Tangerine(27)

PILED INTO THE PROMISED CAR, Tom’s friends reluctant to abandon him to the back roads of Vermont, we made the final leg of the journey in silence.

Once at Bennington, it was with something near regret that I eventually left them, dismayed to find that the thought of returning to my room, to Lucy, had since grown terribly dim.

“Wait.”

I turned and found the boy with the leather elbow patches, Tom, I reminded myself, running toward me. He leaned over, taking the suitcase from my grasp. “Let me carry it for you.” And so he walked me back to my room, made sure that I was able to get in safely, setting my suitcase beside my bed as he gazed around the space. I wondered what it was that he saw reflected there: in the hopelessly childish duvet that adorned my bed, a ghastly shade of pink and white that my aunt had purchased in a misguided attempt to welcome her new ward into an adult home, at the embarrassing effort that I had made to decorate my side of the room, various sketches tacked to the wall. He paused at the map on Lucy’s side of the room, studying, or so it seemed, the numerous pins that we had once placed there. A silly game we played with some intensity our first year, when the newness of our relationship had made anything seem possible.

And then he moved to the row of photographs that I had taped above my dresser.

I had signed up for a design class on a lark that fall, and the instructor, a working photographer who spent a few days out of the week in Vermont and the rest in New York City, had been encouraged by several photography enthusiasts in the class to erect a makeshift darkroom on campus. My mother’s old camera had been among the few things I had brought with me to Vermont, though I had never really thought to learn how to use the thing. Soon, however, I began spending hours in the darkroom, happy to lose myself in the process of developing and printing, feeling as though I had found something of my own at last. Something separate and distinct from the Alice I was with Lucy. It was a strange experience, one that began to unfurl within the folds of my stomach, so that there were days when I felt filled up by it, as if this new knowledge—of what I might be capable of—was nourishment enough.

I felt my heart beat faster, waiting for him to speak—but then the door opened and Lucy rushed in. “You’re home.” She breathed. “I was worried, I just checked the bus and it said—” She stopped then, and turned.

Tom smiled, nodded his head.

“Lucy,” I began, “this is Tom. He was my knight in shining armor today,” I said, before relaying the whole tale for her, anxiously, nervously, so that both of them looked slightly embarrassed, slightly aghast by the time I had run out of breath. A frown had crept across Lucy’s face at the story, and she remained silent once I had finished.

We stood there, the three of us, the knowledge that something had changed, that something had shifted, coursing through the room. But then, later, I wondered whether Tom had even noticed, or whether it wasn’t something that Lucy and I had felt alone, another example of our strange duo that defied explanation, that defied normalcy.

And one that I, for the first time, felt myself suddenly anxious to shed.

SUDDENLY, IT WAS NO LONGER Lucy and me.

It was both of us, and Tom too, a strange little threesome that I soon learned refused to fit together. At first, I had made a concerted effort. When I was given an assignment by my professor to learn how to use a view camera—the weight of the piece requiring more than one set of hands—I invited Lucy to join Tom and me as we hauled the equipment around campus, Tom joking he was both subject and subjected. Lucy accompanied us only the once, when we spent nearly an hour lugging it to the edge of campus, to what we laughingly christened the End of the Universe, that stretch of land at the entrance to Bennington, and which dipped, low and jagged, as dangerous and threatening as the End of the World was not.

“I pity the man unfortunate enough to drive off into that,” Tom had said, smiling back at us as he leaned against the rail, waiting for me to set up the camera and begin.

Lucy had stood, tersely, staring out into the woods, and even though I had begged her to let me take her photograph as well, she had remained silent, so I wondered, in the end, whether she had heard me at all.

Later, as we walked back to campus, Tom had tried to talk with her, about literature, about what she was working on in her courses. “I’m jealous you’ve got Professor Hyman here,” he said. “I would love the opportunity to take a class with him. Have you signed up for any of his yet?”

She had turned to him, her gaze steely and hard. “No. But then, I suppose I’d rather take a class with his better half.”

Tom was silent after that.

I tried to talk about it with her once, not long afterward—to try to dispel the strangeness that had stolen over us, between us. But she had only turned away, her face closed, guarded. I suspected she meant to punish me—for my relationship with Tom, a closeness that not only did not involve her, but which, oftentimes, left her alone. And though I felt guilty, I was confused by her odd behavior, knowing that if the situation were reversed, I would not have been so cold.

“There’s something not right about her,” Tom said one evening late into the spring as we lay, hidden from the Commons Lawn, just beneath the End of the World, waiting for the sun to begin setting.

“Oh, don’t be cruel,” I had protested, pushing against his shoulder—protective, even still, of my odd roommate. It was true that I did not condone her behavior, that I was just as embarrassed as Tom was likely offended by it. And yet, I could not help but pity her too—for those long afternoons she now spent alone, trapped in the library, for those nights we passed, silent and held apart from each other.