“Two of them said they definitely don’t,” Greer admitted. She hadn’t thought about this much, but now she remembered what Ariel Diski had said. “They just want to forget about it and move on.”
“Well, they get a say, don’t they? Look, there’s a whole world out there. Lots to see, lots to be angry about and cry about and do something about, well beyond the bounds of this campus. Other cities and communities. Go have a look.” Faith appeared to be about to say something else, but then someone entered the bathroom—the provost, maddeningly interrupting for a second time, calling out, “Whenever you’re ready, they’re waiting for us at the reception.”
“One sec, Suki,” said Faith, and the provost withdrew.
Greer remembered how Faith had sighed at the mirror. Now, without thinking it through, Greer said to her, “I bet you wish you could go back to your hotel right now instead of to a faculty reception.”
Faith said to Greer, “Is it obvious?” Greer thought: No, it’s not obvious, but I saw it. “When you give lectures,” Faith went on, “the receptions are part of it. Do you know how many turkey pinwheel sandwiches I’ve eaten in recent years?”
“How many?” Greer asked, then immediately felt like an idiot. It hadn’t been a question.
“Too many,” Faith said. “Too many damp little sandwiches in mid-decomposition, and too much sherry served in cut-glass goblets like something from a Renaissance Faire. But when you’re on the academic lecture circuit it comes with the territory. Anyway,” she added, “this’ll be fine. Your provost is a friend of mine from the early days. So it’ll be good to catch up.”
“She’s your friend? Oh, I see. I wondered why you came to Ryland,” said Greer, but it had begun to feel as if Faith had come here just so Greer could meet her.
“And as for this young man,” said Faith, and for a horrified moment Greer thought she meant Zee, and that all this time tonight Faith had somehow thought that androgynous Zee was male, an interloper in the bathroom. But Faith did not mean Zee. She was pointing at Darren Tinzler’s face on Greer’s T-shirt, and she said, “Just forget him. There’s plenty more for you to do.”
“I agree,” put in Zee.
“Throw yourself into new experiences,” Faith went on. “Why not try to use your ‘outside voice’? You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.”
Then, as if remembering something, Faith reached into her large, soft shoulder bag and took out a brick of a wallet, from which she withdrew a business card. In raised letters on heavy, cream-colored stock it read:
Faith Frank
Below it was the title “Editor,” and then all her contact information at Bloomer. Greer took the card from her and held it as though it were a winning lottery ticket. What could it be redeemed for? Probably nothing. But just having been given the card was a reward unto itself, and a kind of small shock. Faith had taken an interest in her. She had even said she admired her. And now Faith was giving her permission. But permission to do what? The answer wasn’t at all obvious.
Twelve years later, when Greer Kadetsky herself became famous, the first chapter of the book she wrote would describe this long-ago ladies’ room scene. She would playfully tease her very immature younger self for having gotten so worked up during the moment she’d had with Faith Frank, and for feeling so excited when Faith had given her the card.
In itself, that card was a kind of abstract prize, a reminder not to stay hot-faced and tiny-voiced. Faith, who a little while earlier had stood and held Greer’s hands, was offering her nothing but permission and kindness and advice and an expensive-looking business card. She hadn’t come out and said, “Be in touch, Greer,” but it felt like more than anyone had ever given her except for Cory.
Probably, Greer thought, Faith was now going to give a business card to Zee as well, which would have made sense, since Zee was the authentically political one, the picketer and leafleter and longtime fan, at which point the two friends would be even. They could walk back to Woolley together and eat their pizza from Graziano’s and sit talking about the evening and admiring the matching business cards they’d been handed.
But instead of giving Zee a card, Faith closed her wallet and returned it to her bag. Greer suddenly wished that she could peer inside. Some childlike instinct made her wonder what was in there. Thunderbolts? Gold leaf? Cinnamon? The tears of a thousand women, collected in a small blue bottle?
Faith said, “Well, the provost awaits. And you know the old saying: ‘One must never keep the provost waiting.’”
“Lao-Tzu,” said Zee.
Faith Frank didn’t appear to hear. She opened the door and gestured toward the stenciled letters of the sign. “Good night, ladies,” she said.
TWO
The Eisenstat family car was a genteel, boxy Volvo, scented lightly with machine oil. As if to further fortify that this was a car belonging to someone’s parents, on the backseat was a splayed-open, wavy, crisp old copy of Scientific American and a chunky purple folding umbrella still in its sleeve. Zee’s mother and father, both judges in the ninth judicial district in Westchester County, New York, had apparently told their daughter that the Volvo was absolutely not to be driven by her friends. “No one else is on our insurance,” they had said. “The only driver can be you.” Yet Zee had ignored this warning, lending the car to Greer, who had become her closest friend at college, and who was now driving it southward this Friday afternoon in February, as she had driven it twice before, both times to see Cory at Princeton.
Soon Greer was walking purposefully across the hand-polished campus. She carried a backpack with schoolwork in it, and as a result she looked like someone who went to Princeton, a thought that struck her with a complicated charge. Moments later there was Cory, leaning out the window and waving as if he were a trapped prince. He clattered down the stairs and opened the front door, and Greer pressed herself into the middle of his overly tall, thin tree of a body.
When they reached his room, the door opened upon a mess even more extravagantly chaotic than usual. Clothes, books, DVDs, empty beer bottles, hockey sticks, audio equipment, all of it massed in piles, indefensibly. “Were you guys burglarized?” she asked.
“If we were, the burglar missed a lot of Steers’s expensive shit.” He gestured to the Klipsch speakers, one of which was a surface for a few beer bottles. Nearby lay a lone Air Jordan 4 Thunder, too small to be Cory’s. They lay together on his bed, on top of some unfolded laundry from this morning’s load, which strangely still held a little vestigial warmth from the industrial dryer all these hours later. “Steers is always lending me things to wear to parties,” Cory said. “Of course nothing fits. I’m way too tall for anything.”
“You still feel self-conscious?” Greer asked.
“About being tall?”
“No. At Princeton.”
“Well, I’m always going to be the kid with the housecleaner mom and the upholsterer dad.”
“There have to be other people here like that,” she said.
“Yeah. There’s a girl from Harlem who lived in a shelter. Another kid grew up on a houseboat in China, and now he’s TA’ing multivariable calculus. But it still gets awkward sometimes. My Secret Santa, Clove Wilberson?”
“Who is named that?”
“Well, she is. She couldn’t believe I’d never worn tails. It’s tricky here. Everyone’s nice, but it’s always possible to seem socially ignorant. In that way, you’re pretty lucky being at Ryland.”