In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(7)

On the way back from the ceremony, the first hints of dusk darkened the summer sky. Someone bumped my elbow, and I turned, apologizing.

“Hey,” said the girl, dark eyes lighting up. “You’re in my dorm, right? East House, fourth floor?”

“I am.” I almost reached out for a handshake, then thought better of it. Too formal. Too weird. “Jessica Miller.”

“Caroline Rodriguez.” She shook out her long, brown hair, which I noticed was almost as glossy as the mystery blond’s. “You live with that mute girl, huh?”

The laugh cracked out of me before I could help it. “She’s not actually mute, but yeah. Rachel. She pretty much never talks. Or leaves the room.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “That’s a nightmare. I have an über-nerd roommate too. Don’t tell her I said that if you meet her. Her name is literally Eustice. I don’t know how Duquette’s algorithm matched us.”

“It’s a pretty simple algorithm, actually.” I was enjoying walking side by side with Caroline and wanted to stretch it out as long as possible. “I researched it, and it’s just a bunch of weights assigned to different answers and plugged into a formula. Not very sophisticated.”

Caroline stopped walking. “What are you, good at math?” The way she said it sounded like an accusation.

I stopped too. “I guess. I mean, I’m not a savant or anything. Just regular good. I mean, probably good. Normal.” The truth was, I’d taken hours of extra math classes at the community college back home, trying to build a résumé that would get me accepted into Harvard’s economics program, like my father before me. But I had an instinct revealing this tidbit might convince Caroline to stop talking to me.

“Well, even with my roommate, I’m glad I got put in East House and not Donahue, or Chapman Hall.” Caroline’s nose wrinkled. “I heard people steal your laundry right out of the dryer in Chapman.”

She laughed at my scandalized expression. Caroline was small and olive-skinned and pretty, and she laughed with her whole body. She pointed to one of the wrought-iron picnic benches in the middle of the quad. Groups of students sat there every night, hanging out and smoking weed you could smell with your window open. “Want to chill for a sec? I’m not dying to get back to Eustice. She says she wants to give me a Klingon name so we can be Klingon warrior sisters, whatever that means.”

“You don’t know Star Trek?”

Caroline gave me a blank look.

“The TV show?”

We walked to the table and sat on the bench, still warm from a day’s worth of sunshine. Other freshmen walking past gave us interested looks. I tried to imagine what they saw: two pretty girls in sundresses, best friends maybe, waiting for the rest of our friends to arrive. I sat up straighter and smoothed my hem.

“This is going to make me sound weird,” Caroline said, “but my parents didn’t let me watch TV or movies growing up.” She reached for the necklace resting on her collarbone—a delicate gold cross—and rolled it between her fingers. “Our pastor said it was a bad influence. Of course, that didn’t stop my mom from inhaling telenovelas. Only I had to suffer. I swear, the first night after my parents left Duquette, I binged the entire first season of Dawson’s Creek. Just ate it up. I wanted to watch that show so bad when I was twelve.”

“And? Verdict?”

“Not worth the six years I spent pining.” We laughed; then something caught her attention, and she waved over my shoulder. “Heather! Over here!”

I spun, trying to keep my face neutral so no one could see how disappointed I was that Caroline was already moving on to someone else. Then I spotted who she was waving at. The confident blond from my floor stomped through the grass in our direction.

“Caro! Was that a snoozefest, or what? God only knows why we had to sign that in person instead of through email, like we’re actually living in the twenty-first century.” This close, I could see a light dusting of freckles across the girl’s nose, and I realized her forehead was several sizes too big. It was what threw off the symmetry of her face, kept her from being truly pretty. But her navy dress—it was dense material, beautifully tailored. It screamed money. I longed to reach out and touch it.

The girl turned to me and stuck out her hand. “I don’t know you yet. I’m Heather Shelby.”

“Jessica Miller.” Her handshake was very firm.

“How do you know Caro?”

Caro. The nickname rolled off her tongue, easy and intimate. “We just met. We live in the same dorm.”

Heather blinked. Then she surprised me by dropping onto the bench. “Shit. That means you’re in East House, too.”

I nodded and tried hard not to care that Heather had passed me in the hallway a hundred times before, yet clearly I hadn’t registered. It’s because you don’t stand out, whispered that insidious voice.

“Ohhh,” Heather said, something dawning on her. “Wait, you’re roommates with that, like, nun who took a vow of silence, right?”

How had Rachel made more of an impression than me?

Caro leaned in, and Heather and I instinctively drew closer. “Don’t look now,” she whispered, “but there’s this guy in our dorm who is, like, the epitome of everything my mother warned me about, and he’s walking by right now. I said, Don’t look,” she hissed as both Heather and I turned.