Taylor left campus often with her drama friends. They went into Center City Philly to see small, up-and-coming shows. They went to New York some Saturdays to go to Broadway. It was as if they had better things to do than hang out in dorm rooms.
Emma didn’t really have a group outside her roommates, but she figured that would come with time. She had one friend from high school—Sarah Franco—who lived on the opposite side of campus and had a work-study job that took up a ton of time. They saw each other maybe once a week. And Emma had signed up on move-in day to write for the school newspaper’s blog and tried to strike up conversations with others at the journalism table. But many of the kids there seemed quieter than she was. Or, they were just awkward or busy, and she was too eager and desperate and blathering.
No one in her suite seemed concerned about this almost instantaneous splintering of the roommates, because they were too busy. They bonded over that at least, the being busy and the being lost. God, how they’d gotten lost. Even kids who went to huge high schools—Taylor had eight hundred kids in her graduating class—even those kids found the campus large and bewildering. They’d all had stories about getting lost and being late and getting yelled at and honked at by professors, security guards, RAs. There was a kind of freshman look; like tourists, they stared at everything with a weird combination of amazement and confusion. And when they relied on Google Maps to get to buildings, turning in circles, looking at their phones? That was a solid giveaway. A few nights in the beginning, they’d taken selfies and tagged them #freshmanface. But they didn’t share them with anyone, not even other freshmen, and their group chat soon dwindled to nothing.
But the truth was, even though she was overwhelmed in some ways, Emma wasn’t as busy as everyone else. She’d gone to a rigorous high school, and compared to it, her classes seemed almost easy. Yes, she had to keep up with the reading and pay attention, but something about the way the subjects were outlined and served up in class reminded her, vaguely, of eighth grade. It was as if her professors were trying to be serious but still bite-sizing everything for the lowest common denominator.
Another difference that became clear right away was that she didn’t have as much money as everyone else. She ate at the dining hall when others went out or ordered in or paid Ubers to deliver. She suggested cooking together to her roommates, pitching in to make chili or Irish stew. They repeated the words Irish stew, as if she had just suggested they eat dog shit. And fucking Fiona, who was one million percent Irish, had not even stood up for her.
The night of the first big football game, against the Ohio Burrs, they’d all had shots of vanilla vodka in their room as they painted their faces. Then the others had dispersed, bouncing off to separate parties. Emma had waved to them and pretended she had somewhere else to go, too. She fake-walked all the way across campus, after white-lying to their faces, saying that she was meeting Sarah even though Sarah had not texted her back and that she’d see them all later at the game. Go Sabres!
As she wove through the throngs of kids coming to the stadium in the opposite direction, she held on to the hope that she’d run into someone from one of her classes, someone she’d met at her dorm orientation, when they’d played those get-to-know-you games. Emma would remember those fun facts! She’d know who had a pet iguana and who loved opera and who thought unicorns were real until she was eleven. She’d recognize those girls in a crowd and shriek “Unicorn girl!” and they’d bond and share whatever horrible alcoholic concoction was available. She’d swallow it gratefully as the price of admission.
But she saw no one she recognized. She wandered around for a while before going into the enormous, pulsing stadium. She knew what her mother would say—Make friends with the people sitting near you! Other people are alone, too! But that was advice that worked in third grade, not now. Drunk friendships didn’t hold. Emma had danced and laughed with a girl at a party the first week, and when she’d seen her the next day and waved, the girl looked at her like she was a stalker. Still. There were thirty thousand people here. Emma had been alone her whole damned life, and she was not giving up.
A few days after the game, Emma received an email asking her to make an appointment with the editor of the Semper Sun. She’d been inside every building on campus—it was a goal she’d set the first week, a freshman bucket list—and Emma saw quickly the disparities between structures. The journalism building was on the far northeast edge of the liberal arts school and dated back to the early 1900s. It was charming on the outside—always featured on the school’s videos—but cold and leaky on the inside. Its computers were old, its desks pockmarked with pencil wounds and burns. In contrast, the new business school campus, with its glass and steel towers, had a juice bar and a sushi restaurant.
Emma had been early for her appointment by ten minutes. She’d shaken the hand of the editor, Jason Cunningham, briskly. She had showed him a link to samples from her high school paper, her column about study habits that kids had ignored but teachers and parents had loved. Jason had glanced at it for two seconds, nodded, then asked if she had ever written anything humorous. Um, no.
Did she have any hobbies that might make good behind-the-scenes pieces, like fencing? Fencing? Funny? Emma had been stunned by these questions—did she look like she did stand-up or jousted? It was only later that night, when she walked away with her one, singular assignment—to find something interesting to write about and then write up a pitch and pitch it to him—that she saw their conversation framed in a different way.
Jason hadn’t assumed anything about her. He hadn’t been sexist or stereotypical or click-bait-y. He hadn’t asked her to do a fluff piece on fall fashion or a stupid college YouTube video series on the fastest way to remove makeup after being up all night. He simply had a list of things that he needed, and without making a single snap judgment, he had asked her if she could fulfill them.
That night, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth. In the hallway outside came the short taps of high heels, the lower thumps of booties, the sounds of a herd of girls going out for the night. There, in the harshest yellow light, with the odd mix of bleachy disinfectant wipes and peachy Dove deodorant always mingled in the air, she tilted her face up, down, and sideways. Squinting and half smiling.
Mysterious? Snarky? Clever? Athletic? All these years, she had looked in the mirror and wondered constantly about pretty or hot and whether she’d stay stranded at cute forever. What a waste. What a stupid, utterly futile waste. Maybe she was funny.
Maybe she could handle a sword and a shield.
Maybe she should stop limiting herself, start looking at other possibilities, exactly the way he had.
Jason, Jason the editor, had edited her.
Five
Maggie
“She’s not here,” Maggie said dumbly, then caught a glance between the policeman and the security guard that stopped short of an eye roll.
“Yes,” Carla said slowly, carefully. “That’s why we—”
“No,” Maggie said and shook her head. “I mean this,” she said, sweeping her hand above the bed, “is her roommate’s side of the room. Fiona. Emma was on the right side. Those might be Emma’s sheets, but all her pillows—” Her heart seized, thinking of the NILY pillow she’d knitted. “I mean, all her stuff is gone.”
Carla nodded, raised her eyebrows. “Maybe they switched sides? Maybe the roommate is gone, too?”
“Can I look in the closet?”
The policeman put on a pair of gloves and opened the door. “You can look, but don’t touch anything.”
Maggie frowned. Dresses. High heels. Someone else’s clothes. Shoved to the back, jeans that might be Emma’s. But the rest?
“Could they be sharing a closet?” she said.
“And what, a bed, too?” the policeman said.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Carla said.
“Well, this is college,” the RA said and sighed.
Maggie should have been offended, but she wasn’t really listening. Nothing in this room made sense. It didn’t look anything like the cheerful room she’d helped set up. No photos mounted on foam core, no class schedule tacked to a bulletin board; just bits of tape and yellow crepe paper and crumbling holes where those things used to be. As if someone had ripped it all out in a hurry, so no one else could see.
Maggie rubbed her eyes. “Could she have moved rooms and I didn’t know?”
“Well,” the RA said, “they’re not supposed to, not without telling me and filling out request forms. And they have to have a good reason, not just, ‘Oh, she was mean to me.’”
“Was she?” Maggie asked. “Mean to her?”
“No idea.”
She scanned his face for a piece of information, but he looked away and put his hands in his pockets the way boys did, as if he didn’t know what to do with his own appendages.
“She’s not staying here,” Maggie declared. “There’s no makeup, no caddy of shower supplies.” She gestured around the room. “No robe, no towels, no books.”
“Maybe she uses e-books.”
“No computer, no backpack, no—”
“Okay, okay,” the policeman said. “Thanks for the inventory. We get your point.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t think you do. Emma is not living in this dorm room. It would be impossible for a girl to live without all those things.”
“Well, it’s certainly being used,” the policeman said, nodding toward the bed.
“You don’t know that,” Maggie said. “It…could be a prank.”
Carla’s eyes reflected empathy. That Maggie could be that clueless, that deluded.
“When you texted her in the car and I told you to act normally, what did you say?” Carla asked.
“I said, ‘Hey, honey, just checking in.’”
“Anything else?”
“Just a bee emoji. For, um…honey?”
Maggie’s knees started to shake a bit. She could not believe she was standing where she was standing, justifying her texting techniques, explaining habits that should be plain as day to an investigator. How could they only see what was here, not what was missing?
“Is there anything you could text that might feel important but not panic her?”
Maggie nodded. She took out her phone, chose a moon emoji, then added NILY. She took a deep breath and hit send.
When they heard the pinging text alert in the room, Maggie’s heart nearly stopped.
Now everyone knew what Maggie knew. Because what teenaged girl goes anywhere, even down the hall to the bathroom, without her phone? Before anyone could speak or locate the phone, another chime came from the doorway.
“Located the boyfriend,” the cop said.
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Maggie said.
Six
Emma
Emma had entered college thinking everything about it was going to be interesting. She envisioned worldly people from different backgrounds, states, countries. But it seemed almost everyone in her dorm was white and their idea of a hobby was spinning class. Outside Hoden House, there was more diversity, so she chatted up people in class, at the cafeteria. She got a lot of one-word answers and apologies for having to go. It turned out it wasn’t that easy to ask people if they had any unusual hobbies. It was like asking them if they were freaks and wanted to confess their serial killer traits.
So after a solid month of searching and praying to God to send her a fellow student who did taxidermy in the common room or made moonshine in her bathroom, she wondered if she had simply been deluded about college.
Emma had been friendly-ish in high school with Lizzie Burton, a girl whose mother travelled constantly on business, who threw parties on weeknights and ditched school to go see foreign films and bought her essays on the internet and was always dating someone in a band. College was just full-on Lizzie Burton.
The best she could come up with were a few Adderall addictions and girls doing boys’ laundry for money. She pictured Jason’s face closing like a bud when she said the word laundry. No. That was too small, she thought. Finally, she found a group of Irish dancers who practiced in the corner of the gym every Tuesday, but when she’d pitched it to Jason, he’d said someone wrote about them last year.
It took her a while to realize that her interest wasn’t just rooted in journalism but rooted in Jason. She wanted to be the person he saw in her. There was something about his quiet calm, the way he tilted his tortoiseshell glasses up onto his nose delicately, with one slim finger. The way he spoke with just the right number of words, no adjectives, nothing extraneous. The smart boys she’d known before seemed to flaunt their brains like chess pieces. Not Jason.
Since Emma wasn’t coming up with any original ideas, Jason had asked her to edit other people’s stories. This meant being on call before deadline, being a good speller, and having a fast, decisive touch. She liked the responsibility, enjoyed the chime of the alerts. She’d say to anyone nearby, “Gotta go. Jason needs me.”
But after a few weeks, Jason asked her to come into the office to talk. She’d dressed carefully for that meeting, trying to look pretty without looking like she was trying to look pretty. A plaid shirt in shades of green and brown that matched her eyes. Boots that made her look taller, since he was tall. She had to be careful about being too intentional. For he was observant, too; she didn’t want him to notice her ministrations.
When she arrived, he was typing quickly but lightly, his fingers almost dancing across the keyboard. Most guys she knew pounded the keys with the wide pads of their fat fingers.
“Just a sec,” he said without looking up. “Okay,” he said at last, flipping his laptop screen down. “Sorry about that.”
“No worries,” she said.
He sighed. “I hate that phrase.”
“Oh. Well, I’d never use it in my writing. Still, you don’t think it’s useful?”
“No. Not with ‘that’s okay’ or ‘fine by me’ still in the vernacular. We don’t need to take anything from Australian surfer culture to supplement.”
She blinked.
“You did know that, right? That the phrase migrated from Australia?”
“Well,” she replied, “‘cheers’ is British, and everyone says that. So I don’t think we’re at any risk of becoming less American. Besides, people hate Americans, so why not dilute?”
“You’re awfully cynical for a freshman.”
She shrugged. She didn’t know if cynical was good or bad.
“Well, Emma,” he said and paused, and she realized it was the first time she’d heard him say her name. He said it softer than others did, not emphasizing the e, sliding the m’s.
“I know you signed up for the blog. But you’re a good editor. And we need someone next semester, because Robb is going abroad.”
She opened her mouth, but he held up his hand.
“Just hear me out, please,” he said as he put his hand down, and the please made her forgive him a little for that hand. A little. Her mom, she knew, would never let a man hold up his hand to silence her. “It’s harder to find editors. Everyone can write a hashtag, but they can’t form paragraphs. And no one can spell. It’s a lost art, like good handwriting.”
Emma wondered if she confessed at that very moment to having good handwriting—because she did, in fact, have beautiful, loopy, Instagram-worthy handwriting—if he’d demote her further to addressing invitations to their holiday parties.
“I appreciate your confidence in me,” she said. “However, I don’t want to give up on the idea of blogging.”
“The idea of blogging,” he repeated softly.
“Okay, on blogging.”
“Well, you’re not blogging, so you were right the first time.�
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She felt her cheeks turning red, which she hated about herself. It was such an Irish thing, and his family was probably totally bougie and English, and her family had probably been their maid and butler a few centuries ago, and she felt all those things at that moment and wanted to die.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That sounded cruel, but—”
“No, you’re right,” she said. “I haven’t come up with something to write, and writers write, right? But I will.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“The world frequently surprises me. But a little advice? Stop looking so hard. There’s probably a story close by.”
She nodded perfunctorily, promised to be in touch, left quickly, and fumed all the way home. He had given her the most basic, vanilla advice. Write what you know? Jesus! How stupid did he think she was?
And she was so angry, she didn’t know whether to prove him wrong or prove him right, but one thing was for sure. She wouldn’t need anyone to edit her story. Whatever subject she chose, she’d do the work of two, and he’d appreciate her twice as much.
Seven
Maggie
The policeman didn’t look much older than the RA, and perhaps because of that, Maggie kept speaking to Carla. She knew the officer had zero jurisdiction, but she was there, and she seemed to be an actual human, and who knows, maybe she had a kid herself. She’d already broken protocol by bringing Maggie to the campus, and maybe Maggie could convince her to help. Maybe the roommates would have a lead they could follow up on together while this baby boy cop who probably wasn’t married and definitely didn’t have a daughter himself and likely hadn’t ever handled a real investigation was busy learning how to tie his shoelaces. He had a full head of hair but shaved his head—a look that Maggie had always found suspicious, like they were trying to hide something essential about themselves.
Where She Went Page 3