Wow, that image got really harrowing, really fast.
Anyway, I should probably finish—or start—unpacking. Daddy didn’t really stick around after helping me get all my stuff into the cabin. We hugged a little, he told me he loved me, and then he was just … gone. I felt superlight and had no idea where to put myself, so I sat down and wrote to you.
Can you tell me about Harvard, please? I’m dying to know whether your roommate is really as mousy (in a good way!!) as she seemed online.
XOXO,
Flora
India Katz-Rosen
1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C
New York, NY 10028
August 30
Dear India,
Do you remember those macarons we used to get from the Seventy-fourth Street Maison Kayser?
Well, I’ve been having dreams about them.
They fall somewhere between Casablanca and that old French movie that Madame Leflore had to turn off because of all the boobs.
I’d definitely rather make out with a macaron than with that old French guy with the weird mole on his face.
You might be wondering why I’m fantasizing about macarons. I can answer that in one word: quinoa. Want another? Kale.
It’s not that I have anything against quinoa. Or kale, for that matter. You know that I enjoyed a spring quinoa salad in the Bowen cafeteria as much as any other girl. And I can’t even count the number of times I’ve opted to add kale into a smoothie at Juice Gen. But it’s gotten to the point—and I know it’s only been two days, and I should be grateful that we have food to eat, blah, blah, blah—that if I am forced to eat either of these things one more time, I might just lose it, and we both know that my losing it is not something anybody wants to see.
I’ll stop talking about food now so you don’t put this letter down and watch a video tutorial on doing milkmaid braids, or something, as I know you are wont to do when you’re bored.
(I promise I won’t tell anyone if you get a prescription for some Adderall. You can reach Dr. Modarressi at 212.547.8923. He got Cora a Xanax prescription when that thing with her dad happened—has that blown over yet, by the way?—and he’s superconfidential. Call him, India.)
Oh my God. I just remembered those thin little pizzas we used to get at Sal’s on Friday afternoons. Please tell our cute Italian waiter that I miss him. Maybe make it sound like I had some sort of romantic mental breakdown, à la Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean Loomis in Splendor in the Grass, instead of the truth, which is decidedly less glamorous.
So anyway, after Daddy dropped me off at Quare like a sack of moldy carrots and then drove off into the sunrise, I was left with two choices: to meet my new classmates or to unpack my stuff.
Obviously, I chose the latter—not because I didn’t want to meet new people (okay, if I’m being perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to meet new people), but because I had to do SOMETHING to make the crapshack I’m living in more palatable.
Honestly, Inds, you wouldn’t believe what it looks like in here. You would be back in your mom’s car the minute you peeked your little blond head inside. When I tell you it’s rustic, I mean it’s rustic—but not in the posh, house-in-the-mountains-of-Colorado way. It’s rustic in the shack-in-godforsaken-upstate-New-York-hippie-school kind of way. Not cute.
My pile of bags alone took up most of the floor space. I felt a bit sheepish about having brought so much stuff. It took me and Daddy about twelve trips to retrieve all the little odds and ends I brought. But seriously, like I was going to leave my collection of scents at home? I know it weighs about three hundred pounds, but I swore on the day that we left New York that I would not let myself go, and I stand by that promise. There was this one small suitcase lying on the other bed—my roommate’s, I assumed—but there was no further trace of her.
By the way, I’ve decided to refer to the cabins exclusively as “hovels” from now on. Technically they’re “love shacks,” for the purpose of “community building” and “honest and judgment-free expression,” but really they’re hovels. We’re talking creaky wooden floors, cobwebby corners, and mildewed mattresses. I opened all the windows to get a cross breeze going, but somehow that just made it worse, maybe because I’m downwind from the communal bathrooms.
But I mobilized quickly. A lone tapestry, probably left by some druggy kid in the seventies, hung from the ceiling when I got there, but I quickly took it down and repurposed it as a dust rag. (And thank God, because otherwise I would have had to untie my silk head scarf—and use that instead.)
Oh, and there was also a squashed beanbag chair, which I imagined reeked of urine—I held my nose as I tossed it unceremoniously out the door, so I didn’t actually smell it—perched in the corner like a socially awkward party guest. I cleaned my entire living space with the cleaning supplies I’d brought from home before unpacking a single T-shirt. I replaced my head scarf with a Rosie the Riveter–style bandanna to get down to the (very complicated, as you know) business of unpacking. But I got it done, and now—
Merde. The dinner bell just rang. I’ll write soon!
Love forever,
Flora
Transcript of a voicemail recording, August 31, 4:21 p.m.
Hello. You’ve reached Flora Goldwasser. I regret that I’m not able to take your call right now, but if you leave a message at the tone, I’d be happy to get back to you as soon as I can.
Flora, what the fuck? I just got your letter about Elijah not coming to Quare. Way to not tell me about that until you’re at that godforsaken place. Why are you letting him get away with this? He completely bailed, and you’re, like, immune to any criticism of him. I guess I just don’t get it. Fuck. I have to go to a first-year meeting. God damn it. Call me back.
Journal entry, night of August 31
I haven’t even been able to write about my first day because I’ve been so overloaded with orientation activities. I still can’t believe Elijah isn’t here. I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality, and it’s all I can do to get up every morning (okay, two mornings so far) and put a small smile on my face.
The first person I met here on my first day was Dean, my mentor, who’s a second-year. We drove right up to the office, a little gray house, and she was inside, waiting for me with her arms crossed against her chest.
Dean’s look is slightly mesmerizing, and as soon as I saw her, I swallowed hard, because she’s clearly cool, which I have to say really threw me off. Her hair is straight and black and frames her face perfectly, and her solid line of bangs has zero splits or uneven pieces. And she’s got these thick black glasses that are way too big for her face, but they make her look awesome, just like Jenna Lyons. She wore high-waisted jean shorts, a stained white T-shirt, and blocky tennis shoes that made her look like a camp counselor from the early 1990s.
Dean barked out to Daddy that she’d point us in the direction of the first-year cabins and then meet us there. We got back in the car, and she jogged along behind us. When we pulled up to the hovel, she was panting slightly.
It was still around the same time I used to get on the subway to go to Bowen in the morning. I hadn’t eaten breakfast before leaving because I was too nervous, so finally, perched on the edge of the mildewed mattress that would become my bed after Daddy drove off, I dug around for a Luna bar in my backpack. Dean stood there watching me, clearly judging my (environmentally friendly!) cleaning supplies; she had refused my insistences that I was fine by myself. I offered her a chunk of the Luna bar, but she just shook her head. Her hair didn’t move one inch.
“I’m off sugar,” she said.
Dean somewhat grimly offered to stick around and help me unpack, but I politely declined, because a) I needed to be alone to absorb the fact that Daddy had really left me here to die, and b) I didn’t particularly want her riffling through my clothes. (I’m such a bitch, I know, but my clothes are the only things I have from my old life. They will not be corrupted by the Quares.)
I felt deflated, but quickly g
ot to work. I was suddenly determined to make this work, if only aesthetically.
A few minutes after Dean left, I was hanging all my dresses on the (tiny, tiny, tiny) hanging bar that I handily installed by dismantling my bamboo lamp and positioning the reed between the two beds (they couldn’t have actually expected me to FOLD my dresses, could they?). I looked out the window to make sure my new roommate wasn’t coming up the path. She wasn’t, thankfully.
Instead I could just make out in the distance someone in another cabin walking out onto her porch: a girl with a mane of coarse yellow hair. That hovel’s exterior was strewn with all the trappings of whom I took to be its freakish owner: assorted miniature flags dotting the surrounding lawn, Mason jars of coffee on the ledge of the porch, and broken wind chimes littering the molding steps.
I got this impulse to grab those vintage binoculars I got in SoHo (the really nice ones with the faux leather strap) and watch her, this new person.
And here’s what happened—I’m almost too grossed out to write this: the girl suddenly scampered down the porch steps, pulled down her cords and granny panties, squatted in the grass, and released a waterfall of neon-yellow urine onto the grass. In plain sight! In the light of day! The communal, gender-neutral bathroom was forty paces away!
But when I quickly diverted my binoculars’ gaze out of sheer disgust, I saw something even more horrifying. Right above where she squatted was a clothesline with about four white cloths dangling from it, each held up by two clothespins. I squinted harder, and I could make out red and brown splotches staining the cloths.
She’d hung up what I can only assume are the cloth-diaper version of maxi pads on a clothesline outside her cabin.
I didn’t blink for about forty minutes after that. After I had recovered from the incident—which took a quick listen to the meditation app on my iPhone and copious lavender spray—I went back to unpacking. I was quite proud of myself, actually: once I had hung up some old movie posters, put my sheets and comforter on the bed, and lined up all my shoes by the doorway, it didn’t look half bad. Still a hovel, of course, but MY hovel.
Ugh, it’s time for a campfire. We have to tell our life stories and roast bananas or something. I feel like I’m radiating with loneliness, sometimes, as though people can feel it coming off me like invisible microwaves.
I can’t believe I’ll have to wait until December (if Elijah even comes then) to see him. I can’t do this I can’t do this I can do this I can do this.
Program for independent fashion show in Brooklyn, September 1
Two · lips
Fashion show & exhibit by six up-and-coming New York designers September 1, 8–10 p.m.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The styles in today’s show are in homage to Miss Tulip, the star of the award-winning blog that rocked the alternative fashion world. Our six young designers hail from all five boroughs of New York City and took inspiration from various blog posts over the course of the past year.
ABOUT THE DESIGNERS
Keisha Miller, an alumna of Brooklyn Heights’s Parker School, was born and raised in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and began studying drama at Yale University in the fall.
Lanier Haim hails from Forest Hills, Queens, where she’s a senior at Forest Hills High School. She’s been taking weekend classes at Parsons since sixth grade.
Joshua Lu, a native of Staten Island, is entering his second year at Williams College. In addition to designing, he enjoys playing water polo.
Frank LeFront emigrated from Haiti to the north Bronx when he was six. All of the fabrics in his collection, Spring into, are from his last trip to Port-au-Prince. LeFront attends Columbia University.
Bea Martinez grew up on the Upper West Side and attended the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. She entered Vassar College this fall.
Margot Wade-Horowitz is a downtown girl through and through: in addition to growing up in the East Village, she now attends NYU, where she’s a sophomore.
ABOUT THE LOOKS
Some enchanted evening: Looks that will keep shining even after the clock strikes midnight.
Jog your memory: Miss Tulip gets her workout on.
Blue: A little winter never hurt anyone’s style.
Spring into: Florals, naturally. “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”
Out to lunch: Lunching with friends and looking good.
Old school: It’s no secret that school comes first for Miss Tulip. Watch her rock ten looks, from fifties-inspired pantsuits to plaid skirts.
All proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center, dedicated to helping LGBT homeless youth.
Lael Goldwasser
Harvard College
2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center
Cambridge, MA 02138
September 1
Lael,
I need to tell you more about arrival day! I was putting the finishing touches on the walls (a bulletin board, a simple vision board, and my entire 1940s movie poster collection—I hoped my roommate didn’t have any grand plans for the space, because I was definitely monopolizing it at this point) when the door burst open. I froze with my thumbtacks in my hand as though I were in the middle of committing a misdemeanor.
It was Dean, my mentor, unsmiling as ever.
“YOU’VE BEEN SUMMONED, FLORA GOLDWASSER!” she boomed after stepping inside my newly cleaned hovel. Her announcement was so loud that I jumped about four feet in the air.
Okay, so you know me. I can’t say no to people, especially not to people I’ve just met, so I followed her out of my cabin. She walked so fast that I was practically jogging to keep up with her. I followed her across a short footbridge stretching over a babbling brook lined with tall grass, and across the enormous soccer field (more of a huge lawn with two soccer goals). The blue-green mountains spread out in the vast beyond almost made me gasp, but it might have just been that I was out of breath trying to keep up with Dean.
The dining hall is huge and oddly shaped, with weird parts jutting out of it where it’s clearly been expanded as the years have gone on. Dean pushed me directly inside the kitchen part of the dining hall, a conspicuous side entrance, before I could examine anything more thoroughly. There she introduced me to a woman named Pearl, who was peeling a mountain of potatoes at a wooden table, letting the skins fall to the floor. I still didn’t know what I had been “summoned” for, but I didn’t mind Pearl, because her face reminded me of a homesteader or a pioneer—one of those plain potato faces you can just see in the 1860s. It helped that her hair was in two long straw-colored braids, I suppose. Anyway, Pearl said that she teaches women’s literature this semester and that she’s my academic adviser.
Yes, I have both a mentor and an adviser. I meet with each of them every other week.
It soon became clear that I had been summoned to help Pearl peel the potatoes. So I did, with as much grace as I could muster, given the circumstances. You’d be proud of me: I donned one of the hideous purple aprons and pretended to be excited to meet my fellow students. I even said, and I quote, “Quare seems like a really nurturing place!”
We were peeling potatoes and making small talk, and Dean was banging around on the stove, making what she described as “the tangiest, most mouth-tastic miso soup in human history” when a commotion erupted from the pantry in the back of the kitchen. It sounded like two rain sticks coming down together. Pearl got this worried look on her face and rushed into the pantry, and when she came back out, she was carrying a four- or five-year-old girl with long blond braids just like Pearl’s, and only a diaper on. I was the only one who was shocked by the just-diaper situation—the girl was at least four, Lael; everyone else’s primary concern was the girl’s shattered psyche.
“It’s just some spilled rice,” Pearl was cooing, swinging the girl by her armpits. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, just some spilled rice.”
I mean, Jesus, you’d think she was comforting a girl who had just accidentally stabbed her dog with a steak knife.
Pearl shot me a
look that was hard to read. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to join in on the comforting or what, so I just stood there, frozen, the peeler in my hand.
“Flora, would you mind taking her to the garden?” Pearl asked, swinging the child over in my direction. “Cass, go on with Flora. Show her all the cukes that are growing in your garden.”
Now, we both know my feelings about children (except for those exceptionally cute, phenomenally well-behaved Lower School girls). Cass, from the looks of it, was not one of those, but I didn’t have a choice but to take her hand and let her lead me (humiliatingly enough, I had no idea where we were going) to the garden.
I’ll admit that it’s a nice garden. There are rows and rows of vegetables, some neat-looking rusty trellises, and a few awesome vintage wheelbarrows with plants just exploding out of them. The soil is all plush looking, and it’s oddly peaceful to gaze out at the mountains in the distance. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how QUIET it is here. It’s downright scary.
Cass had her own little plot next to the playground—which is more like a wooden set of monkey bars and a few swings—and she told me all about her cucumbers. I stopped listening pretty much immediately, but I was impressed by how she knew every detail about how to grow things, and I’ll admit that she turned out to be pretty cute. She’s got huge brown eyes and red cheeks, just like Pearl’s. Cass wanted to go on the rickety little swing, so I started to push her, getting fancy with the underdogs (you remember how much I love my underdogs).
“Is that Cass all the way up in the sky?”
I spun around to see a slender young woman with a cute bob and a big white quilt in her arms. She smiled a little bit, nodding at me.
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