Inside, the dorm was darker than she’d imagined, sallow with the green cast of fluorescent lights, and she tried not to let this disappoint her. There was a small foyer with a security desk—the gate was propped open for move-in, but Charlie could see the machine at which she would be expected to swipe her ID in the future. For some reason, this made her nervous. She’d never carried a house key before; her mother had always left the side door unlocked for her. Charlie gave the paper with her room assignment to the guard, and he pointed down the long center hallway. With her father behind her pushing the cart, she followed the wall plaques down to room 116. KAYLA AND CHARLOTTE were taped in construction paper letters to the door.
Gross, she said aloud.
She hated the long form of her name. She swiped her ID in the lock. Nothing. It took three more tries.
Charlie considered herself a pretty light packer; even though she would be home on weekends it wasn’t that much stuff if you thought about it in the context of an entire year. But when she finally got the door open and pulled her cart inside, she found her roommate already there, sitting cross-legged on a bare mattress, with no other belongings in sight. The girl was wiry with dark skin and jet-black hair gathered in twists across her head. Charlie could tell her roommate was much taller than she was, even though she was sitting down.
Hi, the roommate said. Me name K-a-y-l-a.
Thank god her name had been pasted on the door—the girl spelled so fast she never would have caught it.
C-h-a-r-l-i-e.
Sign name?
They’d discussed sign names in ASL class—only another Deaf person could give you one. Charlie shook her head.
K-on-cheek, Kayla said, twisting the letter in the space on her cheek where a dimple would be.
Nice meeting you, said Charlie.
Same, said Kayla, though she didn’t look that enthused.
Do you want help with this? said her dad, gesturing to the cart.
No thanks, said Charlie.
O-k, said her father.
He looked down at his shoes.
So I guess I’ll just—
Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dad.
They hugged, and Charlie could feel his heart beating too fast.
Text if you need anything.
O-k.
Love you.
Love you too, she said.
For a moment she stood frozen, resisting the urge to go after him. She’d spent the night away from home only a handful of times—she didn’t have good enough friends for many sleepovers. Maybe she should have stuck it out at Jefferson.
You o-k?
Charlie nodded.
The door?
She closed it, looked around. The room had a wardrobe and bed on each side, one desk by the door and the other by the window, the setup symmetrical except for a small television screen on the left wall. No wonder her roommate had chosen that side. But where was all of Kayla’s stuff? Maybe her belongings were coming along later, Charlie thought, though she could see a pant leg sticking out from one of the drawers, and Kayla’s backpack hung from its straps on the back of the desk chair she’d claimed.
You _______?
What?
_______?
What?
Charlie could feel herself starting to panic.
I don’t understand, she said aloud. Do you read lips?
Kayla sighed.
R-i-c-h, she spelled. Rich.
She pointed to Charlie’s cart and drew a heaping pile in the air between them.
Rich, Charlie copied. Me? No.
Kayla didn’t say anything else and Charlie didn’t know how to, so she heaved her suitcases from the cart and laid them on her bed.
Overhead, a light flashed. Charlie jumped, thinking it was the fire alarm, but Kayla got up and opened the door, revealing a dormkeeper with an armful of linens. The woman was fresh-faced and bubbly, her look and demeanor not unlike those of the pageant girls Charlie’s mother usually worked with, though her mother’s beauty queen world felt light-years away. Kayla flung herself at the woman, who returned the hug with her free arm, and the two had a quick and frenetic exchange of which Charlie could not understand a word. Then the dormkeeper handed Kayla a set of sheets stamped with PROPERTY RVSD in faded blue.
The dormkeeper looked to Charlie and said something. A smile and a wave seemed to be a fine enough answer, because she turned to go.
Wait, said Kayla, then another thing Charlie couldn’t catch.
The woman nodded and pulled a length of masking tape from a roll she was wearing around her arm like a bangle, handed it to Kayla.
Thanks.
She gave them a thumbs-up and left. Charlie watched as Kayla pulled something from her pocket and unfolded it gingerly—it was a pair of photos of a woman in a bright yellow basketball jersey, torn from a magazine. Kayla ripped the masking tape into eight pieces and taped the pages to the wall. She began to make her bed, then stopped.
What?
Nothing, Charlie said, realizing she’d been staring. Sorry.
Kayla shrugged and Charlie began to make her bed. She was still hanging clothes in her wardrobe when Kayla flicked the light switch to get her attention.
Food-night?
Right, dinner! Charlie wasn’t hungry, but she knew the cafeteria served food for a limited amount of time, and also she had no idea where it was, so she dug her ID from beneath the pile of clothes and followed her roommate down the hall and out onto the quad.
Charlie had assumed that the majority of students would be boarders, but the cafeteria was only half full when they arrived, with probably about seventy-five students altogether. There were a few tables of younger students with their dormkeepers; the smallest were still puffy-eyed from crying, but the rest of the kids seemed to know one another and were falling back into their old rhythms. Charlie wondered what she would have been like at their age—would she have cried as her parents drove away, or been glad she was in a place where she could understand everything? She scanned the faces of the older elementary students; no tears there. A school week would feel a lot shorter to them than a little kid, and anyway, they’d probably gotten used to goodbyes. Or perhaps, for them, the meaning of “home” had transformed and their families’ houses were just “home” on a technicality.
Across the room was a table of middle schoolers, most of them gathered tight around a girl playing a video on her phone, elbowing one another to get in for a closer look. And then there were her classmates—a few coupled off and holding hands, some just chatting in pairs, but all clustered around a boy she could see only from the back, constellations within his gravitational pull.
The headmistress had recommended that Charlie stay at school to facilitate her language development, but from what Charlie could tell, most of the kids there signed quickly and fluidly, and she wondered why they’d chosen to board. She resolved to ask Kayla about it when they got back to the room, but after dinner her roommate went out into the common area to watch Netflix on one of the other girls’ computers. Charlie stood in the doorway, seeing the group greet each other after a summer apart with hugs and emphatic signs, but when one of them made eye contact with her, she got flustered and slammed the door. Being alone in the room just made Charlie feel worse, claustrophobic, but she didn’t dare go out there. She could barely understand her roommate one-on-one, never mind a whole group of girls going at top speed. Now they probably thought she was an asshole, but at least they didn’t think she was stupid. That was tomorrow’s problem.