The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Chapter 7

  It was a surprise to everyone that Conner’s relationship with Margaret outlasted Lainey’s with Lesley. But Lainey was not yet ready to date someone so kind, nor could she commit to the cheerleading persona she’d enjoyed for the length of the season, and now found as itchy and ill-fitting as the vintage polyester cheerleading costume she’d worn for Halloween. She’d gone as a zombie cheerleader, hoping to make some commentary on the nature of group sports and mob mentality, one whose finer points were fuzzy even before she became too drunk to sputter anything beyond, “Undead love sports, but shriveled brains.” She’d Sharpied her arms with “12” tattoos, Lesley’s jersey number, and drizzled fake blood on her temples and midriff. Lesley had dressed as a wizard and they’d both hooked up with a blond girl dressed like a fairy, mostly Lainey while Lesley watched, licked his lips, and said how beautiful they both looked, You especially, Laine. He was thoughtful even when drunk.

  She knew, even when she broke up with him, a process protracted by how much she cared for him, that it was a mistake. But she wanted to make still bigger mistakes with her body and her heart, wanted to fall in love as many times as she could, have the clarity of purpose and thought that came for her only when she was infatuated, when her focus on a new crush gave her fuel to discover the world through them, to learn everything about them, to try to become them, to swallow them. Once she was comfortable, felt herself with them, or felt that who-knew-who-she-was feeling once more, she’d have to break it off and start again. She was self-aware about the process, had had enough fights in high school with friends who accused her of “changing herself” for a boy or a girl. But who doesn’t change herself when she falls in love? Wasn’t that the point of love? To change for the better, to grow? In college she would fall in love as much as she could, she knew; she would learn as much through make-out sessions at dark parties as she would in seminar halls or in a basement carrel at the library, where she’d heard people hooked up sometimes, and wasn’t this a box as worthy of checking off her college list as sledding down the big hill on a dining hall tray, or doing a work study at the crisis center? She had her own ideas for her education. Stand back.

  But some of her exploits would have to wait, as finals period was upon them, and all four felt they’d partied too much at the start of the year. None were too far behind, save Margaret, the contours of whose learning disorder still remained somewhat vague to the others, though they knew she wasn’t dyslexic, “not technically,” she’d said, when Lainey had been bold enough to ask. She got extra time on papers and tests due to ADHD, and she took her Gen Ed courses pass-fail. They were studying now for their psych final, the only class in which they were all enrolled together.

  It got dark so early in December. Every Friday they’d scurry home after dinner together, skip any meetings or study groups, and ready their space for a weekend of work. By this time on Sunday afternoon, the common room was littered with crusted plates and snack wrappers, half-filled mugs and water bottles, blankets and sweatshirts, notebooks and textbooks, loose-leaf papers and worksheets, Ji Sun’s cache of ultra-fine-point pens from Japan, Margaret’s rainbow of highlighters, Lainey’s scatter of random pens, and the troll doll totems they’d all adopted after Alice revealed the tiny one stuck on the end of her pencil was her good luck charm.

  “Have y’all never heard of the library?” Melinda, their RA, asked. She’d come to remind them about an all-hall meeting later that night. “It pains me to say, but it looks like a hamster cage in here.” She poked her head past Alice, who had answered the door. “Smells a little bit like one, too, if I’m being honest.”

  “The library doesn’t have our good study juju!” Margaret said, positioning her body in front of a contraband cedar candle, lit on the bookshelf. “This place is just riddled with good study vibes.”

  Lainey didn’t feel this way precisely, but she had enjoyed the bolstering effects of Margaret’s Ritalin, which Margaret had offered to her like a mint, as long as Lainey promised not to get addicted.

  “I don’t think that’s how addiction works,” Lainey said, but she felt too strung out after its effects wore off to want to abuse it, as much as she loved how quickly it allowed her to write a paper, to blaze through with enough time to spare that she could read for pleasure, a pursuit that vanishingly few of her fellow freshmen seemed to share.

  Roe, a point guard on the women’s basketball team about whom her roommates couldn’t make enough rebound jokes, teased Lainey about how much she hung out in the college bookstore, camped out in the essays section. Lainey had even begun toying with the idea of a creative writing minor, scribbling down observations she thought she might weave into the sorts of strange, dense essays she wanted to read. Her admissions essay, a sideways look at the makeup of her group of siblings, she and her sister adopted, their younger twin siblings biological, from the imagined point of view of someone watching them ride the school bus together, had been called by interviewers from three different schools “one of the finest” they’d seen, in that same language, bolstering Lainey’s belief that alumni from all these elite schools were part of some kind of cabal.

  Even Alice and Ji Sun didn’t read outside of class, not that they had much time for it. Ji Sun had her stack of art books, mostly architecture and photography, and Alice had the rainbow-corner pocket copies of a few J. D. Salinger books on a shelf in her room. But both Ji Sun and Alice shared a robust familiarity with key classics, which it was easy for Lainey to attribute to their private school educations. They both seemed to have actually learned so much—about history, about science, about the world, even about how to learn: how to talk to teachers, how to organize their time—so many things that Lainey felt she was only beginning to learn now. Her high school experience, at her small-town public high school, had been a lengthy exercise in test taking. She both resented and envied their head starts—prided herself on being at Quincy-Hawthorn without having come from a feeder school, and wondered what she’d be like now, had she been able to attend one.

  Margaret’s high school outside St. Louis was more like Lainey’s, but she hadn’t fared as well as Lainey on the tests. Ji Sun had recently told Lainey that she thought perhaps Margaret had gotten into Quincy-Hawthorn in part because of her Native American ancestry, something Margaret had mentioned in their American history discussion section.

  “Oh, God, everybody claims their great grandmother is Native American.” Lainey rolled her eyes.

  “No, but Margaret’s really is. You can read about her. She was the first female physician on her reservation. She was Coast Salish.”

  “Huh,” Lainey said. “You should tell Alice.”

  “I did. She’s the one who looked her up.”

  Lainey bristled. Even with a reciprocity of intimacy unlike she’d ever known, there were these avenues, bits one told some but not the others, things some wondered if the others knew.

  Lainey looked at Margaret now. She’d unclipped the milkmaid crown that Lainey had given her earlier that day, and two long braids hung down over her shoulders. She looked up, smiled at Lainey. Margaret didn’t think twice, it seemed, about why her friend stared at her. She was used to being looked at, Lainey knew. Other women looked at Margaret when she came into a room and then quickly looked away. Men sometimes just kept looking. Of course people looked at Lainey sometimes, too. But there was something particular about the ways in which people tried to disguise or sustain their gaze where Margaret was concerned. Lainey wished she could ask Margaret about it, but she was still inwardly insistent that she not convey to Margaret how overwhelming she found her beauty, that she not be counted among those who reduced—or elevated—her to that.

  Lainey tried to map Margaret’s features onto the face of the weathered Sioux woman she remembered from her own American history textbooks. She thought of Disney’s Pocahontas, but Margaret’s face looked more like the earlier Disney heroines: its heart shape, tho
se moony mammalian eyes, the sense that she was always gazing up at someone with a tantalizing blend of pleading and mischief.

  Margaret gave this look now, as she passed little packets of her lecture notes to the group. Alice grimaced, and Lainey knew why. Margaret’s lecture notes typically contained the briefest bullet points, elaborate doodles, and a few cryptic questions that they couldn’t even be sure were about the course material: America for real? Stages & fixations = beaches vs. coastlines? Oral fixation source of Trust & comfort

  “Are these for real?” Lainey asked.

  “Everybody’s going to pass this class anyway,” Margaret said. She uncapped a bright orange highlighter and squinted at the packet of notes from Ji Sun.

  “But we don’t want to just pass, Margaret! Some of us care about our grades.” Lainey looked at Alice, who shrugged but then nodded.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to stay at 3.85 or above if I want to get into the best med schools.” Alice had her own notes from every lecture, but contributed to the rotation out of principle.

  “Well, I’m sorry that my notes aren’t as good as yours, okay, Lainey?” She pulled the rubber bands from the bottom of her braids and started to unwind her hair. Waves sprung out, seemed to grow with Margaret’s frustration.

  “It’s not my fault if I’m not as smart as you, okay?” Her hair was a wild mane around her face, now reddened. “Grades are not, like, the only thing in the world for me, okay?” She burst into tears.

  Lainey first wanted to comfort her, but she was irritated by her tantrum. “They’re not the only thing in the world for me, either, Margaret, but I was counting on these notes to help me study efficiently.”

  “Well, why don’t you study efficiently without me here, then.” Margaret stood up and kicked a bowl by accident, kicked it again on purpose. “I’m going to Conner’s.”

  “Margaret, sit down, it’s fine,” Alice said. “It’s not that big a deal.”

  Lainey stayed silent.

  “Lainey, we have plenty of notes.” Ji Sun said. “And we have the review session tomorrow to fill in any gaps.”

  Margaret dropped her notes, watched them flutter to the floor.

  “Stop acting like a child!” Lainey said. She had the urge to pick up a book and toss it at Margaret, but she crossed her arms over her chest instead.

  “You’re both acting like babies,” Alice said. “Let’s get some air. Should we go to dinner?” She looked out the window, but there was no telling if it was four or ten; it seemed like it had been dark for days.

  “I told you, I’m going to Conner’s,” Margaret said, not picking up any of her mess. She pulled a knit Q-H basketball hat down over her hair, its pom-pom bobbling.

  “I think we missed dinner,” Ji Sun said. “But I could go for a burger.”

  “Let’s do it,” Alice said.

  Margaret grabbed her bag and went out the door without another word.

  “Lainey?” Ji Sun asked, and put on her coat.

  “No, thanks,” Lainey said, avoiding eye contact.

  They left and Lainey stayed in the mess they’d all made, hungry.

  It took her a while to remember that no one’s mother was going to clean up after them, or bring her something to eat, so she decided to take one more of Margaret’s Ritalins and do it herself—not from kindness, but because she knew it was the best way to win this fight.

  When they woke up in the morning, the sun would stream into the clean room, and they would sit together on the bright window seat, say how stupid they had both been, hug and cuddle and watch a movie. Lainey would get to feel virtuous for having cleaned the room, though Margaret would never ask or even wonder who did it.

  Chapter 8

  The cold, wet stretch of the year between Thanksgiving, when none of the four went home, and winter break, when they all would, did sustain one parental perforation to their private universe. Alice’s family came from their Boston suburb for the Serpentine Regatta, a weekend-long event they’d attended for generations prior to Alice matriculating at Quincy-Hawthorn, a tradition they broadcast in head-to-toe vintage Q-H paraphernalia, including a gold ’46 Varsity crew pin that Alice’s big brother wore pinned to the polo collar that peeked out from under his Q-H sweatshirt. He worried at the pin, twisted it, and told everyone he met to check it out.

  “What a wild year to have been in college, right?” Lainey said, to which Alice’s brother only smiled and laughed, the same response he gave most questions.

  When Alice’s parents arrived in the room, emissaries from a forgotten realm, they transformed the four into children. Each thought she might feel more mature by now than she did, that standing in front of even someone else’s parents it would be so obvious that she was a woman now, not a girl. But instead, bunched together on the window seat, they felt like they were posing for a photo at a grade school birthday party, and their mismatched mugs, so funky and grown-up most nights, looked, in actual adults’ hands, like a play tea set.

  Lainey watched the awkward way Alice and her parents hugged, as if pantomiming the act from across a traffic cone, their bodies barely touching. Lainey thought back to her mother on drop-off day, how she smoothed Lainey’s hair, squeezed her shoulders, looked for any excuse to touch her. She said good-bye one last time and one last time again just for the hugs, which Lainey would admit to having wished would last longer, too, though more from fear than from longing to be in her mother’s arms. Maybe those two feelings were more alike than she had known before that day, when her parents left her.

  Alice’s father gave Ji Sun an especially vigorous handshake, no doubt due to his conversance with the alumni magazine, Ji Sun thought. Ji Sun’s roommates knew that she was very rich, but they didn’t yet apprehend that she was name-a-building rich. Anyway, none of the buildings on campus were named for her family, but that was because Ji Sun’s mother found the practice gauche, not because they hadn’t paid enough for the honor.

  Alice’s brother and younger sister both widened their eyes at Margaret. Her brother kept staring, and her sister, Brianna, only eight, said, “You are so pretty!” and then, when Margaret laughed and thanked her, put her hand over her mouth as though surprised anyone had heard.

  The others had made posters for Alice when she was at practice, and they were piled on the window seat now. Ji Sun had made a line drawing of Alice’s face, captured perfectly the shape of her wily grin, and paid to have shirts professionally screen printed rather than use the iron-ons Lainey had suggested they buy. The minimum order had been thirty-five, all one size, and Ji Sun brought the box out of her room now.

  “We got extras made!” Margaret said, pulling out four for Alice’s family. Lainey noted how easy it was for Margaret to share in the credit for this kindness, even though Ji Sun alone had designed the shirts, paid for them, and lugged them out of her room.

  Alice’s sister swam in hers, even over her jacket, but she beamed to match the older girls, who had pulled the shirts on over their sweaters, too. Alice’s brother pulled one over his sweatshirt, but her parents politely declined.

  “Oh, thank you, but I’ll be wearing my polar fleece anyway,” Alice’s mother said, and polar fleece rang in Lainey’s ear as she watched Alice’s mother fold the shirt neatly and set it down on the arm of the futon, not even tuck it in her bag.

  “These are like, next-level WASPs, right?” Lainey whispered to Ji Sun as they walked toward the river together. Alice held her sister’s hand, but her parents and brother trailed behind, only her brother’s shirt suggesting any connection between them.

  “I’m not sure that’s it,” Ji Sun said. “They’re only that cold towards Alice.”

  Lainey hadn’t noticed this, but she saw now, outside of the dorm room, how easy Alice’s parents were with her brother, how they each placed a hand on his back when they crossed the street. When they reached the boathouse and Alice was absorbed by
her teammates, her family left together to meet their friends, and Lainey saw that Ji Sun had been right: as a foursome they looked downright cozy. They jostled together, the parents pointing out landmarks, their children laughing.

  Conner had picked up a bunch of AliceFace shirts to share with his teammates, so it was easy to find them in the crowd. Jeremy wasn’t among them, but Lesley was there, greeted Lainey with one of his good hugs, sniffed her neck.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Still miss that smell, Laine.”

  She missed his smell, too, which today was layered with the skunk of weed and the warmth of just-cooked rice. He never smelled like his teammates, their blend of fresh sneaker and nautical body spray, beer breath emanating from their every pore. Lainey had broken up with Roe and was nursing a crush on a sophomore from her dramaturgy class, but tonight she hoped she’d hook up with Lesley. He had a new girlfriend, Vanessa, who was straight edge, which drove Lainey bonkers: the black Xs on her hands at every party, the bottle of some twee herbal soda, the smug look of reproach at all the drunkards who didn’t know any better. Lainey’s childhood best friend had had a long stretch of being straight edge that veered into all-consuming Christianity by the time they graduated high school, making it a little easier for Lainey to say good-bye, in that she felt she already had.

  Lainey, Ji Sun, and Margaret had planned to only stay through Alice’s event, and then go home and study before meeting Alice later for the Serpentine party. But Conner had brought his flask, as usual, and soon they were too buzzed to think of studying. They shared a bag of kettle corn the size of a toddler and watched the boys eat little bowls of ground beef with bright yellow cheese sauce, a Serpentine tradition. When Alice’s boat finally sliced through the water, they stood and hollered, waved their signs, and whooped her name.

  Even in their frenzy, they were struck by how little they had appreciated about this huge part of Alice’s life. Crew was mostly facts and figures to them: when Alice would be away, whether they’d won, what their team standing was. They didn’t encounter the physicality of the endeavor, and as they watched Alice now, even in a line of girls moving in absolute unison, they were certain it was Alice alone who fueled the boat.