Once, Jade came back to the dorm on a Saturday afternoon to find Mary Ann stretched out on her bed, on the phone with her mother. Shelly was there too, lying in the space at the end of the bed not taken up by Mary Ann, scrolling through her own phone, her feet pressed against the wall and her head hanging over the edge of the bed. “What? Oh, nothing. Jade just came in... yeah, I’ll tell her. Okay. Sure, I’ll tell her now.” She made a show of removing her phone from her ear. “My mom says hi,” she said. “Apparently she needs me to say itright now.” She rolled her eyes.
“Tell her I said hi back,” said Jade. She hoped she didn’t sound too eager. “Tell her thank you for the cookies.” Because the week before Mary Ann’s mother had dropped off a dozen cookies from a bakery near her office in Boston, and on the box she’d writtenMary Ann and Jade.Jade was embarrassed by how happy it made her to see her name written on this box—on any box! She’d never received so much as a card in her post office box.Mary Ann had rolled her eyes at the cookies and said, “These things have like a trillion calories,” before leaving the box on Jade’s desk. (Jade ate all of them, one by one, always when she was alone in the room.) “They were so good,” she added now, and she could tell by the shift in Mary Ann’s expression that she’d gone a bridge too far.
She made herself busy at her desk while Mary Ann finished her phone call, then grabbed her stuff to leave with Shelly. They couldn’thave known that the door hadn’t closed all the way when Mary Ann said, “She’s likeobsessedwith my mom.” She didn’t mean for Jade to hear her, but knowing that made it actually worse. Jade remained motionless in her desk chair for a good five minutes, the shame pooling around her feet like hot lava. She tried to forget it—in that moment, the next day, in the days and weeks that followed—but the memory lodged in the back of her mind, and she couldn’t pry it free. It popped up at the oddest times, beyond Jade’s control. In the dining hall, maybe, or in the middle of her first-year writing seminar.She’s likeobsessedwith my mom.
After dinner one evening, Jade was heading back to her room to gather her books for a study session when she saw a person near the entrance to her dorm who looked like he didn’t belong. He was older than the student population, for one thing, and he was dressed differently, in an old denim jacket, not warm enough for the weather. He looked, in fact, at lot like...
“No,” she said aloud, though she was walking alone. “No no no no...”
Her uncle. He was pacing back and forth in a way that suggested something more than impatience—it suggested that he was drinking, or using, or something.
“Hey, princess.”
“Don’t call me that,” she hissed. And: “What are youdoinghere?”
“What? An uncle can’t visit his favorite niece?” Jade looked up at the window that was her room—hers and Mary Ann’s, fourth floor, third from the left. She knew that anyone looking out from her room wouldn’t be able to see them because of the angle, but what about people in the dorm across the way? What about people coming in and out of the dorm? She’d eaten with a few people from her class, but had Mary Ann and Shelly and the rest of the crew been at the dining hall at the same time? What if they were on their way back?
“No,” she said. “You can’t visit me here. I don’t know how you found me, but you have to leave.”
He held his hands out, supplicating. “I need money, Jade.”
“I don’t have money,” she said. Her spending money was carefully calculated to last from now until the end of the year. She didn’t have extra.
“Just let me come up. We can talk about it.”
“No. You can’t come up. No. My roommate’s sleeping. You definitely can’t come up.” The thought of her uncle in hers and Mary Ann’s carefully organized room, the thought of him sitting on her comforter, looking in derision at Mary Ann’s quadrant of prints of Paris in the rain—no. “Visitors aren’t allowed.”
“Which is it, princess? Your roommate is sleeping, or visitors aren’t allowed?”
“Both.”
“Just a little bit of money. Just to get me through to my next paycheck.”
“I told you, I don’t have any money.”
He snorted and gestured—at the dorm, at the campus as a whole, at the first few brave stars in the newly darkened sky. At the students walking around her, each of their vests, one of their boots, worth more, probably, than the amount of money Jade’s uncle was seeking.
“Bullshit. Look at this place. You’re here, ain’t you?”
“I’m on a full scholarship.”
“Exactly.” He rubbed frantically at his chin and blinked rapidly. Using, she thought. Not drinking. “That’s what I mean. That’s why I know you got some to spare.”
“They don’t give mecash. The scholarship covers my fees.”
“No other money?”
She shook her head. “No other money.”
“Talia needs things.”
Talia was Jade’s cousin. “Talia doesn’t live with you anymore How do you know what she needs?”
“She called me.”
Now she could see that people walking by were beginning to do double takes. It wasso clearthat her uncle didn’t belong on the Boston College campus. She wanted to sink into the frozen ground. “She called you? From her foster home? I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Well, she did.”
