by Mary Adkins
In the little correspondence Bea had had with her new roommate over the summer, she’d found the girl to be a completely foreign concept. Excitable, rambling, overeager to be friends—these were terms that had come to mind during the single phone conversation they’d had in July. Early’s latest email, which had been about color-coordinating the room, Bea had ignored. Was everyone in the South like this?
Bea looked around. On Early’s side of the room, bright plastic tubs were stacked on wall shelves that also held books organized by spine color: Tuesdays with Morrie, Gone with the Wind, and The Workings of the Brain were flanked by large Tupperware bins marked “Winter Sweaters” and “Travel Appliances.” Bea’s side was bare apart from a university-issued mattress, desk, and chair.
Early returned.
“Long story short,” she said as they hugged awkwardly, “I was cut first round of rush. Not a single sorority invited me back.” She sniffled.
Coming from an all-girls boarding school, Bea was well acquainted with tears. But the tears she was familiar with were of a different kind. Her classmates at Porter’s aspired to direct indie films, to disrupt industries, to run companies and nonprofits and governments. They measured intelligence by the presence of a proper sense of irony. Their families and thus they, too, valued decorum. Bea’s friends cried over boys, over girls, over expectations, over abstractions of failure, but Bea could not imagine any of her Porter’s classmates weeping so openly over a sorority. Well, maybe a couple of them.
“I’m just devastated,” Early continued. “But I sound selfish; listen to me. Hungry? I have snacks in here.” Early pulled a clear container out from under her bed, which she’d lifted onto stilts for yet more storage space. “Or can I get you a Coke? There’s vending down the hall. I always need one after a flight to settle my stomach.”
“That’s okay, thanks.” Bea felt Early studying her as she unzipped her bag. “Did any boxes come for me?”
“Oh, is that what’s in the study room?” Early gestured for Bea to follow. As they walked down the hall, Early chattered without pause. “I grabbed some brochures for you at student group speed dating this morning. And I saved space for you in the closet, but if you need more, just say the word. I have extra hangers, too.”
The enclave at the end of the hall, the size of a master bathroom, was crammed full of Bea’s things.
“Holy crap,” Bea whispered. She didn’t remember her stuff taking up so much space when the men showed up to her dorm at Porter’s to pack her things and move them. She’d had the opposite reaction when a different set of men had packed up her and her mother’s house to send their belongings off to storage (“in case she wants them someday,” Audrey had insisted). That their entire lives could be consolidated into a few neat stacks of boxes in a handful of hours—it was fast and easy, much faster and easier than it should have been.
“Did you think you had a bigger room?” Early chuckled. “It’s okay. I have extra bed stilts.” She wrapped her arms around a wardrobe box and eased it through the doorway on its corners. “Welcome to college!”
OVER THE NEXT several hours, Early helped Bea organize her things. While they worked, she rattled off a million questions—what other schools had Bea applied to? Where did she get in? What was her SAT score? GPA?
“I got a 1520,” Early said, “which was the highest in my school, but I only had a 3.87 GPA, which put me third in my class, which sucked because I always wanted to beat out Lisa Gardener for salutatorian. But Ross Hughes was always going to be valedictorian because he literally did nothing but study. He got into Yale. Did you get in there?”
Bea answered truthfully: 1550, 3.9, ranked fifth, and, yes, she was admitted to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. No, her mom didn’t still live in Connecticut because her mom was dead. It’s okay. No, she doesn’t have a relationship with her father. Yes, she has other family (Audrey would have been thrilled that she said this). No, she didn’t know anyone who had gotten a full ride to Carter, but she’d gotten a small scholarship as part of the Justice Scholars Program.
“My brother was in that,” Early said. “You got into Princeton? I’d go to Princeton over Carter any second of any day.”
“What’s your major?” Bea asked to change the subject. To Bea’s surprise, Early was a coder. She was going to major in computer science and was considering a double major with math. Her brother was a fourth-year in a fraternity. Early winced as she said the word. Her undereyes were still smudged black.
“Are you going to rush?”
Her mouth full of one of Early’s granola bars, Bea shook her head and furrowed her brow in confusion. Rush was over.
“I meant, if you want to rush a black sorority. Since those rush later.” Early looked nervous that she’d said something wrong. “In January, I think.” Bea already knew the sororities at Carter were essentially segregated by race. The photographs in the brochure had made that apparent.
“I’m not interested in Greek life,” she said.
BY 10 P.M., Bea’s side of the room looked as if it belonged to her, thanks to the tangerine bedspread with the blue trim she’d used throughout high school. Lorn had been shocked that Bea didn’t want a new comforter for college, but Bea liked this one that she and her mom had chosen together in eighth grade.
Hours alone with Early, coupled with the fatigue of travel, had eased her inhibitions, and she suddenly spoke frankly.
“Since you didn’t get into a sorority, does our room have to look like you did?” she asked. Early’s face fell, and Bea felt bad. “Just kidding?” she joked. “I, uh, love paisley.”
“You’re a bad liar,” Early said.
“I’m not lying. I’m kidding.”
“Well, I like paisley.”
“Good. If you like it, fine. I just don’t want some sorority you’re not even in as our third roommate.”
“Ha. Meet our third roommate, Kappa,” Early said. A moment passed before she added, “Fuck Kappa.”
“That’s the spirit!” Bea said.
Soon, as they lay in their beds in the dark, Lorn began to blow up Bea’s phone with texts.
WHERE ARE U ANSWER PLZ SO I KNOW YOU AREN’T DANGLING FROM YOUR CLOSET ROD.
Suicide is not a joke! I’m alive . . . for now.
Oh, good. How is Late, the roomie?
Early, on her bed, was also occupied on her phone.
A lot, Bea typed back. Lorn responded with an emoji storm of exasperated expressions.
“Can I ask you a question?” Early said, dropping her phone. “I hope you won’t be offended.”
Bea knew what was coming. She’d attended private and boarding schools in New York and Massachusetts since she could walk. When she’d started Porter’s in ninth grade, there were only two other students of color in her class—Tina from LA and Sujita from Nepal. She’d been the brownest person in classrooms her whole life and had felt this in small and big ways—being picked last for the math showdown in middle school, being the only one of her friends without a date to the eighth-grade dance, being accused outright of stealing Sloan Peterson’s parka out of her room based on nothing other than the fact that Bea owned the same jacket. Then there was the question Early was about to ask.
“My mom is black, and my dad is white,” Bea said.
“I was going to ask why you don’t want to be in a sorority.”
“Oh,” Bea said. How to answer sensitively? Sororities struck her as something that interested women who lacked real ambition—the kind of people who would grow up to be like the mothers of her friends from high school, including Audrey. She loved Audrey, but she didn’t want to be her. With degrees from Ivy League colleges and law schools and medical schools, they’d abandoned the professional world to run households, which as far as Bea could tell meant bossing around hired staff, doing Pilates, and becoming overly invested in their children’s academic and social lives. Bea half-pitied, half-disdained these women for giving up so casually, for wearing their coveted pedigrees lik
e accessories.
“Just want to have time to focus on school, I guess,” said Bea.
“It’s just really hard to have a social life here if you aren’t in one. I mean my brother says the frat houses are where all the parties are. And they have mixers with the sororities. So if you aren’t in a sorority . . . I guess you can go to parties on frat row, but can you really?” Early said.
“We’ll be okay, I think,” Bea said.
“So what are you in besides your justice classes or whatever?” Early asked, yawning.
“Physics,” Bea said, wondering if every night was going to be like this—interminable chatter after the light was out.
Of Bea’s four fall courses, two were required as part of the Justice Scholars Program, “JSP”: the seminar that Dr. Friedman flew in once a week to teach on Friday mornings, simply called Justice, and the writing course all Carter first-years were required to take, which for her was a JSP-only section: Notions of Justice Around the World. Her other two courses were electives. She’d picked Abnormal Psychology because it sounded interesting—and because she’d knocked out the Psych 101 pre-req as an AP. For her fourth, while perusing the course catalogue she’d come across Writing Crime Fiction, which sounded impossibly fun, and she’d clicked ENROLL.
But then, three days before flying down to North Carolina, she’d gotten nervous. What if she changed her mind back to pursuing medicine? At midnight she swapped the fiction class for physics. She’d done well in physics in high school and liked talking about torques and velocity.
“You know my brother’s class of Justice Scholars was the first?” Early said.
“Oh, yeah?” Bea mumbled.
“Three years ago. No one from his year is going into anything related to law, though. They’re all econ majors now and already being recruited for consulting jobs.”
“Mmm.”
“He says you get disenchanted pretty quickly. Or disabused. I can’t remember what word he used. Basically it convinced them all that criminal justice reform is a waste of time. But, like I told him, it saved him basically a hundred thousand dollars instead of going to law school to find that out, you know?”
Bea was glad it was dark so she could roll her eyes. It was like when you’re excited to go on a trip and someone tells you all the reasons why your destination is shitty.
“Cool,” she said, then yawned loudly.
In seconds, Early was snoring, and the glow of Bea’s phone was the only light in the room. She scrolled through Instagram, then signed into Facebook and typed a name into the search bar: Lester Bertrand. Her secret.
BEA AWOKE EARLY, tied on her sneakers, pulled on her headband, and set out. The sky was overcast as she jogged toward the six-mile trail that encircled campus, which she’d read about on the school’s website, navigating on her phone to her running mix. As she always did when she turned on her music at the start of a run, she thought about the guy who’d inspired her to take up running. Noah had gone to Avon Old Farms (“AOF”), Porter’s brother school. At AOF-Porter’s prom, they’d made out behind the music building, then had hooked up a few more times after that. He was into long-distance running but didn’t believe in listening to music while he ran. He said it got in the way of his focus.
Apart from Noah, Bea’s only other romantic experience was with a guy named Demetri. In East Hampton the summer after sophomore year of high school, she’d met Demetri at the ice cream shop where the high school kids gathered in the afternoon. He was from Massachusetts, a rising senior at a country day school she wasn’t familiar with. He’d known Lorn from summers in the Hamptons and had gotten Bea’s number right away. They’d spent two evenings together, one alone and another with everyone on the beach, before he’d stopped responding to her texts.
Long after Lorn and their other friend, Isabel, had believed Bea to be asleep in her upstairs bedroom of the family beach home, she’d come down for a glass of water and had overheard them talking on the porch.
“He said she’s too clamped up,” Lorn was saying. “He felt like he was with a mannequin: she didn’t react to anything. I told him she is actually hilarious once she’s comfortable around you.”
Bea had wanted to scream at them: My mother just died! I’m doing my best!
He hadn’t known. But lying in bed that night, she thought that even if he had known about her mom, it wouldn’t have been surprising for that to freak him out and turn him off. People acted as if grief were contagious.
I’m totally hilarious once you know me, she reminded herself as she jogged to the beat. In eighth grade, at slumber parties, they would play spin the bottle. Meredith Welcher would make girls go into a closet and kiss, saying you can tell if someone is a lesbian by how warm her lips are. She was very into outing lesbians. Everyone was scared of Meredith, so they complied, until one night, Bea had wound up in the closet with her and pressed a cold jalapeño swiped from the pizza onto Meredith’s lips. Meredith had screamed, and the closet coercion had eased up after that.
Despite being a rule follower, Bea had gotten detention a couple of times in high school for being unable to resist an opportunity to make the class laugh: Once, in Mrs. Wood’s Latin class, she’d spotted the detached, freshly glued, sticky, papier-mâché scrotum sack of Pegasus. The horse was being created collaboratively by the Latin students as a contribution to the school arts fair, but he wasn’t supposed to have balls, of course. Earlier that day Mrs. Wood had ripped off the balls and placed them on her desk, where they now sat within Bea’s reach. As Mrs. Wood turned to offer a lengthy lecture to a student on the other side of the room, her long blonde hair pooled on her desk. Bea had simply given the balls a nudge, and the testicles had wound themselves into the woman’s hair without any further provocation. “What the . . . ?” she said when she felt them dangling. She stood and pulled at them, worsening the tangle, while screaming, “Get the horse genitalia out of my hair!”
Again, it had just been too easy.
Mannequin. Please. She had merely been vacant for a bit. As if she were moving through quicksand. She was a Justice Fellow now!
Three miles into her run, she had to pee. She sped up until she reached the student center, slowing to dab the slick sheen of sweat off her face with her shirt before going inside. As she walked the long corridor in search of a restroom, she recalled from her visit to campus earlier in the year that there was a coffee shop at the far end of the student center. Surely it had a bathroom. She made her way past the mailboxes, past a long row of darkened offices, to the café. Finally, a door with two stick figures on it, locked.
Her phone vibrated.
Want me to wait on you for breakfast? It’ll be Lord of the Flies in there soon, Early texted.
Bea was about to reply that Early should go on ahead when a flyer on the wall caught her eye. C.U.N.T., it read, and in fine print beneath the large letters: CARTER UNIVERSITY’S NIMBLEST TURTLES, THE MOST CELEBRATED IMPROV TEAM IN THE SOUTHEAST! Underneath was a cartoon drawing of a sea turtle with excessively long limbs in Warrior II pose. The flyer announced a performance that evening.
Want to go see the improv group’s show tonight? she wrote to Early.
Ok!!! Early responded as the bathroom door opened and a bleached-blonde woman in a green apron emerged.
“Toilet paper’s out so I’d grab a napkin if I was you,” the woman said.
Isn’t that your job? Bea thought, following her into the café to retrieve one.
THE DOORS OPENED, and a student in a Carter sweatshirt appeared, yelling orders at the sea of milling students in line for the show.
“House is open! Fill every seat! Keep moving! Fill every seat!”
Bea felt as if she were boarding a plane as a hundred-plus people shuffled forward into a space that appeared too small to hold them.
“Once all the seats are taken, make rows on the floor!” the sweatshirted student yelled.
Early and Bea found spots on the ground in front, and Bea pulled in her knees, surprised
by the size of the crowd.
At 7:05, the room sank into darkness, and the chatter quieted. A cheer rose to the familiar bars of Drake:
You used to call me on my cell phone
Late night when you need my love
Then the lights flew back on to deafening cheers as the members of the team—eight guys and one girl—ran out onto the stage.
A chubby fellow with shiny, cherry-red hair stepped forward.
“Welcome to the first C.U.N.T. show of the year!” He paused for whooping and applause. “If this is your first show, raise your hand!” Bea and Early timidly lifted theirs. “Fantastic to see all of you first-years here tonight. For those of you who are new to us, I want to be clear that our name, C.U.N.T., is just that—an acronym. It is not a word. We’re vulgar, but not that vulgar.”
Laughter.
“Quick origin story. . . . In the early days of the group, before it had a name, before we were even an official group, we would meet up on Tuesdays to do improv for fun. One afternoon a group member—someone says his name was Stephen, but this was long before my time, so I don’t have any clue if that’s right—said, “See you next Tuesday!” without realizing that he was using a euphemism for”—he paused and then whispered, “cunt.”
He continued, “From then on, C.U.N.T. was our name. Of course, when parents visit, we are Carter University’s Nimblest Turtles, spelled out. They’re confused, but they aren’t so offended that they withdraw their children from the university, at least as far as we know.”
He explained that the group would be coming up with a performance on the spot, based on a single suggestion from the audience. The show would be improvised from start to finish; nothing had been planned, practiced, or decided in advance. It would begin with a monologue—a true story—told by one of the group members, to give the team more ideas to play with.