Roomies
Authors: Sara Zarr,Tara Altebrando
Digital Galley Edition
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando
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First Edition: January 2014
[CIP to come; Summary: Told from their own viewpoints, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth, of New Jersey, and eighteen-year-old Lauren, of San Francisco, are assigned to be freshman roommates, and they strike up a correspondence over the summer before their first semester of college.]
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RRD-C
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
THURSDAY, JUNE 27 SAN FRANCISCO
WEDNESDAY, JULY 24 SAN FRANCISCO
SATURDAY, JULY 27 SAN FRANCISCO
SATURDAY, AUGUST 3 SAN FRANCISCO
SUNDAY, AUGUST 4 SAN FRANCISCO
FRIDAY, AUGUST 9 SAN FRANCISCO
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10 NEW JERSEY
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10 SAN FRANCISCO
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 SAN FRANCISCO
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 NEW JERSEY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18 SAN FRANCISCO
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28 SAN FRANCISCO
Sometimes there are signs. Or things I can’t help but interpret as signs. Maybe from fate or the universe or God, if there is one. Or maybe from the grandmother I barely knew but who I’ve always been told is in heaven.
Watching and judging.
Like Santa.
There are just times when it really feels like some
one
or some
thing
is paying attention. Even to little old me. And right now he or she or it is looking down on me lying on my bed, where I am seething because of a five-minutes-ago fight with my mother about how I am going to spend this, my last summer at home before college. I have plans to meet my friends at the beach tomorrow and she thinks I should be… well, she doesn’t even know
what
she wants me to be doing instead. Here’s a hint: It is probably the exact opposite of whatever I want to be doing at any given moment.
I seriously only graduated last week. The cap and gown are still hanging right there on the back of my bedroom door.
Someone, some power, must see me gripping the bedspread beneath my fingers and he (or she or it) must feel some kind of pity for me because he (or she or it) takes it upon himself (or herself or itself) to trigger someone on the opposite coast, someone named Helen Blake, who works in Student Housing at UC Berkeley, to sit down at her computer and type in my e-mail address and send me a message that makes my phone buzz on the bed next to me and that helps me to calm down, and to release the bedspread, and to remember that nothing, not even living with your mother, is forever, though it mostly feels that way.
Dear Elizabeth Owens
, it says.
I am pleased to provide you with your dorm room assignment and contact information for your roommate this coming school year. While it is by no means mandatory for you to get in touch, some students find that there are practical issues they would like to discuss before orientation week.
Below the dorm info is a name—Lauren Cole—a snail mail address in San Francisco, an e-mail address, and a phone number. It is enough to make me spring up off the bed and rush to my desk. There is a light, gritty layer of dust on my open laptop’s keyboard; I haven’t used it since school ended but something about sending e-mail from it—instead of from my phone—feels more official, more serious.
I am nothing if not officially serious about going away to school.
So I type in this Lauren’s address—calling seems crazy—and I put
Hi Roomie!
as the subject; then I think for a second that I have no idea what to say, but it turns out I do.
Dear Lauren,
You don’t know me but I got an e-mail from Berkeley telling me that we’re going to be roommates. I am so excited to “meet” you! I’ve been waiting and waiting. Since I’m moving to California from New Jersey, I’m not bringing that much stuff at all—only what I can fit in two suitcases. Maybe I’ll ship stuff? I’ll probably pack a hundred times in the next 65 days (not like I’m counting, ha ha), so I can be sure everything I want to bring will fit. My mother says she’ll give me money for a mini-fridge or microwave. Are you already planning on bringing either of those?
I think about wrapping it up but I am really just getting going so I don’t stop. Not yet. I rub my fingers together to get rid of some dust, then dig in again.
I’m so jealous that you live in San Francisco. You must really like it if you’re staying close for college. It’s cool that you’re going to live in the dorms. I swear I’ve been wanting to go away to college ever since I found out it was possible to do that. It’s all I think about lately. Getting out of this place.
I should stop now. No one sends e-mails this long. But as it turns out I am not quite done with the stuff that needs to come off my chest so that I can maybe breathe again, so that I can maybe survive the summer and the move to the land of the Man Who Left, otherwise known as Dad.
This may sound crazy but I’ve never been to California—even though my father moved to San Francisco a bunch of years ago. I haven’t seen him since I was pretty little, and I never talk to him, so it’s not like that’s the reason I picked Berkeley. Anyway, I promise not to be too annoyingly touristy or anything.
I’m babbling. So yeah. Let me know about the microwave/fridge situation.
Elizabeth (but everyone calls me EB) Owens
I send it before the feeling of release turns sour. Then I head over to Facebook and search for Lauren Cole. Turns out there are a couple of fan pages for famous Lauren Coles I’ve never heard of. And one at the University of Florida, but none that looks like she might be my roommate, a fact I find depressing. Who
isn’t
on Facebook?
It’s a rare quiet moment in the house. When I say
rare
, I’m using it in the real sense of the word: rare like a meteor shower, rare like a white tiger, like a double yolk or a red diamond. Rare as in I use up about a third of this precious silence trying to remember when it last was. Silent. For another fifteen minutes I try to decide how not to waste it. I have the day off from both my jobs. Should I take a nap? Hook my iPod up to the living room stereo and blast it? Make a deluxe quesadilla, which, for a change, I wouldn’t have to share?
I opt for a combination stereo takeover and nap, putting on a mellow playlist at a soothing volume and stretching out on the floor—with a blanket under me so as to avoid Cheerio dust. Finally and blissfully, I’m alone. It isn’t long before I make the muscle-twitching, gape-mouthed descent into sleep. After what seems like about ninety seconds, I become aware of the sound of the van idling outside.
Already? No. No.
Sometimes in the moments surrounding REM sleep, you hear things that aren’t really there. I forbid my eyes to open. But there’s the sound of the van door sliding on its track. (Note that I did not say
mini
van.) My mother’s voice. The babbling of P.J.; the cry of Francis; Jack and Marcus fighting. For some reason I don’t hear Gertie out there. Soon enough that reason becomes apparent.
“Why are you on the floor?”
Gertie plops onto my stomach. Oof. “Because I like the floor,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“Why are your eyes closed?”
“Because it makes the room nice and dark.”
She touches each of my eyelids gently, and I feel her weight shift as she leans over my face, expelling her soft grape-juice- and-baby-carrot breath. She pets my hair and I hope to God she hasn’t been picking her nose. “Are you
dead
?” she asks in a dramatic whisper.
“Yes.”
Gertie is absolutely still for a count of three; then she bounces on my stomach and I’m forced to open my eyes and roll over to get her off me. “No you’re not! No you’re not!” She laughs like a maniac. “Mama says come help.”