I considered lying to him, saying everything was fine, that I’d already heard and I was clear to stay. But he’d know that wasn’t true, would sense it in the way I’d force those words out, as false as the thug image of Omar I’d given people up at Rawlings. The difference between him and the Rawlings audience was that he knew me better, or more precisely, he knew the version of me that couldn’t lie to him, not yet.
—There’s another stupid meeting, where they’ll tell me the decision. I’ll probably find out when that is like the minute I get back, I said.
The weight of that truth made me clutch the phone to my face and slide down in the plastic seat.
—Well good luck with that, he said.
He cleared his throat, the sound crackling in my ear, then said, Seriously, good luck. I actually mean it.
And then he hung up on me.
9
FROM THE ROWS OF SHUT DOORS and the absence of wet boots outside of them, I figured I was the only person back on my floor. I was in our room just long enough to leave my bags in the middle of the carpet separating Jillian’s side from mine—she’d be back Sunday, and I planned to spend my night alone spreading myself over the whole room just because I could—before turning around and heading immediately back into the cold, to a building everyone called the Commons, where our mailboxes lived.
It had snowed all day, but some miraculous group of people apparently still worked that weekend, plowing the sidewalks and paths for those of us unlucky enough to be on campus. Everything felt louder for the unnatural silence—no cars searching for spots in the parking lot, no one smoking or talking on their dorm’s front steps. My sneakers against the clean pavement made soft, dry taps; the only real sound around me was my jacket’s plasticky swish.
The Commons could feel deserted in the mornings whenever I made it to breakfast, but that Saturday night, the place felt post-apocalyptic empty. Inside, the snack shop that served fried things—normally open until two A.M.—was closed, a metal grate I’d never seen before pulled down over the entrance. In the TV lounge across from it, a screen glowed a beam through the dark over the body of just one person, a guy with his head thrown back against the recliner holding him, a baseball cap over his face.
At the bank of mailboxes, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of plastic and metal, more key chains than keys. I fumbled for the tiniest one while eyeing the crush of papers waiting inside, visible through the slit of a window lodged in my mailbox’s face. Through that slit I spotted the bright red envelope the school used to mail out the bursar bills. I had these sent to myself at my campus address because at first, when they went to my mom’s apartment, her and Leidy lost their minds over numbers so big, not realizing that most of the figures in one column were canceled out by the figures in another. I’d switched the delivery address and dealt with it myself after a second month’s round of panicked calls from home. In the box, too, were flyers for concerts I wouldn’t go to, ads for events in the Commons about which I didn’t give a shit—pool tournaments, marathon game nights, free popcorn and screenings of French films—paperwork for a housing lottery I might or might not be around to experience, and in the smash of all of it, in that little bin, there was, as I’d predicted for Omar, a sealed letter from the Office of the Dean of Students.
I dumped the flyers in the recycling bin and shoved the bill and the lottery info and the letter into the mesh pocket inside my jacket. As empty as the Commons was, I wanted to open the letter in my room to guarantee I’d be alone, in case the reality of the set date made me cry.