The furniture is not fancy. The beds have no box springs, just mattresses, and even those are covered with a practical plastic barrier that is stitched into the batting. The bed frames are metal and the headers and footers rise up on both ends to the chair rail level, as if that piece of molding is a height restrictor. The bureaus are old wood. So are the chairs that go with the desks.
I’d chosen the right side for no practical reason and every superstitious one. As I first entered with the laundry basket of bedding suspended between my cramped, stinging hands, it was immediately apparent that I had to be on the right side or everything would go badly. If I ended up on the left, these next nine months were going to be consumed by academic trials I cannot best, pretty girls who hate me, and an enduring, baseless homesickness that cannot ever be cured because I don’t actually enjoy living with my mother in our home. As long as I’m on the right, though, there’s a chance I’ll come out on the June side of this sophomore year with, if not a glowing experience, then at least something I tolerated.
Something I lived through.
I glance over my shoulder at the door. The 213 on it bothers me tremendously and I stare across the hall at the closed-up room opposite me. It bears the more coveted 14 after its 2, and I wish I could change rooms with that Greta girl who is not my best friend. I can’t, of course. I’m a cog in this wheel of pairings and location assignments, and if childhood has taught me anything, it’s the reality of endurance.
Behind 214’s closed door, there are voices. High, shrill, bubbly. There is music, too. Paula Abdul, bright, cheerful, danceable. Parents venture past the members-only party and ignore the muffled sounds. Every single girl who passes by looks and lingers, like she’s trying to figure out how to get in there, the code to that vault of valuables.
I find myself yearning to be welcomed into room 214, too, and I hate it. This hollow coveting is my mother’s persistent hobby, and after watching her want things she cannot, and will never, have, I’m not interested in impotent cravings. If I start with that stuff now I’ll be just like her as a grown-up, greasy-lipped, smoking a Virginia Slim, wearing a cheap knockoff dress as I flirt with the father of one of my daughter’s schoolmates. The good news is that I know damn well that my black wardrobe and my matte, dyed-black hair are, among other things, guaranteed to cut off access to 214 right at the pass. This justifies my aesthetics. I’d rather make things like that Paula Abdul dance party an impossibility than be tortured with a string of maybe-I-mights that are forever defeated.
I walk over to the window, lean across my shallow desk, and check out what’s behind the dorm. I see a parking lot with three spaces and a tremendous oak that seems as big as our whole building. Then there’s a stretch of mowed grass that declines to a thick border of unruly vegetation that is ready to give someone ticks or at least poison ivy. Through the rare breaks in its entwined growth, I can make out a stream that is flowing fairly fast.
The longer I stare at my short-stack view, the more my mind begins to stir in ways that I need to watch out for, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether I can do this. And not from a social or academic standpoint. My fault lines run very deep, and keeping them quiet is something I have failed at before.
“So we’re roommates.”
In the moment where I am suspended between hearing the voice behind me and seeing whoever spoke the words, I am convinced, in the same way I knew I had to be on the right side of this room, that the girl who has entered is my tea leaf reading on how things are going to go. Her appearance, her short skirt or sensible shorts, her belly shirt or her polo, will determine whether I make it out of here in one piece.
As I turn around, there is a loud thump, her duffel bag hitting the floor, and I am instantly relieved. She is not like me, but she is not like the blond girl across the hall, either. She is tall, and her shorts reveal the thick ankles and calves of a field hockey player. She is brown-haired, only the wisps that escape her ponytail blond. She is wearing a blue T-shirt that has no words on it, no appliques of a joke or a concert cluttering what covers up her strong upper body. She has no glasses, a square face, and blue eyes that are the color of a Sunoco sign’s lettering.
“I’m Ellen. Last name Strotsberry. People here call me Strots.”
She puts her hand out. She is not smiling, but she’s not looking at me with disdain. As I step forward, I want to tell her my name is Bo. I want a nickname like hers, punchy, powerful, a declaration that I’m not going to be snowed by bullshit and I can handle anything.
“Sarah Taylor,” I say as we shake. “But my mother calls me Sally.”
As I tack on the second half because it’s what I’ve been doing all my life, I realize that it is odd that my mother named me to rhyme with Tera, yet calls me something that ends in -ly.
My roommate’s handshake is dry and firm, not a bone-crusher, but not anything I want to hold on to for very long because I don’t want her to feel the moisture of my own palm. She nods as we drop our arms, as if that greeting malarkey is off her list, and sure enough, she moves on fast. She kicks the door shut, goes over to the bed on the left side, and throws open a portion of the window. Dropping an enormous, camping-sized backpack onto the bare, plastic-coated mattress, she curses as she unzips a compartment.
“I can’t believe it’s so damn hot.”
She takes out a pack of Marlboros and a red Bic lighter. Tilting the cigarettes toward me, she says, “Want one?”
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.