And so Jess rocked, finally warm, while the kettle boiled, steaming up the windows and obscuring the lights outside. She could have been anywhere—in Paris, or Morocco. A colourful crochet blanket covered the bed, a deep red rug hid the industrial carpet, and Clara had plastered the cinderblock walls with antique postcards, tourist maps, and line drawings presumably done by her own hand. With the fluorescent overhead light off, Clara’s desk lamp illuminated the room, casting inviting shadows around its edges. And in the centre, taking up what little space remained, was an old blue travel trunk decorated with stickers from long-ago transatlantic journeys on the Cunard Line.
“That’s cool,” said Jess, indicating the trunk with her foot.
“I found it on the street,” Clara explained. “You can see the scratches on the bottom from where I dragged it home.”
The kettle started whistling, and after rummaging through her desk-drawer pantry for two mugs, Clara unplugged it. She fetched the box of ginger tea from the shelf on her headboard and removed two teabags. She poured the water with a swish, then sat down on her bed and let it steep.
“It’s a bit crowded in here,” Clara said, an apology. “I’m like a turtle, going around carrying my home on my back, but I like to have all my things around me.” She turned and rubbed the steamed-up window, clarifying the view. “Besides, these rooms are so ugly. I had to do something.”
“How come you decided to live on campus anyway?” Jess asked. Most older students lived in draughty attics, or basement apartments with ceilings so low you had to duck to pass through the doorways.
Clara moved Jess’s tea to a corner of the trunk where she could reach it. “I thought maybe I could do one normal thing in my life,” she said. Raising her own mug to her face, she inhaled the aroma. “This,” she said, “is better than crackers.” Then she folded her legs beneath her, her hair hanging down, her face shiny. She looked younger now. “And I wanted to meet people. I wanted to make friends.” Jess knew that part hadn’t panned out well, because Clara was always alone.
“So what happened?” said Jess. She breathed in the flavour of the tea. It was still too hot to drink, but Clara was right, it was better than crackers. “I mean, how come you came back to school?” She couldn’t imagine being launched into the world like that, then opting to compress an entire life down to class schedules, meal plans, this one tiny room.
Clara shrugged. “I was stupid. I couldn’t wait to get out my hometown, and I’d hated high school, so I was finished with that. Plus, Alex, my boyfriend, he was thirteen yearsolder, and he’d got to do all those things I’d missed out on, so when we split up, I decided to go backwards. To act my age. To go to school and learn and do ordinary things.” She gestured toward her surroundings in general. “It’s been hard, though. It’s the girl thing.”
“The girl thing?”
“I went to an all-girls high school,” said Clara. “An all-girls dorm is basically my worst nightmare. Not quite what I had in mind.”
Jess had actually chosen the all-girls residence, brainwashed by an adolescence spent reading British books about boarding schools, so she had nothing to say to this.
“By the time I got my application in,” said Clara, “it was the only dorm left. So I decided I’d give it a try.” She said, “And it’s been trying for sure.”
Jess didn’t think this was fair. Clara never went out of her way to engage with anyone on their floor, situating herself apart from them.
Clara continued, “I mean, one-on-one, girls are fine, because one-on-one, girls are just people, but put a whole bunch of girls together and things get nasty. Just like high school.”
Jess considered that she and Clara must have gone to very different high schools. “The thing that surprised me,” she offered, “was I thought everyone would be smart. Or at least smarter than me. A baseline IQ requirement, you know? But—” Her voice trailed off. She sipped her drink.
Clara prompted, “But, Muffy.”
Laughing, Jess nearly spit out her tea. “No,” she said. But yes. “Muffy’s okay—she is.” Muffy self-identified as “bubbly,” majored in psych because her parents insisted on a university degree, but she aspired to be a nail technician.She was good at nails, incredible patterns she coordinated with outfits and statutory holidays, and everybody loved her, which did make Jess suspicious of the general population. Maybe Jess had more in common with Clara than she thought. “And oh, laughter,” she said, clearing her throat, taking another sip. It had been a long time. “That felt weird.”
“So,” said Clara. “When’s it happening? You’ve got an appointment?”
“I got a referral,” said Jess, “and they booked it for Tuesday.” It had been so easy, staff at the university clinic treating the whole thing as ordinary, but Jess still couldn’t bring herself to say the word.Abortion. She just wanted everything to be over.
“And in the meantime?”
“I don’t know,” said Jess. “I just have to wait. And just be…pregnant, I guess.” Another word that seemed strange, and ill-fitting. She said, “You know, I really appreciate this.” She nodded, indicating the tea, the room, its warmth and comfort. Especially from someone who didn’t like girls. She drained the rest of her tea and set the mug down on the desk.
Clara said, “But you don’t have to go.”
“No?” And for a few seconds, everything hung in awkward balance. Jess was wary of venturing too far too soon, of those missteps that could be the peril of any tentative friendship. Could such warm affection really be mutual? Could anything be as simple as that?
“I could stay? Really?” Jess needed to be sure that Clara meant it. Muffy hosted after-parties in their room, and she wouldn’t be able to stand it tonight. “For a little while at least?”
But Clara was already making space, pushing her trunk up against the wall, sweeping the cushions heaped on her beddown onto the floor. “Not ideal,” she said, “but it will do for the night.” When Jess got up from the chair, she draped the quilt over the makeshift bed, and seemed pleased with the effect.
They dashed down the hall to Jess’s room to retrieve pyjamas, a change of clothes, her basket of toiletries. A brief stop at the bathroom for tooth-brushing, and at the kitchen for more crackers, then back to Clara’s room, with its soft shadows and textiles, like a hideout, a womb. They closed the door on the rest of the world, and neither of them missed it at all.
—
Clara never ate her eggs. They sat in their pot poached and puckered, until the skin got wrinkled and they started to smell even worse. Somebody threw them out on Tuesday, when they were no longer identifiable, but left the pot and the spatula soaking in the sink. It wasn’t until Friday that the pot was washed, by one of the cleaners probably, and by then Jess wasn’t pregnant anymore. She was still wrapped in Clara’s quilt, though, curled up on the corner of her bed eating a pot-noodle. Clara had protested that the soup mix in its little foil envelope was probably carcinogenic, but she put the kettle on. They’d had that kettle going all week.
“Did you know,” said Clara, who was highlighting paragraphs in her history textbook—when she was reading nonfiction, Clara started most of her sentences with “Did you know…”—“that Hitler was a made-up name?”
