I typed back, I recognize that but I DO miss you, and she responded immediately, I miss you too. is it mean to say I wish you were hungover so you could sympathize with me?
not mean, I said, smiling, and she didn’t respond from there. I put my phone back in my pocket, because Claire was talking.
“So, from left to right, you’ve got dorms, classrooms, cafeteria, arts, admin, library, gym.” She pointed at each building in turn. “Those first four you already know. Except I should tell you that every third Thursday of the month, dinner is Italian Night, and it is great. Most of the food is only fine, but Italian Night is the absolute best. They have these amazing meatballs, I don’t know what they put in them—”
“I probably won’t be around for dinners,” I reminded her.
“Oh, true. Well, I’ll get you a guest pass for Italian Night sometime, because you can’t miss it. Anyway, that’s all for the cafeteria.”
“Their salad bar is pretty good,” Kitty piped up.
Claire gave her a pitying glance. “No salad bar is good. Alas.”
Kitty looked somewhere between annoyed and amused, but Claire didn’t notice. We were on to the next building, cutting across the grass toward the far right side of campus. To our left were Oma’s eight Garden Club plots, neatly arranged in two rows of four, empty tomato trellises standing up like scarecrows.
“You’ve seen the arts building already, right?” Claire asked.
“Yeah, for photography class.”
“I spend a lot of time in the practice rooms there,” she said, nodding. “The pianos are shitty, but so it goes. Sometimes I get to practice with the baby grand in the band room, if they leave it unlocked. Anyway, next is admin building, and that holds no interest for us. The library, however, is wonderful.”
Kitty swiped her card, and we entered the library.
Outside had been quiet, but inside was quieter. Rows of books, interrupted by long wooden tables, stretched the length of the enormous room. There was a second floor, too, open in the middle with an ornate wooden balcony.
“It’s open from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. every day,” Claire said, a little less softly than I thought appropriate. “The best place to study. Or to be alone.” Based on what little I knew of Claire, I was surprised that she ever wanted to be alone, but she seemed sincere. After waiting a minute to let me look around in silence, she cocked her head toward the door.
“They have a really good fiction selection, too,” Kitty added as we stepped outside and headed toward the gym. “Most of the time, if you want them to order a book, they’ll get it. Which is nice, because the local library is too far to walk.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t worried about fiction. “I have a lot of books on my list already,” I told Kitty. “My best friend gave me a whole bunch to read while I’m up here.” She had sent me with a tote bag full of novels and poetry and instructions on which to read first. They were lined up on my windowsill in priority order, a little ribbon of color that reminded me of home.
“This is Jess?”
“Yeah.”
“I like her,” Kitty said.
“Me too.” I couldn’t help smiling.
We moved on. The gym was big and flat and opened onto an outdoor basketball court and a beach volleyball court, both currently deserted. Concrete stairs sloped down the hill toward the water, and on the beach, there were a few smaller buildings and hutches.
“For the boats,” Kitty said. “Kayaks and canoes. It’s way too cold now, but when it’s warmer, they’ll set them out during the day.”
“I promise I’ll take you out in one before the end of the year,” Claire said. “It’s great. Now, I wanted to show you the gym because it’s part of the tour, but there is nothing exciting about it. To me, at least. Especially since phys ed isn’t required here after tenth grade, thank God.”
Kitty said, “I know you said you don’t like sports, but do you run or anything?”
I shook my head. “Never. The only consistent exercise I ever got was when I played tennis for a few summers when I was a kid. But I was terrible. I think my parents wanted me to stick with it, but…”
“For some of us, it’s not meant to be,” Claire finished.
“Yeah. No one in my family is athletic. My younger siblings both play basketball, but it’s the one thing they’re not amazing at.”
“How old?” Kitty asked.
“Twelve. They’re twins.”
“Wow,” Claire said, raising her eyebrows, but I didn’t volunteer any more. I felt a lump in my throat. I was missing most of basketball season for both of them. At the last game in December, Candace’s team had won, and I had rarely seen her so happy, jumping around with her teammates, even though she hadn’t played more than a few minutes.
“You like sports, right?” I asked Kitty, partly to change the subject and partly because I really wanted to know.
But she shook her head. “Not team sports. Just running.”
“Why? What about it appeals to you?”
Kitty didn’t answer immediately. Claire led us away from the gym, toward the far edge of campus. After a minute of walking, Kitty spoke up. “A lot of things, I guess. Runner’s high is real. You get into a kind of trance after a few miles that I love. And I like that it’s entirely self-contained. Only you, nothing else. Nobody else. I don’t really like team sports because they require a whole bunch of people to work as—”
“A team?” I suggested.
Claire laughed, and Kitty’s thoughtful expression split into a smile as well. “Yeah. But with running, I get to just go out and do it. As many miles as I want to go, as fast or as slow as I need that day. There’s no one relying on me and nobody to compete with me. I can try to beat my own times for a mile or a 5K or a half-marathon, but no one else is going to care.”
“I care,” Claire said with gentle indignation.
I saw a flicker of frustration cross Kitty’s face, but Claire was looking ahead, and she couldn’t have caught it.
“I know, but that’s not what I meant,” Kitty said. “You don’t get a lot in this world that is one hundred percent your own, under your own rules. With my running, I get to control it. Completely. That’s what I love the most.”
Quiet overtook us again. The mood had changed with Kitty’s unexpected sincerity, but she did not apologize for it, nor did Claire try to soften the impact.
This right here, as the breeze picked up and we all shivered deeper into our coats, was the moment I felt our friendship snap into place, like a dissonant note that had finally caught the right frequency. I had felt that sensation almost instantly with Jess, when she accepted my gift of a pretzel on the side of the soccer field; not before or since had I resonated with anyone in the same way. This was not the same, not exactly. I had only known them a few days, after all, and I did not have that soul certainty I’d felt with Jess—that we were linked for good, no matter what. But I knew it then as we walked down to the river in silence: This was right. We would be friends.
* * *
We walked through the classroom building before Kitty and Claire showed me their dorms, the part of the school I had been most curious about. They turned out to be both more and less exciting than I had hoped. We visited Kitty’s dorm, East House, first. The first floor had a movie room, a shared kitchen, and a study space, all of which were full of shabby furniture and bulletin boards papered over with flyers. After having signed out to go to Harold’s, Kitty signed in with the residential supervisor, Rebecca, and I introduced myself as Marie Nolan’s granddaughter.
“Good to have you here,” Rebecca said, expressionless.
“Rebecca may be a cyborg,” Claire whispered to me as we walked upstairs. “It’s extremely hard to tell.”
On the fourth floor, Kitty’s bedroom was long and narrow. Her roommate, Penny, had covered her half of the room in ph
otos and posters, but Kitty’s side was sparse, a few items taped to the wall over a navy-blue bedspread. A photo of her and Claire laughing together in front of the river, another photo of her near some palm trees with a man and a woman I assumed were her parents, and a poster for a music festival in a Florida town I had never heard of. Her window looked out onto the road. “Disappointing,” she said. “Last year, I got to see the river.”
“I have a river view,” Claire noted, “which is why we spend most of our time in my room.”
“That, and Penny is not a fan of visitors.”
“Oh yeah, and Penny is the worst.”
“She is not the worst,” Kitty protested. “She just likes her space.”
“The worst,” Claire whispered as we left the room.
In West House, Claire’s dorm, the layout and common rooms were almost exactly the same, though the kitchens were painted different colors and the couches were a little shabbier. When Claire signed in, the residential supervisor was slightly nicer to me. But the biggest difference became evident when we got up to Claire’s room. She unlocked and opened the door with a grand gesture, and as we stepped in—
“Wow,” I breathed.
“I know,” she said.
“What I love most about you, Claire, is your humility,” Kitty said, but I was too distracted by the room in front of me to laugh at her joke.
Claire had transformed the room completely. It didn’t look like a dorm. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen, except maybe pictures in magazines. An enormous number of string lights looped in Starry Night whorls up the walls and toward the high ceiling. The ceiling itself had been papered with dark-blue tissue paper and dotted with glow-in-the-dark paint, so it looked like dark clouds with light shining through. She had replaced the gray plastic window blinds with floaty curtains that glittered in the light. I stepped a little closer—gold and silver threads were woven through them here and there, like the sparkles little girls sometimes got in their hair.
There were plenty of personal touches, but they, too, were curated. Claire had pinned photos, postcards, and various other paper goods to the walls between the string lights, all in black and white. A shelf between the two closets was packed full of books and notebooks, sorted by color. School supplies and makeup each had their own color-coordinated shelves on Claire’s desk, and her bedspread matched the curtains perfectly.
Her roommate’s side of the room was not quite as flawless. Her desk shelves were much less organized, and her duvet was a brighter blue than Claire’s. But her books were clearly blended with Claire’s in the color-sorted bookshelf, because I didn’t see books anywhere else. And all the photographs on her wall were also in black and white.
“Was this all your doing?” I asked Claire after doing a full rotation.
“Yep. It took the whole summer to plan. And a week to execute once I was here.”
“How did you get your roommate to go along with it?”
“She was actually excited,” Claire said, smoothing her bedspread. “I pitched it to her before school started this year—I had drawings and fabric samples and everything—and I didn’t think she was going to go for it.”
“It is way over the top,” Kitty said. “Claire showed me before she sent the email, and I thought Fiona would reject it for sure.”
“This was before we knew Fiona,” Claire added. “Kitty had an English class with her sophomore year and that was it.”
“But she liked it,” said Kitty, shrugging.
“She loved it. She said I could do whatever I wanted. Tell her what I needed from her, and as long as it wasn’t expensive, she’d handle it. Fiona is…” Claire paused and looked at the photos on her roommate’s wall. All of them were black-and-white snapshots of a thin, pretty girl posing with other thin, pretty girls.
“Fiona is the kind of person who would like to do something like this but would never come up with it herself,” Kitty finished, and Claire nodded.
“She thinks I’m bohemian,” Claire said, waggling her fingers around her head.
I laughed. “Aren’t you?”
“I guess,” she said, laughing too. “I don’t even know what that means. I just like making a space that feels like me. It’s home for most of the year, you know? Might as well make it right.”
“You have to show us your room at Ms. Nolan’s place now,” Kitty pointed out.
I looked around again, admiring. I agreed with Claire’s approach but had never been able to achieve the same effect. Nor had I ever had a model like this to work from. The twins had shared a room until my parents finally gave up on the guest bedroom last year, and the only décor in their shared space had been their certificates and medals hung up on the wall. Jess’s bedroom, meanwhile, was pure chaos, mess exploding from every drawer, with random photos pinned to the walls for a week or a month before being replaced when she grew tired of them.
My room at home had always been somewhere in between. I was tidier than Jess—it was hard not to be—but never quite as organized as the twins. And I had never succeeded at making my space feel like myself. When I hung up photos, they always seemed unbalanced. There was too much plain wall or, in some parts, too little. Now, here at Oma’s, I had another opportunity and exactly zero ideas.
I sighed. “You will be disappointed. I did not have a cohesive decorating plan when I moved here. Or a plan of any kind. Not even one single fabric sample.”
“Okay, I do want to see your room because I think I can probably help, but is it bad if I admit I mostly want to see where Ms. Nolan lives?” Claire hopped up to sit on her bed, and Kitty followed. I took the desk chair, which rocked perilously as I leaned back.
“It’s not that interesting.”
“I refuse to believe that. Seeing where teachers live is always interesting.”
“Well, I’m sure she’d love to have you. Actually…” I checked my phone. Between our long lunch and our wandering tour, it was past four. “She wanted me to be home for dinner, and I’ve got a ton of work to do. I’m really behind in Spanish.”
“You’re not alone,” Kitty groaned.
“I told you to switch to French. Mademoiselle Schumaker never even gives us homework. For my final last year, I did a presentation on croissants. Got to eat a ton of ’em.”
“But I like Spanish. I’m just not good at it.”
“Do you know where the croissant originated?”
“France?”
“Wrong. Austria.”
“How is that relevant?”
“A question that Mademoiselle Schumaker never asked.”
“So I am gonna head home,” I interrupted, “but I will make sure she knows you want an invitation to dinner for the future.”
“She does not have to invite us to dinner,” Kitty said.
“She does,” Claire said, “but be cool about it.”
Outside, the sun was setting and the air was chilling again, and I wrapped my coat around me tightly as I made my way back to the condo. Partway there, I saw the shadow of a tree on the side of a building, and I almost raised my camera before remembering that I had used up my entire roll of film. I framed the image in my phone instead. It didn’t look quite as good through the phone lens, for reasons I could not figure out. But I tapped anyway and sent the picture with a black-and-white filter to Sam, whose number I had received in a flurry of passed-around phones at brunch. I’m coming for your photography awards, I said. He responded when I was getting off the elevator on the fifth floor: my nonexistent trophies will tremble in their nonexistent case.
I walked in to an excited greeting from Eleanor Roosevelt. Oma was slicing eggplant and listening to classical music.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Great. Brunch was excellent. And Kitty and Claire gave me a tour of the school.”
“I offered to give you a to
ur,” Oma said, sounding slightly indignant.
“Yeah, but you can’t really do it from a student’s perspective, right?” She rolled her eyes, and I knew it was fine. “How was your day? What did you do?”
“Oh, this and that. A little cleaning and some reading. Took Ellie for a walk. Had lunch with Nadine.” Nadine lived on the third floor and was, as far as I could tell, Oma’s closest friend. She had come up for dinner one of the nights my family was here, a five-foot-nothing widow with long white hair, and had asked nonstop questions of me, Candace, and Bryan. She was not unkind, but she was loud, and I was glad that Oma had chosen lunch with her instead of inviting her to our meal tonight.
“That sounds nice,” I said. I started to go to my room, then doubled back, remembering I was supposed to be polite. “Do you need any help with dinner? It’s early for dinner, right?”
“Yes, I’m just getting ahead, and then I’m going to take a bath before putting this in the oven. I might ask you to come cut up vegetables for a salad in a few hours. But I’m fine for now.”
I closed the door of my room and sat on my bed, doing Spanish homework. It was a little difficult to spread out my textbooks and worksheets among the blankets. But I was thinking about Claire and the space she had made for herself, and my bed was the only place that really felt like mine. After a week of living here, it finally smelled like my bed at home, and it was pressed right against the windowsill with Rosemary and my books from Jess. I didn’t have a lot of photos like Claire, but I did have one, of me and Jess grinning at the camera by the pool last summer, and it comforted me to look at our smiling faces together.
I had only gotten through half my homework when Jess texted me: call??
I called her immediately; she picked up on the second ring.
“You’re fast,” she said, laughing. “Hello, my love.” Her voice—the richness, the humor—made me homesick all over again.
“How are you? Are you feeling better since this morning?” I asked.
“Oh, totally. I’m good, thanks to coffee and pancakes. Saw a matinee with Patrick. Now I’m doing homework. You? I assume your day was another dismal experience in the far north?”
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