After all the movies I’ve seen about moving into college, heading off on your own, getting into your first apartment, taking on the big world with wide eyes, I expect...something.
But all I really feel is that it’s kinda stuffy. It’s like I’m waiting for all the deep, life-changing emotions to finally arrive. In the meantime, I’m just in a much too hot, nondescript room without air-conditioning on a late-summer afternoon.
The building is the oldest on campus, like two hundred years old, and it takes me a while to pry open the window. Doesn’t do much to affect the heat anyway.
“Pretty bullshit they don’t give us air-conditioning,” my roommate says, returning from the bathroom down the hall and slamming our door, disregarding the open door, open friendship rule they kept telling us about during orientation events.
Warren has a really strict roommate policy, forcing everyone to enter randomly so all the kids from elite schools don’t pair up and leave kids like me—who know zero of the two thousand other students in our year—stranded.
Which is how Leighton Spencer got stuck rooming with me instead of one of her ten close friends who also got in.
She’s a pretty, wiry track runner—“not here, in high school, but I could if I wanted to”—with a platinum-blond ponytail and a ten-minute answer about where she’s from that includes three European cities and the most selective boarding school on each side of the United States. And she scares me absolutely shitless.
“I started hanging some stuff up while you were gone. I hope you don’t mind.” I glance at my Christmas lights, Warren pennant and vintage Beatles poster. “If there’s anything you don’t like, I can take it down.”
She flops on the plasticky blue mattress she’d claimed by the time I’d arrived, her Louis Vuitton luggage stacked around her, untouched. “It’s your half of the room—why would I care?”
“Thanks.” I clear my throat.
All my decorations are up, and all my shirts, pajamas, underwear and socks are placed in their respective drawers, by the time she eventually gets up to hang a rainbow of cocktail dresses in her wardrobe and starts taping Polaroids above her desk.
“Do you mind if I play music?” I take my speaker out of a box my mom labeled “Cassie’s dorm stuff” (so specific and helpful) and set it on the desk.
“If it’s not pop.”
Okaaay, then. I scroll past the boy bands and choose an indie alternative band I heard at Fountain Square.
She looks up as the first song starts. “I actually like this band. Where did you say you were from again?”
“Indianapolis.”
She turns back to her things.
I look at her pictures. Leighton vacationing in the Maldives, at home in Hyde Park, leaning on a balcony with the Eiffel Tower in the background, Leighton with three different boys in a series of repeating shots. There are also a bunch with a dark-haired girl, laughing candids, posed with her hand on her hip, meeting James Franco.
I think of Alex.
“Is she your best friend?” I point to one with the girl.
“No.” She scoffs. “I’m not friends with girls—too much drama. That’s my sister.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, half sister. That’s why we don’t look alike. She’s at Dartmouth. Pi Phi.”
She stares at me for a second too long and then turns back to her wall, trying to figure out how to hang up her map from Urban Outfitters that still has the USSR on it. Edgy.
“First hall meeting!” someone shouts, knocking on our door. “Come on out, frosh!”
I open the door to see a tiny redhead ringing a cowbell and wearing a very bright T-shirt with a button that says, “I
A group of people are huddled awkwardly and silently in the hall. Leighton stands in the doorway, as if debating whether she should go outside for this at all.
“Welcome to Warren!” the overenthusiastic redhead says. “I’m your RA, Becky Scott. I hope you are all just loving meeting your roomies! I think we might just have the best hall ever this year, and I’m really excited to go on this journey with all of you! But first I have some presents!”
The presents turn out to be all the free shit Housing gave her, and soon I find myself with the weirdest assortment of objects I have ever held at once.
There’s a rubber duck with a mental health hotline number stamped on its butt to represent “Duck Syndrome,” the idea that the high-stress environment of an elite school combined with the Californian desire to seem chill creates a group of students who act calm on the surface but are paddling for their lives underneath.
Welcome to college, I think. That’s comforting.
Next come the rainbow stickers with the words This is an inclusive community! across them. And your choice of glittery or black ones that say, “Of Course I’m a Feminist.”
A muscular guy about the size of Hagrid from down the hall opts not to take one of these. “Those are who’s messing with my frat.”
“Aren’t you a freshman? How are you even in a frat?” My hand flies to my mouth—that was not in character.
“Yeah, but I’m a football player.” He looks at me like I’m stupid. Maybe I should’ve noticed his T-shirt, which also broadcasts this affiliation.
“All football players rush DTC,” he says.
“Oh.”
Next there were the condoms. I blush despite myself, used to my Midwestern Catholic school and the oxymoron that is Abstinence-Only Sexual Education, which is a little bit different from liberal California. I mean, this stuff shouldn’t be taboo; it’s a health issue. Still, I can’t bring myself to grab one in front of these people I just met. I feel like a bad feminist.
The football player has no problem taking multiple boxes. Classic. He’s my favorite type of antifeminist, the sexually prolific guys who don’t support gay rights and think the very women they fuck are “slutty” for being available. The hypocrites who are all right with the sexual revolution when it means they get laid but not when it means oppressed groups expressing their sexuality.
The meeting disperses, and Leighton is still in the doorway, apparently not wanting anything rubber, duck or otherwise.
“Hey, I’m gonna put this on the door, okay?” I say as I struggle to peal the backing off one of the feminism stickers.
She seems about to give another grunt of indifference, but then the words register.
“Yeah, no, I’d rather you not.” She wrinkles her perfect little nose.
“What?”
“It’s not a good look.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t sure about the sparkles, either. I could grab a black one?”
She just stares at me blankly, turning her head to the side so her blond ponytail swings.
And something clicks. “Leighton...are you not a feminist?”
She shrugs. “Are you?”
“Yeah...” I resist the urge to add “of course.”
“Whatever, just don’t put it on the door, okay? I don’t want any guys to see it and think I’m like that.”
Like what? Sure of your own inherent worth no matter what kind of reproductive anatomy you have? The type of person who’s for equal pay and against the human trafficking, abuse and inequality that so many women are victims of? Are you worried a sweaty frat guy might not like you because