The St. Ambrose School for Girls(39)

Falling in with the traffic in the hall, I enter the bathroom. Her red bucket is in her cubby, so I know she’s not in one of the running showers. I use the toilet and wash my hands just to make it look like I’m here for the appropriate reasons. I’m also burning time. I want to give Strots an opportunity to come down from wherever she is so that what happened at that tree can be mutually brushed aside, as a drinking binge would be, my mouth like the open throat of a tequila bottle, never to be broached again.

As I dry my hands too thoroughly over one of the trash bins, I decide to be relieved that Strots’s bucket is where it should be. I don’t want her to pack up all her things and relocate off the floor, out of the dorm, even out of Ambrose itself. Somehow it’ll all be my fault, and Keisha will blame me for her best friend leaving. Then I’ll have two people out to get me.

I return to our room. I knock again before I enter, and there’s no answer. Opening the door, I check the drawer of her bureau once more. It’s in the same position. I check under her pillow. Still no cigarettes.

I pivot to her desk. What about her textbooks? What about her homework? She can’t go to class in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and no bra, with nothing but shower shoes on her feet, and no work to hand in or notebooks or textbooks.

Although if anyone could get away with that, it would be Strots.

I go over and sit on my bed, tucking my legs up and linking my arms around them. My sleeping uniform consists of baggy boys’ pajama bottoms and soft, well-washed, long-sleeved shirts. The idea of changing out of these comfortables and into the dark armor I wear around campus exhausts me, and as I wait for my roommate, I become utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of gathering my books and heading to class.

And forget about going to Wycliffe for food. That’s like asking me to bench-press the dorm.

As I contemplate the hundreds of steps ahead of me, the weight of my backpack, the glare of the sun on my aching eyes, I feel heavy inside my skin and not from lack of sleep. My bones and my muscles throb and so does the base of my skull. It’s as if I have come down with the flu in the space of a minute and a half, my immune system caught unawares, my corpuscles overrun and defeated by a microscopic invader. Except this is not really anything physical. This is an infestation of regret.

All I can think about is how I messed everything up and ruined my living situation. Last night, I should have run after Strots and told her right then and there it was okay, it was no big deal, it didn’t bother me, I was only surprised. And all of this is true, not a constructed reality I discipline myself to believe in.

I am not bothered or freaked out. I have other things to worry about. Besides, I like Strots, and nothing changes that.

If only I had caught her before everything solidified overnight, I might have had a chance at undoing it all. At first she maybe wouldn’t have believed me, but I could have pressed the issue, and revealed to her how cool I actually am. She could have been surprised, relieved, perhaps we would have had a short, hard hug to put it to rest, never to be thought of or worried about again. And then we could have returned to the split sugar maple, and she could have stared at Greta some more, and I could have supported my roommate in some way, and we both could have condemned all three of those litterbugs for mistreating the river with their ashes and their filters. After the girls finally left, Strots could have made a joke and we could have sauntered back here, feeling superior to those negligent pretties, Strots because she actually is, me because I’m with Strots. We could have become closer, even if Strots continued to go up to see Keisha every night after dinner, because whenever my roommate and I found ourselves together, we would have two secrets that bound us, my being pranked by Greta, and her having a crush on the girl.

Except that’s not what happened.

Instead of being cool, I fumbled the ball, and this time, it was not on purpose.

I just can’t get along with people my age. I can’t get along with grown-ups, either, but that’s not a value judgment against a person when you’re fifteen. It’s the relating with our peers that counts, and I fail across the board. I’ve always failed. I was the three-year-old in the sandbox who couldn’t understand how the games were played and why. I was the six-year-old at my cousin’s birthday party who no one wanted to get stuck sitting next to because of a rumor I wet my bed. I was the ten-year-old in gym class in mismatched socks and orange shorts because that was all I had to wear. And now I’m here, at fifteen, facing the prospect of being alone in this two-sided room, having driven away the most charismatic girl on campus.

In retrospect, I was stupid to think this Ambrose experience would go any other way, even if I’d been assigned to room 214.

And I will always fail. I will never have friends, and as I age, I’ll just increase the breadth and scope of the categories of people with whom I cannot manage to engage. I’ll be an eighty-year-old in a nursing home who no one wishes to sit next to because, even though we’re all wetting our beds, my bladder’s incontinence is the only one that is seen as a referendum on character.

As I contemplate my bleak, lonely future, my thoughts become tangible and they increase in weight geometrically, not just subject to gravity, but linking hands with the force that keeps all objects on the earth to pull hard, lock tighter. I gather tonnage at an incalculable rate, my thoughts leaping past the laws of physics, going quantum, absorbing dense energy that makes them infinitely solid. Unable to sustain the load, I warp in on myself, a black hole forming here on my bed, on the second floor of Tellmer Hall at the St. Ambrose School for Girls. With this change in my form, the momentum accelerates even further, and the more darkness I collect within the boundless funnel of my mind, the faster I increase the concentric circle into which all things are sucked and never released.