Jade’s roommate was a randomly assigned girl from Weston, Massachusetts, named Mary Ann. Mary Ann’s parents were an ageless, lovely-smelling couple named Bob and Kathleen. They worked with the efficiency of the military to set up Mary Ann’s side of the room. Bob used a level from a tool kit he brought to affix four small, square, uniformly framed black-and-white photos of Paris to the wall. Then, while he attached a gray padded headboard to the wall (Headboard? thought Jade. She had no headboard at home, never mind an extra one to bring to college!), Kathleen made Mary Ann’sbed with crisp white sheets whose edges were piped in gray, and sent a matching gray comforter billowing over it. When the comforter had settled (with an audible sigh of satisfaction, it seemed to Jade), Kathleen folded a darker gray quilt in thirds and placed it at the foot of the bed. Next came the storage cubes that fit under the bed, the suede hangers for the standing wardrobe, the office supplies to unpack into the desk. Jade tried to make herself appear busy on her side of the room, though truth be told she had already unpacked everything she’d brought and had nothing left to do.
“Lawrence, huh?” said Bob, after grilling Jade politely. “How about that, huh? Jade’s from Lawrence!” Jade watched Kathleen rummage through her mental file box, emerging eventually with the pronouncement that she thought she’d once “eaten a First Communion cake from a bakery in Lawrence” and that it had been delicious. Only she didn’t saydelicious,she saidscrumptious,with a toss of her honey-colored bob, and Jade thought she saw Mary Ann gently cringe.
“Great area,” Bob said affably. “Lawrence.” Jade said, “Sure,” although it really wasn’t, in places it was terrible, and Bob added, “Shame they can’t do more with those old mill buildings.” Jade agreed that yes, it was a shame, not realizing then that this genial, agreeable, ultimatelyfalsecostume she had slipped on for Bob and Kathleen was one that she’d wear for the next four years, and for a long time after that.
Kathleen and Mary Ann had moved on to the dresser, carefully arranging underwear and socks in small white boxes that somehow fit the drawers exactly. How had they known to acquire these?
“I don’t know what I would have done if you’d chosen Chapel Hill,” said Kathleen. “If we had to say goodbye to you and then get on a plane...” Her voice trailed off. Bob squeezed Kathleen’s shoulder, as though to shield her from even the thought of a multistate distance between her and her daughter.
The goodbye between daughter and parents, though Mary Ann’s house in Weston was only nineteen minutes away, less as the crow flies, was tearful and punctuated by long silent hugs that seemed to have no end in sight. Jade tried to bury herself behind the open door of her own wardrobe, but this was a fruitless endeavor because the door didn’t reach all the way to the floor and certainly her feet were visible. After the hugs came admonitions to call or text if Mary Ann had forgotten anything,anything at all, and while Jade was marveling over what it must be like to be loved like this, so thoroughly and unconditionally, so, well, sopublicly, Bob and Kathleen slipped out the door.
At this point Mary Ann, wiping unashamedly at her tear-dampened eyes, turned to Jade and said, “Where’s all yourstuff? Is someone else bringing it?”
They got along well enough, Jade and Mary Ann. It didn’t take long for Mary Ann to unleash her inner party girl, and it took about the same amount of time for Jade to unleash her inner ghost, floating through the dorm, mostly invisible. Soon Mary Ann’s attachment to her mother fell somewhat by the wayside, though the same could probably not be said in reverse. After a time, if Mary Ann’s phone happened to be face up on her bed, Jade could see a call from Kathleen go ignored, and then two more calls after that, and then a text. The text usually said something likeJUST CALLING TO CHECK IN!followed by several cheery emojis. (Emojis were new then, and Kathleen made copious use of them.) Jade couldn’t imagine anyone in her life trying to get in touch with her with such vigor and regularity. She couldn’t imagine anyone “just checking in.”
Jade and Mary Ann were respectful of one another’s space. Both tended to do laundry in the hangover quiet of a Sunday afternoon, and sometimes they’d fold together in companionable silence, playingGilmore Girlsin the background on Mary Ann’s laptop. Both girlscould sleep through mostly anything, Jade because she’d been reared in chaos, the ignoring of which was necessary for survival, and Mary Ann because she had both a state-of-the-art noise machine that played soothing waterfall sounds and an expensive pair of noise-canceling headphones that she used when her family traveled to Europe because “overnight flights were brutal.”
Not that there was much noise to block from Jade’s side of the room. From the first day of matriculation, when the first-year class gathered at the First Night Festival on Stokes Lawns, to graduation in Alumni Stadium, Jade mostly put her head down and she worked. And she worked. And she worked.
It was her shameful, dark secret, that she didn’t come from a place of love. Maybe she wasn’t the only one on the campus who had that secret—but she felt like she was.
At Boston College, Jade studied. Her classmates also studied, but they did other things too. They went to shop on Newbury Street or eat in the North End; they went to a Red Sox game, a Bruins game, a nightclub called Venu. Winter break or spring break rolled around, and off they went, sometimes on trips with their parents (Aspen, St. Barts) or with each other (Cancún, Punta Cana, Miami). They returned tastefully tanned, complaining of lack of sleep and airport delays and the papers they had yet to write for the next day’s class.
Lawrence was forty-two miles from campus; fifty-two minutes in average traffic. But it may as well have been another country, because here people spoke an entirely different language. Ski houses. Prep school. Parents who were “helicoptering.”
And yet the same students called upon these very same helicoptering parents when the slightest bump appeared in the road: a professor who had graded them unfairly, a credit card that wouldn’t work, a simple appointment that needed scheduling.
A partial list of things Mary Ann called her parents about that first year:
A broken clasp on her favorite gold bracelet (her mother swung by after work one Wednesday evening to pick up the bracelet; she delivered it, clasp repaired, the following Monday).
Help composing an email to her writing seminar professor to challenge a poor grade on the first paper of the semester.
Help replacing her iPhone 4, which she had dropped on the way back to the dorms after a night out.
An appointment at a day spa on Newbury Street when her “skin was so dried out she couldn’t stand it.” (There she was the following afternoon, arranging a ride downtown from a sophomore with a car, returning with a damp sheen to her skin, needing a nap because “treatments were exhausting when they were intense.”)
Advice on what courses to choose for the second semester.
More shampoo, which came from a specific hair salon near her home, and which appeared, as if by magic, outside the dorm room thirty-six hours after the request went out.
It went on from there. And on, and on, and on.
One day that freshman fall semester, Jade returned from the library to find Mary Ann lying on her own bed and, on Jade’s bed, a girl from down the hall. Jade didn’t know this girl’s name but she saw her sometimes in the bathroom, brushing her long, wavy hair, or standing as close as she could get to the bathroom mirror, considering herself with a stern, unsparing look. Once she had said out loud, “God, I wish my nose wasn’t so pointy.”
Jade looked around to see who this girl might be addressing; it turned out it was nobody, or it was Jade.
“Your nose isn’t pointy,” Jade said after a time, because it seemedlike this was what she was supposed to do. “Ohmygod, really?” Jade nodded. “Ohmygod, you’re the best.Thankyou.”
“This is Shelly,” Mary Ann told Jade, in the dorm room, and Jade said, “Hi,” and Shelly said, “I’mtotallylying on your bed,” and smiled but made no move to rectify the situation.
“That’s okay,” said Jade. “I was just picking something up.” (Not true.)
“No, stay!” said Shelly. She sat up, swung her legs to the floor, and patted the spot next to her, to indicate that Jade should feel welcome to sit down on her own bed.
Shelly’s phone rang at that point and she glanced at it and said, “Oh boy. Mama Salazar’s on the prowl.”
“Answer it!” said Mary Ann, laughing. “Put her on speaker!”
