Sam held both of Alice’s hands. “I promise to try to help. Even if it means helping you talk to someone. You know, like a doctor.”
23
Everyone was already sitting in their seats when Sam and Alice walked into the gym, and so everyone turned around to look at them when the door squeaked open. There were a few empty chairs in the last row, and Alice and Sam ducked into them quickly. Jane, who had been Belvedere’s college counselor when Alice was a student, stood at the front holding what looked like about five hundred loose pieces of paper, which she was no doubt about to distribute among the students, who were either bored, anxious, or both. Jane was not beloved at Belvedere for many reasons, but the biggest reason was that she often told students that their dream schools were well out of reach and spent most of the counseling sessions asking questions about their parents’ finances. In retrospect, Alice got it. Jane was pragmatic and understood how the machine worked.
“I have no memory of this,” Alice said to Sam under her breath. “I barely remember taking the actual SAT, but for sure, I have zero memory of this.”
Jane handed the giant stack of paper to the kid sitting in the front corner—Jessica Yanker, with the tubular bangs—who took a few pages and handed the rest to the person next to her. Tommy was in the row ahead of Alice, leaning so far back in his chair that it looked like his clothes were going to melt onto the floor. Alice suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe. “I’m going to get some water, just get me whatever they’re giving out, okay?” Sam nodded, and Alice hunched over and ran back out the gym door.
There was a water fountain on the second floor, down the hall from what Alice thought of as her office, though right now, of course, it wasn’t her office at all. Being in the school building on a Saturday always felt transgressive, even as an adult. Unlike the first floor, the second floor looked remarkably the same as it had the last time she’d left the office. The wood floor was exactly the same, and so were the ornate doorframes, the only part of the building that still resembled the brownstones that had once stood on the spot. Someone was chatting and laughing in one of the offices. Alice would have recognized Melinda’s big, throaty laugh anywhere—it sounded like a happy oak tree, full and broad and dappled with sunshine. Alice started down the hall and immediately tripped over a bench outside the college prep office.
“Shit,” Alice said, clutching her shin. “Shit shit shit.”
At the end of the hall, Melinda’s head poked out of the doorframe. “You okay out there?”
Alice straightened up and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Hi, yes,” she said. “Fine. Just walked into something.”
“Need a Band-Aid? Ice pack?” Melinda had a nice husband, grown children who didn’t seem like ax murderers, and adorable grandchildren who made her lumpy ceramic sculptures. In 1996, she wouldn’t yet have grandchildren, but her kids would already be older than Alice, maybe even out of college already, she wasn’t sure. What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid-and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end of Titanic. Alice hadn’t ever thought about how Melinda might want to be around her and all the students in part because it was nice to be surrounded by young people. She felt it, at Belvedere. It wasn’t fair to call it a fountain of youth—nothing could make you feel ancient and crumbling faster than a cruel word from a teenager—but even so, being around young people kept the heart healthy and the mind open.
“No, I’m okay,” Alice said. She walked closer, unable to keep herself from the office that she thought of as her own, but which now belonged only to Melinda.
“Are you looking for something?” Melinda asked. She sat back down in her giant, cushioned rolling office chair in front of a desktop computer the size of a Fiat.
“Does that have email on it?” Alice asked. The computer looked, like, prehistoric. She didn’t know how to explain how she was feeling to Melinda, other than that she’d been brought to her door by muscle memory honed over years that hadn’t happened yet.