I was leaving the gym after practice when I heard Conchita call my name. During the last twenty-four hours, I had recalled with embarrassment my earlier snottiness toward her. I waited for her to catch up with me, and when she did, we began walking up the flagstone path to the circle. “Hard practice,” she said.
I had noticed that when the team jogged to the boathouse and back, Conchita was one of the stragglers-as most of us were starting the return route, headed away from the river, she was still heading toward it, walking instead of running and breathing in through an asthma inhaler. For a split second, I’d considered stopping, but already Clara O’Hallahan was walking beside her.
“When I was down at the river, I thought about joining crew,” Conchita said. “Have you seen the coxes? They just sit there shouting orders.”
“But I heard your teammates throw you in the water when they win a race, and imagine being thrown in the Raymond River. You’d give birth to a two-headed baby.”
Conchita laughed. “I’m not giving birth to any baby unless it’s through immaculate conception.” As if I hadn’t understood, she added, “I’m a virgin, of course.”
I willed myself not to turn and stare at her. What kind of person advertised her virginity?
“Hey, want to come back to my room and listen to Bob Dylan?” she asked. We’d reached the end of the path-her dorm was on the west side of the circle, and mine was on the east.
“Now?” I said. It was one thing to leave the gym with Conchita because we were both headed in the same direction and another thing entirely to accompany her to her dorm, to go somewhere with her.
“It’s okay if you can’t.”
“No, I guess I could,” I said. “For a little while.”
As we climbed the staircase in Conchita’s dorm, I said, “Who are your roommates?”
“I have a single.”
“I thought you were a freshman.” Singles, in spite of their undesirability, were never assigned to freshmen.
“No, I am,” she said. “But I have insomnia, so they made an exception. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.”
“That’s horrible.” I’d never met an insomniac my own age.
“I nap when I can.”
We entered her room, and my first thought was that it had been furnished by someone who was trying to decorate for a teenage girl without ever having met one. There was something creepily professional about it, like the set of a television show: the ruffly pink curtains (typically, shades hung at the windows of dorm rooms), the pale blue throw rug spread over the standard tan carpet, the framed poster of the Eiffel Tower, the heart-shaped mirror encased in a heart-shaped frame of white wicker. There was a low white plastic table with a large dish of candy, a vase of fake pink and blue flowers, and white beanbags on either side. (All the whiteness did vaguely impress me because at home, my mother never bought anything white, not furniture or sheets or clothing. Every year until I was twelve, I’d asked for white patent leather shoes for Easter, and every year my mother had refused, saying, “They’d get dirty so fast it would make your head spin.”) Over Conchita’s bed, her name was spelled out in pink cursive neon; something about the neon being lit in the daytime, in an empty room, struck me as deeply depressing. On the bureau rested a stereo that was, improbably enough, also pink, but what was truly remarkable about the room, even more than the décor, was the size. It definitely wasn’t a single. It was a double with one bed in it.
“Sit anywhere,” she said, and I sat on one of the beanbags. “Are you hungry? I have some food.”
“I’m okay.”
Ignoring me, she perched on her tiptoes and reached for something on her closet shelf. When she pulled it down, I saw that it was a large basket containing-in unopened packaging-potato chips, sunflower seeds, macadamia nuts, chocolate chip cookies, animal crackers, and several pouches of cocoa powder. Even the arrangement of the food in the basket looked professional, and I felt, suddenly, like I was attending a slumber party to which everyone else who’d been invited had chosen not to come.
“I’ll just have some candy,” I said, gesturing toward the table. “But thanks for pulling that down.” As she hoisted it back up, I leaned forward and reached for a caramel. All the candy wrappers, I saw, were coated with a thin layer of dust.
“There’s something I have to do,” Conchita said. “Can you keep a secret?”
I perked up. “Of course.”
She lifted the dust ruffle from her bed and pulled out a telephone.
“I didn’t even know there were jacks in the rooms,” I said, though as secrets went, this wasn’t great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.
“We had it installed. Dean Fletcher and Mrs. Parnasset okayed it, but I’m not supposed to tell other students. My mom convinced them I needed it in case I have an asthma attack in the middle of the night.”
“But if you were having an asthma attack, you wouldn’t be able to use the phone.”
“I could dial 911.” Conchita paused. “The truth is that my mom is kind of overprotective. When I first got here she would try calling me on the pay phone and either it would be busy, or no one would answer and she couldn’t leave a message. Anyway, I’ll put on the music in a second. I just have to call her really fast.”
She dialed, and after a moment, she said, “Hola, Mama.” Although I was taking Spanish, I didn’t understand anything after that except possibly-it was hard to know for sure-my own name. I thought about how much money it must have cost to furnish this room, and then I thought about how maybe it was a cultural thing, how even though her family didn’t have a lot, they were willing to pour what they did have into objects that were tangible and conspicuous. I had recently read an article about quinceañeras, and I thought that Conchita would probably have one when she turned fifteen. And maybe I’d even be invited and-because it would be fascinating and because it would happen far from Ault-I’d go. I could ask my parents for the plane ticket as a combination birthday and Christmas present.
When Conchita hung up, I said, “Do you talk to your mom every day?”
“Yeah, at least once. It’s really hard for her with me gone.”
I spoke to my own mother on Sundays, when the rates were lower, and we never spoke for long because I always seemed to call when she was starting dinner or putting my brothers to bed. Sometimes after I hung up the phone-even when other girls were waiting to use it, which was usually-I sat in the booth for a moment doing nothing. I thought about how my parents had not wanted me to go to boarding school, how my brothers had cried the day I left, and how quickly they appeared to have adjusted to my absence. I knew they missed me, but by now they seemed to find the fact that I didn’t live at home a lot less surprising than I did.
Conchita walked to the stereo. “As promised,” she said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr. Bob Dylan.” As the sound of a guitar became audible, Conchita turned the volume knob clockwise. I heard a deep, soft voice crooning the song “Lay, Lady, Lay.” It wasn’t what I’d expected-it was softer, and twangier. Most surprising of all, it did sound like make-out music, or maybe sex music: Dylan was singing about a man with dirty clothes but clean hands, and about how a woman on a bed was the best thing the man had ever seen.
“I like it,” I said.
Conchita turned the volume down. “What?”
“I like it.”
“Oh. Me, too.” She turned it up again.
Why wait any longer for the world to begin? Dylan sang. Why wait any longer for the one you love, when he’s standing in front of you?
Out the window, the light was turning from the bright yellow of afternoon to the more muted shade of dusk. This was always the time of day I felt the saddest, when I most believed my life should be something other than what it was, and the music compounded the feeling-I found myself wishing I could exist inside the song, lying on white sheets while a shy man in dirty clothes approached me. I could love such a man, I thought; he’d be wearing a flannel shirt, and I would pull him to me, my arms tight around his back, the warmth of his skin coming through the fabric.