Sex addressed, they could move on to the sort of hungry questioning where they wished equally to reach the end, to learn everything about the others, to know them, and also to never stop talking.
When their throats got sore, Lainey put on music, and they began to move and dance. Alice plucked the scarf from the lamp where Margaret had draped it, mouthed fire hazard, and tied the scarf around her neck fifties-style, did a little sock hop to the beat. Lainey flipped through the pages of her CD binder, liberated from the usual need to impress with her music. There was time enough for her roommates to hear Bikini Kill wail and Black Star bounce from her bedroom, and she didn’t need to prove anything on this, their first night together, only needed to give them that feeling she got in her chest when her favorite songs came on, that they must leap to their feet and throw their arms up into the air, that they must erase any self-consciousness that came from moving their hips in front of others, close their eyes or keep them open, up to them whether they wanted to sing along, but they had to dance together, had to feel some kind of ecstatic freedom from everything that had come before and would come later, bound only to each other for at least the length of the song. None of them had any idea how long they’d been dancing, but they were coated in sweat, hair matted, mascara running, when their RA knocked on their door and told them quiet hours had begun half an hour ago, and could they please start the year off on the right foot. “Think about how your decisions impact others,” she’d said, tapping her pointer finger on her own chest, on the Quincy-Hawthorn crest on her T-shirt. But that night, outside the confines of their common room, there were no others. They considered only their roommates, and each one fell asleep to find the other three already waiting in her dreams.
Chapter 2
Though the four shared as many meals together as possible, there were already times, three weeks into the semester, when their schedules necessitated other permutations. Alice and Ji Sun took early dinner together every Wednesday night before Alice went to weight lifting, while Lainey was in rehearsal and Margaret met with her writing tutor.
Ji Sun liked these Wednesday nights. They attracted less attention just the two of them, and they sometimes sat at the lone table for two that remained in the dining hall because one of the college’s two founders had proposed to his first wife there. She was seventeen to the founder’s fifty, and he went on to leave her and their four children for a nineteen-year-old, whom he left, three kids later, for another seventeen-year-old, this time to his sixty-seven, who bore him two more children before he died, losing the chance to do it all again. “Different times,” the student guide on their freshman tour had said, and shrugged, before putting his hand over his mouth to whisper-shout the rumor that every class of Quincy-Hawthorn College since 1874 had as a student one of Hawthorn’s descendants. Alice and Ji Sun had exchanged raised eyebrows, Alice then pantomiming a glance around with a magnifying glass before shooting Ji Sun a wink. Of anyone she’d met so far at school, including professors, Ji Sun was most impressed with her roommate Alice: her square jaw, her candor, and the ease she had in her body. But Alice wouldn’t have guessed as much, Ji Sun knew. If you were reserved and not unattractive, people assumed you were a snob, that you disapproved. Ji Sun allowed that, in her case, they were often right. Alice knew, of course, that Ji Sun cared for her, loved her even, as they all loved each other already, and had said as much, even though Alice and Ji Sun shared in common families that almost never expressed this sentiment aloud. But Alice may not have known that Ji Sun admired her. Alice, with her low, raspy voice and patrician accent, lank blond hair that she wore scraped back into a ponytail where others would surely want to show off its virgin corn-silk color, defied categorization in a way that appealed to Ji Sun. There was a kind of creamy toughness to Alice that Ji Sun found both reassuring and a bit intimidating.
Alice already knew she wanted to be a doctor, but she approached her studies with a kind of pragmatism that the other premed students—a number of whom Ji Sun knew from the campus Korean Cultural Association—forwent in favor of agonized rants about organic chemistry and hopped-up, almost masturbatory accounts of the rigors of their current schedules, and the gauntlet of semesters to come.
Then there was Alice’s command of her body, even with a limp that made her right foot land a little funny. How she rose with the sun for crew practice, how she ran for enjoyment, how she did not agonize over what she put on her plate each night in the dining hall. Alice’s tray looked to Ji Sun like a television advertisement for American dinnertime: meat, mashed potatoes, peas, tall glass of milk. No apple pie, but Alice’s blond hair and sailor-knot bracelet gave the tray a glow so you might still see a slice of it there.
Alice bore the signifiers, too, of a certain shaggy New England wealth, which Ji Sun could recognize but did not care to adopt. Ji Sun carried purses alongside her backpack that could pay for three months’ room and board, but the few students who recognized them probably assumed they were fake. She alternated between all-white and all-black outfits, and while financial status was signaled for most students by whether they used the laundry service or scrounged for quarters and braved the dank basement, Ji Sun sent her clothes to an actual dry cleaner, a service her mother’s assistant arranged before Ji Sun arrived on campus.
“Alice.” Ji Sun waited for her roommate to sit. “How did you get your limp?”
“I told you.” They had discussed it briefly that first night together, when Margaret had tentatively reached for, but had not touched, the pearled scar that ran along the left side of Alice’s face. “I was in a car accident. When I was twelve years old.” Alice went back to her meal. Her answer was practiced, succinct. The way she met Ji Sun’s gaze when she said “twelve years old” was meant to shut down further inquiry, Ji Sun could see.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” American women said they were sorry for everything. I’m sorry, can you pass me the salt? I’m sorry, do you mind? I’m sorry, just squeezing by here. Ji Sun had heard Lainey apologize to a door in their suite.
“Who was driving?” Ji Sun asked, and knew by the way Alice’s jaw tightened that she had landed on the exact question she wasn’t meant to ask, and that Alice never answered. This she admired about Alice, too. She wasn’t shy about her life, but she wasn’t desperate to give up its secrets the way their classmates were. They couldn’t wait to play Never Have I Ever at parties, a game that afforded drunk girls the chance to share that they cut themselves or gave their swim coaches hand jobs in high school, hoping the damage would help pass them off as interesting.
“A relative,” Alice said, and looked down at her plate. “Inclement weather.”
“I see,” Ji Sun said. “I’m sorry. Were you close?”
“What?” Alice said, face flushed above her cheekbones. “Close to what?”
“You and the relative, were you close?”
“He was fine.” Alice answered a question Ji Sun hadn’t asked, but the way she’d finally veered from her script held promise.
“And you, you’re varsity crew now, as a freshman.”
“Yes,” Alice said, looking up, back on steadier ground. “A child’s body is remarkably resilient.” She touched the back of her head and looked away. Ji Sun worried Alice might cry and then Ji Sun would have to say she was sorry yet again, and the conversation would be over.
“That’s true,” Ji Sun said. “My mother used to say our skulls were rubber and our brains congee. Porridge,” she added, disappointed that Alice hadn’t known.
Alice laughed, and then, almost as if by accident, said, “It was my dad. Driving.”
Oh, Ji Sun thought, a drunk, then. She’d read John Cheever, and expected every wealthy New Englander she met to have a drunk, distant father and a pill-popping, resentful mother.
“Oh,” Ji Sun said. She should say I’m sorry now, she knew, and she was sorry that Alice’s father had imperiled her in this way, when she was a child. She wo
uldn’t push Alice any further, but she didn’t look away.
“It was . . . I don’t like to talk about it, to be honest,” Alice said, and rested her fork beside her peas and potatoes.
“Yes, sorry, of course,” Ji Sun said. “I’ve just wondered. If you ever do . . . want to talk about it. I’m here.” I’m curious, she almost added, still negotiating the terrain of their friendship, new but deeper already than any she’d known before. In boarding school she hadn’t been part of a tight-knit group. Her wealth had made it easy to dip into different cliques, accumulate certain expected markers of an international boarding-school experience: trips to European capitals, elaborate meals shared for various cultural New Years, dances in the ballrooms of Swiss hotels. Looking at the pictures she’d brought to hang on her wall, she felt sometimes that they belonged to another student, had landed in her bedroom by mistake. She could find herself, her closed-mouth smile set apart from her classmates’ toothy grins, their peace signs and high kicks, their goofy ease. Here at college, she had a real chance for that kind of coziness, felt near to the warmth of that comfort already, knew she shouldn’t risk it the way she was now. You could go years into a friendship before learning how someone got her scars. Why push it? The four had hurried into intimacy, but they were not yet family. They didn’t know the whole of each other’s histories, and they had not yet built up their own together.
Should she put her hand out, make some kind of gesture of caring? Ji Sun thought again of Margaret, how she seemed to find a way to hug them—each of them—every day, how she flung herself alongside the others in their narrow extra-long twin beds, nestled like a puppy. Her touch was easy and welcome; Ji Sun hadn’t known how much she craved it, this fraternal physicality, the closest prior approximation of which she’d experienced with her older sister before she’d left for boarding school when Ji Sun was nine.
“Thanks,” Alice said, and it occurred to Ji Sun that Alice might be glad Ji Sun didn’t try to touch her now. The way Alice sat, so straight backed, made it feel as though she’d moved across the room even though they still sat together at the small table, tucked against the wall.
They ate together in silence for a stretch, the din of the room recessed. It felt to Ji Sun, with each bite, that their table, already on the room’s perimeter, was moving further and further away, enclosed by some kind of force field of loaded silence.
“My brother.” Alice put down her fork again. “He nearly died in the accident.”
Alice looked at her tray while Ji Sun stared at her scalp, a zigzag of skin pinked by sun. Alice had this impossible blend of clean and dirty that intrigued Ji Sun, like she’d been at a boys’ sleepaway camp all summer but showered in an upscale hotel.
“And he’s still . . . compromised. Mentally. Because of it.” Alice met Ji Sun’s gaze. “So I don’t, well, I don’t . . .” Her eyes filled but didn’t overflow. Ji Sun watched as her friend’s chin trembled, and lifted her hand to reach across the table to finally touch Alice’s.
“No, it’s okay,” Alice said, lifting her two hands in surrender. “I’m fine.” She touched her eyes with the backs of her hands and when she lifted them away, her eyes were dry and her chin stilled.
“Should we get ice cream?” Ji Sun asked after a pause, and pointed in the direction of the soft serve machine, which dispensed a substance suggestive of ice cream. “Sprinkles?” Sprinkles seemed like the right thing to offer Alice, who looked so like a child now, with her scrubbed-clean face and long ponytail, flyaways wild at her temples.
“I think it’s mandatory,” Alice said, and stood. Ji Sun followed behind as they deposited their trays and swirled their cones full, then dunked their ice cream in the sprinkle vat in clear defiance of the note requesting students use the “custom sprinkle implement.” Ji Sun still trailed a step behind as they left the cafeteria, and watched Alice navigate the crowd, her one foot turned the slightest bit inward, tapping an extra heartbeat on the floor. Then they were outside, side by side, hands sticky and swinging. When their knuckles bumped for the fourth time, Ji Sun took Alice’s hand in her own, a move her hand remembered with no hesitation, a holdover from her primary school days, dormant in Switzerland, where hand-holding had been reserved for couples intent on broadcasting their status. Alice didn’t turn to look at her, but Ji Sun could feel her face unclench, and when she glanced over, Alice had her eyes closed and mouth set in a small, relaxed smile. A bit of chocolate ice cream had dried above her lip, a half mustache. Alice’s hand, covered in calluses from crew, made Ji Sun aware of how soft her own hand was, and she swung it a bit, carried Alice’s along. Alice gave her hand a small squeeze and Ji Sun felt it as a thank-you, a lightness that reached even her feet, and she nearly skipped a little, or she would have, but she was in no rush.
Chapter 3
On her way to meet Margaret and the rest of the small study group from their American history survey course, Ji Sun slowed to adjust the bobby pins Lainey had put in her hair after giving her a milkmaid crown that morning. Ji Sun had admired Lainey’s hair worn this way, and was surprised by how eager Lainey was to replicate it, and then again by how she liked it on herself, the relief of the weight off her shoulders in the heat, and the way it connected her to Lainey, the only one of them who might pass for a sister to each of the others. As Ji Sun approached, she could hear Margaret, facing away from Ji Sun, explain to the other students in the group, “No, GEE sun, just think, like, Oh, gee, the sun is out!”
“Oh, gee, the sun is out,” felt like the furthest phrase Ji Sun would ever associate with herself, but something about hearing it in Margaret’s nasal lilt, the way she spoke to the other students like a primary-school teacher, singsongy and patient, filled Ji Sun with the warmth that Margaret so often brought, made her feel for a moment like the sun, which was out in force, was powered in part by herself, or at least that she might curl up in and enjoy it, a black cat with a glossy coat.
It was easier for Ji Sun to appreciate Margaret than it was for Alice, who grew impatient with Margaret’s flightiness, or Lainey, who distrusted Margaret’s earnestness. Ji Sun found both of these traits unobjectionable if not endearing, having encountered them less often than her roommates had. She also struggled less against Margaret’s beauty. Her father had a penchant for hiring women who stopped people in their tracks, and Ji Sun’s own older sister, Ji Eun, was beautiful in a way that made people say stupid things around her.
Ji Sun also appreciated her own aesthetic presence in a way that it seemed few women her age did. She loved the way her body wore clothes, and she didn’t have problems with the way it looked naked, either. She wished, on occasion, that her butt were less flat, but not enough to do squats or anything more than imagine what she might look like in certain skirts with a rounder ass.
If anything, she worried that sometimes she was tokenizing Margaret, that she enjoyed her company as an ornament, look how nicely this Renaissance painting of a girl pairs with this living creature in sculptural clothing, one petal soft and diaphanous, the other crisp and angular, jagged to the touch. Ji Sun didn’t view the attention as people locking in on Margaret, comparing everyone within radius unfavorably. Rather, she thought Margaret had a beauty so encompassing that it cast an aura out around her, and Ji Sun herself was made more beautiful because of this. She saw this especially when, like now, she heard Margaret describe her as sunshine. Did Margaret see everyone as sunshine because her beauty lit them up somehow?
Ji Sun joined her roommate and their study group.
“It’s me, sunny Ji Sun. Here comes the sun.” She smiled, but the group didn’t know her well enough for the joke to land. She gestured at her all-black outfit and sat.
“I’ll just call you Jesse,” Conner said.
“Fuck that!” Margaret said, her mouth hot pink with the word, its abrupt shift in sound and shape from the sweet coaching she’d just given them.
Ji Sun didn’t need Margar
et to stand up for her in this way, but she did enjoy it.
“Yes, indeed,” Ji Sun said quietly, because she wanted to confirm their expectations about her in order to better mess with them later. She wouldn’t blush, though, or hang her head.
“What, Conner, should I just call you, I don’t know, Conehead?” Margaret crossed her arms.
They all laughed at the feeble insult, but Conner was a dog with a bone.
“It’s not the same. My name’s easy, it’s, like, normal American.”
“Whatever,” Ji Sun said, wanting to save Margaret from the battle she was gearing up to do. Margaret had stood and kicked off her woven leather huaraches as if in preparation for some kind of hand-to-hand combat. “Perhaps we won’t have much need to address one another in any case,” Ji Sun said, looking first at Conner and then at the rest of the group, on his side in their silence.
Margaret was still flushed pink, too angry to be articulate. “American?” She scowled. “Normal? What does that even mean?”
“Man, you’re hot when you’re mad,” Conner said, and reached for Margaret, as though instead of a fight she might consent to his embrace, roll around with him right here in the grass outside the library.
The Other's Gold Page 2