Just One Day

After we hang up, I shove the alarm clock into a box in my closet and take the cookies and bring them into the lounge where the rest of my roommates have started in on a six-pack. They’re all dressed up and ready to go out.

When school started, the rest of them were so excited. They really were Happy College Students. Jenn made organic brownies, and Kendra drew up a little sign on our door with all our names and a moniker, the Fab Four, atop it. Kali, for her part, gave us coupons to a tanning salon to ward off the inevitable seasonal affective disorder.

Now, a month in, the three of them are a solid unit. And I’m like a goiter. I want to tell Kendra that it’s okay if she takes down the little sign or replaces it with one that says something like Terrific Trio* and Allyson.

I shuffle into the lounge. “Here,” I say, handing over the cookies to Kali, even though I know she watches her carbs and even though black-and-whites are my favorites. “I’m really sorry about my mom.”

Kendra and Jenn cluck sympathetically, but Kali narrows her eyes. “I don’t want to be a bitch or anything, but it’s bad enough having to fend off my own parents, okaay?”

“She’s having Empty Nest or something.” That’s what Dad keeps telling me. “She won’t do it again,” I add with more confidence than I possess.

“My mom turned my bedroom into a craft room two days after I left,” Jenn says. “At least you’re missed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What kind of cookies are they?” Kendra asks.

“Black-and-whites.”

“Just like us,” Kendra jokes. She’s black, or African American; I’m never sure which is right, and she uses both.

“The racial harmony of cookies,” I say.

Jenn and Kendra laugh. “You should come out with us tonight,” Jenn says.

“We’re going to a party over at Henderson and then there’s this bar over on Central that apparently has a very liberal carding policy,” Kendra says, twisting her just-straightened black hair up into a bun, then thinking twice about it and pulling it down. “Lots of fine male specimen.”

“And female specimen, if that’s your thing,” Jenn adds.

“It’s not my thing. I mean, none of it is my thing.”

Kali gives me a bitchy smirk. “Think you enrolled in the wrong school. I believe there’s a convent in Boston.”

Something twists in my stomach. “They don’t take Jews.”

“Back off, you two,” Kendra says, ever the diplomat. She turns to me. “Why not come out for a few hours?”

“Chemistry. Physics.” The room goes silent. They’re all liberal arts or business majors, so invoking Science shuts them up.

“Well, I’d better get back to my room. I have a date with the Third Law of Thermodynamics.”

“Sounds hot,” Jenn says.

I smile to show I actually get the joke, then shuffle back to my room, where I diligently pick up Foundations of Chemistry, but by the time the Terrific Trio are heading out the door, my eyes have sandbags in them. I fall asleep under a mountain of unread science. And thus begins another weekend in the life of the Happy College Student.

Fifteen

OCTOBER

College

I put off thinking about Parents’ Weekend as long as I can and then the Thursday before they’re due to arrive, I look around my dorm and see it not as I see it—walls, a bed, a desk, a dresser—but as my parents will see it. This is not the dorm of a Happy College Student. There’s dirty laundry spilling out of every drawer, and my papers are everywhere. My mother despises clutter. I ditch my classes and spend the day cleaning. I haul all the dirty laundry down to the washing machines and sit with it as it turns and gyrates. I wipe down the dusty surfaces. In the closet, I hide away all my current schoolwork—the Mandarin worksheets, piling up like unread newspapers, the Scantron chemistry and physics exams with their ominously low scores scrawled in red; the lab reports with comments like “Need to be more thorough” and “Check your calculations!” and the dreaded “See me.” In their place, I set out a bunch of decoy notes and graphs from early in the term, before I started obviously bombing. I unwrap the duvet cover we bought at Bed, Bath & Beyond last summer and put it over the plain quilt I’ve been sleeping under. I grab some of the photos from the boxes and scatter them around the room. I even drop by the U bookstore and buy one of the stupid banners with the school name on it and tack it above my bed. Voila. School Spirit.

But somehow I forget the clocks. And this gives me away.

When Mom comes into the dorm, after cooing over our tiny dump of a lounge, she oohs over Kali’s pictures of Buster and then looks at my relatively bare walls and gasps. By her look of horror, you’d think I’d decorated with crime-scene photos. “Where’s your collection?”

I point to the boxes in the closet, unopened.

“Why are they there?”

“They’re too noisy,” I quickly lie. “I don’t want to bother Kali with them.” Never mind the fact that Kali blasts her radio at seven in the morning.

“You could put them out and not wind them,” she says. “Those clocks are you.”

Are they? I don’t remember when I started collecting them. Mom liked to go to flea markets on weekends and then one day, I was a clock collector. I got really into it for a while, but I don’t remember the moment I saw an old alarm clock and thought, I want to collect these.

“Your half looks terribly barren next to Kali’s,” Mom says.

“You should’ve seen my dorm,” Dad says, lost in his haze of nostalgia. “My roommate put tinfoil on the windows. It looked like a spaceship. He called it the ‘Future Dorm.’”

“I was going for Minimalist Dorm.”

“It has a certain penitentiary charm,” Dad says.

“It’s like a before/after on one of those home decor shows.” Mom points to Kali’s half of the room, over which every inch of wall space is covered either with posters, art prints, or photos. “You’re the before,” she says. As if I didn’t already get that.

We head off to one of the special workshops, something insanely dull on the changing face of technology in the classroom. Mom actually takes notes. Dad points out every little thing that he remembers and every little thing that is new. This is what he did when we toured the school last year; both he and Mom were so excited about the prospect of me going here. Creating a legacy. Somehow, back then, I was excited too.

After the workshop, Dad meets up with other legacy parents, and Mom has coffee with Kali’s mom, Lynn. They seem to get along famously. Either Kali hasn’t told her mom what a dud I am, or if she has, her mom has the good grace to shut up about it.

Before the President’s Luncheon, all four members of the Fab Four and their respective families meet back at the suite and the parents all introduce themselves and cluck over the tininess of our rooms and admire what we’ve done with our tiny lounge and take pictures of THE FAB FOUR WELCOMES THE FAB EIGHT sign that the rest of the group made. Then we all walk out onto the quad together and tour the campus, going the long way around to point out some of the older, statelier buildings, reddening ivy creeping up old bricks. And everyone looks nice together in flannel skirts and tall black boots and cashmere sweaters and shearling jackets as we swish through the autumnal leaves. We really do look like the Happy College Students in the catalogs.

The luncheon is fine and boring, rubber chicken and rubber speeches in a big, cold echoey hall. It’s only