“Me too.”
When she didn’t say anything else, I asked, “Do you think I’m making a huge mistake?”
In her thoughtful way, she asked, “Does it matter what I think?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not for me to judge, Iz.”
“But you’re my friend. I respect your opinion. I don’t want you to think badly of me.”
“You care too much about what other people think.” She said it with sureness but also tenderness.
If anyone else had said it—my mother, Taylor, even Jere—I would have bristled. But not with Anika. With her, I couldn’t really mind. In a way it was flattering to have her see me so clearly and still like me. Friendship in college was different that way. You spend all this time with people, sometimes every day, every meal. There was no hiding who you were in front of your friends. You were just naked. Especially in front of someone like Anika, who was so frank and open and incisive and saidwhatever she thought. She didn’t miss a thing.
Anika said, “At least you’ll never have to wear shower shoes again.”
“Or have to pull other people’s hair out of the drain,” I added. “Jeremiah’s hair is too short to get caught.”
“You’ll never have to hide your food.” Anika’s roommate, Joy, was always stealing her food, and Anika had taken to hiding granola bars in her underwear drawer.
“I might actually have to do that. Jere eats a lot,” I said, twisting my ring around my finger.
I stayed a while longer, helping her take down the rest of her posters, collecting the dust bunnies under her bed with an old sock I used as a mitten. We talked about the magazine internship Anika had lined up for the summer, and me maybe going to visit her in New York for a weekend.
After, I walked down the hall back to my room. For the first time all year, it was really quiet—no hair dryers going, no one sitting in the hallway on the phone, no one microwaving popcorn in the commons area. A lot of people had already gone home for the summer. Tomorrow I would be gone too.
College life as I knew it was about to change.
chaptersixteen
I didn’t plan to start going by Isabel. It just happened. All my life, everyone had called me Belly and I didn’t really have a say in it. For the first time in a long time, I did have a say, but it didn’t occur to me until we—Jeremiah, my mom, my dad, and me—were standing in front of my dorm room door on freshman move-in day. My dad and Jeremiah were lugging the TV, my mom had a suitcase, and I was carrying a laundry basket with all my toiletries and picture frames. Sweat was pouring down my dad’s back, and his maroon button-down shirt had three wet spots. Jeremiah was sweating too, since he’d been trying to impress my dad all morning by insisting on bringing up the heaviest stuff. It made my dad feel awkward, I could tell.
“Hurry, Belly,” my dad said, breathing hard.
“She’s Isabel now,” my mother said.
I remember the way I fumbled with my key and how I looked up at the door and saw it.ISABEL, it said in glue-on rhinestones. My roommate’s and my door tags were made out of empty CD cases. My roommate’s, Jillian Capel’s, was a Mariah Carey CD, and mine was Prince.
Jillian’s stuff was already unpacked, on the left side of the room, closer to the door. She had a paisley bedspread, navy and rusty orange. It looked brand new. She’d already hung up her posters—aTrainspottingmovie poster and some band I’d never heard of called Running Water.
My dad sat down at the empty desk—my desk. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped off his forehead. He looked really tired. “It’s a good room,” he said. “Good light.”
Jeremiah was just hovering around, and he said, “I’ll go down to the car to get that big box.”
My dad started to get up. “I’ll help,” he said.
“I’ve got it,” Jeremiah said, bounding out the door.
Sitting back down, my dad looked relieved. “I’ll just take a break, then,” he said.
Meanwhile, my mother was surveying the room, opening the closet, looking in drawers.
I sank down on the bed. So this was where I was going to live for the next year. Next door, someone was playing jazz. Down the hall, I could hear a girl arguing with her mother about where to put her laundry bin. It seemed like the elevator never stopped dinging open and closed. Ididn’t mind. I liked the noise. It was comforting knowing there were people all around me.
“Want me to unpack your clothes?” my mother asked.
“No, that’s all right,” I said. I wanted to do that myself. Then it would really feel like my room.
