The song changed to one of the songs everybody knows all the words to from middle school dances and hairbrush microphones. We sang even louder until someone flushed a toilet. I had learned very quickly that the rush of water swirling down the pipe was always accompanied by three seconds of scalding heat in the showers. I just hadn’t figured out how to get out of the way in time. Singing turned into shrieking as we both jumped out of the spray. Soap bubbles slid down my body and foamy white shampoo suds popped on my hands until I could safely step back in.
We spent the rest of the night watching movies on Cleo’s shag rug with Amie. In all the nights I had slept in her room, Cleo had assured me that they were called shag rugs for a very good reason. At the time, I was a little scared to know. Now, though, it was sounding a little more interesting. I was almost tempted to ask but I didn’t. My parents had always said experience is the best teacher. Even if they didn’t mean it in this particular context, I had a feeling the same sentiment still applied. Intellectual curiosity and all that.
I had to remember something my parents had taught me, since I had started blatantly ignoring the warning they always gave me in the years when the world is your teething ring: Don’t put anything in your mouth if you don’t know where it’s been.
We didn’t sleep until after three, and then only after I had stumbled down the hall to finish throwing stuff in my bag. Josie had already left, so the room was wonderfully empty. I glanced up at my bare walls and thought about buying some posters over break. The room looked practically unoccupied.
When I passed out on the aptly named shag rug, I was pretty sure Cleo’s foot was dangling off her bed onto my face and Amie was using my stomach as a pillow. Some people would have called it weird, inappropriate or uncomfortable. Lucky for me, boarding school had broadened my horizons. You know you’ve made friends when they don’t have to ask you where your tampons are, no one can find their clothes anymore but yours keep showing up in their drawers and you feel at ease discussing razor nicks in the worst places possible. Sleep was nothing. We had spent a night or two three to a double bed. Uncomfortable, sure, but only when referring to my back the next day.
Five o’clock is only happy hour when P stands for
post meridian
, not
pre
. I don’t know how Amie and I got out of bed in enough time to make it to our buses. Jeans and a T-shirt felt way too complicated after uniforms—plus, after three months, just rolling up my kilt and unbuttoning my shirt was as good as stripping. Tank tops felt practically indecent outside of the dorms. Somehow, I pulled what I’d thrown over my bags onto limbs that felt heavier than they ever had. We said our good-byes like we were going away for months, even though it was only five days, dulled by texting and instant messenger.
The heaviest thing in my bag was my laptop by a large margin, and it still threw my balance off walking down the stairs. I don’t know how we made it, stumbling worse than drunks and missing steps. Amie almost dropped her glasses. She at least managed to look okay though. My hair looked like it had been rubbed vigorously with a balloon and there might have been eyeliner on my chin: the mirror had been going in and out with the slow up-down of my lids. At least there was no one to impress. Stupid Dev got to sleep in.
Instead of waking me up, the cold air that hit us as we pushed open the doors just made me wonder, again, what the hell I was doing out of bed. Amie moaned and then started saying something sleepily under her breath. No idea what it was. Probably something like what was running through my head:
shitgoddammitfreakingCOLD
Considering the direction in which my vocabulary had expanded, it was probably a good thing my parents weren’t paying tuition.
The glare of the headlights was the only light in the semi-dark. It illuminated patches along the sidewalk: mountains of duffel bags, shuffling half-asleep kids, harassed bus drivers, the neon-colored cans of energy drinks. My breath steamed, frosting on air as it hit the cold. Amie was exhaling in a thin stream like cigarette smoke.
Bus One was denoted by a blue sign in the window right in front of us. Lucky Amie. I had to walk all the way to Two and, at 5:07, twenty feet takes a really long time. Especially when the number of yards involved is exponentially more than the number of hours of sleep you got.
But I made it. Barely. My bag landed on top of a paisley printed duffel and a hockey bag in our school colors. A yellowing sock was poking out of a side pocket of the hockey bag. Ew. I had buried the yellowing socks at the bottom of my drawers and the bottom of my bag.
I followed a pair of sneakers with holes in the sides and untied laces up the stairs and onto the bus.
Classic high school dilemma. Nowhere to sit.
It was way too fucking early for this.
My eyes scanned the two-by-two columns: the Bose headphones, the heavy lids, the drool at the corners of the open mouths in heads that lolled against the window. There were gaps between blond hair and black hair and I looked to see if I knew anyone.
I would have been nervous except that I was too damn tired and swallowing yawns every three seconds. The closest seat not next to the guy no one knows since he hasn’t left his room all year and the girl who was snoring quietly, sprawled over both seats, was next to a blond guy in headphones and a football sweatshirt. I knew him only by his name, Bryce Kennan, and his reputation, varsity football player.
He was scary but he wasn’t snoring. I sucked it up and shuffled down the narrow aisle, past rows of fabric-covered seats.
“Hey, Bryce?”
He took out an earbud and looked at me with red eyes under his blond lashes.
“There room here?”
He gestured to the seat and put his earbud back in.
Minutes after I dropped into my seat and leaned my head back against the itchy, crazy patterns of the seat, the bus started moving.
I don’t really remember whose idea it was. Probably Cleo’s. But suddenly there we were, a bunch of girls shimmying and sliding heavy denim and cotton down our legs and over our heads, trying to keep everything out of the mud under our bare feet. Raindrops were hitting my skin and my hair, sliding down in cool trails that collided and intertwined.
It was one of those warm spring nights, late enough that you could almost taste the stale beer at graduation parties. Within minutes of stepping outside, we had been soaked, clothes hanging heavy on our bodies and slapping at our skin. The dark was tangible, far removed from the dusky night of yellow streetlight pooling on cement. Music from the dorms reverberated even out here, yards away on an open field. It was a crazy surreal night that called for crazy surreal actions.
Anyone can attest that crazy had never been my thing, and, most of the time, never would be. For most of middle school—and really high school too—I felt like a fish out of water. Some places, dried and stretched in the open air, shed scales from the parts of me that grew too fast to accommodate my skin. Other places, my skin sagged, marking spaces the inside had yet to fill. No amount of lotion and aloe would make me sleek, moving through the water in flashes of silver and color. Sometimes I flopped or flipped, but mostly I lay limp and frozen, waiting. Eventually, I began to move first one small muscle, then another. I knew eventually it would burst into full, coordinated, maybe even streamlined, movement. Maybe I just expected a few more road signs.
Urban grays and blacks, the color of storms and sidewalks and the ash at the tip of a cigarette butt, were rinsed and replaced with the green, orange, brown and Seussical yellow of lights flooding out of the gym. Perhaps that was just my city-girl expectations, seeing a place like this as pretty and tranquil, serene and surreal. I forgot, though: with water washing all the color away and drowning out the quiet, campus shed its staid and sensible straight lines of cement and neatly manicured grass. For us, that was often all it took.
I hesitated at first, holding the heavy wet of clothes, shucking equally weighty shoes off into the grass. All I was wearing was a necklace, thin sterling silver and corners that poked my skin: the sketched outline of a rose. My skin stood in sharp goose bumps but the hair on the top of my head and the backs of my forearms was plastered down.
Most of these girls had seen my skinny butt before: a couple of them were from the swim team, including a girl Cleo had volunteered me to help in math. I had been terrified to take that plunge, but now here she was, part of our group. Despite very different final grades in math, she was my friend, through the hell of precalculus and the current high water. All of us were looking at each other: no one wanted to end up running alone. But all it took was one person (probably Cleo), and we were all running across the grass, feeling mud creep between our toes and loose grass adhere to our heels.
I was hardly graceful or supple. This was no baptismal fount or cleansing stream to wash away the sins of the world (or even just me) and magically tighten the sagging spots.
But quick fixes drip through your cupped palms as quickly as they arrive. There was something about the sudden immersion—perhaps a catalyst, perhaps a confirmation. There was makeup smearing on my face and every so often, my foot would drop an extra inch into a hidden pitfall, but I was moving through the water, semi-coordinated, somewhat streamlined. It was a start.