Maeve is now distracted by the materials on the table, and so she doesn’t answer, instead reaching for a small wooden bowl filledwith lavender sprigs. She grabs a fistful and dumps the flowers unceremoniously over the center of the grid, so that half the molds are covered completely in purple, and the other ones are untouched.
“You have to spread them evenly,” the older girl says. “Let me show you.” She takes her own fistful of sprigs and scatters them perfectly across the remaining untouched soap molds.
I point at the lavender sprigs. “Who taught you to add the herbs?”
The older girl turns to face me. “You did,” she says calmly. “It was you.”
4
“Drink this,”my new college roommate commanded, and shoved a plastic cup into my hands. Her name was Reena Magliotti. Standing before me in her branded jeans, with her branded headband and branded sneakers and branded T-shirt, she looked like a walking, talking directory for the nearest luxury mall. It was the first night of college. We were hosting a pregame, the definition of which had been provided to me approximately fifteen minutes earlier.
I held the cup up, raising my voice to be heard over the rap music playing from the speakers on Reena’s desk. “Is there alcohol in this?”
“Don’t worry,” Reena said dismissively while she poured another cupful. “You won’t taste a thing.”
I sniffed the cup—strawberryjam—and then blushed at the sound of laughter. A few girls were sitting on Reena’s bed. They looked identical to the poster collage of models framed on the wall above: modern, manicured, and just a little bit surly. “It’s basically juice,” one of them offered. The other girl snickered again. Neither had opted to sit on my bed. They hadn’t even stepped over into my half of the room, which held the small handful of things I had brought from home: a hand-stitched quilt, a framed picture of my family, a desktop computer paid for by my scholarship. No posters on my side of the room.
I nodded politely, though it was starting to bother me, the waythese women refused to answer the questions I did ask and pretended to hear questions I didn’t ask. Still, my mother’s voice bellowed through the hallways of my brain:Be nice!
Was it more important to the Lord that I abstain from alcohol, or get along with strangers? I took a sip. It was surprisingly sweet, less like juice and more like syrup, not unlike the fake wine they offered out at church service each Sunday.
I closed my eyes, then took a larger gulp from the cup, and then another, ignoring the girls as they laughed again, ignoring Reena’s whoop of support—“Hell yeah, roomie!”—as the juice dribbled down my chin and dripped onto the lace collar of my dress, leaving a spattering of blood drip stains that would never come out.
The music was loud. Louder than loud. How were so many young women capable of fitting into such a small room? Worse: they all kept talking over and around and past me. From what I could gather, these girls all knew each other already somehow.
Friends of friends.
Summer camp.
Boarding school.
Your dad wentto—?
No way, my mompledged—!
Across the room, Reena stood in a semicircle of women who all looked like misshapen clay versions of her and were equally covered in the cursive scrawl of corporations. Standing together like that, they looked like a huddle of branded cows, freshly escaped from the hot iron poke. They were laughing, or screaming. The music—it was really so loud. And the floor—I couldn’t see it, could see only dozens of sneakered feet, moving and shifting like snakes, the floor was filled with snakes, these people were snakes—
No. Silly. Sneakers. Not snakes.
Was this what it felt like to be drunk?
I wasn’t drunk.No, not drunk.Well—maybe a little drunk. The room held the atmosphere of a jungle. Every few moments a gustof rank, warm air drifted past. It felt less like we were in a college dorm room, and more like we were standing inside some horrible monster’s mouth.
Monsters. Mouths.
The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies. Their poison is like the poison of aserpent—
There it was: the lurch of panic. A tear rolled down my cheek. I was standing in (around? alongside?) a group of girls who were all talking to one another simultaneously, a strange simulacrum of conversation that was clearly preventing any true exchange of information. One of them caught my eye, then leaned forward and said, “I like your hair!” She gestured at my braid approvingly. “It’s solong.”
At once, the torrential monologues ceased. All the girls were looking at me, now. The pressure of their collective attention felt like a gravitational force. I resisted the urge to drop to my knees. “It’s so healthy,” another girl chimed in. They were all grinning at me now. Unnerving: everyone I’d met so far at college had teeth so straight and white, they barely looked like teeth at all.
“Have you ever cut it?” a third said, mimicking scissors. “Have you ever cut your hair?”
Oh. That’s what was happening here: these girls thought I was dumb. But how? I’d barely spoken enough to identify myself in a lineup, let alone to incriminate my intellect. I cast my gaze across our huddle, caught one girl frowning contemplatively at the juice-stained blouse of my prairie dress. She startled at my attention and looked quickly away.
So that was it. My hair, my dress—it signified stupidity to them. Too late, I wiped my tearstained cheek with the back of one palm and said shortly, “No, I’ve never cut it.”
“Woooow,” they said as one. A desperate, childlike loneliness fell over me. My free hand clenched into a fist. What I would’ve given to feel my mother’s skirt fabric in my grip, for me to look up and see her kind, authoritative expression peering down at me.Ready to go home, Nattie?
