by Phoebe North
“I’m sorry,” she said again, though she wasn’t sorry and we both knew it. “I can’t help you.”
I rushed from the art room before the tears could start.
So, I didn’t apply to art school. Mrs. DeGrassio didn’t want to help me. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t crawl my way out of Wiltwyck, didn’t mean I couldn’t find an ally or two anyway. In the end, it was my therapist, of all people, who suggested Hampden to me. Well, not only Hampden. In fact, two days after I cried to her about how I could never go to art school, she came into our session with a whole stack of college brochures to places like St. John’s and Evergreen, programs without grades or classes, a gleam lighting her dark eyes.
“You should find someplace different,” she told me, and I could tell from her energy that she’d been waiting a long time to tell me this. “Some place that can synthesize your unique perspective into something that can be of use to the greater world.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I had no idea what she was talking about, so I pursed my lips, pretending to look uninterested in the brochures as I riffled through them. Then I stopped. There was Hampden, its logo, a coiling griffin, printed on the cover of the brochure. The other colleges featured gaggles of teenagers of every race grinning frenetically at one another, as though they were trying to prove something. Not Hampden. Pictured instead were two women standing in front of a painted mural. An enormous world tree had sprouted on the bricks behind them. There were mermaids swirling in the ether behind their heads. Neither one was smiling. Neither one had anything to prove. They weren’t traditionally pretty—one was thick as a Venus of Willendorf; the other had acne-scarred skin and gauged ears and an eyebrow ring. But it didn’t look like they cared that they weren’t pretty the same way that other girls were pretty. They looked happy to be themselves. Happy to be different.
I touched the glossy paper and tried to chase away the thoughts that were pushing just below the surface of my mind.
Winter Watcher girls.
“What do you know about this school?” I asked, holding the brochure aloft.
I had the forms ready to go. The copies of my transcripts. The letters of recommendation. The application fee, saved from my birthday money. The essay I’d written on Hampden’s motto: Knowledge Is Insufficient. I was ready, except I wasn’t ready, because I needed my parents’ financial information and social security numbers for the financial aid application. And the weeks were ticking by.
All through the holidays, I felt like a hollow shell of myself. The application deadline—January 15—loomed over me as I tried to find a way to raise the issue with my mother and failed, over and over again. At our annual Christmas movie matinee, while Jamie was at his girlfriend’s and Dad and Eli were gone to some church service, and at our dim sum dinner after, I turned myself inside out trying to think of how to tell her, missing and missing my chance. A few days later, she sat next to me on the sofa, the laptop between us, and she told me what to write on my SUNY application. She even dictated an essay to me on the hardships I’d experienced, how I’d missed my brother through his disappearance and celebrated his return. I did what she said because I couldn’t think of a way out of it. I was scared, I think, of how she’d react, and for good reason. Her unhappiness always loomed so much larger than my own.
For years, it had been easier to keep my head down to keep the peace. But now, as I hit send on the application to a school I never wanted to attend, breaking that peace had gained a new kind of urgency. Still, I’d trained myself too well. I’d taught myself that silence was a balm that could soothe any wound. So I kept my tongue tucked into my cheek, and now couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to untuck it.
The first morning of the New Year was bright, the light clean and blue through my window. I rose, like I always did, pausing outside Jamie’s door to listen to his steady breath. It was reassuring that he was still there, and real, too, and not some kind of illusion, even if we hardly ever spoke. I’d just heard a snore catch in his throat when footsteps shifted the floorboards on the stairwell. I drifted toward them, feeling outside myself.
There was Dad, wearing Mom’s robe, halfway down the stairs already when he looked up over his shoulder at me. If this was supposed to be weird, Dad spending the night after the ball drop and champagne and toasts over Jamie’s transfer to the meat department at work and my incipient attendance at the school down the road, he didn’t acknowledge it.
“I was going to make some pancakes,” he said. “Want to give me a hand?”
I hated pancakes, but I just nodded, feeling lost again, empty again. I followed him down the stairs.
My father whistled as he assembled the ingredients. He set them out on the counter one by one. Slowly, I stirred the batter, until all the lumps went smooth. And then I just kept stirring.
“Dad?” I began.
He didn’t eye me nervously like Mom might, didn’t act as though every word was weighty and important. He was too busy dripping oil onto the griddle, watching the steam rise. “Mmm?”
“I . . .” I took a breath, and it caught raggedly in my chest. “I don’t want to go to SUNY next year. There’s another college. Hampden, in Massachusetts . . .”
I trailed off. I waited for my dad to say something, anything. I waited for him to tell me it wasn’t possible. That he couldn’t help me, the way Mrs. DeGrassio hadn’t been able to help me. That I was on my own, like I always was, or worse: that he wanted me to stay right where I was for the rest of my G-d damned life.
Instead, he turned, calmly holding a hand out. I handed him the bowl of batter and watched him stand over the griddle, contemplating the steam. He wasn’t looking at me when he answered, but one eyebrow was lifted, just a smidge.
“Tell me what you need, Annie,” he said. Then he poured the batter down against the hot surface. It sizzled and popped.
“I’ll need your financial info. Mom’s, too. I need you to tell Mom. I need you to convince her that it’s okay for me to—”
“Okay for you to what?”
I turned, bracing myself, half expecting to see my mother standing in the doorway, her mouth a thin line that had almost vanished with disapproval. But it wasn’t Mom at all. It was Jamie, his dark hair tousled. Sleepy. Wearing boxers and a sweatshirt, the same things I always slept in. A shadow of me now, not the other way around.
“For me to leave,” I said softly. “For me to go away to college.”
Jamie stared at me. Blinked. Moved toward the coffeepot, which was noisily percolating. He drank coffee endlessly now, as if he was incapable of staying awake or even upright without it. He poured himself a cup, took a sip. I realized I was holding my spine straight, waiting for something. Part of me wanted him to express disapproval, I think. To beg me to stay. He’d had to fight so hard to get back to me, and now here I was, itching to go anyway.
But he only shrugged.
“Who cares what Mom says? You should go where you want. Wherever that is.”
And then he shrugged again.
I stared at him, his words sinking in. Maybe they stung a little bit, but I couldn’t hold it against him, could I? We weren’t friends anymore. We were barely even housemates. He’d left me once, but now we were both leaving each other, and it was almost a mutual decision, a natural development. The truth was, neither of us had fought for one another in a very long time.
But at least I had Jamie’s support. I told myself that it was something. I told myself that it was enough.
“Thanks, Jamie,” I said.
He nodded stoutly, just as Dad let out a hiss.
“Burned the first one,” he said as he scraped the griddle clean and started over. “The first one is just a practice pancake, anyway.”
He smiled at us. Faintly, my brother and I both smiled back.
After the pancakes that sat like a rock in my stomach, after the coffee and sour orange juice and my older brother drifting off for his weekend work shift and my younger brother h
iding in his room to do homework and talk to his church friends online, Dad dropped the bomb on my mother. I was cleaning the breakfast dishes, scraping each one clean, trying to pretend like I wasn’t listening when I was actually, most definitely listening.
“She doesn’t want to live at home,” my dad was telling her. “She wants to go away to school. She found one she likes, Hampden. Kit Hendricks said—”
“Oh, she found one she ‘likes,’” my mom said, circling the word likes with air quotes, rolling her eyes. “Even if she applies, she might not get in. What if she doesn’t? Then what?”
“What do you mean, ‘then what’? Then she’ll go to SUNY, or to somewhere else. We can have her apply to safety schools. Other SUNYs, schools in the city. It’s not an issue. Anyway, her grades are amazing.”
My stomach felt twisted in two ways around the greasy batter and butter and syrup. For one thing, it felt good to have one of my parents acknowledge that I’d done well in school. “Gifted” like my brother had been or not, all those years of keeping my head down and working hard had paid off. Sure, my grades had slipped a little in the last year or two. But my GPA was still solid, and in all honors classes. Not that grades were supposed to matter when it came to a school like Hampden.
But the other feeling was heavier, worse. Mom didn’t think I could do it, didn’t think I should. She was mocking me and my choices. Maybe if I were Jamie, she’d take what I wanted seriously. Whether it was a haircut or a bicycle or a job or a girlfriend, what Jamie did mattered. We discussed his choices as a family, mulling over them together. She just wasn’t invested in me in the same way. Never had been. Never would be.
“She needs to stay here,” she shot back. “We need to give Jamie stability. After everything he’s been through—”
“You can’t seriously expect our other children to stay frozen in time, Shira. She’s about to be an adult. She needs to have a life outside Wiltwyck. Outside—”
“Don’t say it, Marc.”
But my dad said it anyway, and I’d love him forever for it.
“You—we—all need to let her have a life outside of Jamie.”
Silence. I looked at both of them through the kitchen doorway. My dad’s expression was flat. Firm. Unreadable. But not Mom’s. It was like something was collapsing inside her. And even though I was glad that he’d said it, I kind of wanted him to take it back. I’d never wanted to hurt my mom. All this time, through Jamie’s reappearance and disappearance, through his troubled adolescence, through the golden days of his youth, I’d only ever wanted to make her happy. But somehow, through time that stretched back and back and back, it seemed I never could.
“I don’t have to go anywhere,” I said softly, putting the last plate, finally, in the dishwasher. “I’ll stay here. I’ll go to SUNY.”
“Good,” my mom said. And when Dad didn’t answer, she added: “See?”
But my dad shook his head. “It’s not a question, Shira. She’s applying.”
And then he looked at me.
“Got that, kiddo?”
I nodded. Quickly, gratefully, before I could ruin it all for myself.
“Got it,” I said.
40
Jamie had to work the day my family drove me through the mountains and the woodlands of western Massachusetts. He gave me a tight, wordless hug in the morning and told me we’d talk soon, though I knew it was a lie. We never talked, not really, nothing beyond pass the peas and I think Dad slept over last night again. What would we have to say to one another over the phone or in emails or texts? Nothing. But I appreciated the hug. Jamie didn’t like touching people. It meant something that he was still willing to touch and be touched by me.
In his place, Mom, Dad, and Elijah drove me and all of my belongings to Hampden. The freshman dorm where I’d be living was in an ancient Victorian building that smelled of furniture polish, dust, and ramen soup. The extra-long twin bed that would be mine was covered in crinkly plastic.
“Cool,” said Elijah, sitting on it, making the bedsprings creak. “Easy to clean if you puke. Or pee yourself, I guess.”
“Eli,” Dad warned, but my little brother only grinned.
My roommate was a hippie girl from Boston named Sophie. We got dinner in the dining hall that night, her family, mine, all of us. Her parents were unbearably stodgy, even worse than Dad. But Sophie had white-girl dreads and a nose piercing and, every time she spoke, my mom looked like she was holding back laughter.
“Yes, I’m sure studying abroad in India would be very enlightening,” Mom said, her mouth quirking wryly. Sophie didn’t notice the sarcasm, just kept talking about all the places she and her boyfriend planned to backpack that spring break. Her own parents just looked tired. Dad looked tired, too.
“Well,” he said, sliding his slice of oversweetened pie away. “I think it’s time we hit the road.”
I walked them to their car, parked in a lot on the far end of campus. I hugged them goodbye, felt nothing. There were woods shouldering the highway, but I couldn’t see anything in them. No potential. No magic. Not yet. When I walked back to the dorm, I kept my hands tucked into my pockets and my head down. It was strange to be so empty inside. I wasn’t even afraid. Only hollow.
When I got back to the dorm, Sophie’s parents were gone. She was unpacking a giant flat of bottled waters, trying to wedge as many as she could into her minifridge.
“Your parents seem sweet,” she said. “You can tell they really love one another. Not like my parents, not since the divorce. They can hardly stand to be in the same room anymore.”
“Actually, mine are separated,” I said. I put my suitcase on my bed and started to unpack my clothes.
Sophie paused, looked at me with eyes like tepid water. “Oh,” she said. “Is that hard for you?”
I could hear the unspoken implication: her parents’ divorce had been hard for her. And she wanted to talk to me about it. She wanted to connect. She wanted us to be friends. And we were supposed to be, right? Roommates. It was meant to mean something. That’s why I’d come here. To connect with people. To feel full of hope, alive again.
But I didn’t know how to tell her the whole truth, the truth that we hadn’t even touched on in our emails. I didn’t know how to tell her about Jamie.
I bit my lip. “No,” I said. “It’s fine. They’re probably going to get back together, but I don’t care either way. Can I have a water?”
Sophie looked at me for a moment, her mouth open and soft. Then she handed me a bottle. “Sure,” she said, and she turned away from me and blasted the music on her laptop. I’d said the wrong thing. I knew I had, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
That night, I lay in my narrow bed staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. Sophie was still awake; I could tell from the way the plastic under her new sheets crinkled and creaked as she tossed and turned. I didn’t toss and turn—I didn’t even move. I kept trying to figure out how to tell her about my brother. Kept thinking about Jamie, too. I thought I would have escaped this feeling by crossing state lines and starting a new life. But I hadn’t. The window AC unit that Sophie’s parents had bought her from the Target in Hadley kept rattling in the frame. Outside, there was some forest, dark and lovely and deep. But it wasn’t my forest, my Gumlea. And there were boys here, but none of them mine.
I thought I would have escaped that feeling by going away for school, but somehow, I’d just brought it with me. We were still alone together, no matter how many miles of highway stretched out between us.
It was like there was an invisible silver thread knotted through my stomach and elsewhere, as my brother slept, into his, too.
I turned over and forced myself to sleep.
41
There were no classes at Hampden. Instead, our coursework was composed of a hodgepodge of private tutorials and open workshops. That first semester, I discussed Descartes with a philosophy professor, read about the Milgram experiment with a rogue sociologist, and argued about Japanese cinema
with a woman who I later learned had run the last video store in town for the past fifteen years. Because I didn’t know how to talk to her otherwise, I picked up Sophie’s regular pot habit, and often spent my nights in a haze getting lost around campus—or else shoveling food into my face in the dining hall, where they had every kind of cereal you could imagine, including the ones Mom had refused to buy me when I was a kid. I went to parties, but mostly stayed on the outside of things, watching. I felt like I was waiting for something, a slow doom building in my stomach, my skin goose pimply as I walked home at night across campus. But I wasn’t sure what.
My professors didn’t require us to write papers, and though some gave us the option, I never took them up on it. In my classes, my pen was always moving—but my notes never went anywhere. I wasn’t sure how to get my thoughts to coalesce into anything meaningful. After all, I wasn’t a writer. That had always been Jamie. My notebooks were full of delicious words. Physical determinism. Leibniz. The best of all possible worlds. Obedience. Pareidolia. Pattern recognition. And those words were joined by drawings: Skeletons. Bones. Animals. Woods. A knife, once or twice, though I quickly erased it. It all hinted at meaning but “meaning” still felt like it was beyond me. So many ideas, echoing inside my hollow skull.
Sophie, meanwhile, didn’t bother with her tutorials. She had her boyfriend over nearly every night, and the room always stank of their cigarettes when I got back to it, even though she sprayed a pungent room spray over it to try to cover their smell.
“I just haven’t found my narrative yet” was something she was fond of saying, while she tossed her dreadlocks over one shoulder and took another bong hit. Anywhere else, that comment would have been absurd. But we were all concerned about our narrative at Hampden. In our final year, our disparate studies were to culminate in a project that was supposed to encapsulate our experiences there. It seemed incomprehensible to me. I was too scattered. There was no common thread in my life—not one I was willing to pull at, at least.