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* * *
By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.
“Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.
There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.
I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”
One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”
“Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”
Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”
The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”
Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”
“We’re practically twins,” I said drily.
When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.
* * *
That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.
Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”
“I did okay.”
She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”
“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.
“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.
“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.
“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.
* * *
The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.
“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”
Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.
“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”
“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”
“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”
Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”
After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.
* * *
Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.
“Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.
“Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”
I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”
“Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”
“No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”
He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”
“Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.
“Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”
“Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”
Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”
* * *
That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.
Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”
“The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.
“But this is just for one assignment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.
“For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.
Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”
I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.
“Lauren! I don’t even have my hair done.”
“Relax,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”
I spent the next week shooting rolls of film all over campus, looking for interesting angles and tricks of light. I lugged my camera bag to the chapel to shoot the sunrise streaming through stained glass, and onto the roof of Stanton Hall at sunset to catch the last wink of sun as it disappeared over a row of elms, the branches backlit. I stopped some girls on the way to class, and photographed them with their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Is this for the yearbook?” one of them wanted to know, and I told her it just might be. What I liked most was the feeling of authority that came with the camera hanging from my neck, and the way I could instantly disappear when I looked through the viewfinder.
Dr. Mittel developed two rolls for me and we met in his office to look at the contact sheet through his loupe, a cylindrical magnifying lens that he kept on his desk. He passed over the smiling girls in their stiff poses, the sunrises and sunsets. “This is good for a first attempt,” he said finally. “You’re looking for all the right things—angles, lighting. And you must have a good lens on that camera of yours.”
I told him about the Leica, my splurge, and he frowned, either at the expense or at the thought of some no-talent hack having access to such nice equipment.
“I assume you’re serious about this, then,” he said, passing me the contact sheet. “The best thing for you, I think, would be to take a class this spring. I teach an intro course—very hands-on, lots of time in the darkroom, some developing techniques—”
“I’ll look into it,” I said, my heart hammering. Suddenly it was imperative that I take that class.
“As far as your portfolio is concerned, I think you probably already have a few prints here you could work with. But we’ve got some time, and you could certainly keep going. I feel like you’ve shot the things you think I wanted you to shoot—maybe the things you thought you should shoot. I’d like to see what you’re interested in. What does Lauren find fascinating?”
Over the next two weeks, I shot a half dozen rolls of film, trying to let Dr. Mittel’s words sink in. What did I find fascinating? I shot the empty girls’ bathroom, with its rows of gleaming sinks, the jumble of shoes in the bottom of my closet, the third floor of the library, the shadows of the shelves creeping across the carpet. I shot tree branches and leaves, a lone red-breasted bird perched on a fence. Shoot what you want to shoot, not what you want me to see.
And then one morning, I looked over at Erin, sleeping, lovely Erin, who was just like all the girls I’d ever known. She had a boyfriend at Boston University, and during her nightly chatter, I learned that she had planned their lives down to the most specific detail—engagement after their junior year, the wedding after graduation, kids two years apart. During the daytime, she looked too calculated, too poised, her face hidden behind foundation and powder, blush and mascara, the pinkish lipstick she reapplied even when it was only the two of us and her grand plans for the evening included sending an email to her boyfriend.
But at that moment, with the sunlight filtered through our Venetian blinds, creating light and dark panes on her face, she was a different Erin entirely. Pale wisps of hair covered one cheek, and her mouth was slightly, sweetly slack, with the tiniest bulge of fat beneath her chin. Beneath her pale yellow pajama top, the hard knot of one nipple was visible.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was freeing my camera from its safe spot at the top of my closet. I snapped one picture, and then, moving closer, another. In this moment, Erin was lovely in a way she’d never been before—relaxed, vulnerable. A small red blemish on her chin was visible; her lashes were pale and fragile against her eye socket. I knelt next to the bed, snapping away, entranced.
“What are you doing?” she murmured, drawing a hand over her face.
“Sorry. Just checking something on my camera,” I said, letting it hang loose from the strap around my neck. “I was going to head out to take some pictures...”
“It’s so early,” she moaned, rolling over, pulling her Garnet Hill sheets and the matching comforter into a heap over her head.
I was aware that it was creepy, that photographing a person without her knowledge was crossing a definite line. But I’d captured something good in that fleeting minute, which made me understand something else: none of the pictures I’d taken before—the landscapes and sunsets and reflections off buildings, the stained glass in the chapel—were any good. These ones were.
By this point, after a few weeks of tailing Dr. Mittel, I’d picked up the basics in the darkroom and he usually let me operate more or less on my own, only popping in occasionally to look at my negatives. It was a thrill to see Erin’s face appear during the developing process, the sunlight catching the fine strands of hair, the wet corner of her mouth. I stared at her face in the stop bath, warmth spreading through my body. I’d created this. No—that wasn’t quite right. It was simply there, but I was the one who found it. Afterward, I held my breath while I waited for Dr. Mittel’s regular verbal cues—the harrumph and hmmm, the tapping of his finger against an image. Instead, he was silent.
Maybe they weren’t good, I thought. Maybe they were horrible. Maybe I didn’t have an eye for this kind of thing at all. Maybe, like the faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebooks, photography was something that couldn’t be taught beyond the technical processes.
“What’re these?” he asked finally.
“My roommate,” I said, wiping my suddenly sweaty hands against my jeans.
He nodded. “Tell me about them.”
My words came out in a rush, stumbling over each other. I told him about seeing the sun on her face, how it was like I’d never seen her before until she was framed in the viewfinder.
“They’re good,” he said. “Obviously, there are some techniques you need to learn, some tricks of lighting and shadow, and then there’s a whole host of printing options...”
I waited, leaning back against the counter.
“But there’s something here, Lauren. Something raw and intimate. You let the camera speak. It’s almost like a lover’s gaze, seeing everything.”
“She doesn’t know—” I stammered, my gaze flickering to the outline of Erin’s nipple, which somehow looked innocent and obscene at the same time. “She was asleep.”
He frowned. “Obviously, that’s an issue. You’ll need to get her permission if you’re going to display these or use them in your portfolio. But maybe this is your thing. Portraiture, but not posed. Candid. Catching these unaware moments. This is something to pursue.”
I nodded, trying not to burst through my skin with happiness. This is something to pursue.
“You’re taking my class in the spring, I know. Maybe we’ll see about getting you on the Courier, too. Have you considered that? They’re always looking for photographers, and I could write a recommendation.”
I grinned. The Courier was Keale’s weekly newspaper, something I’d only glanced at occasionally in the Commons, thumbing through pages while I twirled my spaghetti with a fork. “That sounds great,” I admitted.
I left his office feeling the most alive, the most right, I’d ever felt. The closest I’d come otherwise was with Marcus, when everything was thrilling and dangerous, thrilling because it was dangerous. This was something I’d done, something I’d created, not dependent on anyone else. Dr. Mittel didn’t give a damn that I was a Mabrey, and I didn’t, either.
Megan
Mom wanted to know everything about Keale, but even after the initial newness wore off, I had trouble putting it into words.
Keale was its own little world—sprawling green lawns and clusters of Victorian-era buildings, bordered on two sides by horse pastures and on another by a seventeen-acre forest that backed onto a tributary of the Housatonic. The buildings were named after female suffragettes and abolitionists and artists—the Susan B. Anthony Auditorium, the Alice Stone Blackwell Hall of Arts & Letters, the Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton residential halls. “Who?” Mom asked, but I could hardly keep them straight myself. The school seemed torn between its past—earnest and vaguely religious—and its present, where couples openly held hands and as a form of protest art, girls hung their bloody tampons on a display in the student center.
I’d expected a campus built in the 1800s to be showing its age, imagining a dusty reference library, cracks in foundations, crumbling facades. Instead, every outward inch of Keale was maintained to perfection. The brickwork gleamed; the sidewalks were pressure-washed to sparkling silver. Leaves and food wrappers were whisked away by a small army of maintenance workers in green jumpsuits. Inside, the buildings were light and modern, housing computer labs and rows of microscopes.
That first night, alone in my room, I had the impression that Keale was a sort of sacred space, a feeling enhanced by a quaint bell from the original chapel marking otherwise silent hours. But then the dorms filled, and this vision was shattered with feet pounding in the hallway, music pulsing through walls, female voices echoing up and down the stairwells. In the common kitchen on each floor of Stanton Hall, someone was forever burning popcorn in the microwave or losing the remote control right before Friends was scheduled to start or bitching about who had used the one-percent milk, despite the fact that it had been labeled in permanent marker as Hailey’s Milk.
By contrast, my room was a tomb. Someone in Housing must have thought that Ariana Kramer and I made a perfect match, based solely on the fact that we were both from the Midwest. But Ariana was quiet and studious and serious, charged with living up to the expectations of her pediatrician father and her law professor mother. She lined the bookshelf above her desk with ribbons and plaques and trophies—First Place Academic Decathlon. National Honor Society Lifetime Member. Soroptimists International Achievement Winner.
“I didn’t think to bring my Pinewood Derby participation ribbon,” I told her that first day, after her parents had left for the airport and she was carefully arranging her clothes, grouping the hangers by color. I expected at least a courtesy laugh, but Ariana didn’t crack a smile.
She had already started her course reading during the summer, something I’d never even considered, and her thick copies of Organic Chemistry and Human Biology and World Cultures looked worldly and sophisticated next to the yellow spines of my Nancy Drews, packed for sentimental rather than practical value. From the critical glance Ariana gave my side of the room, I might have brought my stuffed animals and pink plastic ponies.
“I’m an English major,” I said, as if this might explain it. “I mean, at least, that’s what I’ve declared for now...” I trailed off, not wanting to explain about my unplanned “gap” year and the feeling of comfort I’d felt when I stumbled on Keale’s list of English courses. American Literature I and II, Writing Between the Wars, Post-Colonial Voices... Reading, I’d thought. Writing. I could do that. “What about you? Did you declare a major?”
“Oh, I’m a bio girl. Premed,” she clarified, fiddling with her hair. I watched as a French braid emerged from her deft fingers, the strands of hair pulled too tight, giving her eyes a squinty look. If it were someone else, I might have suggested a different hairstyle, volunteered to do a loose fishbone braid like I used to do with my girlfriends in junior high. But somewhere, Ariana probably had proof that this was the best kind of braid—a ribbon from the county fair with her name embossed in tiny gold letters, maybe. “I’m leaning toward the heart,” she said.
“The heart,” I repeated, distracted by the efficient rotating motions of her wrists.
“You know, cardiology?” The last syllable rose to a question mark, as if to ask if I’d heard of it.
* * *
We didn’t have the chumminess that other girls had, but we didn’t have the volatile ups and downs, either. Ariana spent most of her time in the library, and during the day I caught rare glimpses of her crossing campus, bent forward beneath the weight of her backpack. Most days she couldn’t be bothered to go to the Commons for dinner, and crinkly foil Pop-Tart wrappers glimmered in our trashcan.
The other girls—women, I supposed—seemed to move in packs, united by shared characteristics. At first, I assumed that they all knew each other somehow, like they’d been fed into Keale from the same high school, and the same middle schools before that, all the way to the preschools where they’d first finger-painted their names. It took me a while to realize that their familiarity was based on loosely shared experiences from communities up and down the East Coast—prep schools and summer camps and tennis lessons, summers on the Cape. They didn’t need to know each other; they understood each other. They spoke the same language. In class, they raised their hands confidently, referencing books I’d never heard of, historical events that hadn’t been mentioned in my history classes at Woodstock High. I might have been one of the best and brightest of my graduating class, but the bar was much higher at Keale, the work more rigorous, the competition fierce. In high school, skimming the reading and turning in completed worksheets had earned me A’s and the occasional B, but at Keale the quizzes focused on obscure passages in the reading, and my papers were returned full of red ink.
On my weekly phone calls home, I told my mom that everything was fine, that Ariana and I were getting along well, that I was learning a lot in my classes. It was only to myself that I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake, if KSU wouldn’t have been a better choice after all.
* * *
At the end of September, sick of riding the Keale Kargo shuttle into town, I bought a bike from an upperclassman for ten dollars. Even though the green paint was chipped and the banana seat was in need of repair, it was a steal, with a giant wicker basket perfect for transporting the toiletries and snacks and other things that cost a fortune on campus. One afternoon, I was locking the bike outside the Common Ground, Scofield’s artsy coffee shop, when Joe Natolo walked up with his hands slouched into his pockets.
“A granny bike. Nice,” he said, running his hand over the seat I’d repaired with a few strips of duct tape.
