The St. Ambrose School for Girls(6)

I shake my head. She doesn’t ask me if it’s okay if she smokes in our room, but even if she had, like I would ever presume to tell her she couldn’t? I may have unpacked and have my thin sheets and a blanket covering the right, correct-sided, bed, but Strots is in charge here. I am relieved by this. I picture myself drafting behind her in a bike race, her larger, more powerful body creating a lee in the wind that I am permitted to take advantage of, thanks to the room assignment gods.

She exhales out the open window. “So what’s with the black clothes, Taylor.”

Her eyes are direct as they focus on me, and to duck the spotlight in them, because I love that she’s calling me by my last name, I focus on her hands. Her nails are cut to the quick, her fingers blunt and veined, her forearms strong, but not in a manly way. She has moles in the bed of her tan, darker spots that announce her Eastern European ancestry. No doubt all her time in the sun is from sports.

My roommate does not smoke like my mother, all flourish and false-fancy. She inhales, she exhales, she rests the hand doing the nicotine delivery on her bare knee in between draws. When the smoke comes out of her mouth, she kind of shoots it in the direction of the open window, but she doesn’t seem concerned about being caught and her casualness makes me wonder whether we’re allowed to do this in our rooms? That can’t be right. I think of the hot residential advisor with the Nirvana T-shirt and wonder how much he is going to let us get away with.

I decide he’d probably just let her carry on, too.

“Do we have a problem with the smoking?” Strots asks me.

I realize my eyes are on her lighter and the soft pack of Marlboros, and in the silence that follows, I know I’ve got to explain myself to her satisfaction. I look at her face, but do not make it past her nose, which is slightly sunburned. Her stare is an intimidation ray.

“No,” I say. “I’m just wondering whether you matched your Bic to the Marlboros on purpose. It’s something I would do.”

Strots glances down at where she’s placed the red twosome on the mattress. “Huh, hadn’t noticed.”

My roommate smiles, revealing teeth as straight and white as a picket fence, although not from any kind of expensive dentistry, it seems. Like her mannerisms and her voice, every piece of her is sturdy, functional, and, in the manner of reliability, attractive.

“So you wear black because you can’t handle not matching?”

I look down at myself in the same way she assessed her smoking paraphernalia. I sift through possible responses, and then decide, again, to be honest.

“I’m angry at the world.”

It’s almost the truth. I can’t finish the second part. I’m mad, but I’m powerless. I am fifteen years old, the product of a man who doesn’t care and isn’t around, and a woman who cares too much, just not about me. In addition to being my social defensive mechanism, black seems like the only way to express my inner rage at living in a house full of magazines and cigarette smoke with nowhere else to go. Well, nowhere except Ambrose, and I did not choose this escape hatch.

“Everyone’s pissed off when they’re fifteen,” Strots announces. “It comes with the territory.”

“You don’t look mad.”

“You don’t know me yet and people are weird.” But then she smiles. “Don’t worry, I let it all out on the field.”

“On what?”

She laughs. “The opposition, dummy. You don’t do sports, do you.”

“No.”

As she cocks one eyebrow, like she can’t fathom my reality, I take a deep, disappointed breath and smell smoke, but I’m not resentful because it is Strots’s. We do not have a problem with her smoking. On the contrary, as I stand in front of her, I want to change into loose khaki shorts and a loose blue, unmarked T-shirt. I want to have a by-mistake matching set of lighter and pack of cigarettes, although something different than Marlboros so we are not matchy-matchy.

I want to throw out my black clothes and armor myself in everything Strots.

All of this is bullshit, of course. And I’ve got to keep this kind of characteristic crazy thinking, among many things, from Strots. She cannot know how my mind actually works, the connections it makes, the places it goes without my permission. If she finds out, she’ll demand to be assigned to another room, and I don’t want to live alone when everybody else has someone.

The sound of a toilet flushing on the other side of the wall next to her mattress makes Strots roll her eyes. “This room sucks.”

“Do you want to switch?” I ask, pointing to the bed I have made and praying she doesn’t want to.

“Nah. I can sleep through anything. But the toilet flushing is annoying.”

“Were you in this room last year?”

“I was on the first floor and farther down the hall. But I had a friend in here and I spent a lot of time at her place.”

“Did you like your roommate?”

I’m hoping she did, as if it might be a warm-up for tolerating me.

“Nope.” Strots gets to her feet and returns her cigarettes and her lighter into the pocket of the backpack. “I did not.”

In that moment, I am desperate for her to tell me she feels differently about me. I want her to give me a gold seal of approval, a stamp on my forehead that announces I have passed quality control.