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“Call me tomorrow. And leave your phone on.”
“Professors tend to frown on calls in classes.” The snark comes out again.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. And I know your schedule, Allyson. All your classes are in the mornings.”
She would know my schedule. She basically created it. All those morning classes because she said they’d be less attended and I’d get more attention and then I’d have the whole rest of the day for studying. Or, as it turns out, for sleeping.
After we hang up, I shove the alarm clock into a box in my closet and take the cookies and bring them into the lounge where the rest of my roommates have started in on a six-pack. They’re all dressed up and ready to go out.
When school started, the rest of them were so excited. They really were Happy College Students. Jenn made organic brownies, and Kendra drew up a little sign on our door with all our names and a moniker, the Fab Four, atop it. Kali, for her part, gave us coupons to a tanning salon to ward off the inevitable seasonal affective disorder.
Now, a month in, the three of them are a solid unit. And I’m like a goiter. I want to tell Kendra that it’s okay if she takes down the little sign or replaces it with one that says something like Terrific Trio* and Allyson.
I shuffle into the lounge. “Here,” I say, handing over the cookies to Kali, even though I know she watches her carbs and even though black-and-whites are my favorites. “I’m really sorry about my mom.”
Kendra and Jenn cluck sympathetically, but Kali narrows her eyes. “I don’t want to be a bitch or anything, but it’s bad enough having to fend off my own parents, okaay?”
“She’s having Empty Nest or something.” That’s what Dad keeps telling me. “She won’t do it again,” I add with more confidence than I possess.
“My mom turned my bedroom into a craft room two days after I left,” Jenn says. “At least you’re missed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What kind of cookies are they?” Kendra asks.
“Black-and-whites.”
“Just like us,” Kendra jokes. She’s black, or African American; I’m never sure which is right, and she uses both.
“The racial harmony of cookies,” I say.
Jenn and Kendra laugh. “You should come out with us tonight,” Jenn says.
“We’re going to a party over at Henderson and then there’s this bar over on Central that apparently has a very liberal carding policy,” Kendra says, twisting her just-straightened black hair up into a bun, then thinking twice about it and pulling it down. “Lots of fine male specimen.”
“And female specimen, if that’s your thing,” Jenn adds.
“It’s not my thing. I mean, none of it is my thing.”
Kali gives me a bitchy smirk. “Think you enrolled in the wrong school. I believe there’s a convent in Boston.”
Something twists in my stomach. “They don’t take Jews.”
“Back off, you two,” Kendra says, ever the diplomat. She turns to me. “Why not come out for a few hours?”
“Chemistry. Physics.” The room goes silent. They’re all liberal arts or business majors, so invoking Science shuts them up.
“Well, I’d better get back to my room. I have a date with the Third Law of Thermodynamics.”
“Sounds hot,” Jenn says.
I smile to show I actually get the joke, then shuffle back to my room, where I diligently pick up Foundations of Chemistry, but by the time the Terrific Trio are heading out the door, my eyes have sandbags in them. I fall asleep under a mountain of unread science. And thus begins another weekend in the life of the Happy College Student.
Fifteen
OCTOBER
College
