He’s smiling at me, as if he believes that he might, possibly, in some small way, have improved my situation. The fact that this matters to him at all makes me smile shyly back to him.
Except then I remember.
“Oh, God, she smoked,” I say softly. “I’m so sorry, my mom smoked in your apartment. She does that when she’s nervous or upset.”
And when she’s happy. Sad. Bored. Tired. Anxious. But I suggest to him a specific linkage with this difficulty I’m in, in the hopes that it will predispose him to forgiveness.
“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Sandra smokes sometimes.”
How does that work, with her being into public health, I wonder. But I don’t bring that up.
“I wish I had you as my English teacher,” I blurt out.
I’m horrified that I’ve spoken the admission aloud because I’m worried that my mouth won’t stop there and the next thing I know I’ll be talking about his Ray-Bans and the size of his shoulders and how much I like his hair.
“Me, too,” he says. “But we can talk books on our own.”
“We can?”
“Sure. I’d love to. We’ll start our own private book club.”
As I begin to glow like a night-light, I wonder how I could ever have thought of killing myself. If I had bought those aspirin and that Orange Crush, and taken them down to the boiler room? I would have missed this chance to talk books with my new friend Nick.
All things considered, Phil the Pharmacist should have played this card above all others, and as I consider the pure radiance running through my veins, I take note, in the back of my mind, that this wild elation spinning through my chest, just after I was prepared to kill myself, is as close to a diagnostic criterion as having the word “bipolar” stamped over my eyebrows when I came out of the birth canal.
To distract myself, both from this confirmation of my condition that I didn’t need, and from an asinine urge to giggle, I take note of the girls coming up the stairs. Going down the stairs.
Their curious stares are a grim re-grounding, and I can’t decide whether there’s been an uptick in traffic or not, whether my dorm mates are making excuses to go check their mailboxes so they can spy on me and my mother and Hot RA and the administrator or if they are, in fact, simply going about their business.
My mother and the administrator come back over. Both are looking calm in the manner of adults when a crisis involving a child under their care has been resolved. A plan of action, which I am required to agree to, is spelled out—I will take a call from Dr. Warten tomorrow morning in Nick’s apartment for privacy, I will check in at the clinic tomorrow afternoon for blood tests to monitor my sodium levels, I will talk to Nick if I have any problems with anything.
After all that, my mother suggests the two of us go into town and have dinner, and I readily agree, not because I am hungry, but because I find myself wanting to spend some time with her. I’m interested in exploring this new, unanticipated territory that has opened up between us. I also don’t trust my mood in the slightest.
At the restaurant she chooses and parks behind, we sit in a booth and eat Italian food that has been prepared with such haste and lack of skill that it has almost no flavor. My mother promptly falls back into her normal ways, updating me about people neither of us know, people who lead glamorous lives, people who are in those magazines. The difference now is that I forgive her for the banal conversation. I listen and I nod, and I’m content to let her go on without any judgment whatsoever.
You’re more likely to forgive people if you respect them, and you tend to respect people because you’ve seen their strength revealed in a moment of struggle. After the self-sacrifice I have witnessed from her, there’s a new, more solid platform for our relationship on my side.
Whether I make it through the rest of my sophomore year here or not, this will be one good thing that comes out of Ambrose.
When she takes me back to the dorm, pulling around to where Nick’s blue Porsche is parked on its lonesome, my mother turns to me and brushes my hair back.
“I wish you would just let that black color grow out,” she says.
“Maybe I will.”
“Listen, I’m not sure I can come up for Parents’ Weekend. I don’t think I can get the time off from my cleaning job.”
“It’s okay.”
“Are you still going to stay here over Columbus Day weekend?”
“I could use the money.”
“So I guess I won’t see you until Thanksgiving.”
Unspoken in this pronouncement is her hope that she won’t have cause to see me. That I won’t crack and call her and ask to come home. Also unspoken is the fact that she will come and pick me and my stuff up anytime, without questions or censure, no matter what her job says or what she’s told people in our small town about where her talented daughter is going to school.
“I love you,” I say.
Her eyes flare, like they did when I hugged her. And then they get teary. As she pulls me across the seat against her, I find that I like the smell of her Primo. What I didn’t like was that I assumed she was wearing it to show off and pretend like she was someone else. Now I recognize that it’s all she can afford, the closest she can ever get to Beverly Hills, and that she has no choice but to accept this vast distance between where she is and where she wishes she were. I find grace in her resignation. I trust it, too, far more than superficial posturing.
I get out of the car and shut my door. She backs in and out a couple of times to turn around in the tight space. As she takes one more lingering look at me from her window, I am reminded of the way she stared up at me as she departed the day she dropped me off.
Even if I have a breakdown and have to pull out of Ambrose, I’m left with the very clear impression this school has been good for us.
And I know, without a doubt, that I will never, ever refer to her in my mind or anywhere else as Tera Taylor, undiscovered movie star.
“Bye, Mom,” I say.
“Bye, Sarah.”
And just like that, she is gone.
chapter SIXTEEN
For all my time at Ambrose, I’ve never been up to the third floor of Tellmer. I hear the girls moving around above my room occasionally, but it’s rare, so either they are very quiet, which is unlikely, or the dorm was built very well seventy-five years ago, something that’s quite likely given the standards here. As I mount the apex series of landings, I feel like a trespasser, especially as I emerge in front of the residential advisors’ door. Fortunately, they don’t have a check-in roster or something you’ve got to put ID into to walk down the hall. On the contrary, the RAs up here have accessorized the entryway to their suite with a welcome mat and a seasonal wreath in autumnal golds and red. This strikes me as something married people do. They tend to have the stability and dual incomes to support things like mats and wreaths, plus they live in homes no matter if they are in an apartment or a house because they’re a family.
Nick and Sandra are too cool for that, though. They’re intellectuals busy analyzing great literature and saving the world. I want to be like them.
Which is probably my mom’s point.
I glance left and right. I have no idea what room I’m looking for so I’m forced to wait for someone to stroll by—which turns out to be a girl on her way to take a shower, given the towel on her shoulder and her flip-flops. I know I’ve seen her on campus and in dorm meetings, but I don’t know her name. I’m certain she feels the same about me.