I approached the wall of gold, windowed mailboxes. You knew you had mail because you saw it in profile, leaning diagonally against the wall of your box, and years later, after I was gone from Ault, I dreamed sometimes that I saw that skinny shadow.
My mailbox was empty. I glanced to my right and saw Jamie Lorison from Ancient History. I could hear his heavy breathing. “Jamie, why is it so quiet?” I asked.
“The seniors just heard back from Harvard, the ones who applied early. But everybody’s striking out this year.”
“No one at all has gotten in?” Long ago, before Ault had taken girls, the boys would go to the headmaster’s house the day before graduation and on a slip of paper they’d each write Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; the school they wrote was the one they’d attend.
“Only two so far,” Jamie said. “Nevin Lunse and Gates Medkowski. The rest got deferred.”
I felt a swelling in my chest, a rise of breath. I scanned the mail room, hoping to congratulate Gates, but she wasn’t there.
I finally spotted her in the dining hall that night. It was regular dinner, not formal dinner where you had to dress up and sit at assigned tables. As I set my plate in the dirty-dishes carousel, I saw her in the food line. My heart pounded. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, swallowed, and walked toward her.
I was less than ten feet away when, from the opposite direction, Henry Thorpe appeared. “Lay it here, Medkowski,” he said.
Gates turned.
“That’s right,” Henry said. He was holding up one hand. “Gimme five, you rock star.”
Gates slapped her palm against his. “Thanks, man.”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Gates grinned. “Goddamn lucky.”
“Forget luck. Everyone knew you’d get in.”
The casualness of their interaction made me understand I could not approach her, not in such a public setting. Even in complimenting Gates, my own neediness would rear up. I decided to make her a card instead, and then I could stick it in her mailbox, or leave it off at her room.
Back in the dorm, switching between blue and red markers for each letter, I wrote CONGRATULATIONS, GATES! Then I wrote Good luck at Harvard! With a purple marker, I drew stars. The sheet of paper still looked a little bare, so I added vines in green, weaving them around the words. Then I had to sign my name. I wanted to write Love, Lee. But what if she thought that was weird? My name alone seemed curt, and Sincerely or Yours truly seemed formal and dorky. I held the blue marker above the paper, hesitating, then signed it Love, Lee. I’d leave it in her dorm, in an envelope outside her door. That way, she’d likely be alone when she found it.
The next night was formal dinner, and most people showered in the gym after sports practice, then went straight to the dining hall. I saw that if I hurried, I’d have time to return to my room, get the card, and drop it off; I didn’t like to get to formal dinner too early anyway, because then you stood around.
Just before I reached the courtyard, I broke into a jog. It was getting dark so early that no one would see me and wonder why, in a skirt and navy flats, I was running. Broussard’s was quiet. I skipped up the stairs to the second floor. When I opened the door to the room, Dede slammed shut a drawer and whirled around, and then I realized-I was preoccupied enough that I’d never have realized this otherwise, and I noticed it only because of the frantic quality of the gesture-that she was not standing in front of her own dresser; she was in front of Sin-Jun’s.
“This isn’t what you think,” she said.
I stepped backward, and she stepped forward.
“I’m just trying to figure out where the smell is coming from,” she said. “It has to be Sin-Jun. Because it’s not us, right?”
“If you think it’s her, you should have asked if you could look through her things.”
“I don’t want to offend her.” Dede’s tone was impatient. “Lee, obviously I’m not the thief if I was the first one who was stolen from.”
We regarded each other.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You think I would steal from myself?”
I continued to back out of the room.
“Are you going to tell Madame?” she said. “There’s nothing to tell. I’m not lying, Lee. Don’t you trust me?”
I still said nothing, and she lunged toward me, gripping my upper arms. My heart jumped. Standing so close to her, I could smell her perfume, I could see the tiny hairs that were growing back in her eyebrows. If only I’d known before this moment that she plucked her eyebrows, I thought, I could have gotten her to teach me how. Then I thought, no, we’d never been that kind of roommates.
“Let go of me,” I said.
“What are you planning to do?” Though I could tell she was trying to sound firm, her voice was uneven. “Are you going to say something?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to shrug away from her, but her grasp was tight.
“What do you want me to do to prove I’m telling the truth?”
“Let go,” I said again.
Finally, she withdrew her hands. “I’ll tell Madame myself I was looking in Sin-Jun’s dresser,” she said. “Then will you believe me?”
I let the door shut without answering her.
I hadn’t yet left the dorm when I realized I’d forgotten Gates’s card. I decided to skip dinner-I could hide out in the common room phone booth until I knew Dede had gone to the dining hall, then sneak back upstairs. Also, this way I’d have time to decide what to do about having caught her.
The phone booth was hot and smelled like dirty socks, and my pulse was wild. I wanted to do jumping jacks just to get rid of my roiling energy. Instead, I sat on the chair inside the booth, the soles of my shoes against the seat, my knees bunched up in front of me with my arms around them.
After the thought of the picture popped into my head, it was like knowing that as you sit in the living room, cake is in the kitchen. All you have to do is fetch it. Don’t, I thought. Dede will hear you moving around. Then I thought, But she won’t know who it is. I peered out the phone booth’s window, which was streaked with fingerprints, slowly pushed open the door, and crept across the common room to the bookshelf. With trembling fingers, I pulled down the most recent yearbook and crept back to the booth.
The picture was exactly as I remembered it: her cowboy hat, her unruly hair, her smart, perfect face. Opening to the page it was on was like taking the first bite of cake, knowing the whole slice awaits you. If Dede would just leave, I could take the yearbook upstairs, I thought. It wasn’t like I would gaze at it endlessly. I just wanted to know it was mine, to look at when I needed to. I wanted to get in bed and turn out the lights; in the dark, I would be alone in my head, and I could have imaginary conversations where I made funny remarks and Gates laughed, but not in her being-nice-to-a-freshman way. It would be a laugh that meant she respected me and knew that I was like her.
I heard someone descend the stairs, so I waited, then went to the window, hunching down and peering over the sill. It was Dede. I lifted my blouse and stuck the yearbook in the waistband of my skirt-I seriously doubted it would be missed since I’d never seen anyone besides me look at any of them. Upstairs, I placed it on the shelf in my closet, underneath a sweater. As much as I wanted to, there was no point in going to bed, because Dede and Sin-Jun would return from dinner within the hour, flicking on lights and talking. Plus, I still needed to deliver the card.
It was folded into my dictionary, where I’d left it the night before. I unfolded it and set it on the desk. The second N in CONGRATULATIONS had smudged. I licked my finger and pressed it against the smudge, which made it worse. I wondered why I’d written Good luck at Harvard! That was stupid; it made it seem as if she were departing immediately, when she’d be at Ault for another seven months. The stars and vines looked, suddenly, like the efforts of a nine-year-old. And Love–love? Who was I kidding? We hardly knew each other. I picked up the card and tore it into long strips, then ripped the strips into thirds. The pieces of paper fluttered in the trash can before they settled.