She’d been the one to remind them to register the moment Walker’s enrollment opened, to give them the best chance at getting spots. And she was the only one who had read any of his articles before they’d been assigned. She felt like a brat whose favorite indie band had made it big, though Walker had hardly been underground. Professor of the Year every year for the last seven, save one, when he’d been on sabbatical coming up with the algorithm that made even the young Republicans crush on him.
“He’s actually having it at his house,” Lainey said. “I thought I told you?”
“I’m planning to be there,” Ji Sun said, and then, to Margaret, “and you’re welcome to come along if you decide you’re interested.”
Ji Sun had it bad. Lainey was in love with Walker’s mind, and though she appreciated that he was incredibly sexy, she felt so moved by his work that she sometimes forgot how good-looking he was. But she’d never seen her roommate blush so much.
“Hmm. I am curious what his house is like,” Margaret said. “Maybe I will come.”
“Great,” Lainey said. “Another Architectural Digest fan against the war. Viva la Revolución!”
* * *
• • •
When they got to Walker’s house, anyone could understand why Margaret had wanted to see it. Lainey, Ji Sun, and Margaret got a ride with Seamus, one of Walker’s TAs, and his girlfriend, Amy. The three of them squeezed in the backseat of an Oldsmobile Seamus had modified to run on fry grease. The whole car smelled like a fast-food restaurant, but its seats were plush velour, the same deep green as the trees that surrounded them, pine and fir and birch. Walker lived on the woody, wealthier side of town, but they hadn’t realized he lived in the woods. When they’d turned off the road, it first seemed as though they were driving into the arboretum, but there was his sleek mailbox, Walker-Yamomoto 3021 in sans-serif font. His driveway was endless. Seamus and Amy had turned off the radio to argue some finer point about Frantz Fanon, but they quieted as the light left the sky, and a soft hush filled the car as they snaked along, feeling cocooned and cozy as the gravel crackled beneath the tires.
They gasped when they saw it: a beacon of light wedged into a hill. Ji Sun thought it looked exactly like the kind of house a computer programmer-cum-academic instigator would have, showy but so elegant that you couldn’t call it ostentatious. It was all windows, and what connective wood there was looked to have been chosen to blend into the environment. Who could fault a man for wanting a giant cube of radiant light? And to build it right into a hill, both a rodent and a god.
The house was illuminated now, warm as a hearth, and they could see students bustling around in the kitchen. They could see, too, a few rooms down and to the left, Walker’s wife and children in what looked like the library in a museum, a huge wall of books behind them, overstuffed ottomans artfully arranged like postmodern toadstools in a minimalist wonderland. None of them could wait to get inside.
There was the promised pizza, but the kitchen island also had huge trays of crudité, and little ceramic pinch pots full of pink salt and dark flakes of crushed pepper. Bottles of sparkling water were lined up behind stacks of the photocopied agenda, homemade signs, and materials to make more. Someone had filled a woven sisal basket with pin-back buttons: G. W. Bush’s face behind a red strike-through; NO BLOOD FOR OIL in white letters on a black background; NO WAR IN OUR NAME in black on bright green. Though it was one of the nicest houses she’d ever been in, Lainey felt right at home. The warmth combined with the energy around protesting made her comfortable. Margaret touched her arm, asked, “Can we take a tour?” Ji Sun didn’t ask, but began to look around for secrets of Walker’s life. The fridge was photograph-free, but there was a row of framed finger paintings on the wall toward the hall that she thought led to a bathroom, which she’d claim to be looking for if anyone asked.
Before they did, she ran straight into Walker. She’d been looking at her feet, her socks too thin for this weather. Her roommates had grumbled when they’d had to leave their shoes by the door: Lainey said her tights stunk and Margaret said her outfit looked weird without boots. Nothing put Americans out like being asked to take off their shoes. And yet in this moment she felt a rare kinship with the complaint, with her thin little mesh socks, sent from Belgium by her sister, tiny mermaids and sea stars embroidered onto the nearly translucent fabric so that they looked like they swam along her feet. She saw Walker’s slippered foot before she felt her body collide with his, before she could take him in. He smelled like his house looked: modern and elemental, like woodsmoke and pencil lead.
“Oh!” Ji Sun said.
“Pardon me,” Walker said, and put his hand on her arm, near her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said, to reassure her that he wasn’t wondering what she was doing, prowling around his halls in the dark.
“No, no, it was me. I wasn’t looking—I was looking for the bathroom.”
“Straight back that way and to the left,” he said, pointing toward the kitchen. “I’m Professor Max Walker. Welcome to my home.” He stuck out his hand for her.
“I know,” she said, and stared at his hand, his wedding band glinting in the shadowy space between them. “I’m, I’m—” she was too stunned to know what to say. Should she say her name? Tell him she was in his class, sat in the second row every week, had been to his office hours? Did he not remember that he was, if not in love with her, at least quite taken with her, knew she was something special?
“Of course, of course,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you. In the dark.” He took a step back and reached out, lifted a dimmer switch along the wall. The lights went from low and flickering to interrogation bright. Ji Sun could feel the heat on her scalp. She began to sweat. Even her feet felt clammy. She had to get away from him.
“Okay, well, I’ll see you in there,” she said. “Not the bathroom!”
He laughed. Ugh, he was so gorgeous! How dare he show his dimples, bare his teeth.
“We’ll convene in the family room. Just off the kitchen,” he said. “And we’ll get started in short order.” He looked at his watch and then back at her face. “See you in there.”
She thought he winked, but she couldn’t be sure as she was shielding her face with her hand, to block the light, to keep from crying.
“And thank you for coming, Ji Sun.”
Had she reminded him of her name? Or had she imagined it? Was this some kind of mind game? She went down the hall, away from him, in the wrong direction for the bathroom he’d mentioned. She would find another bathroom, and then an exit that wouldn’t take her back through the kitchen. She would climb out a window if she had to! She would get out, gone.
She couldn’t sit through this meeting now. Her cheeks burned and she spotted a bathroom. Houses like this always had a million bathrooms—maybe the architects knew that people who visited places like this would need ample opportunities to close the door and cry.
But she looked at her face in the wall-wide mirror and saw that she wasn’t crying. She was drawn and dry: hollow. Ji Sun turned on the fan and stepped into the shower, nearly as large as the rest of the room, just a sheet of glass and a change of tile to indicate it was a shower. There was a slotted bench and two showerheads. The bathroom wasn’t even en suite! Was this an invitation to guests? Maybe she’d been wrong about the reasons for so many bathrooms, maybe new money meant wild parties where people paired off and showered together. But two showerheads in such a large space seemed more in the service of efficiency than romance. The other person would be as far away as at the gym, when you had to shower before entering the pool. Ji Sun stood under one showerhead now and imagined Walker under the other, looking at her, his eyes narrowing, struggling to make her out.
She used her mobile phone to call the single car service in town, quicker than a taxi since fewer people used it. Louis said he’d be there in fifteen minutes, but Ji Sun thought it would take him that
long just to get down the driveway, so she told him to meet her on the main road. Lainey had a cell phone, too, and though she rarely checked it, Ji Sun tapped out an SMS: Feeling unwell. Ducked out. See you at home. Sorry.
She was sorry. She should have sucked it up, filled a compostable paper plate with crackers and cheese and joined the meeting. It was just a misunderstanding! She could sit among the students and his eyes would lock on hers again, she knew. She could hear laughter as she made her escape, and Walker’s sonorous voice, but she couldn’t change course now.
The woods looked different now that the sky was dark. Though she’d just come down the driveway and knew it led to the road, she feared now that it would be easy to take a wrong turn, veer off into some dark copse of trees and never find her way home. Why was she walking away from the warm house, the bustle and hum of the gathering? Because he hadn’t known who she was with her head down in the dark? She didn’t want to feel so foolish while she was also scared. This was silly. She could still turn back. But her feet were moving not so much without her consent as without her knowledge, and with every step away from the house it seemed more impossible to change her mind. By the time she climbed into the backseat of Louis’s town car, she was sweating, out of breath. The woods were no longer magical, but as they receded she saw they weren’t foreboding either—just dense, just trees. She was too far away to even glimpse the box of light built into the hill, and as they drove back to campus, she started to feel that she’d imagined it. It wasn’t until Louis asked her, “Miss Ji Sun, you all right?” that she realized she’d forgotten to retrieve her shoes. Her mermaid socks were shredded, the undersides more hole than fabric, and the sea beauties who remained were covered in mud, tails obscured, faces—she swore it—scowling, forced to adapt to land, forced to lose their wonder and live among all the dirt of the dry earth.
Chapter 13
With finals approaching, the four cocooned in their room again. Lainey had a pack of Ji Sun’s fancy markers and a sheet of stickers from Rachel, was making new name-tag cards for their door. She’d drawn APlus for Alice, Elaine the Brain, as her roommates sometimes called her since overhearing her parents do so, and Sometimes Sunny for Ji Sun.
“What’s your nickname, Margaret?” Lainey looked up from her work.
“Yeah,” Alice said. “It’s funny, you don’t really have one! We always call you Margaret.”
“Well, I guess Margaret is my nickname,” she said, and went back to her book.
“Huh?” Alice scrunched her nose.
“Oh. Well, it’s not my real name.” She stood and turned away from them, took a bottle of apple juice from the mini fridge. “My birth certificate says Majestic.”
“Your given name is Majestic? Are you for real?” Lainey sat up straight on the futon.
“How could you have never told us this! This should have been the first thing you told us!” Ji Sun waved her arms. She sat next to Alice on the window seat, and both of them had put down their textbooks, too, to stare at Margaret.
“I’ve gone by Maggie since I was a kid. But when I met people who didn’t know me, know my family, they’d sometimes ask if I preferred Margaret. I decided that I did, and that when I got to college, I’d go by it. Maggie seems like a little girl’s name.”
“Why not go by Majestic?” Lainey held her arms out, a full wingspan of What!??!
“Majestic is a stripper’s name.”
They all laughed, even Lainey, who had been the one to tell the rest not to use hooker or whore, but instead to say “sex worker.”
“No, I mean, really. I’m named after a stripper that my mother says saved her life.” Margaret took a deep breath, like she was already bored of this story. “I was born nearly three months early, and my mom didn’t realize she was in labor. She knew something was happening, but she thought it was Braxton Hicks, which she got with my sister. So she kept on grocery shopping. But Majestic saw her and knew she was in labor, and she drove her straight to the hospital, and they made it just in time. The doctors said a minute later and I’d’a been born in the car, probably not made it. I needed to be hooked up to a respirator immediately.” She looked at them. “Fluid in the lungs.” She placed both hands over her chest. They waited for her to take a bow.
“Wow. Just—wow,” Lainey said.
“What was the stripper’s real name? Did they think about naming you that?” Alice asked.
“Huh,” Margaret said. “I don’t even know! My mom loved Majestic. She thinks it’s the most beautiful word in the world. She doesn’t know that I don’t . . . really go by it.”
Lainey thought she should give Margaret more credit, having dropped her given name out of some sense of decency, since how could she walk up to someone looking like she did and say, Hello, I am Majestic? But even this rankled Lainey, to learn that Margaret knew they needed some safeguard from her beauty.
“Wow. Well. Majestic!” Alice shook her head. “That is really something else.”
They all stared at her in confusion and awe. What other secrets was she keeping?
“I dunno,” Margaret said. “Maybe I should have gone by Jesse?”
They laughed again then, this time for what felt like forty minutes, until their cheeks and stomachs hurt. One would stop, or try to, but the others’ laughter would catch them up again, and they would tumble into it, the kind of laughing fit that started to feel more like punishment than pleasure. One would fall back into hysterics, slap the window seat, kick the baseboards, plead Stop, stop, stop. Finally, their RA knocked on their door, asked if they were all right.
Lainey managed to answer it. “We’re fine,” she said, through hiccups. “We’re downright majestic.”
They could die behind this door together, gasping for air, and tonight they wouldn’t mind. They were majestic, transcendent, in love. They were stupid and awful and they were fools. They hated one another, but only because they sometimes hated themselves. They loved the others more than they had loved anyone before, more than they would ever love anyone else on earth, they were certain.
Chapter 14
Back after winter break, the four planned a surprise party for Margaret, who had turned twenty-one the day after Christmas. The others wouldn’t turn twenty-one until junior year, but Margaret had repeated fourth grade. They took Ji Sun’s car service to the party store and loaded their cart with self-consciously kiddie stuff: party hats with pom-pom tops; a piñata and prizes to put inside; tiny cupcake-shaped erasers and Matchbox cars; a whole suite of unicorn-themed paper tableware; and a sparkly plastic tiara, its crowning jewel a huge pink heart that read Birthday Girl. Lainey had wanted them to dress like the empress from The NeverEnding Story, at least wear necklaces draped on their foreheads like that. They’d had the idea to have “Majestic” be the party’s theme, but Margaret didn’t want anyone else to know her real name, and they were also struggling to upgrade the party now that actual adults were coming.
They’d invited Seamus and the other TAs from last term, and Walker had overheard, asked after his invite.
“Oh! Of course you’re invited!” Lainey had said. She blushed and shot Ji Sun a shocked look while Walker took out his datebook. “We didn’t think you’d . . . want to come? We’re in Birch Hall and it’s this Friday. Margaret’s turning twenty-one.”
“Turned twenty-one already,” Ji Sun added. “But anyway, it’s a surprise.”
“Right,” Lainey said. “So we’re asking everyone to arrive before seven or after eight.”
“Smart,” Walker said. “I’ll just stop by at the start with Sachi?” He penciled neatly into his planner while Ji Sun and Lainey nodded, tried to keep their squeals swallowed.
* * *
• • •
Most parties in the dorms had an open bag of chips that was all crumbs by the time guests arrived. Their friends swarmed on the cheese and crackers they’d put out on unicorn paper p
lates atop a cafeteria tray, a bunch of grapes plunked down in the middle, satsumas with their leaves still on forming a border. Ji Sun felt more anxious about the food being gone before Walker arrived than before Margaret did, but she busied herself filling the piñata with the little plastic shot bottles Conner had dropped off earlier in the day.
Just before seven, they quieted and hid, Lainey near the door with her Polaroid camera, Alice planning to answer it, and Ji Sun behind the futon. The look on Margaret’s face when they shouted surprise was magnificent—a gift to them all. They’d feared Conner would accidentally tell her, but they could see on her face that he had not. Her eyes were wider than ever, glassy and exhilarated, and she put her hands on her cheeks, framing the O of wonderment her mouth made. In this moment, her beauty had nothing to do with symmetrical features or clear skin. She was elated, alight.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh! Oh, wow!” She burst into tears. “You guys,” she said. “You did this?” She touched the streamers they’d hung to frame the door. “I’ve never had a surprise party.”
“Looks like someone had a bit too much wine at dinner,” Conner said. He was red-faced and laughed too hard at himself, and more than one person answered him with, “Who, you?”
Margaret spent the first hour of the party running around and hugging everyone. Conner and Lainey bickered over the music, with Lainey wanting to keep it at synthy and poppy until the adults came and went, and Conner wanting the nineties rap that he thought made him a true OG. Seamus and Amy were already there, and while Lainey argued over the volume with Conner, she realized that Walker was there, too, in a scarf and jacket, a bottle of wine under his arm.
He moved easily among the students, shaking hands and offering his big, easy laugh. She watched as he shook off his coat and joined the TAs who were clustered around the window seat, drinking warm beers that they’d brought.
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