here, a place where people referred to “the city” and only meant one place, New York, even though many took planes to arrive, passing over other cities as they went.

As I rounded the curve of a shadowy path about 200 yards from my front door, I saw a pack of guys walking toward me through the trees. I do not know whether to call them men or boys. I could not tell if they were talking, but they had the straight gait of people who were not engaged in conversation but purpose. Their bodies were muscular, solid as a wall of trees.

Some sparkplug in the root of my spine told me to panic, but I was what my parents called “jumpy” and I was trying to learn to control it. Besides, this was a small town of students and retirees on the Maine coast. I was used to seeing others returning from the library at this hour, and I imagined the group would murmur hello as we slouched past one other.

They did not. When we were a few feet apart, the line of guys formed a tight semi-circle around me. They did not speak, but they stared, and when I looked back, I saw their faces were masked in white cotton T-shirts, with slits for eyes and mouth. The white athletic socks they wore on their hands turned their fingers into paws.

I do not need to tell you what my heart did in those moments, or for the rest of the night or for the nights that followed. What happened to my body is that it froze. The men were frozen too. It was a terrible dance. The moon gaped above us.

Pray, I thought. Also: Prey.

Nobody talked. I waited for their hands to reach for me; they did not. Finally, my body pushed through their bodies and ran. Nobody followed.

Years later, in graduate school, I found an old version of Little Red Riding Hood in the University of Min