That fall, Kate frequently mentioned the idea that the other two girls should visit her in New York. Whenever Jenny tried to follow up and set a specific date (she liked to keep an orderly calendar), Kate would get all vague and wave her off. Vagueness – a Kate specialty when confronted with anything she didn’t feel like dealing with at that moment. After a while, Jenny figured the invitation was BS, like a lot of stuff Kate said, and let the subject drop. She was busy with classes, and chorus, and had been elected freshman rep to the student council from Whipple. She worked at the hardware store every Saturday, and had taken a second part-time job, typing and filing in the provost’s office, because she wanted to learn how the college ran. (She was the first freshman ever hired by the provost, in fact.) It would have been a struggle to fit a trip to New York into her crazy schedule anyway.
Late one night a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving break, Jenny switched off her desk lamp and got into bed. The lavender comforter cover was freshly laundered, and she snuggled down under it, curling and uncurling her toes and trying to unwind from the difficult econ problem set she’d been working on. Aubrey had gone to bed an hour earlier, and Jenny assumed she was long asleep.
After a few minutes in the dark, however, Jenny became aware of quiet sniffling emanating from Aubrey’s bed.
“Aubrey?” she whispered.
The sniffling stopped.
“Aubrey, are you crying? What’s wrong?”
Aubrey broke into muffled sobs. Jenny sighed, threw the covers back, and climbed in next to Aubrey in the other bed. As usual, she was torn between feelings of tenderness and irritation for her roommate, who’d been having trouble getting her footing at Carlisle, and seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next. The only time Aubrey ever looked happy was tagging along with Kate to parties.
“What is it, sweetie? Tell me,” Jenny said, stroking Aubrey’s shaking back. “Is it about a boy?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I . . . can’t . . . go . . . home,” Aubrey forced out between sobbing breaths.
“Home? You mean home for break, to Nevada?”
Aubrey nodded miserably, dissolving into sobs again. Jenny hopped out of bed, grabbed a box of Kleenex from her desk, and switched on the lamp.
“Here, sit up,” she said, resuming her place next to Aubrey.
Aubrey sat up and blew her nose. “I can’t afford the plane ticket. The dorms are closed for a week.”
“Why didn’t you say something? You’ll come home with me. You know you’re always welcome. Problem solved.”
“Thank you. I’ll take you up on that. But it’s not the only problem.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know where my mother is,” Aubrey said, bursting into tears again.
“I don’t understand. Did she go somewhere?” Jenny handed her another Kleenex, and Aubrey mopped her face.
“Her phone is disconnected. That happens sometimes. She waitresses, she doesn’t always have enough to cover her bills. And even when she does, she isn’t always organized enough to pay them. I used to handle that. I probably still should, it’s just, with everything . . .”
“Of course. I’m so sorry, that’s awful.”
Jenny genuinely felt terrible for Aubrey. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like, not only to have such money problems, but to be uncertain where your own mother was. Jenny’s mother phoned her twice a day, and if Jenny didn’t call back right away, she worried there was something wrong and called again. To not hear from your own mother was beyond her comprehension. Surely there was somebody back home who could help Aubrey get in touch. Jenny knew surprisingly little about Aubrey’s home life, because Aubrey rarely chimed in when they talked about their families. Jenny had noticed this silence and tried to be sensitive to it, but now she felt compelled to ask.
“Is your father in the picture, or are your parents divorced? I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind if I ask.”
“Ugh, I can’t talk about this,” Aubrey said, flopping down and pulling the pillow over her head. Jenny tugged it aside.
“Hey. Come on, divorce is nothing to be ashamed of in this day and age.”
Aubrey looked at her with watery eyes. “If you want to know the truth, it’s a lot worse than divorce. My parents never got married. My dad drove a long-haul truck, and my mom was like, his road girlfriend. She says he had another family somewhere, and one night he drove away and never came back. I’m so ashamed. Don’t tell anyone? Please?”
“Of course not. I would never. This is not your fault. You’re the victim. It must have been terrible for you. How old were you when it happened?”
“I was three. It’s not like I missed him or anything. All I remember about him is the smell of beer. But after he left, things were rough financially. My mom couldn’t catch a break. Vegas is a tough town for a woman. She was pretty when she was younger, and she made decent money waitressing. But she got old fast. And she didn’t have the gumption to make a move. You know, take a GED course, learn to type. She never got her act together, and she lost one job after another. Once I was old enough to work, I did my best to help out. But then I left.”
“Well of course you did, and I’m sure she wanted you to. Who’d want their kid to pass up a Carlisle scholarship? But wait, don’t you have an older sister? Amanda, right? Why can’t she check on your mom and help her get her phone turned back on?”
Aubrey’s sister was in her early twenties, and worked as a cocktail waitress in one of the big hotels on the Strip in Las Vegas. She’d been in and out of trouble. Jenny knew the two of them weren’t close.
“I tried, believe me, but Amanda doesn’t return my calls,” Aubrey said.
“Give me her number. I’ll call her.”
Jenny was relentless when it came to solving problems. Over the next couple of days, she left a series of increasingly urgent messages for Aubrey’s sister. When she didn’t hear back, she got the number of the hotel where Amanda worked and called the manager four times in a single afternoon demanding to talk to Amanda regarding a family emergency. That finally resulted in an expletive-laden return message from Amanda, left on the answering machine on the room phone. Buried among the swear words was the revelation that Mrs. Miller was fine, just temporarily without a telephone, so Jenny should back the hell off and tell that whiny idiot Aubrey to get bent.
Jenny played the message for Aubrey, who hugged her, with tears in her eyes, and whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” over and over again.
“Don’t mention it,” Jenny said, basking in the gratitude as she rubbed her roommate’s back. She loved helping someone in need, and Aubrey provided ample opportunity to do that.
Despite what seemed to Jenny to be an extremely satisfactory resolution to Aubrey’s quandary, as Thanksgiving approached, Aubrey seemed increasingly depressed. In fact, Jenny noticed, she was growing paler and sadder – and also thinner, since she’d nearly stopped eating – with each passing day. This disappointed Jenny, who liked to see more concrete results from her efforts. It also alarmed her.
Jenny reviewed the protocols in her dorm rep handbook for what to do if you suspected that a student suffered from untreated or undiagnosed depression, anorexia, or any other of a long list of mental or emotional challenges. The first step was alerting the dorm RA, but Jenny dismissed that out of hand. Whipple’s RA – a biochem grad student named Chen Mei – was rarely around, and when she was, she made it very clear that she’d taken the position for the free housing, and wasn’t interested