I moved into an apartment half a mile from the university. I had new roommates. Robin was tall and athletic, and the first time I saw her she was wearing running shorts that were much too short, but I didn’t gape at her. When I met Jenni she was drinking a Diet Coke. I didn’t stare at that, either, because I’d seen Charles drink dozens of them.
Robin was the oldest, and for some reason she was sympathetic to me. Somehow she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly. She told me exactly what I would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment. No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink.
Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another roommate, Megan, cleared her throat.
“I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.”
Robin rolled her eyes. “I’m sure everyone here washes their hands.”
That night, after I left the bathroom, I stopped at the sink in the hall and washed my hands. With soap.
The next day was the first day of class. Charles had designed my course schedule. He’d signed me up for two music classes and a course on religion, all of which he said would be easy for me. Then he’d enrolled me in two more challenging courses—college algebra, which terrified me, and biology, which didn’t but only because I didn’t know what it was.
Algebra threatened to put an end to my scholarship. The professor spent every lecture muttering inaudibly as he paced in front of the chalkboard. I wasn’t the only one who was lost, but I was more lost than anyone else. Charles tried to help, but he was starting his senior year of high school and had his own schoolwork. In October I took the midterm and failed it.
I stopped sleeping. I stayed up late, twisting my hair into knots as I tried to wrest meaning from the textbook, then lying in bed and brooding over my notes. I developed stomach ulcers. Once, Jenni found me curled up on a stranger’s lawn, halfway between campus and our apartment. My stomach was on fire; I was shaking with the pain, but I wouldn’t let her take me to a hospital. She sat with me for half an hour, then walked me home.
The pain in my stomach intensified, burning through the night, making it impossible to sleep. I needed money for rent, so I got a job as a janitor for the engineering building. My shift began every morning at four. Between the ulcers and the janitorial work, I barely slept. Jenni and Robin kept saying I should see a doctor but I didn’t. I told them I was going home for Thanksgiving and that my mother would cure me. They exchanged nervous glances but didn’t say anything.
Charles said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost pathological inability to ask for help. He told me this on the phone, and he said it so quietly it was almost a whisper.
I told him he was crazy.
“Then go talk to your algebra professor,” he said. “You’re failing. Ask for help.”
It had never occurred to me to talk to a professor—I didn’t realize we were allowed to talk to them—so I decided to try, if only to prove to Charles I could do it.
I knocked on his office door a few days before Thanksgiving. He looked smaller in his office than he did in the lecture hall, and more shiny: the light above his desk reflected off his head and glasses. He was shuffling through the papers on his desk, and he didn’t look up when I sat down. “If I fail this class,” I said, “I’ll lose my scholarship.” I didn’t explain that without a scholarship, I couldn’t come back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, barely looking at me. “But this is a tough school. It might be better if you come back when you’re older. Or transfer.”
I didn’t know what he meant by “transfer,” so I said nothing. I stood to go, and for some reason this softened him. “Truthfully,” he said, “a lot of people are failing.” He sat back in his chair. “How about this: the final covers all the material from the semester. I’ll announce in class that anyone who gets a perfect score on the final—not a ninety-eight but an actual one hundred—will get an A, no matter how they performed on the midterm. Sound good?”
I said it did. It was a long shot, but I was the queen of long shots. I called Charles. I told him I was coming to Idaho for Thanksgiving and I needed an algebra tutor. He said he would meet me at Buck’s Peak.
When I arrived at the peak, Mother was making the Thanksgiving meal. The large oak table was covered with jars of tincture and vials of essential oil, which I cleared away. Charles was coming for dinner.