regularly got sunlight. She almost always left her door open when she was home—a steady, hopeful invitation to anyone walking by. Or almost anyone. From the hallway, I could see just the tip of one of her pig slippers on the floor. I hid behind the wall when I knocked.
“Come in.”
I moved quickly to the interior of the room. As soon as she saw me, she looked back down at her work.
“What do you want?” she asked.
She was sitting at her desk, or what I assumed was her desk—the room was clearly divided in two. The bed behind me was as neatly made up as a store display, with a floral dust ruffle that matched the sham pillows. Sorority letters, painted blue with tiny daisies, hung on the wall overhead. On the bureau sat several framed pictures of tan, smiling girls in formal dresses, their heads resting on each other’s shoulder, their arms almost always interwined. I squinted at each picture, trying to pick out Marley’s roommate. It wasn’t all my fault that I couldn’t do it. She really wasn’t ever around.
The other bed was unmade. The quilt that Marley always dragged out to the lobby was twisted across the bed, and a pillow, with a pillowcase that did not match anything, had fallen to the floor. In the corner of the room, wadded up on the floor, was the flowered dress she’d been wearing when I yelled at her. The French horn lay at the foot of the bed, looking beautiful and complicated with all its swirling tubes.
“What do you want?”
My gaze moved over her bulletin board. She’d tacked up a postcard of a boy with a french fry in his nose, and another of a ferret getting a bath. She had a large black-and-white poster of a man in a bow tie blowing into a French horn, but even that was just taped to the wall. There was only one framed picture, and it was on her desk. A woman in black glasses sat at a piano, with a little smiling girl next to her on the bench. I bent over and squinted to get a better look.
“Is that you?” I asked. “Is that you and your mom?”
She picked up the picture and turned it so I could no longer see the front. “Don’t come in here and ask me things. Don’t come in and ask about my mom. You’ve never even been in my room before.” She looked up again. “What do you want?” she asked. “For the last time. I’m busy. Obviously.”
I stood on my toes to see what she was working on. Sheet music was scattered across her desk, her own handwriting scrawled above and below and beside all the rows of notes. I don’t know why this struck me as strange. I had an idea of people who played instruments just sort of magically picking them up and playing them. I knew they must practice. But I didn’t think of them as studying music, thinking about it, the way I might think about a book.
“Will you please come down to my room?” I started to sit on her roommate’s bed, but then thought maybe I shouldn’t. “We’re making luminarias. You already know that. You should come down, Marley.” I ducked, trying to catch her eye. “Please? I really wish you would.”
“I’m never going in your room again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked up. Her nostrils were flared, and her eyes were blank with sadness. I understood then how much I had hurt her, and also how much she was already hurt.
“I appreciate that. Now please go.”
I held up one finger, trying to think. Just that morning, during the exam, I had struggled to come up with solutions to one problem after another. I had gotten most of them wrong. But not all of them. I tried to think.
“What if I leave?” I asked. “What if I go right now, and I promise not to come back for several hours? I mean, it’s me that’s the problem, not the room. Right?”
Headway. She lifted her eyebrows. “That would work,” she said.
I told her I just needed a few minutes to get my things. Baby steps, I told myself. She wouldn’t forgive me all at once. And that wasn’t the point anyway. She needed the company more than I did, and I at least owed her that.
Back in my room, I grabbed my bag and my coat and my keys and announced, to no one in particular, that