by Mary Adkins
“Ridiculous,” Donna said defensively. “That’s all in your head. You could’ve gotten in there if you’d wanted!”
Stayja often wondered if it was true—she’d considered applying to Carter but didn’t, since even if she’d gotten in, which was a long shot, they could never pay. Then Rhonda Jenkins from her class, who didn’t make as good grades as Stayja—Stayja was ranked fifth, and Rhonda was not even in the top ten students, whose names were the only names released—announced in April of their senior year that she had applied and been accepted with a full scholarship for students of color from North Carolina who had attended public school. Stayja had vacillated between jealousy and disappointment at the news and had never really stopped. Rhonda had since graduated and moved to New York, where she walked to work over the Brooklyn Bridge and posted the same photo of that damn bridge over and over on Instagram.
No, Donna didn’t understand the clear boundary that distinguished students from staff on campus. It was in their clothes, in the way they spoke to one another versus the way they spoke to Stayja. Stayja wore Goodwill clothes bought on Friday Color Clearance (50 percent off everything a single color on Fridays!) and Nicole’s more modest Forever 21 hand-me-downs. She didn’t hate her clothes or wish she dressed like Carter kids—many of them were far too preppy for her taste, sporting bright shirts with little alligators on them or patterned dresses that looked to Stayja like children’s birthday decorations. But she was astounded by how many clothes they had. There were regulars at the coffee shop whom she saw every day for entire semesters, never once in the same shirt. They spoke without accents, as if they were from everywhere and nowhere. Their smiles were perfect.
4
Annie
FRIDAY, AUGUST 25
That Friday, at the first orchestra rehearsal of the year, I found my spot behind the flutes and next to the trombones.
“Welcome back! To those of you who are new, welcome,” Juan-Pablo, the music theory professor and orchestra conductor, said from behind his music stand. “Let’s get settled quickly, please.”
I moistened my reed and waited. My thighs stuck to the cold metal chair.
I’d picked the bassoon because my high school band director, Mrs. Hays, had begged me to, bribing me with immediate acceptance into the Pineville County Youth Orchestra. She needed a bassoonist, and, having successfully persuaded the school to invest in a bassoon, she needed to justify the expense.
Playing in an orchestra sounded much more interesting and classier than playing solely in high school band, and I liked that I could borrow the school’s instrument and wouldn’t have to burden my parents with having to buy me something like a French horn. The rest was history.
The bassoon: how I’d gotten into college for free and, now, how I’d afforded to fix my legs. It had turned out to be the best decision I’d ever made. After five years, though, I was tired of bassoon even as I was grateful for all it had gotten me. I was obliged to stay in orchestra to keep my scholarship, but I wouldn’t have quit anyway. I wouldn’t do that to Juan-Pablo, leave him without a bassoonist.
I’d had a tender spot for khaki-pants-with-ASICS-wearing Juan-Pablo ever since the fall of my first year, when I’d declined to join an orchestra trip to a nearby waterpark (because I had to wear a swimsuit) and he’d called me to his office to ask why I wouldn’t be joining. I hadn’t told him, of course. I lied and told him I had to work.
Still, at the next rehearsal, he announced that the orchestra would be going to Six Flags instead. I had a feeling it was for me.
We began to sight-read a new piece, the theme from a movie called October Sky, which I’d never heard of. As the music swelled, even with the mistaken notes and clunky rhythm of a sight-read, I was glad to be back.
After rehearsal, we trekked as a group to the campus gardens for the orchestra’s annual start-of-the-year picnic. Around me, students discussed their summers in regional orchestras, their class schedules, and the luck of their new dorm room sizes and locations, but the breeze on my thighs was alien and distracting, and I struggled to pay attention. If people were aware of what was left of my scars, they weren’t showing it.
Then I was lying in the sun, my lower body drenched in invisible zinc that reflected the glare, a decade of obscurity bouncing the light. I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what was to come, but I sensed that it was good.
CARTER PROGRESSIVES WAS holding a back-to-school roller-skating party that night, and I’d persuaded Matty to come with me.
Social events with large groups of people weren’t Matty’s idea of fun, which I learned quickly after he and I had met in my first college class, a seminar titled Introduction to Philosophy.
“Is there an advanced syllabus for those of us who have already read these?” a small, angular boy with a meticulously gelled swoop of hair asked. I surveyed the three-page document: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, On Liberty. On it went, more titles I’d never heard of.
“I can create a supplemental reading list for you,” the professor, an energetic, bow-tied doctoral student who couldn’t have been older than thirty, said. The boy thanked him.
As I walked back to my dorm after class, wondering if I should drop the course, the boy appeared next to me.
“Hey. I’m Matty. Where’re you from?”
“Pineville. In Georgia,” I said, stopping.
“Sounds metropolitan.” He grinned. “You hate me,” he said, still smiling.
“What?”
“You do not have a good poker face.”
“It’s just that if you have already read everything for Philosophy 101, maybe you don’t need to take it,” I said.
“Fair,” he said, reaching out his hand as if we were adults. We shook.
“I’m Annie,” I said.
“So how big is Pineville?” he asked.
I had no clue how many people lived in Pineville. It wasn’t as small as Argyle or Jenkinsburg, but it wasn’t Augusta. “Medium?” I said.
He howled. “You’re hilarious! Medium. Like it’s a T-shirt. Want to get coffee?”
And that’s how Matty Solomon bullied me into becoming his fast friend.
At the coffee shop, I learned that he’d grown up as an only child in Washington, DC, his father a congressman from New Hampshire and his mother a serial nonprofit president. He didn’t believe in government, religion, or really any institutions, including college. He’d been out of the closet since he was thirteen and casually recalled only nontraumatic homophobic teasing at his small, liberal prep school near the capital.
Matty explained to me that first day we met that he was at Carter for one purpose: to write for the school paper. His singular aspiration in life was to become a journalist, and he treated writing for the school daily as a tedious but necessary first step in that direction. He talked about college as if he’d already been to it. Since I found our classmates intimidating and he found them boring, we were perfectly matched in our reclusive leanings.
So getting him to come to a roller-skating party was no small feat, but once we arrived, he refused to skate.
Side by side—Matty in no-show socks and loafers, me in my brown, neatly tied rental roller skates—we sat on a bench. The jovial roster of howling students scrolled past, cycling through.
“Get out there if you want,” he said for the third time.
“I don’t want to skate by myself,” I said for the third time.
“Oh, fine,” he finally said, standing. “I’m sick of your sulking. You’ve sufficiently guilted me.” He disappeared and, several moments later, returned with a pair of skates and two pints of beer. “But I need to tell you something. I don’t know how to skate. So we’re going to have to get drunk for this.”
Half an hour later, Matty and I were making idiots of ourselves, giggling uncontrollably on the rink floor. It had turned out that the one thing Matty didn’t know how to do he was, indeed, very, very bad at.
“
Be brave!” I yelled, pulling him with both hands. His legs widened as he rolled forward, his body hinging forty-five degrees and panic in his eyes, until he slowly regained his balance. We stayed on the rink through the hokey pokey, the limbo, reverse skate, couples skate, and something called “shoot the duck,” where you crouch down and roll on one skate while sticking your other leg out straight in front of you. We kept falling over, Matty especially, who, with the flexibility of a ninety-five-year-old, couldn’t straighten his leg.
This is what I remember about the first part of that night: having the time of my life.
When Matty had to use the bathroom, I rolled over to our bench, breathless, and plopped onto it.
I had first spotted the boy during the hokey pokey, across the room from me in a circle of people so sprawling it nearly grazed the oval wall. At first I noticed him because he was the only one in the circle who wasn’t wearing skates. In bright blue Converse sneakers, he shook one foot and then the other and pranced around as a clownish voice blared on the crackly speaker, “And then you turn yourself around; that’s what it’s all about!”
He was handsome in that way that a nerdy kid who sprouts into a man is handsome. He had a strawberry blonde mess of unruly hair and was just shy of tall, with calf muscles that bulged when he walked—I could tell this even from a distance. “Shaggy Tyler,” I’d later learn he was called by his PiKa brothers, to distinguish him from “Big Tyler” and “Gay Tyler” (who wasn’t gay, just slight and therefore the locus of the fraternity’s latent homophobia).
As the crowd turned rowdier and the room dimmer, the strobe light casting the only lights apart from the soft glow of the corner rental booth in the distance, I found myself emboldened by the beer I’d consumed. I stood and made my way over to where he was leaning, alone, against the wall. I believe he was wearing those pastel beach shorts that southern college guys wear in warm months, though I forget what color.
“Nice hokey pokey out there,” I said.
The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.
“Thanks,” he said. “I really should have stretched after. Don’t want to cramp.” He leaned over and touched his toes.
I laughed.
He rose and pushed his wild hair from his face.
“I’m Tyler,” he said. “You are?”
“Annie Stoddard,” I said, immediately embarrassed at having offered both names.
“Is the last name so I can stalk you online?” he asked.
“Only if you want,” I said, feeling a dreaded red flush crawl up my neck. At least it was dark.
“Annie Stoddard, let’s play a game,” he said. “Would you rather”—he looked around, contemplating—“have hands for feet or feet for hands?”
“Hands for feet,” I said. “Of course. I’m a bassoonist. I need my hands. But also, who would ever choose to have four feet?”
“Good point. Your turn.”
The game was familiar to me—my brother and I had played it on road trips for years.
“Would you rather stink the rest of your life or have a really annoying voice?” I asked.
He pondered this.
“How stinky am I?”
“There is no question that it’s you who smells.”
“Voice then. When you have death fantasies, who do you imagine dying—yourself or other people?”
“Wow,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll answer first. Myself. Now you answer.”
I hesitated.
“You know you do. Everyone has death fantasies,” he said.
“Both,” I said. Then, seeing that this didn’t satisfy him, I continued, “Other people more. My dad. I’m scared of that most, I guess.” A knot of girls rolled by. He high-fived one of them. “You fantasize about your own death?”
He nodded. “I am constantly anticipating how I might die. I have since I was twelve. Somehow I’m still around. It quite honestly shocks me.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I haven’t made any real contributions to the world. I’ve taken more than I’ve given. I’m a tax on global resources.”
This struck me as funny—assuming that one would have done anything meaningful before even finishing school.
“You’re in college,” I said.
“So?” he said. “By my age, Mark Zuckerberg had already launched Facebook.”
“The one guy who dropped out of college and did something huge?” I was definitely drunk. I sort of wanted to laugh, but there was something about his earnestness and his grand ambitions that made him seem vulnerable.
“Is that your boyfriend?” he asked, and I followed his gaze to Matty, walking toward us.
“No, my best friend,” I said.
“What’s he like?” he asked.
A wave of panic passed over me as Matty moved closer. The conversation we were having was not the kind of conversation Matty was willing to entertain. Matty didn’t relate to insecurity—he seemed immune to it, somehow already an expert at warding it off. It left me in awe, it made me feel safe, and it was also why being friends with him could be so lonely.
“Witty,” I said.
Suddenly a girl with a long braid was careening toward us with great speed, crashing into Tyler and pulling him out onto the floor. He waved at me as he jogged to keep up with her skilled skating—too skilled, I noted, for the collision to have been an accident.
Seeing that Matty had made a detour to get another beer, I headed to the bathroom, where, stationed safely in a stall, I searched through Instagram until I found his profile. I scrolled through his pictures—of friends at parties, his family dog, a vacation to Cabo. The girls in the photos held nylon Longchamp totes in bright hues, the kind I’d never seen before arriving at Carter and couldn’t afford myself, but at least there didn’t seem to be one particular girl featured in his feed.
Then I googled him. He was a fourth-year in PiKa and was on the board of the Interfraternity Council. Diversity Chair. He’d been interviewed for the campus daily The Chronicle the year before as part of a series called “Getting to Know Campus Leaders.” His dream vacation was to sail around South America, having been taught by his father during family vacations in Nantucket as a boy. He was a Pisces but didn’t believe in astrology. His parents, both of whom attended Carter in the 1980s, were college sweethearts who lived in Houston. His dad had founded some kind of addiction-treatment company. He was a history major and an art minor. He planned to apply to law school.
AS MATTY AND I meandered back to campus, my phone dinged. Matty groaned, peering over my shoulder. Tyler had found me as well on Instagram and followed and messaged me.
“You had to pick the guy too good to skate like everyone else?”
“You weren’t going to skate either until I made you!” I said, desperate to read the message but also to hide it.
He ignored this.
“Was he one of the ones who did a keg stand? If you start dating a keg stand guy, I will begin drafting the obit for our friendship.”
“He didn’t do a keg stand,” I said, suddenly irritated by Matty’s snobbery, which was how it often happened with us—his smugness would not bother me at all until it did. “He’s chair of diversity for the Greeks.”
Matty snorted, then shrieked, “Oh yes—a public servant!”
“Shut up,” I muttered. It was always better with Matty if you didn’t engage. His opinions were to be heard, appreciated, and left alone.
“Don’t make this about his leadership qualities,” he said. “You just think he’s hot.”
“Isn’t he?” I smiled.
“Not my type. He’s far too unkempt.”
The only thing unkempt about him was his hair—the opposite of Matty’s highly manicured style, which cost so much to maintain that he wouldn’t tell me the price of his cuts. (He said only, “I don’t trust anyone down here to touch it” and scheduled them during visits home.)
“I like his unkemptness,” I said.
“Exactly.” Matty was quickly losing interest in the conversation, and I was glad. Soon, he’d change the subject. “But you extoling his role as a champion of tolerance was my favorite thing of the night. The white MLK of Carter, he.”
I didn’t answer.
“Can we get some food, please?” Matty whined. “I need carbs to sop up the booze.”
My phone buzzed. Another DM from Tyler.
I covered my screen with my palm.
“Sure,” I said.
As I fell asleep that night, my phone glowed in my palm. I opened, closed, and reopened his two messages, basking.
I like your voice, and you don’t stink.
And:
Goodnight, Annie. ☺
Perhaps Matty was right. Perhaps I just thought he was hot.
But he was. And he liked me.
Tingling with possibility, drifting into sleep, I felt anything could happen. Nothing, I recall, felt out of reach.
5
Bea
FRIDAY, AUGUST 25–SATURDAY, AUGUST 26
In leopard-print leggings, purple fuzzy slippers, and a light gray sweatshirt that fell off one shoulder, the girl sat cross-legged on a bedspread covered in bright red poppies. Her yellow hair zigzagged to her waist. She was weeping.
Bea stood in the doorway, one hand on the handle of her rolling carry-on.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Oh, God, oh, God. Hi, hi. I’m Early. Obvi.” Her new roommate pressed sparkly, manicured hands onto her eyelids. “I didn’t know when you said you were close you meant this close. I promise I’m not crazy.” She hopped to her feet and opened her arms for a hug, then noticed that her palms were streaked with mascara. “Oh, God. Let me go wash my hands,” she said, hurrying past Bea into the hall.