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.
Chapter Sixteen
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—a Trainspotting movie 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 whereto put her laundry bin. It seemed like the elevator never stopped dinging open and closed. I didn’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.
“At least let me make up your bed, then,” she said.
When it was time to say good-bye, I wasn’t ready. I thought I would be, but I wasn’t. My dad stood there, his hands on his hips. His hair looked really gray in the light.
He said, “Well, we should get going if we want to beat rush-hour traffic.”
Irritably, my mother said, “We’ll be fine.”
Seeing them together like this, it was almost like they weren’t divorced, like we were still a family. I was overcome with this sudden rush of thankfulness. Not all divorces were like theirs. For Steven’s and my sake, they made it work and they were sincere about it. There was still genuine affection between them, but more than that: there was love for us. It was what made it possible for them to come together on days like this.
I hugged my dad, and I was surprised to see tears in his eyes. He never cried. My mother hugged me briskly, but I knew it was because she didn’t want to let go. “Make sure you wash your sheets at least twice a month,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“And try making your bed in the morning. It’ll make your room look nicer.”
“Okay,” I said again.
My mother looked over at the other side of the room.
“I just wish we could have met your roommate.”
Jeremiah was sitting at my desk, his head down, scroll-ing on his phone while we said our good-byes.
All of a sudden, my dad said, “Jeremiah, are you going to leave now too?”
Startled, Jeremiah looked up. “Oh, I was going to take Belly to dinner.”
My mother shot me a look, and I knew what she was thinking. A couple of nights before, she’d given me this long speech about meeting new people and not spending all my time with Jere. Girls with boyfriends, she’d said, limit themselves to a certain kind of college experience.
I’d promised her I wouldn’t be one of those kind of girls.
“Just don’t get her back too late,” my dad said in this really meaningful kind of way.
I could feel my cheeks get red, and this time my mother gave my dad a look, which made me feel even more awkward. But Jeremiah just said, “Oh, yeah, of course,” in his relaxed way.
I met my roommate, Jillian, later that night, after dinner. It was in the elevator, right after Jeremiah dropped me off in front of the dorm. I recognized her right away, from the 78 · jenny han
pictures on her dresser. She had curly brown hair, and she was really little, shorter than she’d looked in the pictures.
I stood there, trying to figure out what to say. When the other girls in the elevator got off on the sixth floor, it was just the two of us. I cleared my throat and said,
“Excuse me. Are you Jillian Capel?”
“Yeah,” she said, and I could tell she was a little weirded out.
“I’m Isabel Conklin,” I said. “Your roommate.”
I wondered if I should hug her or offer her my hand to shake. I did neither, because she was staring at me.
“Oh, hi. How are you?” Without waiting for me to answer, she said, “I’m just coming back from dinner with my parents.” Later, I would learn that she said “How are you” a lot, like it was more of a thing to say, not something she expected an answer to.