14
I LEFT JILLIAN (IN HER CLOTHES from the night before, minus the boots) sleeping facedown on her still-made bed, getting dressed and leaving without waking her. After a few hours in the library rereading the early chapters in my chem textbook and outlining them the way my tutor had suggested, I hauled myself and my stuff to Donald Hall. It was one of the more modern dorms, with a wide entrance and a sort of concrete porch, which is where a group of ten or so people—Ethan not among them—stood waiting, a few with skates hanging from their shoulders. As I walked up to the circle, I glanced through the building’s glass doors and realized I’d never been inside any dorm but mine.
Ethan materialized from a stairwell door and met me with a huge wave, saying, You made it! as he came outside. He introduced me to the other residents all up for ice skating that afternoon, most of them freshmen like me. Everyone looked exhausted, pale: Ethan even said, I’m thinking this is a much-needed break, you guys. Just one week left before study week starts. We can do this!
We slouched across campus to the rink where the hockey team played and practiced. I’d seen it from the outside during an orientation week tour, but it was up near the athletic fields—a part of campus I never needed to visit. Ethan asked me how the party had wrapped up, and all I said was, Good. He mentioned that a few of the people walking with us now had been there, had I seen them? He herded us together into a little group of three and then abandoned us for another subset of residents. We proceeded to have an awkward conversation about the DJ and whether or not he was sketchy. They declared me the ultimate authority on this issue, since they recognized me as the girl who’d gotten closest to him.
—I guess he was pretty sketchy, I said, trying out the word.
It was sweeter-sounding, more innocuous, than skeezy or grimy—words that would’ve felt more natural coming from my mouth but that didn’t really describe him. Sketchy was it. Sketchy was perfect. I wondered if people used that word in Seattle.
We kept walking, the piles of old snow lining the sidewalks and paths reaching almost to my thighs, the sky clear and so the cold extra brutal. I still couldn’t understand why the sun, when out like that, couldn’t do its job and warm us even a little bit. I kept my hands in my coat pockets, though I’d brought Jillian’s mittens with me in my backpack for skating; there was only so much cold I could take for so long without them.
Ethan would occasionally jog up to the front of the group and point out some awesome or rad thing about Rawlings, grinning like a fool at a plaque that commemorated the graduation of the first woman admitted to the college—We were the first of our sister schools to go co-ed, he pointed out—or the building that housed a brain collection.
—We have a brain collection? someone said from the back of the group, and I was glad I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about it.
Ethan told us that, among other brains, there was the brain of a local serial killer (supposedly bigger than Einstein’s brain, he said) and the brain of an orca. He told us that orca brains had a part of the corpus callosum that was far more developed than that of humans, and that this likely meant they were not only smarter than us, but capable of more complex emotions than anything we as a species could ever feel.
—Holy shit, someone said.
After a second of walking in silent awe of this new fact, I asked Ethan what his major was. Whatever he said—marine biology, neuroscience—I would make myself study it: I wanted to know things like the things he was telling us, even if facts like that made the field trips my elementary school had taken to see Lolita the Killer Whale at the Miami Seaquarium so morally wrong that I’d spend my life trying to make up for it.
—History, he said.
I stopped walking without meaning to, and the person behind me slammed into my back, said, Oh sorry, even though it was my fault.
I didn’t ask Ethan if he’d learned that fact at Rawlings or somewhere else, but I promised myself I’d see the brains by the end of next spring. I’d see everything, cram four years of exploring into a semester if I had to. Maybe I’d ask Ethan for a list of recommendations, assuming I could do it without letting on that one year at Rawlings might be all I could afford. He pointed out a building that had a twin in New York City: it was made out of a metal that, when exposed to atmospheric pollutants, would turn a brilliant, aquatic blue. But our version, on this crisp hill, was a dump-in-the-toilet brown.
—Too clean here, he said, walking backwards so that he faced us. But seriously, guys, check out the one in the city if you’re ever there.
He turned around with a little hop, an honest-to-goodness skip, and seeing him do that made me hope that after graduation, Ethan could find a job as some sort of RA for the world.