Читать книгу Here We Lie - Paula DeBoard Treick - Страница 13
ОглавлениеMegan
From the window seat on the bus, America was a blur of fields and forests, the brick fronts of small-town buildings, the jutting skylines of cities. Every bit of it was unfamiliar and terrifying. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Woodstock, Kansas, was my destiny, and I was only fighting it by heading all the way to the East Coast with my worldly possessions crammed into two army-green duffel bags and my old JanSport backpack. Maybe Woodstock was what I deserved after everything I’d done.
Enough. I tried to sleep, but besides the occasional jolting was the fear that I might close my eyes and wake up in Canada or Texas, or all alone. Each time the bus stopped, I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and lined up for the exit, then rushed to the bathroom and back, afraid to be left behind. Once a man about my dad’s age tried to chat with me, but outside the bounds of Woodstock and the diner, I seemed to have forgotten how to have a polite conversation. Did I look like a typical college student or an overgrown runaway?
“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he huffed, and when I slid back into my seat, my cheeks were flaming.
We were delayed fifty miles outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with an overheating engine, and it took a few hours for a replacement bus and luggage transfer, then for new tickets to be issued. It didn’t occur to me until we were on the road again that I would be arriving at the bus station in Scofield much later than originally planned. Keale’s shuttle system ran on the half hour, but it stopped each night at nine. Using my wristwatch and the illuminated road signs, I calculated the distance and realized I was officially screwed. The bus wouldn’t be arriving until ten at the earliest. In the beam from the overhead light, I consulted the map supplied by a travel agent at AAA and learned that the Scofield station was five miles from campus—an impossible distance to walk with my bulging duffel bags.
Three hours later, I pressed my forehead to the glass when I saw signs for Scofield. You live here now, I told myself—something that seemed both impossible and incredibly surreal, as if I were trying to convince myself that I’d grown a third foot. Two miles south of town, the bus rumbled past a good-sized lake, the surface shimmering with boats and Jet Skis docked for the night. Everything felt sleepy, winding down from too much summer. I squinted out the window at the license plates on the Audis and Peugeots, trying to determine if they belonged to locals or vacationers.
Either way, I thought, wealth lives here. Privilege. People different from me.
The main drag was settling down for the night—lights off at most of the stores. Everything had a cutesy name—To Dye For and Slice of Heaven and Scoops & Swirls, which had a giant ice cream cone protruding from its striped awning. A few families were still clustered around sidewalk tables, wearing flip-flops and suntans, catching the drips on their ice cream cones.
There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.
I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.
“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?
Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.
Well, shit.
The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.
The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.
An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.
Suddenly, the urge to pee, which I’d been battling since we crossed into Connecticut, became insistent. With the bus station closed, my only option appeared to be a secluded space behind a commercial-sized trash container. I heard the Honda’s clunky tailpipe again while I was zipping up and cursed myself. Someone could be rooting through my bags right now, making off with my clothes and books and my beloved afghan with the red, white and blue Chevron stripes, not to mention my wallet and driver’s license and the painting I’d taken off the refrigerator, the oversize stick figures of Dad and Mom and me. I zipped and broke into a run.
A man in jeans and a black T-shirt was leaning against the Honda, smoking a cigarette and not looking in my direction, as if he’d been there forever and his being there was in no way connected with me. I stopped next to the platform, catching my breath. It startled me when he spoke, as if he might be addressing a third, unseen person.
“You know, any one of the local creeps could have come by and made off with your stuff.”
“Are you one of the local creeps?” I asked.
He dropped his cigarette, grinding it beneath the toe of a scuffed Doc Marten. “I am the local creep.”
I laughed despite myself.
“Actually, the city of Scofield has hired me to enforce its public urination laws, which is a common problem with our—” he hesitated, looking at me pointedly “—vagrant population.”
Conscious of my unwashed hands, I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans. “Guilty,” I confessed, blushing bright red.
He grinned. “So. Not from around here?”
I shook my head. “Kansas.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, not Kansas, specifically, but I knew you were from somewhere in the Midwest.”
“I have that Midwest look about me, do I?”
He gave me an appreciative up-and-down glance, taking in the greasy blond hair I’d pulled into a ponytail, the teeth I hadn’t brushed since that morning, somewhere in Ohio. I was wearing a baggy T-shirt—I always wore baggy T-shirts—but I felt his gaze linger for a moment on my chest. “Yep. Corn-fed goodness,” he said.
I looked past him, out toward the road, trying to figure out what came next.
He cleared his throat. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”
“Like what? Your name?”
He dipped at the waist in a mock bow. “Joseph P. Natolo, at your service. Actually—I thought you might need a ride.”
“Well, yeah. I’m a—”
“A student at Keale,” he finished. “That’s not exactly rocket science. Come on, let me load you up.” He grabbed one of my duffel bags, mock wincing at its weight. “What did you do, pack your library?”
I hesitated, watching him cram the bag into his trunk, already cluttered with loose shoes and clothes and fast food bags spotty with grease. “Do you work at the college?”
He took the other bag from my grasp, his hand brushing mine. “Would you believe I teach cultural anthropology?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed. “Good for you, Midwest. Being gullible is never a good thing. No, I’m just Scofield’s one-man welcoming committee.”
The trunk was so full, he had to lean his weight against it before we heard the telltale click. He looked at me. “Well? Come on.”
* * *
Joe’s car smelled faintly of pot, although an evergreen air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I belted myself in, heart hammering beneath my rib cage to warn me this was not my brightest idea. Outside my window, the scenery was a dark blur of open meadows divided by wooded areas, dense with trees. I rested my fingers on the door handle, planning an emergency exit—stop, drop and roll.
Joe glanced at my hand. “Seriously, I’m not a psycho. I was driving by and I spotted you there, and I figured you needed some help.”
I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks.”
He pointed at a rectangular green sign that appeared in front of us and receded in the side mirror: Keale College, 3 Miles. “See? We’re heading in the right direction.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he laughed. “Could have fooled me. So let me ask you this. What’s so horrible about men, anyway?”
I half turned in my seat. “When did I say men were horrible?”
Joe rolled his eyes. “Please. You come all the way from Timbuktu or wherever just to go to a school where there are no men, except the odd janitor or history professor. What’s that all about?”
“It’s not about hating men,” I said, my mind searching for one of the phrases from Keale’s brochures. “It’s about empowering women.”
Joe shook his head. “Why would anyone want to deprive themselves of this?” He raised a hand from the steering wheel and made a circle in the air, meant to encompass the two of us.
I snuck a sideways glance, trying to determine Joe’s age. At least as old as me, maybe a few years older. Still, there was a confidence to him—the way he’d tossed my bags into his trunk without getting my explicit permission, his easy, flirtatious jokes. He seemed decades more sophisticated than the boys (men, really, although they didn’t seem to have earned the title) I’d known in Woodstock. I cleared my throat. “So, do you go to school around here, too?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a few years now.”
It wasn’t clear if he was referring to high school or college. “Here in Scofield?” I pressed.
“Sure. You’re looking at a proud graduate of Scofield-Winton High School, class of 1995. Well, I was proud to graduate. I’m not sure the powers that be at SWHS are thrilled to claim me. But beyond that—no. I’m not what you’d call scholar material.”
He didn’t seem embarrassed to tell me this, but I was embarrassed that I’d asked. Without taking a single college class, I was already a snob. Joe’s car slowed, and I spotted twin brick walls, formed like parentheses around either side of a wide entryway. Giant steel letters spelling Keale College rose out of a manicured lawn. “The school was established in 1880,” Joe boomed suddenly, adopting the inflections of a tour guide. “If you look straight ahead, you’ll see the place that has been home for more than a hundred years to privileged girls from Connecticut, the larger New England area and, apparently—” this was said pointedly to me, with a raised eyebrow “—regions beyond.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
We passed acres of gently rolling lawn before coming to the buildings themselves—towering brick structures bathed in golden lights. Footpaths crisscrossed the campus, cutting around and between buildings. Joe stopped to let a girl pass with her rolling suitcase and then cleared his throat, preparing to launch into the next stage of our tour. “Keale was founded by prominent members of the Episcopalian Church, presumably as a way to keep young ladies away from the horrors of intermingling with the opposite sex. I hear that the school isn’t particularly religious today, although they have maintained a fine tradition of refusing young eligible bachelors entry into the sacred dormitories of said young women.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Joe said, dropping the tour-guide impression. “And believe me, I’ve tried. Men aren’t allowed to step foot in the dorms unless they’re family. So up here we have the Commons—that’s the dining hall. Classroom buildings, the science center, fine arts auditorium, a gym complete with indoor track and racquetball courts...”
I followed his gestures, trying to take it all in. Keale looked like its own small town, separate and distinct from Scofield, operating on its own purpose and pace. I knew from the brochures that there were just under two thousand students at Keale, but only a few were visible that night, including a girl lying on a blanket, looking up at the stars, and a trio running past in gym shorts and tennis shoes, ponytails swinging, their steps perfectly synchronized.
“What’s your dorm?” Joe asked.
“Stanton.” I’d read the housing form so many times that I’d memorized the details by heart. Stanton Hall, room 323 South. Roommate, Ariana Kramer.
Joe circled a row of buildings and pulled into a parking lot that was mostly empty. He nodded his head in the direction of a brick monolith, patches of ivy creeping up its sides. “That’s it, then.”
I unbuckled my seat belt and it zipped back to its holster. “Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it.”
“Hold on,” he said, shifting the car into Park. He popped the trunk and met me there, hoisting both of my bags over his shoulders with an exaggerated groan.
“I can at least carry one,” I protested.
“You ordered the deluxe service, right? This is the deluxe service.” He staggered next to me like a pack mule. At the door to Stanton, he set the bags on the ground and held out a hand, palm up. “So. Five dollars.”
“Oh.” I blinked and felt around in my pocket.
He laughed, shaking his head. “Just kidding. The first ride is free. Maybe someday we’ll run into each other in town and you’ll buy me a cup of coffee or something.”
“Absolutely.”
He turned, waving over his shoulder.
“Hey,” I called. “You ended up not being a creep after all.”
He put a hand to his heart. “I’m flattered, Midwest. A bit disappointed in myself, but flattered.”
I’d only managed to drag one bag inside the dorm when I heard his car start, followed by the rattle of his tailpipe, which grew fainter and fainter until it became part of the night.
* * *
Five minutes later, I’d retrieved a key from the resident advisor on duty and wrestled my bags into the elevator and down a long hall, past dozens of closed doors. My roommate hadn’t checked in yet, and two neatly arranged sets of furniture greeted me—beds, dressers and desks, industrial and plain. I was too exhausted to change clothes or find my bedding, so I collapsed onto one of the bare mattresses still wearing my tennis shoes.
You did it, I thought, grinning in the dark. You made it. You’re here.
For the first time in hours, I thought about my dad. I didn’t know if I believed in angels that could look down from heaven or karma or anything beyond this very moment. But right then, I thought he would be happy for me.
Lauren
The summer after I graduated from Reardon, I spent ten lazy weeks on The Island, our five acres in the Atlantic, not far from Yarmouth. The land had been in the Holmes family for generations, passed down to Mom as the last standard-bearer of the name. With nothing expected of me, I slept in until eleven, dozed in the hammock in the afternoons, avoided my mother except at mealtimes, and took late-night smoke breaks with MK in the old gazebo, perched on the east cliff of The Island.
“I wish I could just disappear,” I told MK, staring out at the water, the cigarette turning to ash in my hand.
He narrowed his eyes, giving me a faux push, as if it might send me not only toppling over the edge of the gazebo but out to the Atlantic itself, to the blue-green forever that waited beyond the rocky edge of The Island.
“Very funny,” I told him.
He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked the butt, which bounced on the railing and disappeared into the vegetation below. There were thousands of cigarette butts there by now, the accumulation of our idle summers. “Poor kid, condemned to a life of luxury.”
I tapped off an inch of ash, watching it crumble before it hit the ground. “Easy for you to say. You’re doing what you want to do.”
MK shrugged. He was starting law school at Princeton in the fall, following in Dad’s footsteps. The only difference was that he didn’t seem to mind that his life had been planned out for him, the way I did. “Well, what do you want to do?”
I shrugged.
“There must be something you’re half-good at,” he said, knocking his shoulder into mine in a way that suggested he was joking.
“Nope.”
He was quiet for a minute, as if he were trying to dredge up some hidden skill I didn’t know I possessed. Eventually, he said, “You used to draw people’s faces all the time. Remember? It made Mom furious. Instead of taking notes in class, you would basically just doodle.”
I laughed. “I could be a professional doodler.”
“Artist, dummy.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the lingo down.”
Except I knew that the little faces I drew really weren’t more than doodles, and certainly not the sign of artistic talent. I’d taken a drawing class at Reardon, and the instructor had been less than enthusiastic about my work. The proportions were all wrong, she said—the necks too skinny, the shoulders too broad. At The Coop, I’d watched Marcus capture the essence of a person with a few brushstrokes, not needing to pencil in first or leave room for erasure. I might have liked doodling, but it clearly wasn’t a skill that was going to get me anywhere.
Every day on The Island, I’d read the classifieds in the Boston Globe, scanning for options: education, engineering, medicine, social work—anything to get me away from the predicted Mabrey track. I didn’t even meet the qualifications to be a night clerk at the 7-Eleven, which required previous cashier experience. I’d entertained briefly the idea of the Peace Corps—a lifestyle that would have suited me for about five seconds—but there was a surprisingly long list of requirements, none of which I met. It turned out no one was looking for a spoiled eighteen-year-old with an unimpressive GPA.
Finally, I gave in.
It was easier to accept that I was nothing more than a cog in a machine that had been set in motion long before I was born.
* * *
Keale College in northwest Connecticut was the perfect choice from my mother’s viewpoint—far enough away that we wouldn’t bump into each other, but close enough to keep me under her thumb. Since it was an all-girls school, she must have figured I was less likely to become romantically involved with the resident pot dealer. She filled out my application, requested housing, registered me for classes and signed my name to everything: Lauren E. Mabrey. It amazed me to think of the strings she must have pulled to get me into Keale with my dismal grades and my spotty list of extracurricular activities. Had she begged administrators, promised to endow a scholarship or fund a new wing at the library? Or had the Mabrey name—as in Charles Mabrey, freshman senator from the great state of Connecticut and already something of a dynamo on Capitol Hill—done all the talking?
Mom drove me to campus at the end of August, the trunk of her Mercedes stuffed with the accoutrements for my dorm room: a new duvet, two sets of Egyptian cotton sheets, down pillows, thick blankets in zippered plastic bags. We were silent for most of the trip, the two hours stretching painfully between us. Mom’s face was stony behind her Jackie-O getup, the dark glasses and headscarf she wore whenever she was at the wheel of her car, as if to announce that she was someone, even if she wasn’t instantly recognizable. In the passenger seat, I closed my eyes against a pulsing headache and waited for the inevitable lecture, the Mabrey rite of passage, delivered on momentous occasions, like when I’d first gone away to summer camp, and every fall when I left for Reardon. Since my disaster at The Coop, her warnings were no longer vague but specific, centered on staying away from “certain kinds of people” and promising to yank me out of school if she caught so much as a whiff of pot. She wouldn’t have believed me if I told her I’d sworn off all that, that I wasn’t planning to get into any kind of trouble she would need to rescue me from, that I’d learned my lesson.
It wasn’t until we were in Scofield itself, just a few miles from Keale, that Mom cleared her throat. I waited, steeling myself.
“Your father and I disagree on certain things,” she began. “He’s willing to give you more chances, Lauren. He’s willing to excuse what you’ve done, saying you’re young and you’re still learning. He thinks we might have made some mistakes ourselves, taken our eye off the ball.” Her eyes were dark shadows behind her lenses. “But not me. I don’t agree with him, not for a second.”
I looked from her face with its slightly raised jaw to her white-knuckled hands on the wheel, a two-carat diamond winking in the sunlight.
“As far as I can tell, we’ve given you plenty of opportunities, and you’ve squandered all of them. You’ve had chance after chance to do anything, one single thing, to make us proud. But even when you were under our noses, you were involved in unspeakable things—”
Speak them, I thought, like a dare. Say his name, the one we promised never to say.
“—and we had to scramble to cover for you, in the midst of all the stress of the campaign. But I won’t do that again. I’m ready to cut you loose. The first time you get in any kind of trouble at Keale, I’m going to say, ‘Too bad, so sad,’ and let you figure it out on your own. What happens if you burn through all the money in your bank account? Too bad! What if you get caught for drinking and doing drugs because you haven’t learned your lesson? So sad! I’ll tell the officer to let you sit in jail until you figure it out on your own.”
I closed my eyes, as if I could ward off her words. I wondered if she really believed them, or if she had already come to accept that Dad’s career would always be paramount, the mountain that would bury all our sins.
“Can you at least nod to let me know you understand?”
“Mom,” I said, “I’m not going to—”
She waved a hand, like she was swatting away a fly. “Or you could choose to see this as a fresh start, a chance to fall in line. And if you do that, of course, there will be rewards. There are benefits to being in a family like ours.”
The laugh escaped my mouth before I could stop it. If MK had been here, we would have quoted lines from The Godfather to each other and talked about family with a capital F.
Mom’s voice was icy. “You’ll make your bed, Lauren, and you’ll lie in it. And maybe then you’ll see what it’s like to be cut off from all of this.”
We were heading out of Scofield by this time, in stop-and-go traffic on the tiny main street. I made eye contact with a little girl on the sidewalk holding a balloon in her chubby fist. Don’t let go, I thought.
“Lauren!” Mom snapped. “Are you listening to me?”
Behind us a car honked, and Mom pressed on the gas. The Mercedes jerked forward, only to come to a halting stop again a few feet later. I focused on what was outside the car—the hair salons and antique stores, a building with a giant tacky ice cream cone pointing toward the sky.
I already hated Scofield.
* * *
By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.
“Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.
There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.
I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”
One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”
“Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”
Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”
The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”
Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”
“We’re practically twins,” I said drily.
When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.
* * *
That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.
Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”
“I did okay.”
She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”
“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.
“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.
“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.
“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.
* * *
The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.
“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”
Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.
“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”
“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”
“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”
Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”
After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.
* * *
Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.
“Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.
“Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”
I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”
“Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”
“No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”
He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”
“Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.
“Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”
“Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”
Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”
* * *
That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.
Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”
“The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.
“But this is just for one assignment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.
“For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.
Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”
I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.
“Lauren! I don’t even have my hair done.”
“Relax,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”
I spent the next week shooting rolls of film all over campus, looking for interesting angles and tricks of light. I lugged my camera bag to the chapel to shoot the sunrise streaming through stained glass, and onto the roof of Stanton Hall at sunset to catch the last wink of sun as it disappeared over a row of elms, the branches backlit. I stopped some girls on the way to class, and photographed them with their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Is this for the yearbook?” one of them wanted to know, and I told her it just might be. What I liked most was the feeling of authority that came with the camera hanging from my neck, and the way I could instantly disappear when I looked through the viewfinder.
Dr. Mittel developed two rolls for me and we met in his office to look at the contact sheet through his loupe, a cylindrical magnifying lens that he kept on his desk. He passed over the smiling girls in their stiff poses, the sunrises and sunsets. “This is good for a first attempt,” he said finally. “You’re looking for all the right things—angles, lighting. And you must have a good lens on that camera of yours.”
I told him about the Leica, my splurge, and he frowned, either at the expense or at the thought of some no-talent hack having access to such nice equipment.
“I assume you’re serious about this, then,” he said, passing me the contact sheet. “The best thing for you, I think, would be to take a class this spring. I teach an intro course—very hands-on, lots of time in the darkroom, some developing techniques—”
“I’ll look into it,” I said, my heart hammering. Suddenly it was imperative that I take that class.
“As far as your portfolio is concerned, I think you probably already have a few prints here you could work with. But we’ve got some time, and you could certainly keep going. I feel like you’ve shot the things you think I wanted you to shoot—maybe the things you thought you should shoot. I’d like to see what you’re interested in. What does Lauren find fascinating?”
Over the next two weeks, I shot a half dozen rolls of film, trying to let Dr. Mittel’s words sink in. What did I find fascinating? I shot the empty girls’ bathroom, with its rows of gleaming sinks, the jumble of shoes in the bottom of my closet, the third floor of the library, the shadows of the shelves creeping across the carpet. I shot tree branches and leaves, a lone red-breasted bird perched on a fence. Shoot what you want to shoot, not what you want me to see.
And then one morning, I looked over at Erin, sleeping, lovely Erin, who was just like all the girls I’d ever known. She had a boyfriend at Boston University, and during her nightly chatter, I learned that she had planned their lives down to the most specific detail—engagement after their junior year, the wedding after graduation, kids two years apart. During the daytime, she looked too calculated, too poised, her face hidden behind foundation and powder, blush and mascara, the pinkish lipstick she reapplied even when it was only the two of us and her grand plans for the evening included sending an email to her boyfriend.
But at that moment, with the sunlight filtered through our Venetian blinds, creating light and dark panes on her face, she was a different Erin entirely. Pale wisps of hair covered one cheek, and her mouth was slightly, sweetly slack, with the tiniest bulge of fat beneath her chin. Beneath her pale yellow pajama top, the hard knot of one nipple was visible.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was freeing my camera from its safe spot at the top of my closet. I snapped one picture, and then, moving closer, another. In this moment, Erin was lovely in a way she’d never been before—relaxed, vulnerable. A small red blemish on her chin was visible; her lashes were pale and fragile against her eye socket. I knelt next to the bed, snapping away, entranced.
“What are you doing?” she murmured, drawing a hand over her face.
“Sorry. Just checking something on my camera,” I said, letting it hang loose from the strap around my neck. “I was going to head out to take some pictures...”
“It’s so early,” she moaned, rolling over, pulling her Garnet Hill sheets and the matching comforter into a heap over her head.
I was aware that it was creepy, that photographing a person without her knowledge was crossing a definite line. But I’d captured something good in that fleeting minute, which made me understand something else: none of the pictures I’d taken before—the landscapes and sunsets and reflections off buildings, the stained glass in the chapel—were any good. These ones were.
By this point, after a few weeks of tailing Dr. Mittel, I’d picked up the basics in the darkroom and he usually let me operate more or less on my own, only popping in occasionally to look at my negatives. It was a thrill to see Erin’s face appear during the developing process, the sunlight catching the fine strands of hair, the wet corner of her mouth. I stared at her face in the stop bath, warmth spreading through my body. I’d created this. No—that wasn’t quite right. It was simply there, but I was the one who found it. Afterward, I held my breath while I waited for Dr. Mittel’s regular verbal cues—the harrumph and hmmm, the tapping of his finger against an image. Instead, he was silent.
Maybe they weren’t good, I thought. Maybe they were horrible. Maybe I didn’t have an eye for this kind of thing at all. Maybe, like the faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebooks, photography was something that couldn’t be taught beyond the technical processes.
“What’re these?” he asked finally.
“My roommate,” I said, wiping my suddenly sweaty hands against my jeans.
He nodded. “Tell me about them.”
My words came out in a rush, stumbling over each other. I told him about seeing the sun on her face, how it was like I’d never seen her before until she was framed in the viewfinder.
“They’re good,” he said. “Obviously, there are some techniques you need to learn, some tricks of lighting and shadow, and then there’s a whole host of printing options...”
I waited, leaning back against the counter.
“But there’s something here, Lauren. Something raw and intimate. You let the camera speak. It’s almost like a lover’s gaze, seeing everything.”
“She doesn’t know—” I stammered, my gaze flickering to the outline of Erin’s nipple, which somehow looked innocent and obscene at the same time. “She was asleep.”
He frowned. “Obviously, that’s an issue. You’ll need to get her permission if you’re going to display these or use them in your portfolio. But maybe this is your thing. Portraiture, but not posed. Candid. Catching these unaware moments. This is something to pursue.”
I nodded, trying not to burst through my skin with happiness. This is something to pursue.
“You’re taking my class in the spring, I know. Maybe we’ll see about getting you on the Courier, too. Have you considered that? They’re always looking for photographers, and I could write a recommendation.”
I grinned. The Courier was Keale’s weekly newspaper, something I’d only glanced at occasionally in the Commons, thumbing through pages while I twirled my spaghetti with a fork. “That sounds great,” I admitted.
I left his office feeling the most alive, the most right, I’d ever felt. The closest I’d come otherwise was with Marcus, when everything was thrilling and dangerous, thrilling because it was dangerous. This was something I’d done, something I’d created, not dependent on anyone else. Dr. Mittel didn’t give a damn that I was a Mabrey, and I didn’t, either.
Megan
Mom wanted to know everything about Keale, but even after the initial newness wore off, I had trouble putting it into words.
Keale was its own little world—sprawling green lawns and clusters of Victorian-era buildings, bordered on two sides by horse pastures and on another by a seventeen-acre forest that backed onto a tributary of the Housatonic. The buildings were named after female suffragettes and abolitionists and artists—the Susan B. Anthony Auditorium, the Alice Stone Blackwell Hall of Arts & Letters, the Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton residential halls. “Who?” Mom asked, but I could hardly keep them straight myself. The school seemed torn between its past—earnest and vaguely religious—and its present, where couples openly held hands and as a form of protest art, girls hung their bloody tampons on a display in the student center.
I’d expected a campus built in the 1800s to be showing its age, imagining a dusty reference library, cracks in foundations, crumbling facades. Instead, every outward inch of Keale was maintained to perfection. The brickwork gleamed; the sidewalks were pressure-washed to sparkling silver. Leaves and food wrappers were whisked away by a small army of maintenance workers in green jumpsuits. Inside, the buildings were light and modern, housing computer labs and rows of microscopes.
That first night, alone in my room, I had the impression that Keale was a sort of sacred space, a feeling enhanced by a quaint bell from the original chapel marking otherwise silent hours. But then the dorms filled, and this vision was shattered with feet pounding in the hallway, music pulsing through walls, female voices echoing up and down the stairwells. In the common kitchen on each floor of Stanton Hall, someone was forever burning popcorn in the microwave or losing the remote control right before Friends was scheduled to start or bitching about who had used the one-percent milk, despite the fact that it had been labeled in permanent marker as Hailey’s Milk.
By contrast, my room was a tomb. Someone in Housing must have thought that Ariana Kramer and I made a perfect match, based solely on the fact that we were both from the Midwest. But Ariana was quiet and studious and serious, charged with living up to the expectations of her pediatrician father and her law professor mother. She lined the bookshelf above her desk with ribbons and plaques and trophies—First Place Academic Decathlon. National Honor Society Lifetime Member. Soroptimists International Achievement Winner.
“I didn’t think to bring my Pinewood Derby participation ribbon,” I told her that first day, after her parents had left for the airport and she was carefully arranging her clothes, grouping the hangers by color. I expected at least a courtesy laugh, but Ariana didn’t crack a smile.
She had already started her course reading during the summer, something I’d never even considered, and her thick copies of Organic Chemistry and Human Biology and World Cultures looked worldly and sophisticated next to the yellow spines of my Nancy Drews, packed for sentimental rather than practical value. From the critical glance Ariana gave my side of the room, I might have brought my stuffed animals and pink plastic ponies.
“I’m an English major,” I said, as if this might explain it. “I mean, at least, that’s what I’ve declared for now...” I trailed off, not wanting to explain about my unplanned “gap” year and the feeling of comfort I’d felt when I stumbled on Keale’s list of English courses. American Literature I and II, Writing Between the Wars, Post-Colonial Voices... Reading, I’d thought. Writing. I could do that. “What about you? Did you declare a major?”
“Oh, I’m a bio girl. Premed,” she clarified, fiddling with her hair. I watched as a French braid emerged from her deft fingers, the strands of hair pulled too tight, giving her eyes a squinty look. If it were someone else, I might have suggested a different hairstyle, volunteered to do a loose fishbone braid like I used to do with my girlfriends in junior high. But somewhere, Ariana probably had proof that this was the best kind of braid—a ribbon from the county fair with her name embossed in tiny gold letters, maybe. “I’m leaning toward the heart,” she said.
“The heart,” I repeated, distracted by the efficient rotating motions of her wrists.
“You know, cardiology?” The last syllable rose to a question mark, as if to ask if I’d heard of it.
* * *
We didn’t have the chumminess that other girls had, but we didn’t have the volatile ups and downs, either. Ariana spent most of her time in the library, and during the day I caught rare glimpses of her crossing campus, bent forward beneath the weight of her backpack. Most days she couldn’t be bothered to go to the Commons for dinner, and crinkly foil Pop-Tart wrappers glimmered in our trashcan.
The other girls—women, I supposed—seemed to move in packs, united by shared characteristics. At first, I assumed that they all knew each other somehow, like they’d been fed into Keale from the same high school, and the same middle schools before that, all the way to the preschools where they’d first finger-painted their names. It took me a while to realize that their familiarity was based on loosely shared experiences from communities up and down the East Coast—prep schools and summer camps and tennis lessons, summers on the Cape. They didn’t need to know each other; they understood each other. They spoke the same language. In class, they raised their hands confidently, referencing books I’d never heard of, historical events that hadn’t been mentioned in my history classes at Woodstock High. I might have been one of the best and brightest of my graduating class, but the bar was much higher at Keale, the work more rigorous, the competition fierce. In high school, skimming the reading and turning in completed worksheets had earned me A’s and the occasional B, but at Keale the quizzes focused on obscure passages in the reading, and my papers were returned full of red ink.
On my weekly phone calls home, I told my mom that everything was fine, that Ariana and I were getting along well, that I was learning a lot in my classes. It was only to myself that I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake, if KSU wouldn’t have been a better choice after all.
* * *
At the end of September, sick of riding the Keale Kargo shuttle into town, I bought a bike from an upperclassman for ten dollars. Even though the green paint was chipped and the banana seat was in need of repair, it was a steal, with a giant wicker basket perfect for transporting the toiletries and snacks and other things that cost a fortune on campus. One afternoon, I was locking the bike outside the Common Ground, Scofield’s artsy coffee shop, when Joe Natolo walked up with his hands slouched into his pockets.
“A granny bike. Nice,” he said, running his hand over the seat I’d repaired with a few strips of duct tape.
“A cruiser,” I corrected. “It gets me around.”
Joe laughed. “Tell the truth. Too many female hormones on campus. You just had to get out of there.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know it’s nothing but constant talk about our periods.”
He gave me a grin that was already identifiable as his alone, a mismatched alignment of teeth, a dimple that appeared in the hollow of his cheek. “You headed in here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the coffeehouse, and I nodded. It had become my own little oasis on the lazy afternoons when I didn’t have class.
I didn’t tell Joe that part of the reason for wanting a bike was wanting this, the chance to bump into him again. In the weeks since I’d arrived in Scofield, he had begun to seem like a conjuring of my travel-addled brain, but here he was—floppy dark bangs, the long eyelashes that my mom would have said were wasted on a man. Joe Natolo, in the flesh.
Remembering the promise I’d made when he’d dropped me at Stanton Hall, I paid for his coffee. Joe took one sip and grimaced, reaching for a canister of sugar. He asked about Keale, and I told him about my classes, my work-study job at the switchboard, life with Ariana.
He stirred his coffee elaborately with a tiny spoon and sipped, testing its sweetness. “Have you been to any good parties?”
I laughed. “Um, no. I basically study all the time, and still, I’m hardly keeping up.” As proof, I unzipped my backpack and took out my notebook and dog-eared copy of The Awakening. My paper wasn’t due for four days, but I was already starting to panic about my thesis, and my ideas weren’t coming together. On my last essay, the professor had written “Remember, there are tutors available in the writing center.”
Joe reached for my notebook, spinning it around so that my scribbles were facing him. “‘In fact,’” he read, loud enough to get the attention of a frowning woman at the next table, “‘through penile penetration, she both finds and loses her identity.’ Writing an autobiography?”
“Very funny.” I slapped the notebook closed before he could read any of my other observations, such as the one about Edna Pontellier confusing orgasm with independence.
He sat back, arms folded across his chest. “Tell the truth, Midwest. The lack of men is killing you.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m managing. Besides—” I took a careful sip of coffee and leaned forward “—you do know that everyone at Keale is a lesbian, right?”
The smile he gave me sent a rush down to my toes. “Not everyone, surely.”
No, not everyone. Just sitting across the table from Joe was enough to confirm my own sexuality, not that I’d ever been in doubt. I hadn’t come to Keale to find a boyfriend, but I had a sixth sense dedicated to Joe alone, marked by hairs that stood up on the back of my neck when he entered a room and sweat glands that seemed to sprout from nowhere. Through Joe, I could easily find and lose my own identity.
* * *
We started bumping into each other more regularly—at Common Ground, at the Stop & Shop, where I loaded up on off-brand crackers and jars of peanut butter, and once when he pulled up next to my bike at a stoplight, revving his engine. “Race you,” he’d called through the open window.
It was impossible not to laugh when he was around, impossible not to feel a thrill when his knees bumped against mine under a café table.
“We should get dinner sometime,” he said, and I didn’t overthink it.
“We should,” I agreed.
We made plans to meet during Parents’ Weekend, to get me away from campus while it was overrun with families. I hadn’t mentioned the event to my mom—it seemed too far to come for two days of scheduled activities that wouldn’t have interested her. Ariana’s parents had flown out, and I’d unsuccessfully dodged their presence on Friday, surprised when they burst into our room after sharing a meal in the Commons. I kept my nose in a book as Mrs. Kramer worried over Ariana’s chemistry grade—an A overall, although she’d received a B on a recent quiz—and turned a page noisily when Mr. Kramer wondered whether it would be beneficial for her to find a tutor.
By now I knew Ariana well enough to recognize her controlled fury, like a toy that had been wound too tight and was ready to spring loose. “I do not need a tutor,” she said, each word bearing staccato weight.
This was easily verified—several times Ariana had tutored me, making precise notations in the margins of my work—but I decided to stay out of it.
“Maybe this isn’t a conversation we should be having right now in front of Ariana’s friend,” her dad interjected, and I looked up from where I was sitting on my bed, as if I’d been summoned. Were we friends? I felt closer to the girls I saw twice a week in my American lit seminar.
Ariana’s mom looked at her watch. “Well, we can talk on the way to the lecture, I suppose.” She cast me the same pitying smile she’d given me in August, when she learned I’d taken the bus all the way from Kansas, alone. “Maybe you’d like to join us for dinner afterward?”
I noticed the spark in Ariana’s eye, a silent pleading. She didn’t want to be alone with her parents any more than I did. I mouthed a sorry in Ariana’s direction and explained that I’d made other plans.
“Maybe you could meet us for ice cream, then,” Ariana’s mom pressed. “We’re going to go to that cute place in town, the one with the giant cone on the marquee? Maybe around nine?”
I smiled. By nine o’clock, I hoped to be in Joe’s Honda, the windows fogging from the heat of our kisses. “I’ll definitely try.”
* * *
I changed clothes five times before meeting Joe, deciding on my most flattering jeans and a shirt that was tight across the chest and too sexy to wear around Keale. We’d planned to meet at Slice of Heaven, and Joe was already there when I arrived, breathless from my bike ride into town.
He whistled, spotting me through the window. We hugged, same as we’d done the last few times we’d seen each other, but this one lasted a few beats longer, and our bodies were pressed just a bit closer.
“I hope you don’t mind. I got here a bit early and ordered for us,” Joe said, gesturing to the glass of soda in front of him, the empty glass in front of my spot. “Just regular pepperoni and breadsticks.”
“Just regular pepperoni and breadsticks sounds great,” I said.
“I was trying to beat the rush,” Joe said, nodding to the line that had formed at the register, snaking halfway to the door. Most of the booths were already full. “I mean, this town is typically overrun with WASPs, but during Parents’ Weekend, the BMW-to-human ratio is especially skewed, if you know what I mean.”
I laughed at his description.
“Well, what about you? Don’t you have parents, Midwest?” When I hesitated, he covered quickly. “Did I put my foot in my mouth? Sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s fine. It was just too far for my mom to come.”
“What about your dad?”
I shook my head, my throat suddenly clogged. Since coming to Keale, I’d managed to avoid any mention of my dad. It was easier that way, although the omission implied that he’d never existed at all.
“I am an ass,” Joe said. “Remember?”
I stood up quickly, grabbing my frosted red cup. “Be right back.”
By the time our pizza came, we’d already refilled our bottomless sodas twice. Joe laughed as I blotted the top layer of grease from the pizza with a handful of napkins. It’s not a real date, I told myself. It’s pizza and Coke. Beneath the table, his leg brushed against mine, but instead of pulling away like a reflex, it lingered there. Or maybe it is.
While the restaurant filled up, we talked about our jobs. I mentioned the woman who called the switchboard fifteen times in one night, insisting that there must be a problem with the phone lines since her daughter hadn’t picked up. Joe said that a former coworker at the body shop had opened a place in Michigan, and he’d offered Joe a job.
He shrugged. “But, I don’t know. Michigan. It’s pretty far away.”
“Right,” I said, picking off a pepperoni. I felt his loss as keenly as if he’d already packed up the Honda and left. So far, Joe was the only good thing about Scofield. “And you’d have to leave all this.”
“Some things would be harder to leave than others,” he said, and although he wasn’t looking at me when he said it, my cheeks burned. “Anyway—it might not pan out. There are a lot of things to figure.”
“Right,” I said again. Someone at the next table stood, jostling my elbow. The restaurant was crowded now, the line out the door. I recognized some girls from Keale with their families and felt a stab of longing for my own family, back when it had been intact and perfectly imperfect. We would never again order a pizza, bicker over our choice of three toppings, then load up our leftovers to eat later that night in front of the TV.
“Whoa,” Joe said, tapping me on the arm. He gave a subtle head tilt in the direction of a family standing by the door.
I half turned, pretending to casually glance at the line. “Who are we looking at?”
“The guy in the button-down shirt.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
Joe laughed. “With the lady in the sweater.”
“Again, you’ll have to—”
“And the dark-haired girl with legs up to her neck.”
“Ah,” I said, glancing again toward the door. The man was tall with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a striped shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The woman wore a patterned sweater set, a giant diamond glinting from her finger. They didn’t look familiar, but I recognized the tall girl from Stanton Hall. I associated her with the summer camp crowd, as I’d come to think of them, girls who played lacrosse and rode horses and moved around campus in tight cliques. “That’s Lauren somebody. She lives in my dorm, but not on my floor.”
Joe leaned forward, conspiratorially. It was hard to hear him over the general noise of happy families. “Her last name is Mabrey.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“Her father is Senator Charles Mabrey of Connecticut.”
“Seriously? A senator?” I craned around, getting another look.
“Be cool,” Joe said, his thumb and forefinger reaching for my chin, steering me to face him. “People will think you’ve never seen a senator before.”
I burned under his touch. “I haven’t.”
“Well, I suspect they’re just like you and me, only they live in a nicer home—or more likely homes, plural—and they drive better cars if they drive themselves at all, and they’re on a first-name basis with the president of our freaking country, but other than that, no reason to stare.”
“Got it,” I said. We were close enough for me to see a tiny red fleck caught between Joe’s front teeth. “Did you learn all this in your civics class?”
Joe released my chin and reached for his tumbler, taking a long swig. “They’re probably all douchebags, but Mabrey at least seems to be a douchebag of the people.”
I snorted, choking on a bite of cold pizza. “You should volunteer to write his campaign slogans.”
“You know what?” Joe said, wadding his napkin into a ball. “Want to get out of here? There’s a better place down the road, one that won’t be overrun with all these hoity-toity types.”
“Do me a favor,” I grinned. “Say that again. Hoity-toity.”
Instead, he stood up and pulled me to my feet, threading his fingers through mine. I shot a last glance over my shoulder and saw Lauren’s father, the senator, bantering with a cashier. It was the same way married men had talked to me at the Woodstock Diner, as if he were saying, Look how young and virile I still am. In that split second, Lauren turned and our eyes met. She smiled in a faint, pleasant way, as if she didn’t recognize me at all. And why would she? Girls like that moved in their own circles, existed in their own worlds.
* * *
We ended up at a place called Moe’s, too shady for the Keale crowd with its dim, low-ceilinged interior and the haze of smoke that hovered just above our heads. Joe navigated the rowdy crowd at the bar and returned to our table with a pitcher of beer. I thought briefly about pointing out that I was nineteen, and then let it go. It seemed like an incongruous fact, unrelated to this experience. I felt older and wiser, like a more mature version of Megan Mazeros, one who didn’t have to worry about basic rules and regulations.
For a while we drank and watched a vigorous game of darts unfolding between a tiny, dark-haired woman with dead aim and her towering, tattooed companion; with each throw, they razzed and taunted each other. It was like watching an elaborate mating ritual, one based on catcalls and innuendos. When she won, he pulled her onto his lap and whispered into her ear. She stood, tugging him toward the door.
Joe drained his glass. “Do you play?”
“Do I ever.” I slid off my stool, feeding off the charge in the air. We were an extension of the couple who had just left, playing off their energy, becoming more sexualized versions of ourselves. Between throws, Joe’s hand lingered on my elbow, my waist, my hip.
I hadn’t played darts since before Dad got sick, but we used to have a dartboard in the garage, our throw lines taped to the cement. Once I got good enough to be competitive, I’d lost the handicap and he’d eliminated my line once and for all. After a few warm-up shots, Joe and I were evenly matched, going head-to-head, throw for throw. We brushed against each other deliberately, laughing, when we retrieved our darts. When he beat me by three points, I conceded the loss with a mock bow.
“An honor, sir,” I said.
He hooked an arm around my neck, pulling me into him. Our kiss felt effortless, a natural progression of the evening. He trailed one finger down my spine, coiling it in my belt loop. “Want to play another round?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
Our faces were so tight together that I saw his beautiful, crooked grin up close. It was like looking at him through a magnifying glass, all his good parts becoming even better.
* * *
According to the clock on Joe’s dashboard, it was just after nine. He agreed to drive me back to campus, so I could leave a note for Ariana. I didn’t know what I would say, just Sorry I didn’t make it to ice cream or Don’t wait up. I planned to stuff my backpack with toiletries and a change of clothes, just in case. The night was ripe with possibility. At each stoplight on our way out of town, Joe and I kissed like we were perfecting what we’d started earlier. In the parking lot of my dorm, we reached for each other again, his hands inching beneath my sweater, palms hot on the small of my back.
“You know what I like about you, Midwest?”
I murmured, “No.”
“What I like the most is—”
“I meant no, don’t talk,” I said.
“You see? That’s it.”
The car windows began to fog, and Joe’s hand was on my bra, my nipple hard beneath his thumb. It was so close to what I’d imagined that it hardly felt real. Nearby, a car started, headlights springing to life.
“Hold on, cowboy,” I said, pulling back. “Give me five minutes.”
He groaned. “Five minutes is eternity.”
I gave him a teasing kiss and grabbed my backpack from the floorboard. “Five minutes.”
The night was cool, but I felt warm and reckless and happy. I took the side stairs and was breathless by the time I reached the third floor, where I paused to look down at the parking lot. Joe’s car was there, idling with its headlights on. I spotted my reflection at the same time—blond curls wild, cheeks flushed. I’m doing this, I thought. I’m doing it.
In the hallway, I waited for a group of parents to pass. They were chatting loudly about how college had changed since they were in it, how the cafeteria food was better, the exercise facilities first-rate. After I passed, I heard one of the men say, “And the girls are prettier, too.”
Our door was unlocked, although the lights were off. Ariana and her parents must have come and gone, forgetting to lock it behind them. I flicked on the light switch, moving fast. Fresh underwear, a tank top to sleep in, a clean shirt for the morning—if that was how it played out. I hesitated, momentarily frozen by the practicalities. Would he have condoms? Of course. This experience wasn’t the novelty for him that it was for me. Still, I cursed myself for not refilling my birth control. It had seemed a silly, extravagant expense to pay thirty dollars a month for pills I wouldn’t need at an all-girls school.
I was zipping up my backpack when I caught the movement from Ariana’s side of the room and jumped a foot. She was in bed, her body a slight hump beneath the covers. Maybe she’d skipped out on ice cream and come back early, exhausted by her parents’ constant nagging.
Then she moaned, a ragged and gasping sound that made me look closer. Her head was turned to one side, hair plastered against her face and half-covering her mouth. Across her pillowcase was a trail of vomit.
Fuck. Not now.
“Ariana?” I asked, then repeated her name louder. When she didn’t respond, I dropped to my knees, shaking her shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”
Her head flopped backward, mouth open. Flakes of white powder stuck to the corner of her mouth.
“Did you take something?”
I had to put my ear almost to her face, wincing from the stench of her breath, to understand what she was saying. Your pulse. Yourpilse. Your pills.
My pills.
* * *
Later I told the paramedics about the generic bottle of ibuprofen I kept in my desk drawer, taking a pill here and there for a headache. There had been a hundred pills initially, and I wasn’t sure how many had been there earlier that night. Seventy? Eighty? Ariana had taken whatever was left, as evidenced by the empty bottle on her nightstand. I tried to imagine her swallowing the pills, one by one or two by two, washing them down with water from her Peanuts mug, the one that read The Doctor Is In, 5 cents.
After the lecture, Ariana had told her parents that she needed to study, and they’d gone out for dinner without her. She’d already taken the first pills by the time I met Joe at Slice of Heaven, and she’d finished them by the time we’d begun our game of darts at Moe’s, when her parents were having ice cream sundaes without her. She must have been unconscious by the time Joe and I kissed; she’d vomited later, when Joe and I were in his car, when I was being reinvented by his touch, inch by inch. And I’d found her in time, so lucky, everyone noted. Only I wasn’t sure if Ariana meant for me to find her earlier, or hoped I would only find her after it was too late.
Viv, our resident advisor, kicked into supervisory mode and took charge of the situation—which meant contacting Ariana’s parents and taking care of me. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” she said, taking hold of my shocked shoulders. Until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was responsible. Then guilt kicked in hard: I’d been planning a night of reckless abandon, and Ariana had been trying to end it all.
Worse, I felt just as bad for myself, for the lost possibilities of that night. By the time I’d alerted Viv and the paramedics had arrived, twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. When I finally wormed my way through the cluster of girls and their parents in the hallway to look down into the parking lot below, Joe’s car was gone.
Lauren
Although I hadn’t mentioned it once, somehow everyone at Keale knew my father was a senator. It had started out with a little joke: my resident advisor, Katy, mentioned during our first floor meeting that we all had to follow the rules—whether our fathers were elected officials or not. She said this with a wink in my direction, and I heard the general buzz around me. Who? And he’s an actual senator? Later that week, a mousy blonde girl sat next to me in the Commons and over eggs on toast mentioned that her grandfather had been an ambassador to Ghana, as if that made us related somehow, like second cousins.
“Do you have like, diplomatic immunity or something?” another girl at the table asked.
“No,” I assured her, to general laughter.
Later I thought about it and realized that a more accurate answer would have been yes.
My parents had more or less ignored me since I left for Keale, but they came for Parents’ Weekend, bustling into my dorm room with a towering gift basket from Harry & David, as if I were a client and not a daughter. It didn’t occur to me until I was giving them an abbreviated tour of campus that this was an opportunity to see and be seen. For Dad, it was an unpaid advertisement, a chance to shake hands and trade college stories with other dads, homing in on the ones from Connecticut, his constituents. More than once when we were walking across campus, I was aware of camera flashes, of people catching the three of us in motion—Mom with an arm linked through Dad’s, each of us holding bags from the Keale College bookstore, full of the sweatshirts and visors and coffee mugs that proclaimed them the proud parents of a Keale College student.
I was sure we would show up in future brochures advertising the college, with some kind of pretentious caption: Senator Mabrey, His Wife, Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey, and Their Daughter Lauren Enjoy Family Time during a Visit to the Fine Arts Auditorium. It wasn’t so much a visit as it was a campaign stop.
We went into town for pizza, but the line at Slice of Heaven was out the door.
“We could bring it back to my dorm,” I suggested. “There’s a little kitchen down the hall.”
“It’ll be like old times, Liz,” Dad said, draping his arms around Mom’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and I wondered how much of this was genuine, and how much was for show, another chance to impress Scofield’s voting public. Photographic evidence of my parents in their twenties did exist, but I’d never seen snapshots of them eating pizza out of a cardboard box, sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the photos I remembered, they were at important dinners, separated by centerpieces and goblets and place settings with three different forks, Dad in a suit, Mom’s hair in a complicated updo held together by a million bobby pins.
I recognized a few other people in the pizzeria, including Cindy Hardwick, a girl from my dorm. We’d only exchanged the occasional hello as we passed in the hall, but she bounded over to shake Dad’s hand and then, for good measure, Mom’s. She lingered for longer than necessary, beaming up at them. “You must be proud. Lauren is so talented,” she said. I tried to steer her away with an arm on her elbow, but it was too late. “I love her work.”
Worse than the explanations that I would have to provide were the subtle frowns on my parents’ faces, their hesitant glances between Cindy and me, as if to confirm she was in fact referring to their daughter.
“Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.
“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.
Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”
Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.
“I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.
“It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”
One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.
“Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”
We gathered plates and napkins and little packets of Parmesan cheese and smiled our way stiffly out the door and down the street to Mom’s Mercedes. The street was clogged with cars, and it took Dad a while to find an opening.
I popped the lid of the pizza box and put a slice of pepperoni on my tongue, relishing its salt and heat.
“I don’t remember signing you up for a photography class,” Mom said.
I chewed the pepperoni slowly, deliberately.
Dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Well? Your mother asked you a question.”
I shrugged. “It’s for a class called Introduction to the Arts. We study visual art, music—”
“You’re taking that in addition to your other classes?”
“No, I dropped the biology class.” I’d also switched out of math, but this didn’t seem like the best moment to mention it.
In the front seat, Mom’s mouth was set in a tight line. “You need to be taking your general education requirements, Lauren. You’re not just here to try a little of this and a little of that. There’s an educational plan—”
“It’s one class,” I repeated. “And I’m thinking of studying fine arts, so it’ll be part of the requirements for my major.” This much was true, although I had been planning to wait as long as possible—at least another semester or two—before announcing it to my parents. Before their visit, I’d carefully packed away my Leica and slid my burgeoning portfolio underneath my bed.
Dad sighed, adjusting the visor so the setting sun didn’t blind him. “At least your friend seems excited about your work. She said you were very talented.”
Mom couldn’t let it go. “Everything’s always a lie with you. It’s always about sneaking around behind our backs.”
I leaned forward, my head between their bucket seats. “It’s my education, Mom. You can’t control the classes I take, like you did at Reardon.”
“If I hadn’t intervened there, you never would have graduated,” Mom snapped.
I rolled my eyes. I’d earned mostly B’s at Reardon, with the odd A and a few C’s, yet the arrival of my report card in the mail had always felt like doomsday, as if I’d brought shame upon the family for not being as brilliant as my siblings.
A car slowed in front of us, and Dad braked suddenly, the motion shooting us all forward against our seat belts. The pizza box slid from the back seat onto the floor, but thankfully the pizza in all its greasy gooeyness remained inside the box, folded over on itself. I lifted the lid to inspect the damage and said, “Still edible.”
Dad smiled, meeting my eyes quickly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He didn’t seem to understand all the intricacies of being a Mabrey, although all of our lives revolved around him. He was the one who would have to drive back to Simsbury with Mom, after all, listening to her complaints about my thoughtlessness.
In the parking lot outside Stanton Hall, I unclipped my seat belt and Dad did the same. Mom sat stony, staring ahead.
I gestured to the pizza. “Aren’t you coming inside?”
“Now that I think about it, we probably have to get on the road,” Mom said.
“Liz, we have food to eat. We might as well—”
“I don’t think I’m particularly hungry.”
Dad sighed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
I scooped up the pizza box. No point in letting perfectly good food go to waste. “It’s a class,” I repeated. “A stupid fucking class. That’s all.”
Mom said, “You will not talk to us that way—” And I knew there was more, but I wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. I’d already slammed the door behind me and was walking fast across the parking lot, pizza box in hand. I waited for them to do something—for Mom to come after me or for Dad to pull even with me in the Mercedes, but none of that happened.
In my room, I moved some papers out of the way and set the box on my desk. Erin was still out with her parents, probably having the sort of happy family meal that regular people had, laughing and reminiscing and making plans for the next time they would see each other. But maybe there was no such thing as a normal family, a happy family meal. Maybe everyone was secretly, deep down miserable and they only put on brave faces for the rest of us.
More out of spite than hunger, I ate half the pizza and lay down on the bed, still dressed in my jeans and sweater in case Erin and her parents came back. I must have fallen asleep with the overhead fluorescent light still beaming down because the next thing I knew there were people running past my door, their footsteps echoing down the hallway.
“What’s going on?” I called to a girl who stood near the elevators, a hand over her mouth.
“Someone on the second floor took a bunch of pills,” she said. “It’s horrible.”
“Is she...” I faltered. “Is she going to be...”
