A Brand New Day
Inspired by a song by Sting.
Madelyn Cross was an eighteen year old college student. She grew up in an affluent suburb of DC-her father was a lobbyist in Washington, and her mother spent her days attending teas, luncheons, charity events. She was the youngest of four children, two older brothers and one older sister. They have all graduated college and started their own lives. Madelyn has spent her life in opulent surroundings and instant gratification. She spent her weekends attending parties at her friends' houses or shopping aimlessly at the malls and lunching with her friends. Her friends were like her-little to no parental oversight, no worry about money as they all had credit cards with no limit taken care of by their parents. Maddie had grown increasingly restless her junior year, and at the beginning of her senior year she decided this type of lifestyle was not making her happy –she wanted to see the world and was tired of the drinking and drugging and random sex she and her friends were involved in out of general ennui with their lives. She knew her parents expected her to attend a good college and land a fantastic husband and a wonderful career she could retire from when she started having children. She sometimes felt that her parents and their crowd had become stuck in an alternate universe which was permanently mired in the '50s and early 60s. Everyone was beautiful, rich and bored and no one veered from the well prepared path before them. Maddie decided she no longer wanted this-a life preplanned and a future of alcohol and prescription drugs (because drugs were acceptable if your doctor gave them to you), an unfaithful husband (everyone she knew had parents who were divorced or lived in separate residences), and years of unhappiness until she died.
She applied to several small colleges out of weekend visiting range from her mother-not that her mother paid much attention to her and she doubted her mother would have visited her often even if she'd attended college right there in VA or DC. She accepted the offer from the small liberal arts college in central Georgia because she'd never been to Georgia and one of her favorite books was Gone With The Wind. She had a romanticized idea of attending college with handsome men with a Southern drawl and enjoying a more laid back, less stressful pace of life. She had always heard everything moved at a leisurely pace in the South. Her parents had protested-but she had refused to back down. They half heartedly agreed, believing that after spending a few months in some sticky Southern backwater surrounded by people they were sure resembled those from the movie Deliverance she would be more than ready to come home.
She arrived in August in the small college town about two hours south of Atlanta to move into her dorm, get her classes set, find her way around the campus and set about making friends. The town was not at all like the city she grew up in. One small shopping mall with none of the fancy stores she's used to shopping in. No five star restaurants-some fast food chain places, a couple of local diners. A Piggly Wiggly and a small local grocer. The only movie theater is a half hour drive to the next county's three screen theater. There are more churches than anything else in the town and she found that most of the folks she encountered while registering at the college or buying groceries were so earnest and sincere in their interactions with her that it was unnerving. She had never attended church except for weddings and funerals and these people were very open about their faith in God and their desire to impart their ideas regarding Jesus to any and all they met. It made her uneasy in a way she couldn't quite pin down-she felt like a "sinner" without any clear idea of what exactly encompassed the definition of a "sinner". In her world, no one thought twice about supplying teenagers with alcohol at parties, most of her friends had freely and casually smoked pot or popped pills. The majority of her friends had lost their virginity by age fifteen/sixteen at the latest. Their parents had ensured the daughters were on birth control by middle school to prevent any unwanted pregnancies-as if they took it for granted their daughters would be sexually active. It was a life of benign neglect-everyone's parents were busy and she and her friends lived their lives without any real guidance or input from their parents. There were maids and cooks and housekeepers and gardeners and pool boys-but no one to ask them how their day had gone, what did they want to have for dinner, did they need help with homework, how was their boyfriend, did they want to go shop for a prom dress? Maddie supposed that if she let herself really think about it she had picked a college in the South because she had always read books and watched movies that depicted folks in the South as affectionate, friendly, kind, welcoming-she hoped unconsciously to find a family finally, or at least find friends that made her feel like it would matter to them if she disappeared off the earth.
Shortly after she settles into her dorm, her roommate-Stephanie- asked Maddie to join her in barhopping at the local watering holes. Steph assured Maddie that she had been assured by her older cousin who had previously attended the college that the local bars were shit holes, full of the local trash but that they didn't card anyone and not only could they drink without worry but you could also be sure to be able to obtain pot or anything else you liked at these bars. Two of the bars were on the opposite ends of the town, in slightly run down, seedier neighborhoods. The third was just a mile outside town, on an old gravel road and definitely the more run down of the three. It was also frequented by the more hard core trash of the town.