Pamela Dean (2 page)

Janet doubted this account of the students' reasoning; her father's opinion of the Office of Residential Life was, however, woefully accurate. One look around the room they had given her confirmed it. She had the names of two roommates. The room had three closets, three desks, three chairs, three bureaus. But it had two sets of bunk beds (enough, that is, for four people), and it had, replacing the three (or maybe four) tall, solid bookcases with five shelves each, a measly four shelves, warped boards wobbling a little on their brass brackets, which had not been inserted into their strips evenly, probably because the strips themselves were installed crookedly on the wall.

"How many people are supposed to be in here?" demanded her mother.

"Three," said Janet, tragically.

"Open that box of books, then, and grab two of those shelves. Nobody else is going to bring six boxes of books to college."

"I don't even think they read," said Janet, still tragically.

"What makes you think they don't?" said her father.

"One of them didn't write me back at all, and the other one talked about beer and Bach and
tennis."

"Which one did which?" said her mother, slamming two handsful of Heinlein juveniles and a fat chunk of Hermann Hesse paperbacks onto the lowest shelf.

"Mom, if I'm stealing two shelves they shouldn't be the lowest ones."

"Your roommates are probably taller than you are."

"Everybody is," said her sister, who at twelve was, and blond to boot.

"Which one did which?" said her father.

"The Chicago one wrote; the Pennsylvania one didn't. Mom, don't bang that one around, it's coming apart."

"That's
mine,"
said her sister.

"Lily-Milly, it is not. I never gave it to you."

"Don't
call
me that!" shrieked her sister.

"Apply to your parents," said Janet, wrestling her footlocker along the carpeting into the alcove that held one of the desks. It featured a window overlooking, down a long slope tangled with rough grass and dandelions, a round and self-conscious lake full of ducks and algae.

"Where's Andrew?" said the male parent, with good timing but genuine concern.

"Talking to some of the girls in the hall," said Lily. She wandered back along the room's long narrow entrance, where the three closets were—and where had that fourth roommate kept her clothes, for heaven's sake? thought Janet—and after a moment could be heard proclaiming happily, "Jannie, he's telling them about the time you put the garlic in the—"

"God damn it!" howled Janet, lunging for the door. "I should have gone to Colgate! I should have gone to Grinnell! I should have—"

"Don't say it," said her mother, "or I'll throw
The Wind in the Willows
right out the window."

"I should have gone to
Harvard
!" shrieked Janet, recklessly diving into the crowd of girls in the hall and laying impetuous hands on her only brother. "You get in here now!"

"Jannie," he said, as solemnly as only an eight-year-old could, "they say there's a ghost in your room."

"Oh, of course," said Janet brightly. "What a relief. I couldn't think what that extra bed was for."

"She's very quiet," said the Resident Assistant, a tall and round-faced young woman who had written Janet a perfectly responsible and sane letter about the college, just as though Janet's father had not taught here for twenty-two years.

"Who was she?" said Janet, still tugging her brother along but aware of the necessity of being civil. Luckily, Andrew was cute and redheaded, and the four girls in the hall were regarding him benignly.

"Classics major," said a short black student, as if that explained everything.

Everybody at Blackstock who was not a member of the Classics Department talked like that. Janet had never met a Classics major; the professors she had met from that department seemed no more peculiar than those of any other. But it was one of Blackstock's tenets.

They will never fix the Music and Drama Center; it always snows on Parents' Weekend; Classics majors are crazy.

"What class?" Of course, they might have chosen her as the butt of one of the innumerable jokes played on freshmen; faculty brats were favorite targets.

"Ninety-nine," said an even smaller girl with glasses.

"Janet Margaret Carter," said Lily from the doorway, "come unpack these books."

"I'll see you at the meeting tonight," Janet said generally, lugged her brother back into the room, and banged the door shut.

Her mother was leaning out one of the windows; her father was sitting on her desk.

"Look what you made your mother do," he said.

"You made her do it," said Janet, more or less automatically. She let go of Andrew but stayed between him and the door. "She couldn't stand to hear any more about how nobody in the entire Department of Humane Letters at Harvard—not that there is one—is doing anything but painstakingly reconstructing Aristotle." Having delivered her standard speech, she absorbed what her mother had threatened—to throw
The Wind in the Willows
out a fourth-floor window. She said with much more force, "Mom, how
could
you?"

"Colgate," said her mother, not turning from the window. Her voice was unnaturally calm for the subject they were discussing. The morning sunshine haloed her red head. "Or Cornell, maybe—the little one, that is."

"It's too late now," said Janet. "Why don't you all just go home now, and I'll come for Sunday supper in a month or two."

"Walk down with us and get your book," said her mother.

The book had landed flat on its front in a clump of dandelions. Janet brushed it off and felt the binding tenderly. It had been so battered already, any new damage was hard to locate. Her mother had given it to her on her eighth birthday, and if Janet had ever thrown any book anywhere her mother would probably have put her on bread and water and Eugene Field for a week. It must be very stressful after all, sending your oldest child off to college, even if college was about ten blocks away.

Andrew, fidgeting about and scuffing his feet on the sidewalk, said, "Dad, those girls say there's a ghost in Jan's room."

"On Fourth Ericson?" said her father. "Is it the same old story, or a new one? What sort of ghost?"

"Classics major!" said Andrew, and laughed immoderately.

"Ha ha," said his father. "You know it's time to replace the campus joke when small boys find it funny."

"Better the Classics Department than yours," said Janet's mother. "I shudder to think what they could find to say about the English Department if they put their minds to it."

"Now, Janet," said her father, oblivious, "don't take English 10 from Brinsley."

"I know," said Janet. "Senior Seminar from Brinsley. English 10 from Evans if I want to do it right, or Tyler if I want to be usefully irritated. And Chaucer
only
from Brinsley, and if I'm very, very good, I can take the Romantics from you next year. Go away now, I have to unpack."

She hugged her parents; gave Andrew a chance to hug her, which he surprised her by taking; and looked speculatively at her sister.

"I hope you get roommates worse than me," said Lily.

Well, that was that. She ran up the four flights of red-carpeted steps and encountered another group of girls in the wide hall of the fourth floor. The RA was among them. What was her name, for heaven's sake. Irma? Norma? Nora, all right.

"What can I expect from the ghost?" Janet asked her. If they were having fun, you might as well let them have it.

"Not much," said Nora. "She throws books out the window."

"That could get annoying in the winter."

"Not your books—ghost books."

"Whose? All the ones she hated?"

"It's hard to read the titles when they're flying around," said Nora dryly. The three other girls, all clearly new students as well, giggled a little, in a hopeful way.

They either knew nothing, or were dreadfully unim

aginative. "I'd better get

unpacked," Janet said, and went into her room.

There she sat on her desk and surveyed it all. Ericson was one of the older dormitories, which meant high ceilings, slightly scarred oak woodwork, wide windowsills, and an old white porcelain sink, with mismatched faucets, in what might once have been the fourth roommate's closet. The carpet was red, like the stairs'; the walls and ceiling were clean white. You could paint them if you wanted to, but it would be a lot of trouble, and the Office of Residential Life was stingy in its allowance of colors. The iron bunk beds were painted white, too; the other furniture matched the woodwork, though it was rather more used-looking. The room had southern, eastern, and northern exposures; the four largest windows looked eastward, and Janet had claimed the desk that looked north. It was all warm, clean, and pleasant. Janet looked at the tumble of books on the bottom shelf, and sniffed.

She had given up this useless exercise and was putting writing paper and sealing wax and typewriter ribbons into the drawers of her desk when someone knocked on the door and then came in.

"Hello!" called Janet, so as not to startle the newcomer.

"Hi," said a comfortingly midwestern voice, and the first of the two roommates—unless there were three—came around the corner. Janet went on smiling, but her stomach protested a little. This roommate—probably the Chicago one, who had written, since she had a tennis racket under one arm and a tape player under the other—was about six feet tall and looked perfectly pleased with this condition. She was dressed more or less as Janet was, except that her blue corduroy pants had been ironed; her Oxford-cloth shirt was not only ironed, but pink, and tucked in, too; her tennis shoes were of a dazzling blueness. She had a nice healthy face with large blue eyes, and a head of straight blond hair, cut just above the shoulders, that put even Lily's to shame. Why doesn't she grow it long?

thought Janet. All over the country were girls wearing Indian cotton dresses and Earth shoes who would kill for hair like that.

"Hi," said the roommate, a little less certainly. "I'm Christina. Which—no, let me guess. Are you Molly?"

"Why, do I look like somebody who doesn't answer letters?"

"Janet, then. Didn't she answer yours? She sent me a nice one, but it was a little strange."

Janet bit her lip on the next obvious question; Christina looked earnest, and would therefore probably take it the wrong way. "I was glad you wrote, anyway."

Christina dumped the racket, the tape player, and a bulging shopping bag onto the nearest lower bunk, and looked at the contents of the bookshelves. "Are all these yours?"

The dangerous question. "Yes."

"These are kids' books."

She sounded more puzzled than disapproving, but whatever tone it was said in, that remark boded no good. Janet held her tongue. "Oh, well," said Christina cheerfully, "I brought my teddy bear." She extracted a gray floppy object from her shopping bag and propped it up against the brown-paper package of bedding provided by the Office of Residential Life.

Useless, Janet decided, but tolerant. Whether this made her worse than Lily was a question that would bear a deal of examination.

"Did you have a nice trip?" said Christina.

"I live in town," said Janet, who had said as much in her letter. "Where's the rest of your stuff?"

Somebody else knocked. Janet and Christina both called, "Come in!" Janet thought she could grow to hate that hallway with the closets; you always had to wait for who was coming.

Who was coming, as it lumped around the corner, appeared to be composed largely of scuffed blue suitcases. It dropped these, panting, and emerged as another tall person, maybe five eight, with curly brown hair, a sharp, freckled face, and the clothes that should have gone with Christina's hair. Not the Indian cotton, but well and truly faded blue jeans, old sandals, a denim shirt with a peace symbol embroidered on one pocket and a rose on the other.

"Hello, Molly," said Janet.

"Hi. Which of you is—oh, far
out!
" She lunged at the bookshelves, brought up with her nose an inch away from the books, and tilting her head sideways read her way down every spine there, nodding and exclaiming. "I
hate
Hermann Hesse," she said, wheeling around, "but the rest of these are my very favorites."

"They're mine," said Janet, beaming at her.

"So you're Janet. Can you really read Hesse?"

"My best friend likes him," said Janet, "and he's very intense."

"I thought he was boring," said Molly, "but never mind. What else have you got in here?" She folded herself to the floor and looked expectantly at Janet. Janet, feeling unfairly that Christina would have just ripped the boxes open, supposing she was interested at all, sat down too, and reached for the one containing the new books, the ones getting ready for college had not left her time to read.

"I left my stuff down in the lobby," said Christina. This was merely a statement of fact, Janet thought, intended to explain why she was going out the door instead of joining in the examination of the box; but both Janet and Molly, without exchanging a glance, scrambled to their feet and accompanied her down the four flights of steps, and toiled back up them again with suitcases, footlocker, and four cardboard boxes. These last were too light to contain books.

Christina promptly ripped the brown paper from her bedding and made up one of the bottom bunks. Janet and Molly unloaded the box of new books.

"I haven't had time to read these," Janet said.

"Well, let's see," said Molly, turning the books over one by one. She had very long fingers.
Till We Have Faces, All the Myriad Ways, Jack of Shadows, The Children of Llyr,
More Than Human, The Daughter of Time, The Crystal Cave,
and
A Tan and Sandy Silence
fell through her searching hands, accompanied by exclamations of approval and puzzlement and anticipation. Janet watched them, and wished for a quiet corner with any one of them. They would let her read here, all right, until her eyes fell out of her head and she babbled of green fields; but they wouldn't let her read any of these.