Bright Young Women

The novel flashes back to 1978; Pamela is a young woman, living in a sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida and studying at Florida State University. She’s the sorority president and takes her responsibilities very seriously. It’s a cold and snowy Saturday night; Pamela’s best friend, Denise, is preparing to attend a party, but Pamela is content to stay home: “I was never more content than I was sitting at my pencil-scratched desk on a Saturday night […] feeling like I’d done the job I was elected to do” (7). The text reveals that Denise’s ambitions and hopes for the future will be cut short by a murderer that very night.

Pamela wakes up in the middle of the night, hungry, and decides to make a snack. Because she’s the sorority president, she has a large single room that is somewhat isolated from the other bedrooms. A broken light that has turned on in the middle of the night catches her attention, and she goes to look at it. Pamela hears confusing sounds coming from upstairs and then the sound of “someone on the second floor […] running at a nauseating, inhuman speed” (17). Pamela heads toward the main staircase and sees a man descending the stairs and heading for the front door. Because of her position behind the staircase, Pamela can see the man but he can’t see her. At first, Pamela thinks he’s Denise’s boyfriend, Roger Yul, but then realizes that he’s not. The unknown man exits through the front door.

Pamela goes upstairs to see Denise; when she gets upstairs, she finds that two young women, Jill and Eileen (who share a room) have had their faces mutilated. Other girls begin to wake up and emerge from their rooms; Pamela remains calm, telling them to call the police and ambulance. When Pamela gets to the room of a girl named Roberta, she’s unable to process that Roberta is dead; by this time, medics and police are arriving, and the scene becomes chaotic. Pamela goes into Denise’s room, where Denise is unconscious. A medic follows and begins administering first aid.

Pamela and the other sorority sisters crowd into her room, as police and medics scatter throughout the sorority house. A girl named Bernadette explains that whatever happened to Roberta and the other girls had to have occurred in a very narrow time window, because she knocked on Roberta’s door at 2:35 am, and Roberta briefly woke up. Pamela has developed her own theory: “A stranger had come into The House, likely to steal from us, and he’d encountered some of the girls and panicked” (24).

A police officer tells the girls that they’ll all need to be fingerprinted and questioned. Since she saw the man leaving the house, Pamela needs to go for additional questioning. Pamela confirms that the injured girls have been taken to the hospital; she’s anxious about restoring order and continuing on with routines.

The police question Pamela, and she provides a description of the man she saw. She’s frustrated because the police fixate on her comment that she briefly thought the man was Roger (Denise’s on-again, off-again boyfriend), and she senses that they question her account. Pamela asks the police what she should tell the parents of the injured girls when she phones them, and the police confirm, “All the girls are at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital” (33).

Pamela begins to phone the parents of the girls involved in the attack to convey a brief version of what happened: “An intruder broke in and some of the girls were hurt. They’ve been taken to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital” (35). She starts with Roberta’s parents and then moves to the parents of Eileen and Jill. When she phones Denise’s parents, they’re quite emotional and alarmed, and Pamela reassures them that “her injuries were the most minor” (37). Almost immediately afterward, Pamela gets a call from a medical resident named Linda Donnelly. Linda has a connection to the sorority house, so she decided to reach out. When Linda speaks with Pamela, she explains that while Eileen and Jill are being treated at the hospital, Roberta and Denise both died before reaching the hospital. Linda and Pamela are horrified that Pamela mistakenly told the parents of Roberta and Denise that their daughters were merely injured.

Despite Linda’s instruction to take no further action, Pamela calls Denise’s parents to tell them that she was mistaken, and their daughter is dead. She also breaks the news to the sheriff.

Pamela reflects on her decision to attend Florida State University: She became interested in the university because her mother was inexplicably negative toward the school, and when Pamela first visited campus, she felt an uncanny sense of connection: “I was simply in tune with this place” (43). Pamela wasn’t close to her parents and often felt neglected by them. On the morning of the attacks, Pamela breaks the news to the other members of the sorority that Roberta and Denise are dead.

The head of campus security comes to the sorority house to tell them that another young woman was attacked nearby the previous night, less than half an hour after the attack at the sorority. He explains, “We cannot rule out that he specifically targeted this sorority, or the girls he attacked, or that he won’t come back […] the threat level is extremely high” (48). He encourages them to take safety precautions but says the university can’t provide them with alternate housing or protection from the press, who are already harassing them. Eventually, Linda Donnelly arranges for some of the girls to stay with a sorority alum, Catherine McCall, who has a large house nearby.

Pamela and many of the other sorority girls arrive at the McCall house. Pamela has a boyfriend named Brian, who has helped with this process. Brian lives in the same fraternity as Roger and reports that Roger has been arrested. Pamela is angry because she knows the man she saw wasn’t Roger and senses that the police simply want to show that they’ve made an arrest. In addition, Pamela feels conflicted that she hasn’t yet spoken with her parents. She eventually phones them and erupts in anger that it has taken hours to reach them.

Later that night, Bernadette and Pamela talk, and Bernadette questions whether Pamela can truly be sure that it wasn’t Roger. Bernadette reveals that, months earlier, she went on a date with Roger (Roger and Denise were broken up at the time) and Roger sexually assaulted her. Bernadette doesn’t want to share this information with the police because she’s ashamed; Pamela is unsure: “I didn’t want to give Sheriff Cruso one more reason to suspect Roger. But keeping something like this from the authorities felt unethical” (64).

The novel returns to 2021; Pamela travels to Florida; she’s tense and agitated.

The text continues in January 1978. (The chapter title reflects the number of days since the attack.) Pamela and some of the other girls visit Eileen in the hospital. Her mother explains that she has no memory of the attack and has been told that she and Jill were involved in a car accident. (Eileen therefore doesn’t know that Roberta and Denise are dead.) The visit is strained and tense, since Pamela and the others play along with this lie. However, the text also shares information about how Eileen recovered and showed resilience in the following decades: “Eileen could have chosen to view the world as an ugly and hostile place, but instead she was nimble in her life” (75).

At the hospital, a woman named Tina introduces herself to Pamela. Tina is empathetic and takes Pamela seriously, so Pamela describes to her what she saw and what the man looked like. Tina shows Pamela a “Wanted” poster for a man and explains that this man murdered her friend Ruth. Tina is confident that the same man was also responsible for the sorority attack.