“Enjoy your chowdah,” she says. Only Dad and I catch how condescending she’s being.
Dinner is painful. Even sitting at this chichi place with all the best Bostonians, I can tell Mom and, by extension, Dad feel like rejects. And they’re not. It’s my rejection they’re feeling.
They ask me about my classes, and I dutifully tell them about chemistry, physics, biology, and Mandarin, neglecting to tell them how hard it is stay awake in class, no matter how early I go to bed, or how badly I’m doing in subjects I aced in high school. Talking about, or not talking about, all this makes me so tired I want to put my head down into my thirteen-dollar salad.
When the entrees come, Mom orders a glass of Chardonnay, Dad a Shiraz. I try not to look at the way the candlelight dances against the colors of the wine. Even that hurts. I look down at my plate of ravioli. It smells good, but I have no desire to eat it.
“Are you coming down with something?” Mom asks.
And for just the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I’m not the girl in the catalog at all. I’m not a Happy College Student. I don’t know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don’t want to be her anymore.
But this is not an option. Mom would just be aggrieved, disappointed, as if my unhappiness were some personal insult to her parenting. And then she’d guilt me out about how I’m so lucky. This is college! The college experience she didn’t get to have. Which was one of the reasons she spent all of high school like an army general, plotting my extracurriculars, getting me tutors for weak subjects, signing me up for SAT prep.
“I’m just tired,” I say. This, at least, isn’t a lie.
“You’re probably spending too much time in the library,” Dad interjects. “Are you getting enough sunlight? That can really affect your circadian rhythms.”
I shake my head. This too is true.
“Have you been running? There are some nice tracks around here. And it’s not too far to the river.”
I think the last time I went running was with Dad, a couple days before I left for the tour.
“We’ll go out tomorrow morning, before the brunch. Burn off dinner. Get some air in those lungs.”
Just the thought of it makes me exhausted, but this isn’t an invitation so much as an expectation, and the plans are being made even before I’ve agreed to them.
_ _ _
The following morning, the rest of the girls are sitting in the lounge drinking coffee, happily chattering about their dinner, which included some incident with a cute waiter and a lobster mallet that’s already being mythologized into a tale called “The Hammer and the Hottie.” They double-take when they see me in tracksuit bottoms and a fleece sweatshirt, looking around for my running shoes. Our dorm has a state-of-the-art gym that Kendra and Kali are addicted to and Jenn gets dragged along to, but I have yet to set foot in.
I just expect my dad, but Mom is there too, all perky in her black wool pants, a cashmere cape. “I thought we were meeting at brunch,” I say.
“Oh, I just wanted to spend some time in your dorm. It’ll help me to picture where you are when I’m not with you.” She turns to Kali. “If that’s okay with you.” Her voice is so polite, Kali might never catch the bitchiness in it.
“I think it’s sweet,” Kali says.
“Are you ready, Allyson?” Dad asks me.
“Almost. I can’t find my running shoes.”
Mom gives me a look, like I obviously lose everything all the time now.
“Where’s the last place you left them?” Dad asks. “Just picture it. That’s how you find missing things.” This is his typical advice, but it usually works. And sure enough, when I picture my shoes, still packed in the suitcase under my bed, that’s where they are.
When we get downstairs, Dad does some halfhearted stretches. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this,” he jokes. He’s not much of a runner, but he’s always telling his patients to exercise, so he tries to practice what he preaches.
We take off on a path toward the river. It is a true autumn day, clear and brisk with a sharp bite of winter in the air. I don’t love running, not at first, but usually after ten minutes or so, that thing kicks in and I sort of zone out and forget what I’m doing. Today, though, every time I even begin to lose myself, it’s like my mind defaults to that other run, the best run, the run of my life, the run for my life. And then my legs turn into waterlogged tree trunks, and all the beautiful fall colors fade to gray.
After about a mile, I have to stop. I claim a cramp. I want to go back, but Dad wants to check out the downtown and see what’s changed, so we do. We stop at a café for cappuccinos, and Dad asks me about my classes and waxes nostalgic for his days in organic chemistry. Then he tells me how busy he’s been and that Mom is having a really hard time and I should go easy on her.
“Isn’t she supposed to be going back to work?” I ask.
Dad looks at his watch. “Time to go,” he says.
Dad leaves me at the dorm to change before brunch. As soon as I step inside, I know something’s wrong. I hear ticking. And then I look around, and for a second, I’m confused because the dorm no longer looks like my dorm but like my bedroom at home. Mom has dug up all the posters from my closet and put them up in the exact same configuration as at home. She’s moved my photos around, so they too are a mirror image of my old room. She’s made the bed with a mountain of throw pillows, the throw pillows I specifically said I didn’t want to bring because I hate throw pillows. You have to take them off and reorganize them every day. On top of the bed are clothes that Mom is folding into neat piles and laying out for me, just like she did when I was in fourth grade.
And along my windowsills and bookcases are all my clocks. All of them wound up and ticking.
Mom looks up from snipping the tags off a pair of pants I haven’t even tried on. “You seemed so glum last night. I thought it might perk you up if it looked more like home in here. This is so much cheerier,” she declares.
I begin to protest. But I’m not sure what to protest.
“And I spoke to Kali, and she finds the sound of the clocks soothing. Like a white-noise machine.”
They don’t sound soothing to me at all. They sound like a hundred time bombs waiting to explode.
Sixteen
NOVEMBER
New York City
The last time I saw Melanie, she had a fading pink streak in her blond hair and was wearing her micro-skimp Topshop uniform with some teetering platform sandals she’d picked up at the end-of-season sale at Macy’s. So when she charges at me on a crowded street corner in New York’s Chinatown as soon as I’m disgorged from the bus, I hardly recognize her. Now the pink streak is gone; her hair is dyed dark brown with a reddish tint. She has severe bangs cut short across her forehead, and the rest of her hair is secured back into a bun with a pair of enamel chopsticks. She’s wearing this weird, funky, flowered dress and a pair of beat-up cowboy boots, and she has cat-shaped granny eyeglasses on. Her lips are painted blood red. She looks amazing, even if she looks nothing like my Melanie.
At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen, not lose it.”
“Have you had dining hall food?”
“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”
I pull back. Look at her again. Everything is new. Including the eyewear. “You need glasses?”