I think all this but just say, “I have to use the bathroom.”
Splashing water on my face, I think, I am so fucked.
If I can’t change the mind of a bright, athletic girl who has every reason to demand her accomplishments not be diminished because of her sex, how am I going to change the minds of a group that basically benefits from a patriarchal system?
I dry my face with shitty industrial-style paper towels and look in the mirror.
And I remember: I don’t have to convince them of anything; I just have to listen, record, write and publish, then watch their whole system go down in flames.
I throw the sticker in the bathroom trash and walk outside.
“Hey there!” a peppy voice says when I’m barely out the door.
That’s the thing about the first week of freshman year—people are dying to make friends. Especially at a school like this, where it’s incredibly rare to enroll alongside another person from your high school. Unlike Leighton, most people get dropped here, cut off from everyone else who used to define their lives, the single goal that guided them through high school—get into a good college—achieved, and have absolutely no idea what to do with themselves or who they even are.
It’s like they ooze desperation: I really want to know about where you’re from and your potential major that you will definitely not stick with. Love me. Please!
I’m not saying I’m not victim to the loneliness and anxiety, too, but when you’re about to embark on a complicated social experiment, you can’t really make legitimate friends.
For a lot of the students on this campus, the ones who introduce themselves with a suffix of Greek letters after their names, what I am about to do would be social suicide. The ones who will want to cheer me on are probably good people, too good for me to want to lie to them as much as I’d have to.
Which is why I’ve planned to make friends only within my frat (such a weird sentence still) and those who are directly connected to it (the sister sorority or whatever) and steer clear of lying to more people than necessary.
Still, I don’t want to be rude...
I step the rest of the way out of the bathroom and take in the pretty Asian girl with winged eyeliner and hipster glasses smiling at me. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Not to be weird but I heard what your roommate was saying. About the stickers. What bullshit!”
I smile. “Thanks. I’m just glad someone else thinks it’s crazy.”
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“Indiana.”
Her eyes light up. “No way! That’s so cute.”
“Thanks?” I say.
“Do you live on a farm?”
“No I, uh, live in Indianapolis. It’s the fourteenth-biggest city in America.”
“Oh, of course,” she says, waving her hand as if to dismiss the picture of me with pigtails going out to milk the cows she had started to conjure.
“That’s cool, coming to such a different place, though. I’m from SoCal, so it’s only a few hours away for me.”
I nod knowingly, even though I just recently learned that “SoCal” means Southern California and not, like, Very California.
We look at each other for a beat.
“I’m Cassie, by the way.” I reach out my hand.
“Jacqueline Wang. Jackie.”
And it’s silent again. “What are you majoring in?” I ask, hating myself for becoming one of the Eager Freshmen.
“Physics or CS. How about you?”
“Gender and sexuality studies.”
I brace myself for the They have that here? or What will you do with that? I’ve come to expect.
But she just raises her eyebrows. “Maybe you can bring back some books to educate Leighton, then.”
I decide one real friend can’t hurt.
But now the pressure of small talk is on. I look down at my shoes. I look back up. “Do you play any sports?”
“Yeah, climbing.”
“Like rocks?”
She turns her head to the side.
God, I am such an idiot.
“Uh, yeah,” she says.
“That’s so cool.”
“Yeah!” She smiles. “We should go sometime.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool.” I kick myself and hope she doesn’t think “cool” is the only word I know.
“...”
“...”
“Wellll... I gotta go,” she says, breaking the silence. “I wanna finish unpacking tonight, because I plan to fill an entire wall with postcards. But come by my room later!”
I smile and wave and wonder if I should take her up on that offer, if I can take her up on that offer. I debate if I should call my project coordinator to get approval first. And then I hate that I even thought that.
Approval for a friend, what am I doing?
Like a typical freshman girl, I’m spending my first night of college trying on outfit after outfit, making countless trips to the hallway to look in the full-length mirror.
But unlike a typical freshman girl, I am not obsessing over my outfit for the first day of class. I picked that—a white boho blouse and olive shorts—in about 2.5 seconds.
I am probably the first girl in history to spend her first night of college obsessing over what to wear to fraternity Rush. Not exactly the trails I thought I’d be blazing when I was seven with a poster of Sally Ride on my wall or when I was fifteen and carrying one of Gloria Steinem’s books everywhere I went.
But I keep the endgame in mind: one year of investigative journalism in a frat, and I renew my funding. I get to go to college at the best school in the country, and I get three more years of gender-related research funding toward what I really want to do, whether that’s the wage gap in American tech or women’s education in the Middle East.
Setting the winning outfit on my desk, I recheck the pile of syllabi I printed out earlier for my classes tomorrow.
I glance at the clock: nine thirty. Leighton left to meet a friend a few hours ago with no indication of when she’d be back and a clear indication that I was not invited.
Which is fine, it’s not like I particularly want to be friends with her, either. But it would be nice to at least be civil with my roommate.
I walk down the hall to find Jacqueline’s door open but her room empty. She wasn’t joking about the postcards. Half of her back wall is covered in photos of far-off cities. The photos end in a jigsaw shape, with the rest of the wall blank. On the floor I see painter’s tape and a pile of even more glossy postcards.
There’s also a poster of a girl stepping off the curb onto a New York street, empty after the rain. It’s dark save for the city lights, reflected on the wet pavement, blurry like they’re running together. Her back is turned, and all you can see is her wavy hair and her arms raised like she’s dancing or celebrating.
For a second, I can see my life if I were a normal student. I would want to befriend people like Jacqueline, to sit around in her