for me, an adequate response. But I imagined she wouldn’t see it that way. When I was in high school, I only had a steady boyfriend for a total of two months. I always felt a little sorry for, and even a little superior to, the girls who started holding some guy’s hand in eighth grade, and were still holding the same one when we graduated. It all seemed a little claustrophobic, meeting the love of your life at fourteen. And maybe this wasn’t fair, but I sort of assumed that these girls who ate lunch with their boyfriends every day, who huddled against a boyfriend’s arm in the courtyard while everyone else milled about, were the girls who probably weren’t going to college. Their horizons already seemed limited. If that was what they wanted, fine. But I was a different kind of girl.
I even thought that way my freshman year of college, when I was just dating around. But then I met Tim, and all of a sudden I understood why some of those girls in high school had not been able to just let go of their boyfriends’ hands. Tim was simply my favorite person to talk to, my favorite person to be around, my favorite person to look at. If I had known Tim in high school, I would have been a girlfriend myself. It was my first inkling of how foolish it was to judge harshly and to discount fate, and to truly believe I was one kind of girl, and not another, just because of some decision I thought I’d made.
It was almost midnight when I got back to my room. The hall was empty, all of my freshman charges ostensibly in bed. Someone had written “YOU ARE NEVER HERE. YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS JOB” on my message board. I wiped it off with the sleeve of my sweater and, holding the walkie-talkie between my knees, pushed my key into the lock.
My room that year was a little sad-looking. When I’d moved into the dorm as a freshman, my mother bought me a new white bedspread and a little white lamp to put on my desk. White, she told me, would be a safe bet to match whatever my roommate brought with her. And that had turned out to be true, to an extent. My freshman year roommate, a theater major from St. Louis, had proudly brought an entire bedroom set printed with the markings of a cow. Everything—bedspread, pillows, curtains, even a throw rug—was white with Holstein splashes of black.
The first time my mother came to visit, she was amused. “Does it make you want to mooooooove out?” she asked. She stood on my side of the room, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her raincoat, as if afraid to touch anything cow. My roommate had left for a rehearsal.
“Just try to get along,” my mother counseled. “Sometimes you just have to try to get along with someone.” She looked around the room and smiled. “Think of it as a learning experience. You know? Milk it for all it’s worth.”
This year, I had my own room, and there was no cow print to contend with. But I hadn’t really had the time or energy to decorate. I had a laminated poster of the periodic table of elements taped on my wall, so I could stare at it while I blew my hair dry. I’d pinned a calendar to the bulletin board, next to a picture of Tim standing on his head in front of his apartment. But that was pretty much it for wall art. I still had the white bedspread, and I put a white sheet over the other mattress. This looked okay in the early fall, when I still kept my windows open, the sun shining bright on the linoleum floor. But on gray days, and always at night, my room looked bare and stark.
As soon as I put my books down, I checked my phone, pleased to see Tim had called twice.
He answered yawning. “Good evening,” he said. “Or good morning. What time is it?”
“It’s late. Sorry. I forgot my phone. Did I wake you up?”
“No.” He was eating something crunchy. “We’re watching El Corazón Verdad. You’re missing out. Lorenzo is about to find out who his real father is.”
I sighed, envious. The graduate engineering program was famously difficult, but you wouldn’t know that from all the free time Tim seemed to have. He lived in an apartment