“Is that the college, honey?” her mother asked, as they turned off the highway toward Bloomington and a big limestone structure came into view.
“Mom, Jeez. That’s the football stadium.”
Jane’s father gave a sharp glance to the back seat, but her mother just chattered on. “Janey, do you have the map? Do you know where we’re going?”
Jane said the name of her dorm and her mother listened, pointing out street signs, as Jane read from the directions that had been included in her housing packet. It was Mrs. Barth’s way not to acknowledge bad behavior but, instead, respond to the rudeness with exaggerated politeness that made Jane simultaneously furious and ashamed. The truth was, Jane didn’t know much more about college than her mother did. She had set her heart on it long ago, in the first grade when the thrill of words revealing themselves, unlocking stories, had made her decide she would be a teacher when she grew up. But now that it was actually happening, she felt half-sick with dread. She’d never been away from home, except for overnights with friends and one miserable week at church camp when she was twelve. What if she got homesick? What if she hated her roommate – or worse, her roommate hated her? What if her roommate was rich, and Jane was embarrassed by all she didn’t have? The five dollars allowance her mother had promised to send every week would cover only the barest expenses, and it would be awful to add embarrassment to the mix of guilt and resentment she knew she’d feel every time she opened up the envelope and found it here.
She should have let them talk her into going to the university extension at home, she thought, where most of the people from her high school went if they were ambitious enough to want to go to college. She should have been grateful for the opportunity to get any kind of education at all. But she had wanted more, even though she knew going away to college meant that her mother would have to work extra hours at the A&P, where she stood on her feet all day, checking out groceries. Her father would have more cause to stop at the Red Star Tavern each night after work and drink himself quietly, purposefully, into oblivion.
It had been a quiet, awkward trip, the air heavy with all they did not know how to say. Still, Jane felt the weight of her parents’ love for her when her father turned the radio to a station that played the music she liked without her having to ask, and in her mother’s determined cheerfulness, in the way she fussed over whether Jane had remembered to bring the stamps she’d bought for her and the roll of quarters for her washing. Her sisters, Amy and Susan, huddled near her in the back seat the whole way. Twelve and thirteen, they were sweet, spindly girls with white-blond hair. They’d learned muteness, too. Her brother, Bobby, had simply avoided the situation. When everything was loaded and they were ready to leave, he slid out from underneath the junker he was working on in the driveway, bid Jane a gruff goodbye, then slid right back under it again.
They passed the dorms on Fee Lane and then the new business building, where the street T-ed at the old brick stadium. “Okay, turn left here,” Jane said, and they passed more dorms, a little shopping area. “Now right. That’s it, there. The first tall one.”
There were cars parked every which way, their trunks open. Suitcases, stereos, bicycles scattered on the sidewalk. Skateboarders clattered down the little hill from the dining hall: tanned girls in raggedy cut-off wheat jeans, their long hair flying, dodging frantic parents giving last-minute instructions to daughters who, momentarily, would be free do whatever they pleased.
Jane left her family standing on the sidewalk and, trying to look confident, headed toward the registration table to get her room assignment and pick up her key. There were signs welcoming the new freshmen and student guides to offer help and advice. One of them, a girl named Cindy, guided Jane through registration, then snagged a rolling luggage cart and followed to help unload her belongings.
She was tongue-tied by the girl’s friendly questions about her hometown, her major, her hobbies, embarrassed by the inept introduction she made when they reached her family. Transferring her things from the car to the luggage cart, she was acutely aware of what the other girls had: typewriters; stereos and crates of albums; hooded hair-dryers, like the ones in beauty shops; and racks of Villager outfits. Her suitcase was a graduation gift, so brand-new that Cindy could probably tell from looking at it that she’d never been anywhere. If so, she didn’t mention it, just chattered on about what a great place this was and how Jane was sure to love it, until she deposited them all at the elevators and moved on to her next good deed.
In the crush of new students and their parents waiting for the elevators, Jane and her family stood in the silence she had left.
“Jane.” Amy tugged her sleeve. “Is your room on top?”
“It’s on nine,” she said. “Pretty close.”
“There’s eleven,” Susan said. “I counted the rows of windows.”
“Then can we go to eleven?” Amy asked. “Mom, can we go up and see what it’s like at the top?”
A suntanned, freckled girl with long red hair, turned and smiled at her. “You can go all the way up to the roof, if your mom will let you. It’s really cool. There’s a big wall and you can look over it. You can see the whole campus from there.”
“We’ll see,” Mrs. Barth murmured, before Amy could open her mouth. It was what she always said when she didn’t want to say “no” in front of strangers.
The girl shook her hair away from her face and gave Jane a wicked grin. She got off on the ninth floor, too, and Jane watched her hurry off, then disappear into a room near the end of the corridor. She started down the hall, her dad pushing the luggage cart, her mom and sisters following.
“Here it is.” She stopped before the closed door of 907. Taped to it was a sign, decorated with little red and white IU symbols that said “Jane Barth & Karen Conklin Live Here.”
She placed her key in the lock, took a deep breath, and smiled, preparing to confront her roommate for the first time. But, although Karen had moved in, claimed a bed, a closet, and one of the two built-in desks on either side of the window, she wasn’t there.
“Dear Jane,” said the note pinned to the bulletin board. “As you can see, I went ahead and put my stuff away when I got here. But if you’d rather have a different desk or whatever, I’d be glad to trade. I’ve gone out with my boyfriend and won’t be back until this evening. I look forward to meeting you then. Karen.”
“Well, she’s thoughtful,” Jane’s mother said, reading over her shoulder. “That’s something, isn’t it? I guess we’ll be gone, though, by the time she gets back.”
She sounded so wistful and, glancing at her, Jane understood, suddenly, that her mother could not imagine what her life would be like in this place. The truth was, she couldn’t imagine it either, and she wished she had the courage to say this to her mother, to admit how scared she was that she’d feel lost and alone in this new life she’d been so insistent upon. No happier than she had been in high school. But she did not. Instead, she let her mother fuss over her, pretended to care which drawer was best for her nightgowns, which for her socks and underwear. Listened, again, to her instructions about laundry and assured her that she had every single thing she needed. When, finally, there was nothing left to do, she walked her family back down the corridor to the elevator and waited, zombie-like, for the moment it would open, swallow them up, and carry them away.
Alone in her dorm room, Jane studied the prom picture on her roommate’s bookshelf. Even in a formal dress, Karen looked, well, average. Brown hair turned up in a flip, brown eyes. Jane could see in the way she smiled up at her boyfriend that she was the kind of girl who made up for not being pretty by being attentive.
He liked her a lot, in any case. Jane saw that in the way he smiled back at her. He was cute. And a baseball player, too, which she knew because there was a framed picture of him in his baseball uniform.
Karen’s high school yearbook was shelved next to her new dictionary, and Jane opened it to the Class of 1965. There she was, the same smile in place, her hair in the same perfect flip she wore on prom night. Karen Conklin: Pep Club (1–4), French Club (1–4), Class Secretary (3, 4), Rotary Scholar.
Not too intimidating, Jane thought. Then she checked out the closet and was relieved to find that, although Karen had more clothes than she did, they weren’t particularly stylish. She had a typewriter, which Jane hoped she might be able to borrow sometimes, a stereo, and a stack of albums – Johnny Mathis, Herb Alpert, Barbara Streisand, the first Beatles album. Not Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. She had a box of scented pink stationery, a makeup bag with tons more makeup than Jane was used to wearing herself – every color of eye shadow, pale lipsticks, and that thick foundation you put on your face with a sponge. There was a white leather Bible with her name imprinted on the front in gold, set on the table beside her bed.
“Snooping?”
Jane whirled around, blushing, and saw the girl with the red hair standing in the doorway. She grinned that same wicked grin, then came right on in and plunked down on Karen’s desk chair. “Hey, don’t feel bad. I snooped my roommate, too. I’m Bridget Kelly, by the way. 920. You’re Jane, right?”
Jane nodded.
“So, what do you think?”
She laughed at Jane’s blank expression. “About Karen,” she said. “Your roommate? The one whose stuff you were just pawing through? Tell the truth or I’ll tell her I caught you mooning over the picture of her boyfriend.”
This was so obviously not a real threat that Jane burst out laughing. “She looks a little . . . perky,” she said. “That scares me.”
“Exactly what I thought when I spied on her moving in. I’ve been nosing around all day, checking people out.” Bridget rolled her eyes. “Mr. Get Up and Get Going, that’s the Judge. My dad. We left Evansville at five. He and my mom were on their way home by noon. No big deal to them. I’m the last of five kids – all girls. And me a mistake, if you want to know the truth of it. No kidding! My oldest sister, Kathleen, has a kid in junior high. Anyhow, my parents are used to all this. Not to mention ready for a little peace and quiet. We got my stuff unloaded and they were gone. Not that I had any problem with that. Man, I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since we brought Kath here when I was six.”
She smiled. “Your little sisters will probably be the same way. Right now, they’re probably thinking, I can’t wait to grow up and go back there by myself and go up on the roof any damn time I want. That’s why I came down. To see if you wanted to go check it out.”
“Sure. Okay,” Jane said.
They took the stairs, passing the doors to the tenth and eleventh floors to the one that opened out onto the roof, where a dozen or so girls were sunbathing. Jane blinked in the bright sunlight, thrilled by the sudden warmth of the sun on her skin, the scent of Coppertone, the music on a half dozen transistor radios drifting up into the air. Joining Bridget at the wall, she took a tentative look outward, and stepped back, breathless, at the sight of the campus spread out before them like a map of itself.
Later, after they showered and ate their first meal in the dining hall, they walked out into it, toward the Student Union, which Bridget said her sisters had told her was the place where the fraternity boys would come that night to check out the new crop of freshman girls.
They walked along a wooded path that ran aside a creek, which Bridget said was called the “Jordan River.” Jane could see some of the old classroom buildings, limestone with leaded windows, and they seemed perfect to her – just like college ought to look. They emerged at Ballantine Hall, where Bridget said some of their classes would be, passed a pretty little stone chapel, where her sister, Colleen, had married in June.
“Not a Catholic wedding,” she said, sternly. Then laughed.
The Union building looked like a castle to Jane, all peaks and turrets. They entered through an arched doorway and walked along the gleaming corridors, past a bakery and the bookstore to the Commons, where everyone hung out. It was packed, every table taken. But Jane and Bridget went through the line anyway, got Cokes and fries, and a table opened up as they emerged with their trays. They sipped their Cokes, mesmerized by the conversations buzzing all around them, the shouts of greeting, the hugs and even tears as friends reconnected after the long summer.
“Jane! Don’t look right this second,” Bridget whispered. “But there’s this blond guy behind you. He’s so cute. And he’s with this good friend of mine from home. Okay. Now. He’s talking to the girl wearing the pink culottes –”
Jane glanced back and knew instantly which boy she meant. He was built like a swimmer, compact and lean, his floppy blond hair streaked by the sun, his mischievous blue eyes full of light. His left arm was in a sling, his wrist wrapped in an ace bandage; there was a huge, painful-looking scrape on his right elbow. As Jane subtly shifted her chair for a better view, he slipped his arm from the sling, bent his legs and held his hands out in a surfer’s stance.
“I kid you not,” she heard him say. “Fifty miles an hour down that hill on my skateboard. No doubt. And a goddamn little kid comes tottering onto the sidewalk and I jump the curb to avoid him and totally lose it – and what does his mom do? Give me crap for being a bad example.”
The girl laughed.
“Hey,” he said, reinserting his arm into the sling. “It’s a serious injury, man. Major sprain. Plus, it’s my writing hand.” He grinned. “I need a scribe, so I’m signing up for whatever Gilbert’s taking.”
“Sucker,” the girl said, elbowing the boy standing beside him.
He shrugged and smiled.
“That guy he’s with,” Bridget whispered. “He’s my friend. Tom Gilbert.”
He was stocky, with dark, curly hair cropped short. Brown eyes. Out of her league, Jane knew. She glanced at him a second time and blushed, realizing he was looking at her. He smiled, but she turned away as if she hadn’t noticed him. Don’t, she thought. But of course Bridget waved and gestured him over to their table when the girl they had been talking to went on her way.
“Hey, Bridge.” He pulled a chair over and sat down. “What’s up? Who’s your friend?”
Bridget introduced them, then to Jane’s relief chattered on about moving in to the dorm and other people from home she’d already run into. From the corner of her eye, Jane watched the blond boy, who’d fed some quarters into the jukebox and was now flipping through the music charts, pushing buttons. When “Wooly Bully” started to play, he turned, zeroed in on Tom, and headed their way. Pete was his name.
“What happened to you,” Bridget asked when Tom introduced him, then listened, rapt, as he told the story they’d just overheard. She batted her eyelashes at him. “You poor thing,” she said. “You need a nurse and a scribe.”
“Job’s open.” Pete sat down beside her.
Boldly, Jane thought, Bridget took his bandaged hand and examined it. “I actually can do this,” she said. “Wrap, I mean. I took a first aid class at the Y. For life guarding.” She grinned. “You have no idea how talented I am.”
“Yeah?” Pete grinned back. “Can you dance?”
Bridget gave her beautiful red hair a shake. “Tom,” she said. “Tell him.”
“She can dance,” Tom said.
“Excellent,” Pete said. “Party tomorrow night. Sig house. Want to come?”
“I’d love to,” Bridget said.
Into the sudden, awkward silence that followed, Tom said, “Jane?”
“Of course, Jane’s going,” Bridget said.
“Do you want to?” Tom asked.
“Sure,” Jane said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Yeah, okay.”
She was mortified when, entering the dorm lobby the next afternoon, she saw him picking up the telephone – to call another girl, she assumed; one he actually liked – and she took a step backward, hoping to avoid him.
But he saw her and put down the receiver. “Jane! Hey, I came over to make sure about tonight. Bridget can be so –” Then, surprising her, he blushed. “I just wanted to make sure you really wanted to come to the party.”
“I do,” Jane said.
“Good. Well, then. Seven.”
He grinned, offered his hand; they shook.
And he was gone.
Jane stood for a long while, still feeling the warmth of his palm against hers, elated, a little afraid to know that he had come in search of her.
“That’s just like Tom,” Bridget said when Jane told her. “Honest to God. He called me this morning and said, ‘Do you think Jane really wants to go tonight?’ I said, Yes. But I knew he didn’t believe me.” She laughed. “Man, you guys are perfect for each other. You think he’s being polite and doesn’t really like you, he thinks you’re being polite and don’t really like him. It’s a damn good thing I’m around, that’s all I have to say. Here –” She offered Jane a blue and maroon plaid madras shirt that still had the price tag on it. “This will look great with your hair. It’s cool that we’re exactly the same size, don’t you think?”
“Bridget,” Jane said. “This is brand new. You haven’t even worn it yet.”
Bridget rolled her eyes and pressed it upon her. “Jane. Here. Really. My sister Colleen took me shopping and we went totally nuts with my mom’s charge card. She just graduated, Colleen did. So she knew exactly what everyone would be wearing, and she told my mom I had to have it all. So, God. There’s plenty for both of us.”
She said it blithely, as if the dismal state of Jane’s closet had only to do with the lack of an older sister to help her shop for the right things.
The shirt was perfect, nicer than anything Jane had ever worn. And it did look good with her hair, which was sun-streaked from the summer. Perfectly straight, it had grown to her shoulders, finally, and she’d had it blunt-cut – like a surfer girl’s. When she leaned forward, it felt like a silky curtain against her face.
“Okay,” Bridget said, settling on a starched blue oxford, buffing her Weejuns with a damp towel. “I give up. Pete can take me or leave me.” Then she threw herself backward onto the bed and lay, her arms and legs flung out in an X. “Aargh, I’m a wreck,” she said. “A total nervous wreck. Are you?”
“Yes,” Jane said.
The party was in the attic of the Sigma Chi house, where no girls were supposed to be. James Brown was blaring on the stereo. People were dancing, the floor slick with spilled beer. Along one wall, there was a row of battered couches where sorority girls perched, laughing, on their dates’ laps. The room was smoky, close. The red tips of cigarettes glittered in the dark corners.
“Watch out.” That’s what Karen Conklin had said the night before, when they were getting acquainted and Jane told her that she and Bridget had been invited to a fraternity party. “Those boys are wild,” Karen said. “John – that’s my boyfriend – he told me they ask out freshman girls, get them drunk and then – well, you know.”
But Jane nursed a single beer most of the evening, and Tom didn’t seem to notice. He talked to her. He held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, taking deep drags. He blew the smoke out evenly, careful as a little kid trying to make perfect soap bubbles. He talked about school, about the guys he lived with. About mornings, hunting with his father – how the fog sat in little pockets in the hollows and his feet went numb with cold and time stopped. He talked for so long it seemed he’d been saving these things all his life, waiting for the moment she would walk into it so he could tell them to her.
Later, in his room, he pulled her toward him. Now, Jane thought. She hadn’t dated much in high school; she’d never had a boyfriend. Mostly, she had obsessed over certain unattainable boys, shocked speechless on the rare occasion one of them ever said word to her. She had no idea what Tom expected of her now, or what she would say or do if it seemed wrong to her. She tried to concentrate on the bookshelves in the built-in desk they leaned against. Fat, leather-bound business textbooks. A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye. The books made her feel a little better, but the dark shadow of the bed still frightened her.
He kissed her – a good kiss. She knew enough to know that. Then in what was almost like a dance step, he pushed her away so that they stood apart, just holding hands. “Don’t be scared, Jane. I’m not in any hurry here.”
“I’m not scared,” she said.
“Yeah, you are. Hey, I don’t bring girls up here all the time. This isn’t a game with me.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings that dissolved into the room’s gray corners. “Come on. Smile.”
And she did, in spite of herself.
“Good.” He smiled back.
She laughed a little, drifted over to the window. Outside the street lamps shone, and she could hear the music from the party. She felt him move closer. He stood behind her, not touching her, but so close that she could feel the rhythm of his breathing. There was the faint odor of tobacco mixed with the scent of English Leather. They stood there for a long time. Jane thought that if she raised her arm, his arm would raise, too. If she made a quick feint sideways, he would follow. She let out a deep sigh, and he encircled her.
“Well?” Bridget said, when they got back to the dorm. “I, personally, am besotted. Pete told me he’d teach me how to ride his motorcycle, can you believe that? My parents would kill me if they found out!” She threw up her arms in glee. “But they won’t! They can’t! I swear to God, I’ve waited forever to get here and tonight I realized I never even came close to imagining how cool it would actually be. Jane! My God, can you believe it? Me and Pete and you and Tom.
“So, okay,” Bridget went on. “We’ve got the boy front covered. Now tell me what you think about Karen Conklin. The truth of what you think about her.”
They’d fled to the lounge to talk, and Jane dreaded going back to her room where Karen would surely grill her about the party. The night before, she and Bridget had gotten off the elevator singing “Game of Love” at the top of their lungs and there was Karen emerging from 907, carrying a brand new pink plastic bucket with her toiletries in it. She wore a pink robe with roses on it and matching slippers. Her hair was in pink rollers.
“Hey!” Jane said. “Hi. I’m your roommate.”
“I was wondering where you were.” Karen gave her an assessing look. “It’s really nice to meet you,” she said, practically whispering. “But it’s after hours now. Maybe you didn’t realize we’re supposed to be quiet in the evenings?”
“That would be after classes start,” Bridget said.
Karen raised an eyebrow, moved past them, and disappeared into the bathroom. Later, she said to Jane, “Listen, I don’t mean to butt in, but that girl is wild – anyone can see it, and you might want to be careful about hanging around with her. If you wreck your reputation the very first week you’re here, well . . .”
“She’s horrible,” Jane said.
Bridget smiled serenely. “Exactly my thought. And I saw her eating dinner with my roommate, Carla, who’s just as big a drag as she is. So I’m thinking, let’s switch.”
“You can do that?” Jane asked.
“Yep. Colleen told me, ‘If you get a dud for a roommate, figure out who you really want to live with and switch.’ But she said you’ve got do it quick, before things get weird. So let’s go down and talk to the dorm counselor about it right now. Get things fixed exactly the way we want them to be.”
Bridget was a wonder, Jane thought. She convinced the dorm counselor to let them switch roommates. The next day, she marshaled Jane through registration, making sure they got as many classes together as they could. She shared Colleen’s advice to think of college as a 9–5 job and, that first week, the two of them made a pact to get up no later than 8:00 every weekday morning, eat breakfast, and head for class or to the library. No napping in the afternoons, no lying around listening to music, no soap operas down in the lounge. Evenings and weekends were their own, free for hanging out together or dancing with Pete and Tom.
High school had been easy. Jane had grown up in a blue-collar town, and classes were pitched to the majority of students, who were there because they had to be, who expected no more out of life than a job at the steel mill that came with insurance benefits, three weeks of vacation every year, and the promise that you could retire to a little lake cottage someday, kick back, and do nothing at all – or, if you were a girl, to get married to someone with a job like that. Memorize, spit back the facts, and you were National Honor Society material. Here you had to think, which Jane found she liked every bit as much as dancing.
She loved staying up all hours with Bridget trying to puzzle out what a poem meant, or how the stuff of a story might be connected to an author’s real life. She loved highlighting her copious notes, reducing the Civil War into an outline, then an anagram that held within it everything she knew, so that when she opened her blue book and wrote the letters on the inside cover, thoughts and facts blossomed out and onto the page as she answered the exam questions.
But she loved most walking through drifts of red and orange leaves on campus, her arms full of books, and glancing up to see Tom coming toward her. She still half-believed he’d walk right past, as if he’d never even met her. Never, ever was she prepared for the way his face lit up at the first sight of her. Walking up the steps to the fraternity house with him on Saturday nights, Jane quickened at the sound of music pouring from the open windows of the dining room, the sight of bodies moving in the haze of cigarette smoke. Inside, the long, scarred tables had been pushed against the walls; the band was set up in one corner: a whole family of colored people from Terre Haute, who came with parents and grandparents, little kids. Teenage sisters in short, spangly dresses and go-go boots, singing backup. They played Motown and the Blues so deafeningly loud that there was nothing to do but dance.
There was always a keg of beer hidden in the phone room just off the front hall. At first, Jane had hesitated: only the wild girls drank in high school. But a few beers – if she was careful – what could it hurt? The second one gave her a nice little buzz, the third dissolved her last shred of self-consciousness, and she was whirling, shouting the lyrics along with everybody else.
It was fun. She’d never had such pure fun, she thought. She’d never been so happy as she was dancing with Tom – Bridget and Pete circling like satellites. Wild, silly dancing: the Pony, the Swim, the Funky Chicken. Slow dances, feeling the length of Tom’s body against her own, knowing soon they’d go upstairs to his room and collapse, kissing, the music coming right up through the ceiling so that it was as if they were still dancing, even then. One night, goofing around, they realized that their school pep songs were sung to the same tune, then that their thighs, pressing against each other, were exactly the same length, even though Tom was a full head taller. He’d caught her hand and held it to his, palm to palm, and they discovered that, though his palm was bigger, her fingers were longer, making their hands essentially the same size as well.
“See,” he’d said. “One more reason you should fall in love with me.”
The last weekend in October, he took her to see Peter, Paul & Mary in concert at the Auditorium. Just the two of them. Jane loved their music, the way there were ideas in it, the way it made her feel at the same time hopeful and sad. She had sat in the dark auditorium, Tom’s arm around her shoulders, marveling that they were there before her, real. Proof somehow that she belonged in this larger world and that it had been there all along, just waiting for her – with Tom in it. Walking hand-in-hand through campus afterward, her head was still full of music; her heart full, too, for the way he had surprised her with the tickets. His pleasure in surprising her. He stopped and drew her to him in the shadow of a gingko tree.
“I love you, Jane,” he said.
She couldn’t make herself speak, just burrowed into his chest, breathed in the scent of him, her eyes burning with tears, and he held her tighter.
Till then he’d talked to her only in a teasing way about being in love. Love at first sight, he claimed – and she half-believed him, though it seemed incomprehensible to her. But this was different. She was scared, suddenly. Scared to say she loved him back for fear he’d change his mind and what would she do, now that she could no longer imagine her life without him in it? Scared of how loving Tom made her feel.
“Oh, man.” Bridget smacked her hand against her head when Jane tried to explain her confusion. “Jane. Can’t you see what this is really about? You feel guilty because the truth of what’s making you so deliriously happy is making out like a fiend with him. Every single night. Wherever, whenever you can.”
She hooted at Jane’s embarrassment. “You’d have made a great Catholic, you know? Listen. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with making out with someone you like. It’s totally natural. It’s . . . biological! And, Jane, Tom’s completely trustworthy. You decide where you want him to stop, and he’ll stop. You know he will.
“And just in case you’re thinking we shouldn’t be going up to their rooms like we do because it’s against the rules,” she added. “Forget that, too. It’s not like it’s immoral – and besides, what are they going to do if they find us? Send us to make-out jail?”
Jane laughed then. And Bridget was right; as far as Jane could tell, she was right about pretty much everything. Bridget could always tell which of the sorority girls were really nice and which ones were fake. She knew which boys to trust, which ones to avoid. She knew why Pete got too drunk sometimes, knew the meaning behind things he said and did that sometimes upset Jane or made her worry that Bridget might be in over her head with him.
“He’s afraid,” Bridget would say. “His parents give him all this money, all this stuff. They’re competing for him, but they don’t really care about him. Until he met me he was completely alone in the world, really – except for Tom, who’s his friend. But, you know. Guys. I’m the one who understands him. And he’s scared of that, you know? He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, but he tests me sometimes –
“Like the other night, when he did the Alligator at the party. He wasn’t that drunk. I know exactly how much he drank, and it wasn’t that much. Plus, we’d had that huge pizza. He did the Alligator to see if I’d do it with him. Big deal. You throw yourself on the floor and writhe around to the music and that’s supposed to be the be-all and end-all of depravity? I can do that. It’s stupid. But funny. Who gives a shit what those sorority girls think?” She grinned at Jane. “You should have tried it.”
“And wreck your Villager outfit?” Jane said wryly.
Bridget laughed. “Honestly, Jane, the best thing we ever decided was not to go through rush,” she said. “I look at all those girls in church clothes lined up outside the houses just waiting for a chance to go in and grovel for a bid so they can join up and get bossed around by a bunch of prudes. Uh-uh. Not me.”
“Me either,” Jane had said, relieved not to have to admit she couldn’t have afforded it.
Happy, utterly present in this new life, Jane began to dread her regular call home on Sunday evenings: the forced cheerfulness in her mother’s voice, the eagerness with which she asked about friends and classes. Still, she couldn’t have explained why she didn’t tell her mother about Bridget or Tom right from the start, or why she let her believe that she and Karen Conklin were not only still roommates, but had become friends and spent all their free time together. Jane liked to think it was because she believed her mother felt connected to Karen, having read her thoughtful note that first day, and wouldn’t worry about Jane being lonely. In darker moments, though, she knew it was pure selfishness that made her keep this happiness to herself.
The day before Thanksgiving she climbed on the Greyhound bus, fearful that, once home, the growing confidence she’d felt in the past months, the sense of belonging would completely dissolve. She tried to read, study, sleep, but ended up staring out of the window at what seemed like an endless number of small towns and stubbled cornfields as the bus wound its way north, through Indiana. The sky was gray; even so, Jane saw the cloud of smog hanging over her hometown well before she saw the first sprawl of houses or the tall, spewing smokestacks of the steel mills.
Her father was waiting at the station, smoking a cigarette, shy and awkward as a teenage boy. She smelled whiskey on his breath when he embraced her, his fortification for anxious moments like this one – or maybe just to get him through the day. Walking through the front door of their little tract house, it seemed to Jane as if she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything looked so small, so close. The worn carpet, the flickering TV screen, the Formica dinette table set for dinner. There were Amy and Susan, wearing the red Indiana sweatshirts she’d saved up to buy for them. And Bobby, stretched out on the sofa, taller, skinnier, and more sullen than she’d remembered him to be.
“I fixed scalloped potatoes and ham for dinner!” Mrs. Barth said. “Your favorite. It’s ready any time. You’re hungry, aren’t you? After that long bus trip –” She stepped back and looked at her daughter. “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re home. It’s so good to see you.”
Jane wasn’t glad to be home, she wasn’t the least bit hungry. What she wanted to do was collapse right where she stood and sleep until it was time to go back to Bloomington on Sunday morning. But she attempted a smile. Be nice, she told herself; pretend you’re thrilled to be here. For three days, be the Jane they need you to be. But when she took her place at the dinner table, it seemed to her as if she’d never even been away.