Emma
Emma didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She just wanted to grow up.
She’d always been the youngest in her class—born in September but not held back a year in kindergarten like so many others. Perennially a little smaller, more naive. Coming up short, always running after a piece of knowledge the others had first. Not school, but other things. Personal things. She’d pretended to have her period for a whole year before she’d gotten it, carrying tampons in her backpack, complaining about cramps and PMS based on symptoms she’d Googled, without any real understanding of how bad, how devastating it could be. When she’d finally gotten it, on a Thursday afternoon that was stained into memory, she’d wept like a child in her mother’s arms, in disbelief that it could be this gruesome, this painful, and last for forty years! Like a prison sentence! How do you stand it, Mom? Every month? she’d cried. She couldn’t believe every woman in the world she’d ever met, seen, or known had endured this, had carried this secret. Her friends, their teachers and neighbors, strangers on the bus, her mother, her aunt Kate, her freaking grandmother who still had it, all walking around like the cool girls at school, as if it was nothing. And it wasn’t nothing.
That was the first lesson she’d learned, that you had to push those feelings down. Her mother stood on her feet for nine hours a day, every day, no matter what, just to keep things together. Her mother’s mother had worked every day except Sunday in her grandfather’s Irish Isle store—correction, their store, she’d told Emma once, declaratively—for the same reasons. Grandma, who worked so hard that she’d had a little breakdown that no one ever talked about, who had gone off someplace to rest for a week. They’d never thrown this in Emma’s face, but Emma knew. Women worked. They worked hard, harder than men. But men like Frank got the gold stars, the Purple Hearts, the mayor’s commendations, the sobriety chips, the whatevers. No one would give her mother a medal for washing hair and paying her bills while enduring cramps. No freaking way. Women had to do more.
As she grew older and the age-related differences between her and her classmates grew smaller, she was convinced these striations would all be gone by the time she went to college. Everyone had a driver’s license, had tried pot and drank beer. Everyone had some level of sexual experience and survived the singular trauma known as high school. Every time she liked a boy who didn’t like her back, every time a teacher redlined a paper for using the wrong word, every time she saw another girl’s outfit in a store and gasped at the price tag—she’d think, College. This will all be erased at college.
After her mom left on the first day, she looked around her suite at the four other girls. Annie and Morgan, who met each other in summer camp but laughingly said they hated each other then, were both in the CGP, College of General Prep, which encompassed most of the education-oriented majors but was widely known as the school with the lowest standards. CGP: crayon, glue, pencils.
Taylor, who was enrolled in the business school but planned to minor in theater, wore vintage glasses and had a sideways smile. Fiona, like Emma, was in the College of Arts and Sciences with an undeclared major. She was pretty and polite and organized, quick to loan out her scissors, lint roller, thumbtacks. We’re all freshmen, Emma thought. We’re all equals. Those first few nights, laughing and passing around a bottle of cheap pinot grigio, she actually thought she’d found some BFFs.
The cracks began to show a few days later, when girls in other dorms invited some of them to pregames but not all of them. Fiona claimed she’d tried to include them but that it was a “whole different squad.” That made sense. The rooms were so freaking small—you couldn’t squeeze everyone in. Even at the big frat houses, you had to have your name on a list to get in.
Annie and Morgan had met other girls from their camp and hung out separately with them, doing nothing but singing campfire songs and drinking s’mores shots (or so it appeared on Instagram). Fiona spent a lot of time doing laundry; she had Shout wipes and a steamer and a lamb’s-wool buffer she kept next to her shoes. Emma had heard her coming in late at night, heard the light clang of the hanger as she put away her dress and the soft swoosh of wool going over her shoes. She’d started looking at her own shoes differently, seeing the road dust, the edges of mud, errant blades of grass. Did Fiona pay such close attention to everything or just her own things? Emma had known girls like that in high school, who asked things like Who does your eyebrows? As if they didn’t already know: No one. God does my eyebrows. But so far, Fiona hadn’t said anything like that. But then again, Fiona didn’t say much.
Taylor left campus often with her drama friends. They went into Center City Philly to see small, up-and-coming shows. They went to New York some Saturdays to go to Broadway. It was as if they had better things to do than hang out in dorm rooms.
Emma didn’t really have a group outside her roommates, but she figured that would come with time. She had one friend from high school—Sarah Franco—who lived on the opposite side of campus and had a work-study job that took up a ton of time. They saw each other maybe once a week. And Emma had signed up on move-in day to write for the school newspaper’s blog and tried to strike up conversations with others at the journalism table. But many of the kids there seemed quieter than she was. Or, they were just awkward or busy, and she was too eager and desperate and blathering.
No one in her suite seemed concerned about this almost instantaneous splintering of the roommates, because they were too busy. They bonded over that at least, the being busy and the being lost. God, how they’d gotten lost. Even kids who went to huge high schools—Taylor had eight hundred kids in her graduating class—even those kids found the campus large and bewildering. They’d all had stories about getting lost and being late and getting yelled at and honked at by professors, security guards, RAs. There was a kind of freshman look; like tourists, they stared at everything with a weird combination of amazement and confusion. And when they relied on Google Maps to get to buildings, turning in circles, looking at their phones? That was a solid giveaway. A few nights in the beginning, they’d taken selfies and tagged them #freshmanface. But they didn’t share them with anyone, not even other freshmen, and their group chat soon dwindled to nothing.
But the truth was, even though she was overwhelmed in some ways, Emma wasn’t as busy as everyone else. She’d gone to a rigorous high school, and compared to it, her classes seemed almost easy. Yes, she had to keep up with the reading and pay attention, but something about the way the subjects were outlined and served up in class reminded her, vaguely, of eighth grade. It was as if her professors were trying to be serious but still bite-sizing everything for the lowest common denominator.
Another difference that became clear right away was that she didn’t have as much money as everyone else. She ate at the dining hall when others went out or ordered in or paid Ubers to deliver. She suggested cooking together to her roommates, pitching in to make chili or Irish stew. They repeated the words Irish stew, as if she had just suggested they eat dog shit. And fucking Fiona, who was one million percent Irish, had not even stood up for her.
The night of the first big football game, against the Ohio Burrs, they’d all had shots of vanilla vodka in their room as they painted their faces. Then the others had dispersed, bouncing off to separate parties. Emma had waved to them and pretended she had somewhere else to go, too. She fake-walked all the way across campus, after white-lying to their faces, saying that she was meeting Sarah even though Sarah had not texted her back and that she’d see them all later at the game. Go Sabres!
As she wove through the throngs of kids coming to the stadium in the opposite direction, she held on to the hope that she’d run into someone from one of her classes, someone she’d met at her dorm orientation, when they’d played those get-to-know-you games. Emma would remember those fun facts! She’d know who had a pet iguana and who loved opera and who thought unicorns were real until she was eleven. She’d recognize those girls in a crowd and shriek “Unicorn girl!” and they’d bond and share whatever horrible alcoholic concoction was available. She’d swallow it gratefully as the price of admission.
But she saw no one she recognized. She wandered around for a while before going into the enormous, pulsing stadium. She knew what her mother would say—Make friends with the people sitting near you! Other people are alone, too! But that was advice that worked in third grade, not now. Drunk friendships didn’t hold. Emma had danced and laughed with a girl at a party the first week, and when she’d seen her the next day and waved, the girl looked at her like she was a stalker. Still. There were thirty thousand people here. Emma had been alone her whole damned life, and she was not giving up.
A few days after the game, Emma received an email asking her to make an appointment with the editor of the Semper Sun. She’d been inside every building on campus—it was a goal she’d set the first week, a freshman bucket list—and Emma saw quickly the disparities between structures. The journalism building was on the far northeast edge of the liberal arts school and dated back to the early 1900s. It was charming on the outside—always featured on the school’s videos—but cold and leaky on the inside. Its computers were old, its desks pockmarked with pencil wounds and burns. In contrast, the new business school campus, with its glass and steel towers, had a juice bar and a sushi restaurant.
Emma had been early for her appointment by ten minutes. She’d shaken the hand of the editor, Jason Cunningham, briskly. She had showed him a link to samples from her high school paper, her column about study habits that kids had ignored but teachers and parents had loved. Jason had glanced at it for two seconds, nodded, then asked if she had ever written anything humorous. Um, no.
Did she have any hobbies that might make good behind-the-scenes pieces, like fencing? Fencing? Funny? Emma had been stunned by these questions—did she look like she did stand-up or jousted? It was only later that night, when she walked away with her one, singular assignment—to find something interesting to write about and then write up a pitch and pitch it to him—that she saw their conversation framed in a different way.
Jason hadn’t assumed anything about her. He hadn’t been sexist or stereotypical or click-bait-y. He hadn’t asked her to do a fluff piece on fall fashion or a stupid college YouTube video series on the fastest way to remove makeup after being up all night. He simply had a list of things that he needed, and without making a single snap judgment, he had asked her if she could fulfill them.
That night, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth. In the hallway outside came the short taps of high heels, the lower thumps of booties, the sounds of a herd of girls going out for the night. There, in the harshest yellow light, with the odd mix of bleachy disinfectant wipes and peachy Dove deodorant always mingled in the air, she tilted her face up, down, and sideways. Squinting and half smiling.
Mysterious? Snarky? Clever? Athletic? All these years, she had looked in the mirror and wondered constantly about pretty or hot and whether she’d stay stranded at cute forever. What a waste. What a stupid, utterly futile waste. Maybe she was funny.
Maybe she could handle a sword and a shield.
Maybe she should stop limiting herself, start looking at other possibilities, exactly the way he had.
Jason, Jason the editor, had edited her.