Delaney Meyers-Petrov wasn’t made of glass, but sometimes she felt as though she might be. The early-September morning was bright and warm, the wide green square of Howe’s tree-lined quad banded in thin sapling shadows. Overhead, the bluebird sky was laced in pale, pretty clouds, and it wasn’t so much that she felt close to breaking, but rather that her parents were watching her as if she would.
Her parents, who she’d asked repeatedly to stay home. Her parents, who were terrible at listening, for two people whose ears worked perfectly well. Her parents, who had vehemently ignored her requests and had shown up on her first day of class—woefully out of place among the climber ivy and the baked-red brick and the buildings hewn from old money—with a sign on which they’d written her name.
WE LOVE YOU, LANEY!
The inscription was done in fat black letters. The poster paper was bubble-gum pink. The entire experience was, as far as experiences went, extraordinarily humiliating. More than one student on the quad was pointing. Perched under the slender branches of a fledgling elm, her mother didn’t appear to notice the attention she attracted. At her side, Delaney’s father looked positively out of place, his arms inked in grayscale sleeves, his hair slicked back, his beard threaded silver. His expression was a mug shot capture, and though the other students on the walkway gave him and his scowl as wide a berth as physically possible, Delaney could tell that the tight line of her father’s mouth was only there because he was doing his very best not to cry.
Shouldering her briefcase bag and swallowing her pride, she wriggled her fingers in as inconspicuous a goodbye as she could manage. And then off she went, careful to keep to the sunniest of spaces, stepping over shadows the same way small children skipped over clefts in the sidewalk—Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.Every step she took—the children’s rhyme looping between her ears, her parents cheering for her like spectators at Fenway, the shadows cool and leering—she felt less and less like an incoming college student and more like a child toddling to her first day of preschool, lunch box in hand.
It was, she supposed, sidestepping an elongated branch of dark, hard to fault her parents. Brittle of bone and prone to catching cold, she’d cut her teeth on the edge of death well before she could read. She’d slipped away in a hospital bed, lights winking and machinery humming, and resurfaced from the cataleptic dark to find her ears no longer worked. She was left with silence whispering in her head and shadows whispering at her feet and the very distinct feeling that she’d been somehow fractured on the inside.
Every silent day since then, she’d been handled with care.
A glass girl, in a glass menagerie, all the world a whispered hush.
If she was honest with herself, Delaney Meyers-Petrov had never really expected to go to college. Her parents made modest incomes—the kind that kept the lights on, not the kind that paid tuition. Free spirits, they spent their evenings booking spoken-word gigs at local indie venues, their days driving Delaney out to Walden Pond to skip stones across the water. They didn’t put much stock in things like capitalism and folded laundry and formal academia.
Little breakable Delaney hadn’t just fallen far from the tree. Her apple had been picked up by a grazing deer, carried over meadow and hummock, and discarded miles away. While her parents eschewed the notion of higher education—“It’s just an expensive piece of paper, Laney; it doesn’t define you”—she wanted nothing more. She wanted the regimen, the freedom, the promise of opportunity.
She wanted the chance to prove she was made of tougher stuff than glass.
Shewantedto be defined. Not by the silence between her ears or her fear of the dark, but by the sum of her achievements. Not by what she couldn’t do, but by what she could.
That was why, the minute she was of age, she’d gone online and registered for the placement scholarship. The applicant exam was an intensive labor, spanning the course of a week. It assessed mental and physical health, personal aptitudes, and, the forms ominously noted,etcetera. Her results, once factored, would determine her placement in a field that most closely matched her individual skill set.
The needs-based fellowship came with a single caveat: They’d pay her tuition in full, so long as she agreed to go wherever she was placed.
Her parents had been visibly hesitant, but their abhorrence of discipline meant they wouldn’t ever force her hand. “Lane,”they’d said, “if it’s a degree you want, there are plenty of online programs with manageable tuitions. Not only that, but they’ll be far more accommodating to your needs. There’s no bar here. You don’t have anything to prove.”
But Delaney did.
Not to other people, but to herself. She’d been handled with white gloves all her life, kept high on a shelf, and it wouldn’t do to sit up there forever, collecting dust. Glass, she’d learned, was terribly easy to crack, but the pressure it could weather was immense. She wanted to parse out her limits, even if doing so earned her a few nicks. She wanted the chance to melt herself down and shape herself into something new.
Someone capable of conquering the world all on her own.
Someone who wasn’t eighteen years old and still afraid of the dark.
The first day of the exam, she and three hundred other hopefuls spent the morning locked in the echoing chamber of a public high school gymnasium. She’d felt, as she often did in wide, empty spaces, the soft tiptoe of unease down her spine, the unsettled ruffle of shadows along her periphery.
It was a bad habit—her tendency to personify the dark. To imagine it restless, the way she had when she’d been little and lonely and looking for a friend. To fear the way it drew her eye, the way it pulled at her like a tide. As the proctor rattled off rules she couldn’t hear, she’d busied herself with setting her pencils into a neatly sharpened line and done her best not to stare into the gymnasium’s murky corners.
The second day of testing, the aspirants had been called one by one into a little wan room by a little wan man, made to sit in a polypropylene chair with the legs gone loose. There, the darkness had pressed cool and close. It fell across her lap in shallow pools of blue. It coiled against her like a happy cat.
Hello, she imagined it said.Hello, hello.
Across from her, the interviewer watched her much too closely, firing off a series of seemingly unrelated questions. Delaney fidgeted on the edge of her seat and did her best to read his lips beneath the wiry fringe of his mustache. She kicked herself for imagining the way the shadows purred.
On the third day, Delaney was swapping out the dull lead of one pencil for the pin-sharp nib of another when the proctor summoned her by name. “Delaney Meyers-Petrov?” Several curious heads picked up. “I’d like to see you in the hall.”Ears burning, she followed the thin slip of a woman out of the gym and into the menthol-green colonnade of lockers. The slam of the fire doors rattled her teeth.
“Pack your bag, Ms. Meyers-Petrov,”the proctor said, without preamble.“You’re done here.”
The elimination hit like a sucker punch. Delaney wanted to push back. She wanted to resist. But she hadn’t been built to cross lines, and so she thanked the proctor and slunk back inside to pack up her things. That afternoon, she’d lain in bed and thought of all the things she might have done wrong. When dusk settled, she’d felt the dark of her roomtskreproachfully at her, and a bubble of shame beaded deep inside her chest.
Maybe she’d answered a question wrong.
Maybe they didn’t want an applicant who couldn’t hear.
Maybe they thought she was a little bit odd, this girl who side-eyed the dark.
