I was having a hard time finding my groove. I had a handful of friends to eat dinner and go to the movies with, but I grew up with nice kids in a nice town that had a nice school with a college-and-career center filled to overflowing with brochures from idyllic liberal arts college campuses across the country. I was dumb enough to be hopeful that something nice would finally happen for me. The earlier part of my lackluster senior year had been filled with daydreams of escape and reinvention: my cool New York feminist Sarah Lawrence–self or my crunchy/artsy Bennington-self or my sexually free Oberlin-self. I could see the sprawling lawns and smell the libraries full of old books. I had pored over all of the hip college guides, the ones that skipped all the percentages and statistics in favor of “real talk” about what kind of jeans to wear to class and the best local bars at which to test out your fake ID. I wrote thoughtful, honest essays trying to explain how a person with a 1520 on the SAT was also the same person who never took physics (or trig, for that matter) and hadn’t bothered with any AP courses and had just barely held on to a 3.2 GPA because they let me take Spanish and choir for honors credit. I went through my sweaters and boots looking for ones that might work in New England in the fall. I filled page after page with my handwritten good intentions, exchanged my saved babysitting cash for money orders to have those applications processed, then enclosed them in fat, creamy envelopes and sent them off just before the deadline to lovely sounding places like Williamstown and Northfield and Gambier and Claremont.
Months later, as names like Stanford and Wesleyan and Princeton bounced excitedly off the walls of the student center, I was coming home every afternoon to skinny rejection letters mixed in with my sister’s subscriptions to Essence and Cooking Light. My counselor skimmed my list of colleges over her reading glasses while I thumbed through one of the many astrology books lining her shelves. She reassured me that there were colleges out there that would look past the C-minus in Latin American history and into the core of who I really was as a sensitive, creative air sign, but she suggested I probably should add a couple of safety schools to my list so that I definitely had somewhere to enroll come the following autumn. This is the problem with neither applying oneself nor working up to one’s potential, these moments when you are reduced to a bunch of abstract letters and numbers whose unflattering reflection cannot be charmed or joked aside. On paper, I am an asshole: a National Merit Scholar who barely passed chemistry and had to take three different gym classes senior year because I failed one freshman year and dropped out of the summer-school makeup class. Three summers in a row. I led an insurrection of my classmates and refused to read The Grapes of Wrath, for which I should have been expelled. The schools I daydreamed about going to? You know, the ones with the lawns and the sweaters? They were looking for girls who got As and volunteered at homeless shelters after school; I got mostly Bs and a lot of Cs and spent my afternoons watching Ricki Lake and sleeping until dinner. My acceptance letter from Northern Illinois University, NIU, received two weeks before graduation, basically read, “Our condolences. Here’s where you pick up your books.”
“What’s my name, fool?” Adam said, letting himself into my room without knocking. Because I had let that dummy cheat off my biology final, he’d offered to drive me back to Evanston for the two-week winter break, where I was going to grudgingly listen to people I passive-aggressively hated whining about how oppressive their course loads were at Harvard and pretending I hadn’t just taken a 300-level math class at Northern in which the professor had used rhymes to teach trig. My roommate, Cara, had already gone home for the holidays, and Adam made himself comfortable on her bed, his long legs dangling off the XL twin mattress as they’d done dozens of times before. We’d spent many nights just like this, in beds opposite each other as we shoveled Chinese food into our mouths from cardboard containers and watched trash TV or listened to records with a bag of greasy Taco Bell. College was surprisingly lonely. It turns out that I am not very good at making friends unless I am already trapped in an insufferable hellscape with someone who doesn’t mind my cracking a few inappropriate jokes as we circle life’s drain. I kept being introduced to people who didn’t know any black people or, more often than not, any black people like me. Which they exclaimed while taking me in with eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, as if I’d just hopped off a motherfucking spaceship with my cheesy black-light posters and newfound interest in sexual experimentation.
I found myself surrounded on all sides by the kind of dudes who wore shorts in the winter and blasted Tim McGraw while tucking in their polo shirts and putting on belts to go party on a Saturday night. And, surprise, surprise, I kind of liked these jagoffs. I liked watching wrestling and would never mind going in on the delicious party sampler to eat in front of Monday Night Football. (Hot wings! Onion rings! Egg rolls! Pizza bites! Corn dogs! Jumbo mozzarella sticks! Heart disease.) I’m not a “just one of the guys” kind of person—I fucking hate men—but I love eating and marathon television watching and I never met any girls in DeKalb willing to endure six hours on a busted couch with cold cheese fries and reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. John could eat seventeen ground beef tacos in one sitting and once watched From Dusk till Dawn three consecutive times on a Tuesday morning before class. Swoon.
Adam was convinced that the later we left, the quicker the drive home would be, so we laid in bed all morning watching corny Lifetime Christmas movies and listening to our floormates leaving for home. I was feeling strangely conflicted, anxious to get back to gossiping in my friends’ cozy bedrooms yet apprehensive about what, if anything, I could contribute to the discussion. I hadn’t gone to homecoming and I didn’t have a crush on anyone and I couldn’t remember how to get into my e-mail; what was I going to talk about? I got the same activity books everyone else did, and the one time I ventured out to one of the vaguely interesting events (to the Movie Club, which turned out to be me and three other weirdos watching Pulp Fiction in an empty classroom at night with no snacks) I was disappointed and vowed to never try any new things ever again. Except for that one time John dragged me to a Young Republicans meeting. Oh, and Bible Club.