Apparently, Greer thought, these are going to be my people, tonight and perhaps every weekend night. It made no sense; she didn’t belong with them, and yet she was among them, she was one of them. So she took a hand span’s worth of popcorn, which was so wet that her fingers felt as if she’d draped them through soup. Greer was about to sit down and attempt a conversation; they could tell one another about themselves, how bleak they felt. She would stay in this lounge, even though Cory had encouraged her earlier not to stay in tonight, but instead to go out to a party or some sort of campus event. “There has to be something going on,” he’d said. “Improv. There’s always improv.” It was her first weekend at college, and he thought she should just try.
But she’d said no, she didn’t really want to try, she would rather get through it her own way. During the week she would be a super-student, working in a carrel in the library, her head bent over a book like a jeweler with a loupe. Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She’d always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran’s bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she’d first suspected that her parents weren’t all that interested in her. Then she’d kept going, plowing through children’s books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing both backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would be able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did.
But tonight, books were unseductive, and so they remained untouched, ignored. Tonight college was only about partying, or sitting in a bland dormitory lounge, bookless and self-punishing. Bitterness, she knew, could give you an edge. Unlike pure unhappiness, bitterness had a taste. This display of bitterness would be for no one but herself. Her parents wouldn’t witness it; even Cory Pinto, down at Princeton, wouldn’t. She and Cory had grown up together, and had been in love and entwined since the year before; and though they’d vowed that throughout the four years of college they would Skype with each other all the time—the new video feature would even allow them to see each other—and borrow cars to visit each other at least once a month, they would be entirely separate tonight. He had gotten dressed in a good sweater in order to go out to a party. Earlier, she’d watched as the Skype version of him came close to the webcam, all pore and nostril and rock-ledge forehead.
“Try to have a good time,” he’d said, his voice stuttering slightly because of a glitchy system configuration. Then he turned and held up a finger to John Steers, his off-camera roommate, as if telling him: Give me two more seconds. I just have to deal with this.
Greer had quickly ended the call, not wanting to be seen as “this”—someone to deal with, the needy one in the relationship. Now she sat in the Woolley lounge, lowering and lifting her hand into and out of the popcorn, looking around at the tacked-up posters for the Heimlich maneuver and indie band auditions and a Christian Students picnic in West Quad, come rain or shine. A girl walked by the room and stopped; later on she admitted that she had done this more out of kindness than interest. She resembled a slender, sexy boy, perfectly made, with a Joan of Arc aesthetic that immediately read as gay. She took in the sight of the bright room of lost people, frowned in deliberation, and then announced, “I’m going to check out a few parties, if anyone wants to come.”
The boy shook his head and returned to the image on his screen. The girl with the popcorn just kept eating, and the girl in distress was now debating with someone on her cell phone about whether she should go to Health Services. “I know that on the plus side they could help me,” she was saying. “But on the minus side I have no idea where they’re located.” Pause. “No, I cannot call Security and have them escort me there.” Another pause. “And anyway, I think it might just be nerves.”
Greer looked at the boyish girl and nodded, and the girl nodded back, turning up the collar of her jacket. In the dim hall, they pushed through the heavy fire doors. Only when Greer was outside in the wind, feeling it ripple along the thin material of her shirt, did she remember she was sweaterless. But she felt certain that she shouldn’t break the moment by asking if she could run up to the third floor and get her sweater.
“I thought we could sample a few different things,” said the girl, who introduced herself as Zee Eisenstat, from Scarsdale, New York. “It will be like a test kitchen for college life.”
“Exactly,” said Greer, as though this had been her plan too.
Zee led them to Spanish House, a freestanding clapboard building on the edge of campus. As they walked in, a boy in the doorway said, “Buenas noches, se?oritas,” and handed them glasses of what he called mock-sangria, though Greer got into a brief conversation with another resident of the house about whether the mock-sangria was perhaps actually not mock at all.
“Licor secreto?” Greer asked quietly, and the girl looked at her hard and said, “Inteligente.”
Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and then she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her class.
Later on, when it wasn’t just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there—your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were—both exhausted and frightened Greer, and she thought of this as she and Zee headed for their next social destination, the Lamb Art Studio. How Zee, a freshman, knew about these parties was unclear; there had been no mention of them in the Ryland Weekly Blast.
The air in the studio was sharp with turpentine, which almost served as a sexual accelerant, for the art students, all upperclassmen, seemed highly attracted to one another. They were twinned and tripled, with skinny bodies and paint-spattered pants and drawn-on hands and ear gauges and unusually bright eyes. In the middle of the white wooden floor, a girl was being carried around on a guy’s shoulders, crying, “BENNETT, STOP IT, I’M GOING TO FALL OFF AND DIE, AND THEN MY PARENTS WILL SUE YOUR VISUAL ARTS ASS!” He—Bennett—carried her in staggered circles while he was still sufficiently young and powerful and Atlas-like to hold her like this, and while she was still light enough to be held.
The art students were into one another and one another only. It was as if Greer and Zee had stumbled upon a subculture in the clearing of a forest. “The male gaze” kept getting mentioned, though at first Greer heard it as “the male gays,” but then finally she understood. She and Zee slipped away not long after arriving, and once outside again they were almost immediately joined by another freshman who confidently and unapologetically attached herself to them. She said her name was Chloe Shanahan, and she seemed to aspire toward a certain mallish brand of hotness, with spiky heels and Hollister jeans and a Slinky-load of thin silver bracelets. She had wound up in the art studio by mistake, she told them; she was actually looking for Theta Gamma Psi.
“A frat?” Zee said. “Why? They’re so disgusting.”