Maggie
Maggie hadn’t gone to college, but she had a picture of it in her head, and the day she’d moved Emma in, everything she had imagined in her mind, she saw on campus. Yellow Frisbees sailed in the air; boys in long shorts ran across clipped green lawns. Clusters of girls sat in the shade of trees, their nervous giggles absorbed by the low, weeping branches that brushed the shoulders and collarbones peeking out from their carefully chosen shirts. Burgers grilling, balloons waving. And table after table of older kids offering instant friendship in exchange for signing up for something. It was like a street carnival filled with clean-cut teenagers performing the roles of clean-cut teenagers. And the dorm rooms! Brightly decorated with photo boards and fuzzy throw pillows and colorful desk lamps blinking on and off, a friendly coded hello.
How could anything but fun happen in a place like this?
On her subsequent visits, fueled by episodes of crime shows on Investigation Discovery, she was slightly more aware of the fringe-y neighborhoods she drove past before she reached the waving banners that trumpeted Semper’s accomplishments. The yellow-and-gray flags flapped their welcome in the wind, like the United Nations, like an Olympic village. She supposed they were designed to assuage the realization that you’d driven through the most economically depressed, drug-torn part of Philadelphia to get there.
The campus itself was a mix of new, towering buildings named after generous alumni (once a Semper, always a Semper, at least if you had money) and old stone structures meant to signify tradition. There were unusual sculptures like the fifteen-foot-tall light bulb outside the liberal arts building and modern pulsing fountains scattered throughout, to remind you of the prestigious college of art. Decades ago, Maggie remembered they had dyed the water in the fountains yellow to celebrate a football victory, and they’d been widely mocked, with kids posing for photos, pretending to pee into them.
Many of those yellow canvas banners used photos and quotes from famous alumni. Emma hadn’t known who half the people were, but Maggie did, and that, she supposed, was the point. To impress parents, who paid the bills, and not kids, who wanted to know whether the food was good and the other kids were attractive.
But college looked amazing to someone who had never been, whether that someone was eighteen or forty-six. Some of Maggie’s friends and Maggie’s own sister, Kate, had mocked higher education as a rip-off, thought it unnecessary. Go to a trade school! But Maggie had always wondered what it would have been like to be young and free but still safe. Half in, half out of adulthood, instead of being thrust into the work world at eighteen.
The fact that Maggie had wanted to be part of it, to share it with her daughter, wasn’t all that surprising. But what surprised her more deeply was how she’d glossed over all of it with optimism, how much she’d bought into the brochures, the videos, the campus tour led by a perky brunette. How a smart, savvy working mother could be blinded by a campus tour guide who could walk backward and answer questions at the same time.
It wasn’t till the day in November when she arrived with an entourage that Maggie saw things differently, through another lens. Walking with Carla and Kaplan, a policeman from the district, the RA—Tim somebody or other—and a burly campus security guard whose name badge simply read J was like cutting a swath with the grim reaper. The way the crowds parted and kids ducked away guiltily. For that was college too, she realized. What rule or law or mother’s promise should I break today? What can I get away with and try to hide?
Maggie’s heart pounded as the security guard swiped his badge and held the door, letting them in to the first floor of Hoden House. Four stories high, a simple brick building that had always been a dorm, unlike some of the others that had been retrofitted over the years as Semper grew. Horowitz Hall, which used to be the English department, had a soaring room on the third floor the kids called the Ballroom and a parapet on top that was only available for study by reservation. Hoden House was nothing like that, no-nonsense, each floor precisely the same, stacked like pancakes, smelling like beer.
They went in single file, past the check-in desk where a security guard who couldn’t be older than college age himself nodded at them. As they waited for the elevator, kids made a quick detour for the stairs; no one wanted to be trapped in a small space with the official-looking entourage. Three badges, two passkeys, and a mom? No thank you. Not with tequila breath or red eyes or stolen bananas from the salad bar.
“Did, like, something happen?” a passing girl asked the RA.
“No,” he said. “Just a precaution, Robin. Don’t you worry.”
The girl’s face lit up at the sound of her name. He remembered her!
“Is Robin on Emma’s floor?” Maggie asked, and he shrugged. “You don’t know?”
“I have three floors. It’s hard to keep everyone straight.”
Upstairs, the north corner. A passkey swipe and they were inside Emma’s suite. Two double rooms and a single, plus a bathroom, small kitchen, and living room. Empty. Quiet. All three bedroom doors shut. So different from the bustle of that first week of class. Maggie had met all these girls at move-in, memorized everything she could about them. She repeated their names to herself: Annie and Morgan, first door to right. Taylor, the end of the hall. And straight ahead, the minute you walked in the entry, Emma and Fiona, the roommate her daughter didn’t know, the lottery she’d chosen to play. How happy Maggie had been, hearing the Irish name and seeing the tiny cross around the girl’s neck; how relieved Emma had seemed when she’d seen how clean Fiona’s side of the room was and how pretty her clothes. Fiona was taller, but they were the same size. They could borrow. They could share. What had they shared now?
The door of Emma’s room had paper still taped to its door—a colorful Magic Marker rendering of the girls’ names, drawn by the orientation team on the first day of school. A childlike contrast to the way the girls—who’d all moved in before Emma—had decorated their small living room. Two fuzzy white throw pillows. A blue butterfly chair by the window. An end table shoved up against the wall that held nothing but a blender and ten shot glasses, each from a different college. Painted wooden plaques from T.J.Maxx mounted above it, announcing It’s wine o’clock and #TequilaTuesday. And although Maggie had been shocked by the alcohol shrine, she’d been calmed by the art on the door, a kindergarten teacher’s kind of welcome.
As the RA unlocked the door with his key, Maggie noticed the paper curled at the edges, and the ink had run down the F in Fiona, bubbling the fibers, blurring the word.
“No crime tape?” Maggie’s voice was as authoritative as she could make it.
“No crime,” Kaplan said, and the word yet hung in the air.
“Where are her roommates?” Maggie asked, their memorized names a chorus waiting in her throat.
“Still trying to locate,” he replied.
“All of them?” she said, eyes widening.
“Yes. Along with her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Maggie spat it out like a stone in fruit. “Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
The glance exchanged by the four others made Maggie feel sick inside.
“Using the term loosely, from the looks of things, Mrs. O’Farrell, I think she does.”
The door swung open, heavy, banging against the wall. It hurt Maggie, that banging. It felt like a bruise.
On the left side of the room, messy, tangled sheets, an odd woodsy smell in the air. A pair of handcuffs on the pillow, unlocked, beckoning. A condom wrapper on the floor, opened, spent. The bright blue of the package calling to Maggie, signaling her own naivete, her own stupidity. It was the same brand as the five-pack she’d tucked into her daughter’s suitcase with a note: Semper means always…be safe! A smiley face below. A heart. Astroglide on the nightstand, squeezed in the middle grotesquely, violently, like someone in a huge hurry.
But all of that, added together, multiplied, divided, and symbolically rendered in any way imaginable, wasn’t the part that would stay with Maggie.
What haunted her was the right side of the room. The side of the room that was completely empty.