real, five blocks from home. The novelty thrills her.
December of senior year. The semester so close to over. She might stumble now, fall face-first, and still roll across the finish line. What’s left? A short-answer exam on survival analysis. Final paper in Intermediate Macroeconomics. Hundred and ten slide IDs in Masterpieces of World Art, her blow-off elective. Ten more days plus one more semester and she’s done forever.
Three years ago, she thought actuarial science was the same as accounting. When the counselor told her it dealt in the price and probability of uncertain events, the rigor combined with ghoulishness made her declare, Yes, please. If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death. Being one of three females in the program also gave her a little frisson. A kick, to defy the odds.
But the kick has long since gone limp. She’s taken the national Society of Actuaries preliminary exam three times and failed all three. Part of the problem is aptitude. Part is the sex, drugs, and all-night parties. She’ll get the degree; she can still manage that. If not, she’ll sample whatever opportunities disaster resents. Disaster is, as actuarial science proves and Olivia reassures her overly concerned friends, just another number.
She turns the corner onto Cedar in the half dark. Other students, stumbling under the weight of their own backpacks, have beaten trails through the snow, clumping around the first walker’s mostly terrible guesses. Beneath the fresh drifts, cracked sidewalks ride up over bulging tree roots in the world’s slowest seismic waves. She looks up. Although she’ll miss precious little when she leaves this shit-kicking backwater, she does love the streetlamps. Their Gilded Age cream-colored globes look like stilled candles. They light a soft path through the student rentals all the way to her own rambling American Gothic, once some surgeon’s mansion, now chopped up into private cubbies with five separate fire escapes and eight mailboxes.
Lit by the streetlamp in front of her house is a singular tree that once covered the earth—a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood. A tree with sperm that must swim through droplets to fertilize the ovule. Its leaves vary as much as human faces. Its limbs, in the streetlight, have that extraordinary profile, lined with bizarre short side-spurs that make the tree unmistakable, even in winter. She has lived under the tree for a whole semester and doesn’t know it’s there. She passes it again tonight without seeing.
She stumbles up the snowy steps into a dark hall full of bicycles. She shuts the front door behind her, but frigid air keeps pouring through around the seams. The light switch teases her from across the foyer. Six steps into the black gauntlet, Olivia slits her ankle on a derailleur. Her curses echo up the stairs. She has raged against the bikes at house meetings all semester long. But here the bikes are, despite all the house votes, her frozen ankle gouged and smeared with bike grease, and her enraged sense of justice shouting, “Shit, shit, shit!”
Nothing matters. Five little months, and life will begin. Even if she’s still living in rented squalor in a cold-water apartment over a breakfast dive where she waitresses, all the forthcoming crimes and misdemeanors will be gloriously hers alone.
Someone snickers at the top of the stairs. “Everything all right?” Suppressed giggles seep down from the kitchen. Her housemates, entertained by her routine rage.
“Just fine,” she chirps. Home. December 12, 1989. The Berlin Wall, coming down. From the Baltic to the Balkans, millions of oppressed people take to the winter streets. Her scraped-open ankle spills blood through the foyer. So what? She bends to press a dry Kleenex to her wound, stanching the flow. It stings like mad.
HUGS AWAIT HER ABOVE: two routine, one mocking, one cold, and one filled with half a year of hangdog longing. She hates her housemates’ endless cheap hugging, but she hugs them back in kind. The group converged the previous spring in an orgy of mutual enthusiasm. By the end of September, the communal lovefest spun out into daily recrimination. Whose hairs are these in my razor? Somebody stole the thimble of hash I left in the freezer. Who the hell stuffed that leftover turkey log down the disposal? But a girl can do anything, with the finish line in sight.
The kitchen smells like heaven, though no one invites her to