The Girl He Used to Know(9)

“Do you want to catch up with everyone? Get some pizza?”

“No.”

“You’re really good at chess.”

“I know.”

“How long have you been playing?” he asked.

“Since I was seven.”

“How long have you been a member of the chess club?”

“Since freshman year.”

He was probably six-two to my five-four, and his legs were much longer than mine. I had to walk briskly to match his pace in order to answer the questions he kept firing, which hardly seemed fair since I didn’t really want to answer or keep up with him in the first place.

“Did you always know you were going to join the club?”

“No.”

I’d discovered the chess club by accident three weeks after I moved into my dorm room, on the same day I’d called my parents, told them I was dropping out, and asked them to come get me the next morning. I’d spent the preceding twenty days swirling in a paralyzing vortex of loud sounds and bad smells, overwhelming stimuli, and confusing social norms, and I’d had just about all I could take. My parents had taken me out of school halfway through my seventh-grade year, and my mother had homeschooled me for the rest, so the transition had been especially jarring and confusing for me. Janice Albright, a chatty brunette from Altoona, Iowa, who the university had randomly assigned to be my roommate, seemed to float effortlessly through the rapid-fire onslaught of college life while I kept getting stuck in the maze, taking wrong turns and backtracking. I trailed behind her like a wisp of smoke she could never quite shake, a lone figure in a sea of bobbing twosomes and foursomes laughing and joking their way to class. I followed Janice to lectures, to the library, and the dining hall.

On that particular Sunday, Janice and two of her friends returned to our dorm room shortly after I made the tear-filled call to my parents. One of them sat down with Janice on her bed, and the other settled herself at the end of mine. I was sitting cross-legged near the top and the girl’s presence drove me under the covers with my book and the penlight I’d been using since I was a child when I was supposed to be sleeping and not reading. It was September and our unair-conditioned dorm room felt like a sauna most of the time; under the covers it was nearly unendurable, the air stifling and hot.

“Just because you look like that doesn’t mean you can be weird,” the girl said. I froze, hoping she wasn’t speaking to me but knowing instantly that she was. I’d heard some variation of this sentiment more than once when I would do something people thought was strange or out of the ordinary. But she’s so pretty, they’d marvel, as if the way I looked and the way I acted were mutually exclusive.

I am pretty. I know this for two reasons: People have been telling me my whole life, and I own a mirror. Sometimes I wondered how much worse people would treat me if I were ugly. I never thought about it for long because I was almost certain I knew the answer.

“Be nice,” Janice said.

“What?” the girl said. “It’s weird.”

Though Janice had rarely spoken to me in the three weeks we’d shared a living space, she had never been unkind. And once during our second week in the dorm, when I was running dangerously low on clean clothes, she showed me where the laundry facilities were and taught me how to use the machines. Silently, we stood side by side and folded our clean clothes, stacking them in the same basket that she carried back to our room.

Suddenly I was in middle school again, and the kind of terror I hadn’t felt in years enveloped me. I just wanted them to leave me alone, and I trembled as my eyes filled with tears. Beads of sweat prickled my hairline, and the air under the covers became unbearable. But there was no way I could show my face now.

“Why don’t you guys take off without me,” Janice said. “I’ve got some studying to do.”

“Jesus. You really struck out in the roommate department,” one of the girls said.

“Forget about her,” said the other. “She’s not your problem.”

“I don’t mind looking out for her. Besides, it would be like kicking a puppy.” She said it quietly, but I heard it.

The soft click of the door signaled their departure, and I came out from under the covers and took deep breaths of the cooler-only-by-comparison air. “Why would anyone ever kick a puppy?”

“They wouldn’t.”

“Then why would you say that?”

“It’s just an expression.”

I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. The more I tried to stem the flow of my tears, the faster they fell. Neither of us spoke for a while and my sniffling was the only sound as I tried to get myself under control. The ringing phone saved me from further humiliation when Janice rose to answer it.

“Hi. Yes, it’s Janice,” I heard her say and then she stretched the cord to its limit so she could take the phone out into the hallway and talk to whoever it was in private, away from me. After a few minutes, she returned, hung up the phone, and sat down on the end of my bed.

“Sometimes I miss my old room. I have six brothers, but I’m the baby, and they’re all out of the house now. But I remember what it was like when they all lived at home. They drove me crazy. It’s hard not to have a space where you can be alone.”

I hadn’t uttered a word, and yet Janice somehow seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and how I was feeling. How in the world did she do that?