*
She had no one to blame for tonight’s What the Hell Have You Done moment except herself. Finals had ended two days ago and most of the students had decamped for winter break. Flight prices back to New York halved if Sophie left the following week, so she had to stick around and twiddle thumbs. Earlier that day, Sophie had been selling her books back to the bookstore—getting a pittance in return, because two editions were about to be updated, the clerk explained, causing Sophie to get into an argument with the poor sap about why all textbooks should be digital and updated automatically, only it wasn’t really an argument because the clerk wanted nothing to do with the debate. On the way out she’d seen a flier for caroling on the quad that night. And for some reason, she’d thought: This seems like a good idea.
Sophie wondered when was she going to learn that lots of things seem like a good idea but a small amount of analysis might uncover that such seemingly good ideas are, in fact, intrinsically faulty. Take communism. Seemed like a good idea: Everyone shares, no one goes hungry. But maybe give it a good think and you’d come away understanding for it to work you’d need an inhuman capacity for cooperation, or a much more human capacity for totalitarianism. Anyways, she’d heard Luba describe breadlines and bugged phones and Siberian gulags enough to know which way that went.
A caroling concert? She really should’ve known better. The entire point of a caroling concert was to join in. First of all, Sophie was Jewish. It was bad enough that she’d basically skipped Hanukkah this year, but to spend the last night of the Jewish holiday serenading the birth of Jesus.… Just. No. And even if they were to throw in “I Have a Little Dreidel” (they wouldn’t; dreidels were as foreign to Bumfuckville as moon rocks) Sophie wouldn’t sing. Not in public. Not here.
In her defense, she did like Christmas carols, not the horrible dirges sung over mall speakers, but people singing in pretty harmonies. Sophie remembered when she first heard carolers, wandering the streets outside her apartment in Brooklyn. They had harmonized so beautifully, Sophie had asked her grandmother if those were angels singing. “No, darling,” Luba had replied, “just gentiles.”
There was nothing wrong with the singing tonight. It was fine. But not remotely magical or angelic. And everyone seemed to be wearing Christmas sweaters. Like with appliques of Rudolph or Santa on them. One girl even had a sweater with a tree that actually lit up. If Sophie had gone to NYU, such sweaters would’ve been worn ironically. But here, they weren’t. Everything was so godddamned sincere.
Including the carols. Not that she expected ironic Christmas carols—Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg.… Wasn’t that how they sang it in elementary school? But there was so much eye-shining and heart as they pa-rum-pum-pum-pummed about Little Drummer Boys. Plus the sweaters. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“Oh, the Ned Flanders of it all,” she muttered to herself. Which was something she’d been doing a lot lately. When she admitted this to Zora, her friend had warned that it was a certain step on the road to Crazy Cat Lady-ism. Sophie had laughed but when she thought of her mother, alone in the apartment with only her sculptures, and now Luba’s cats, for company, it didn’t seem quite so funny.
“Yo, you just say something about Ned Flanders?”
Caught Cat-Ladying out loud? Oy. Sophie felt as though she’d been spotted streaking the quad naked. She pretended she had not heard the question.
“You did. You said, ‘the Ned Flanders something something.’”
She turned around. Standing about three feet away was one of the Black Guys on Campus. Sophie hated herself for thinking of him like that—she’d grown up on the Bed-Stuy side of Clinton Hill, after all—but here, it was hard not to. There seemed to be like twenty black students at the entire college, a lot of them scholarship students like her. She knew this because she’d met quite a few at that Dean’s Reception for Excellence the first week of school. She’d been flattered by the invite until she walked in and was given a handout with still-open work-study slots and understood that it was a get-together for all the scholarship students. She’d hid out in a corner, eavesdropping on a bunch of guys from the basketball team (basketball was huge here, she’d been surprised to learn) comparing notes about some of the sillier comments they’d gotten in their first week. Sophie had been dying to chime in with some choice examples of her own, but stopped herself. Though she may have felt like a minority here, she was still white.
She tried to remember if this guy had been at the reception. He was looking at her like he might know her. “I didn’t say it so much as mutter it,” she said, or, rather, muttered.
He laughed. A big, open-chested laugh, and for a second Sophie felt the tiny thrill of landing a successful joke, but it was followed by doubt because people here didn’t get her humor. When she made people laugh, she suspected it was after she’d left the room. Which annoyed the shit out of her. Back home, people at least had the decency to laugh in your face.
This caroling thing was a supremely bad idea. She turned to walk away.
She felt a hand, a huge hand, on her shoulder. “Sorry. I’m not messing with you. For real. Just I was thinking the same thing.”
She turned around. “You were thinking about Ned Flanders?”
She waited for him to say “Diddly-oh,” or some such. It would be exactly what the Kyles or Connors would say. Then they’d ask her major. But he just smiled, a slow oozy grin, too hot for this cold night. “Yeah. Ned Flanders,” he said. “Among others.” He made it sound risqué, the among others, and Sophie felt herself flush.
He stuck out a hand, sheathed in a fingerless glove. “Russell,” he said.
She looked at him, or rather up at him. He was very tall, a whole foot taller than Sophie, at least, and Sophie was five feet five. Tall enough to play basketball. Maybe he was on scholarship, same as her. The thought was as reassuring as his grip, which was firm, not crushing; he wasn’t one of those guys who had to break your hand to prove just how much they treated you as equals.
“Sophie,” she said.
“So, Sophie.” He opened his arms wide. “What brings you here?”
It felt like a variation of the What’s your major? query, the implication really being, What are you doing here? Sophie hated being asked her major. (She didn’t have one; she was a first-term freshman for Christ’s sake. Not everyone had their lives figured out by the time they exited the womb.)
As for what was she doing here … A year ago, she hadn’t even heard of this place. Her high school guidance counselor suggested it, apparently knowing the ins and outs of obscure colleges with ridiculous endowments. When the school made a financial aid offer so generous, so above and beyond anywhere else, Sophie simply couldn’t turn it down. Before she’d had time to think about what it would mean—all this pastoralia, et cetera—she had enrolled. Now she found herself checking off days in the calendar, awaiting her parole. (And yes, she knew she was being hyperbolic and dramatic and it was a free fifty-grand-a-year education and she should be grateful, but no matter how many times she told herself that, it didn’t erase how unhappy she was.)
“I believe in the value of a liberal arts education,” Sophie said now. It was her standard response to the annoying question she’d grown accustomed to, along with iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and cheese served on top of things that wouldn’t seem worthy of dairy.
Russell laughed: “I meant here, at the Ned Flanders-ist Christmas Caroling Concert of All Time.”
There was something about the way he said it, as if he and Sophie were on the same side. It loosened something in her.
“I’m doing anthropological research,” she said.
“An ethnography of sorts?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said. “I’m particularly interested in the sweaters. The symbolism of the light-up ones.”
Sophie paused a beat, waiting for the blank expression and the really? she would’ve gotten off a Kyle or a Connor. To which Sophie would’ve had to say, no not really, just kidding and the conversation would’ve fizzled.
But Russell was nodding along, stroking his chin in exaggerated professorial motions. “I believe those represent a mating ritual.”
“A mating ritual?”
“Yes. You see the male lights up in order to attract the attention of the female so that procreation may ensue.”
“Like fireflies?” Sophie asked.
“And anglerfish,” Russell said.