“No,” I say. “I’m just wondering whether you matched your Bic to the Marlboros on purpose. It’s something I would do.”
Strots glances down at where she’s placed the red twosome on the mattress. “Huh, hadn’t noticed.”
My roommate smiles, revealing teeth as straight and white as a picket fence, although not from any kind of expensive dentistry, it seems. Like her mannerisms and her voice, every piece of her is sturdy, functional, and, in the manner of reliability, attractive.
“So you wear black because you can’t handle not matching?”
I look down at myself in the same way she assessed her smoking paraphernalia. I sift through possible responses, and then decide, again, to be honest.
“I’m angry at the world.”
It’s almost the truth. I can’t finish the second part. I’m mad, but I’m powerless. I am fifteen years old, the product of a man who doesn’t care and isn’t around, and a woman who cares too much, just not about me. In addition to being my social defensive mechanism, black seems like the only way to express my inner rage at living in a house full of magazines and cigarette smoke with nowhere else to go. Well, nowhere except Ambrose, and I did not choose this escape hatch.
“Everyone’s pissed off when they’re fifteen,” Strots announces. “It comes with the territory.”
“You don’t look mad.”
“You don’t know me yet and people are weird.” But then she smiles. “Don’t worry, I let it all out on the field.”
“On what?”
She laughs. “The opposition, dummy. You don’t do sports, do you.”
“No.”
As she cocks one eyebrow, like she can’t fathom my reality, I take a deep, disappointed breath and smell smoke, but I’m not resentful because it is Strots’s. We do not have a problem with her smoking. On the contrary, as I stand in front of her, I want to change into loose khaki shorts and a loose blue, unmarked T-shirt. I want to have a by-mistake matching set of lighter and pack of cigarettes, although something different than Marlboros so we are not matchy-matchy.
I want to throw out my black clothes and armor myself in everything Strots.
All of this is bullshit, of course. And I’ve got to keep this kind of characteristic crazy thinking, among many things, from Strots. She cannot know how my mind actually works, the connections it makes, the places it goes without my permission. If she finds out, she’ll demand to be assigned to another room, and I don’t want to live alone when everybody else has someone.
The sound of a toilet flushing on the other side of the wall next to her mattress makes Strots roll her eyes. “This room sucks.”
“Do you want to switch?” I ask, pointing to the bed I have made and praying she doesn’t want to.
“Nah. I can sleep through anything. But the toilet flushing is annoying.”
“Were you in this room last year?”
“I was on the first floor and farther down the hall. But I had a friend in here and I spent a lot of time at her place.”
“Did you like your roommate?”
I’m hoping she did, as if it might be a warm-up for tolerating me.
“Nope.” Strots gets to her feet and returns her cigarettes and her lighter into the pocket of the backpack. “I did not.”
In that moment, I am desperate for her to tell me she feels differently about me. I want her to give me a gold seal of approval, a stamp on my forehead that announces I have passed quality control.
I am my mother, giving my power over to a stranger, all because of a self-created myth of their authority and higher status over me. I am a shadow in my black clothes, looking to conform to another’s contours on the ground, following them wherever they go.
The only benefit to Ambrose that I’d seen was getting a break from Tera Taylor, undiscovered movie star. Now it seems I have brought all my own baggage along with my two suitcases.
On the far side of the door that Strots closed with her foot, there is a burst of laughter and chatter. Greta has broken the seal of her privacy and I have a sense of many girls skipping out, the pressure released, a cascade of Benetton and Esprit like sequins spilled from a dressmaker’s pocket.
When I look back at Strots, she’s staring at me in the same way I assessed her lighter and soft pack. I’m used to this expression on people. Behind their eyes, they’re wondering about me, connecting dots that, if I could read minds, I suspect would make me defensive and sad, even though they’re probably somewhat close to the truth.
“I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” Strots says in a low voice. “Don’t give them what they want.”
“Who is they?”
“You’ll know who I’m talking about,” Strots mutters as she puts her cigarette between her teeth and unclips the flap on the top of the backpack. “Just don’t give ’em what they’re looking for and they’ll get bored. They only like chew toys with the squeakers still in ’em.”
chapter THREE
Two nights later, I’m asleep on my back in bed when my eyes flip open. My first thought is that I’m glad I was in any sort of REM state. Settling here in the midst of all the dorm activity is proving to be a challenge, and I’ve never had a roommate before. And then there is the incessant traffic in the bathroom.
I turn my head on my thin pillow. Moonlight is streaming in the central window that I’ve come to think of as a referee that holds Strots’s furniture on her side and mine on my side. Across the floor between our line of scrimmage, geometric shadows thrown by the frames of the panes cut the lunar glow into blond brownie pieces on the pine boards.
Strots is curled tightly on her side facing me, her head ducked into her hugging arms, her legs drawn up, yet scissored below the knees. It is not a fetal position. It’s as if she has a ball in her grip and is rushing through players on an opposing team. Her drawn brows confirm this impression and so does what I’ve gleaned about her character over these forty-eight hours of our cohabitation. She is an athlete in everything she does. The world is her overtime.
Sitting up, I slip my bare feet out from my scratchy sheets and place them on the blond brownies. I am quiet as I go to the door, but I’m not as worried about waking Strots up as I was the first night. She’s not disturbed by much, and I envy how that generalizes from her waking hours into her dreamscapes.
Our door doesn’t make a sound as I open it, and thanks to the moonlight, there’s no adjustment of my eyes as I step out into the hall. Looking both ways, as if I’m at a busy intersection and trying to cross with no pedestrian light, I’m struck by how many girls my age are sleeping right now. Slumber is an intimate state, marked by vulnerability. To be so close to so many strangers as they twitch like dogs on a rug, separated only by doors that have no locks on them, makes me feel as if I’m an intruder in all of their houses at once.
I don’t have far to go to get to the bathroom, and that’s the problem Strots pointed out that first day. No one is inside when I enter and the details of the buttercup-yellow facility don’t really register in my fog, other than it, as always, reminds me of that Mercedes. One thing does stand out, however. The florist-shop air in here, heavy with humidity and the bouquets of so many soaps, shampoos, and conditioners, is the kind of thing that I haven’t decided whether I find noxious or magical.