Roomies (30 page)

I really do hope we end up meeting and becoming (staying?) friends but I’ve also been thinking so much lately about how in ten days I think I’ll feel like this completely different person than I am now. In a lot of ways, I’ve been counting on that. A transformation. So I guess the person who shows up at college might not be the person who has been sending these e-mails.

I’m not making sense, I know. What I really mean is thanks.

(Have I said thanks yet? Because really I want to say thanks.)

And sorry. I hope you turn down the single. I already told them it was a big misunderstanding and to ignore my request so if you say that, too, maybe we’ll still be roomies after all.

Many thanks,

EB

Yes: White flag.

No: F-bombs.

Maybe so: A copy of the official Berkeley Roommate Agreement. If we end up being roomies, we can either sign it or openly mock it.

When I hit Send I feel like a weight has been lifted. It is chilly out—I really want a sweater or a blanket—but I mostly don’t want this feeling to end. I find the Big Dipper again, connect the stars in my mind’s eye, and call Mark to tell him about Lauren and my dad and Zumba, and how maybe there’s hope for me yet.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

SAN FRANCISCO

I’m in bed with my laptop on Sunday morning, and it’s hard to tell from EB’s e-mail whether or not she’s still at least a little bit mad at me. In a way it sounds like good-bye. On the other hand, she wants us to stay roommates. Though I don’t totally get how she could ever see what happened as some kind of betrayal, now that I’ve heard her voice e-mail feels different. Not quite so… final, I guess. She’s a regular person, like me, leaving home for the first time, scared, excited, imperfect and trying to figure it all out.

Gertie runs into the room. “Why are you still in bed?”

“Because it feels good.” My first instinct is to tell her to go back to the TV or whatever she was doing, but she bounces closer to my bed and her curls bounce with her, and that’s impossible to resist. “Come see.” I flip back the covers and scoot over to make room.

She climbs in and snuggles against me. Where did she get curly hair, anyway? Each of my brothers and sisters looks enough like my parents that no one would ever doubt we’re all blood related. But they also each have some unique, mysterious physical characteristic that seems to come from nowhere.

Sometimes I think of them all together as a unit, a herd of creatures that need containment.

Other times, like now, I see the individual miracles that they are.

“What are you doing?” Gertie asks, her big eyes on my computer screen.

“Reading a letter. It’s from my friend EB.”

“Eebee?”

“EB. Here.” I show her Ebb’s sign-off. “Do you want to see a picture of her?”

“Yeah.” Gertie’s voice is whispery.

I pull up the picture Ebb sent, of her in a garden or park or something, standing under a tree with speckles of sun and shade on her face. Gertie leans toward the computer and touches Ebb’s head, leaving a smudge.

“You know how me and you and P.J. share a room?”

Her curls nod.

“When I go to college I’m going to share a room with EB.”

After she thinks about that for a few seconds, she says, “Me too?”

There’s a rush of fluids to my nose and eyes. I can’t talk. Fortunately, Gertie loses interest fast when Jack dashes in to announce, “Papa made pancakes.”

I close the laptop and take a big breath. “We better get some before Marcus eats them all.”

Throughout breakfast my mom keeps asking—Don’t I want to do something with Keyon? Wouldn’t I like to go shopping with Zoe for a few school things? How about Dad and I go out to lunch? When she ambushes me outside the bathroom, a few laundry items clutched in her hands, and suggests I go get a pedicure, as if I’d ever done that before or expressed any interest in it, I’ve finally had enough.

“Mom. I want to stay home.”

I can see from her face that she’s about to argue with me, maybe urge me to go hang gliding or explore my deeper self in a yoga class. I stop her by repeating, “I want to stay home. I don’t feel trapped. I don’t feel obligated. I want to be here with you and Dad and the kids, and help you clean up the pancake mess. I want to change Francis’s diaper and play Uno for hours with Jack even though he cheats.” My mom’s perky mask is crumbling. My emotions start to let go, too. “I… this… please…”

She drops the laundry and we more or less weep in each other’s arms for who knows how long. When we finally dry up and rejoin the family, we have exactly the kind of day I want to have: loud, messy, chaotic, hilarious, and maddening.

At one point, I think,
Well, this day is the last of its kind. Next weekend I’ll be preoccupied with making sure I’m ready, and…
But as I watch P.J. lug Francis around the living room like a sack of potatoes, and Jack and Gertie actually being quiet during their DVD, I think maybe it’s a mistake to think of anything as the “last.”

School and my house are only an hour apart. Yes, I’ll be busy, but I’ll be here when I can and when I want. There are going to be hundreds of new kinds of days, and probably plenty of days that look an awful lot like this. I mean, I know it will be different. Maybe Ebb will come home with me on the weekends sometimes. Maybe other weekends I’ll be at Chico to see Keyon. Maybe I’ll get to go see Zoe in Seattle on a break. But home is always going to be home.

“Be careful, Peej,” I say as Francis dangles from her arms like a bewildered cat. P.J. brings him over to where I’m sitting on the floor and drops him unceremoniously into my lap. He keels to the left but I catch him before he falls over.

I lie back on the floor and balance my baby brother on my bended legs. He smiles. I hold his arms out.

We fly.

EB,

Thanks for calling me back and for your e-mail.

And for telling Housing to disregard your request. As soon as you said on the phone you didn’t want me to take the single, I knew I wouldn’t. (Even though if I went back in time to tell the Lauren who requested a single on my original application that we’d make this decision, she’d probably throw a fit.)

What you said was basically what I was waiting to hear… I mean, I didn’t want to force myself on you!!

And, I’m sorry. I really am. I’d probably do the same thing again (only different) but I’m still sorry.

Prediction: We’re not going to hate each other.

Like you (sort of) said, we’ve shared a lot this summer and I can’t see the point in pretending like it never happened, and having to start all over with someone else. I think I’ll stay out of the stuff with your dad for now and change the subject to:

PACKING.

I’ve been thinking about it tonight and mentally going through everything in my room and I can’t imagine hauling all this crap across the country, let alone across the Bay. I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed so I think my strategy will be to do it in a few trips. Pack as if I’m going away for a week and then gradually figure out what I really need. It’s different for me because, you know, all my stuff will be right here. It must be hard for you, leaving your life and your things so much farther behind.

Random: Pretty soon I’ll start looking for work in Berkeley… on campus hopefully. Ideally doing something actually related to the sciences, and I don’t count finding the perfect ratio of tuna to mayo, like at my sandwich job.

Tomorrow night, Zoe and I are going out and I will do whatever she says, even if it’s karaoke, to make her happy. Later in the week me and Keyon will do something special. I don’t know what. (Not THAT. Not ready.) I try not to think about all these good-byes too much.

The saddest thing that’s happened is explaining to the kids that I’m leaving. I mean, we’ve been telling them for months, but little kids don’t get things until they happen, so it’s like, “Lauren isn’t going to live in your room anymore. Lauren is going to have her own room in a different house. She won’t be here when you wake up, not every day like she was. Do you understand?” They nod their heads and then run off or ask if they can have crackers, so obviously it’s not quite sinking in. Except today I told Gertie about you and she asked if she could be our roommate, too.

What makes me want to cry (or actually cry) is that when they finally realize that I’m not HERE, I won’t BE HERE to comfort them.

I’m hoping to get to the dorms pretty early, but with traffic and potential kid problems it’s hard to be sure. My dad is taking the day off work, and they’re pulling Jack out of school so you’ll meet all of them except the baby, Francis, who’ll go to my grandma’s. My parents think if the kids actually see me moving in they’ll understand better what’s happening. I hope you’re ready for
the mob.

Oh—sorry that I didn’t call you back but here’s what I think:

No more technology between us until we actually meet.

I’m imagining the moment we’re all moved in and our families are gone and it’s really US in our ROOM, starting college. You know?

Until then,

Lo

SUNDAY, AUGUST 25

NEW JERSEY

When Justine calls early and asks me to meet her and Morgan for a girls’ dinner that night I decline, figuring my mom will want it to be just the two of us for Sunday dinner. But when I ask her it turns out she has to “stage” a house she’s trying to sell, and the job may run into the evening. It’s a big listing for my mom, a three-million-dollar house on the beach, and she needs to fill it with hipster antiques and impractical white chaises to entice buyers. I call Justine right back and tell her dinner works after all.

That leaves me nothing much to do all day but pack for real. So after my mother heads out with some of our fancier soaps and the orchid I brought home from work at the beginning of the summer—“For the master bath,” she says—I open my better suitcase and get started. When I can barely find any clothes I want to bring with me into my new life, I flop down onto the bed and call Mark.

“I was just thinking about you,” he says.

“Want to come over?” The simple act of talking to him makes me
feel strangely alive, like I can feel my blood pulsing from the inside out.

“On my way,” he says. “But I can only stay for a little bit. My mother wants to take me shopping for some dorm room stuff.”

When I open the front door for him a little while later, he steps right in and slides his arms around me and kisses me and kisses me; then he stops and asks, “Is your mom home?”

I shake my head and he keeps kissing, taking a quick break for the stairs, until we’re up in my room and my suitcase has been pushed off the bed. I feel daring at first, and then silly and a little bit guilty because my mom wouldn’t approve. I pull away to catch my breath and he starts tracing circles with the hand he’s slipped under my tank top.

“I need to pack,” I say. I wonder if Lauren has started, too. I am so beyond relieved that we are back to being roommates—Helen Blake has confirmed it—and though it has been hard to not e-mail Lauren this week, I think the no-technology idea is a good one. And anyway, I’m only here a few more days so it makes sense to really be
here
.

“Let’s do it.” Mark rolls off me and gets up. He’s entirely not bothered that we’re not doing more.

It seems easier all of a sudden, the figuring out of what to bring. Mark sits on the bed, crossing things off my list as I pack them and also giving a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to various pairs of jeans and tops and jackets. He only makes fun of the exhaustiveness of my list a little, like when he says, “You really felt the need to write down “clothes”?

“I’m going to miss you,” I say. Which is a way to test the waters, I guess. I’ve never said “I love you” to a guy before. And if you don’t count the word engraved on my necklace, he’s never actually said it
to me. He’s flipping through my Berkeley stuff—course catalog, orientation materials, a printout of the original e-mail I got with Lauren’s name on it. I take the printout from him and slip it into a folder that I’ll pack. For some reason, I don’t want to lose that printout. At this point, it almost feels like I should frame it.

I say, “Hey,” to get his attention; then I sit next to him. “I love you.”

He looks me right in the eyes and it’s like I can see deep into him and he says, “I know. I love you, too.” Then he stands up. “Which is why it pains me to tell you I’ve got to go. But I’ll see you tonight, maybe?”

I shake my head. “Dinner with the girls.”

He groans.

“I have to.”

“Call me after?” He leans his hips into mine and kisses me.

“Sure.” It feels like good practice for saying good-bye for real.