Nell retrieved her mother, and the two of them opened the envelope to marvel at the acceptance letter contained therein. They telephoned Nell’s grandparents in Florida to deliver the good news, putting them on speakerphone so that the whole family could participate in what Nell’s grandfather called “plotzing and kvelling”—“Our little Smithie!” and so forth. I remember much joking to the effect that Nell and her grandmother, who had attended Mount Holyoke, were officially “rivals,” and some ribbing about Nell’s risk of becoming a Republican, given that both Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were Smith alumnae. “If they ever come to campus,” said her grandmother, “give them a big kick in the pants from me.”
Throughout all of this, I remained seated on the living room couch, perusing one of the enclosed pamphlets that accounted for the envelope’s fatness. As part of the BOOBLESS League, Smith was among the schools to which I had secretly applied, but I had never considered the reality of following Nell there specifically. Now the prospect filled me with a pain so pervasive that I couldn’t, in the moment, trace it to its source. I was jealous, perhaps, but not of Nell’s success. I was afraid, but not of my own potential failure. I was repelled, resistant, internally howling I don’t want—but what was it I didn’t want?
I ran my fingers over the pamphlet’s glossy paper, streaking pizza-grease trails across photographs of girls, girls, girls—teams of ponytailed athletic girls in numbered white tunics and basketball shorts, science girls in white lab coats frowning through goggles at beakers held aloft, butch and femme girls lolling in harmony on a verdant lawn. Women, I suppose one must call them. Women only.
“We should really let Nell go,” said Nell’s mother. “She has a friend over.”
From the speakerphone, Nell’s grandmother said, “You’re having a pajama party? What fun!”
Nell laughed. “Pajama party makes it sound like we’re having, like, pillow fights,” she said.
Shame surged through me, hot and nauseous, as I half-remembered the hackneyed slumber party scenario I’d fabricated for Jimmy Frye. “Actually,” I said, “I should get going.”
“Wait, don’t leave!” said Nell. “Grandma, Grandpa, I have to go.” She stepped away from the phone, back toward the couch.
At her approach, I flinched involuntarily.
She sat down on the couch beside me and spoke in a low voice; her mother had resumed the phone conversation. “Sorry.”
I forced a smile. “You’re sorry you got into college?”
“No, I’m sorry for being on the phone so long,” she said. “I didn’t mean to leave you alone.”
She had no idea of the lengths I had gone, the lengths I was willing to go, to prevent her from leaving me alone. Worse yet, I had no idea whether she would do the same for me. I had been ignoring this thought for months, but the possibility existed—I could no longer deny it—that she would not be pleased to find me following her to Smith. Having to ask her, not knowing how she’d answer, was unbearable to contemplate.
“Fay?” said Nell. (When had she stopped calling me boss?) “You okay, dude?”
I was not okay. I was newly uneasy in the presence of Nell. It was not, as it had once been, the bracing tension of finding myself the object of a crush. Rather, it was a stinging new awareness of how much she meant to me. I needed her, suddenly, so much more than she needed me.