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THEN
Mr. S. was right—they did have our work cut out for them. Joanna had to move quickly, and Mr. S. even had to call in a few favors, but she was accepted into Roosevelt University’s incoming class of 2007. As the months passed, and college sweatshirts began proliferating among the senior class, she felt a cautious optimism burgeoning—always ready to be squashed by doubt, but there nonetheless. Mary and Joanna talked a lot about their mutual anxieties. Neither had ever lived anywhere but Grace; neither of them had ever even traveled. Mary’s anxiety was tempered by her consistent, thrilled excitement; Joanna’s, if tempered at all, had to make do with little more than a dogged refusal to change her mind.
As for Erik, she didn’t like to talk to him about it. He never asked her outright to stay, but it was obvious that he wasn’t happy. “You’re gonna be some big-city girl when you come home,” he muttered every now and then. The first few times, she tried to persuade him it wasn’t so; after that, she just ignored him.
She was surprised when he said that he wanted to ride down with Poppa and her on move-in day. “Of course,” he said, looking at her quizzically. “Why wouldn’t I?” She shrugged, too relieved to press the issue. Move-in day would be hard enough; she’d been dreading spending the entire day without him there.
So, one Sunday in August, Mrs. Donovan dropped Erik off at the Beaulieus’ house—very early in the morning—and gave Joanna a tight, wordless hug, which she found touching and a little strange. Erik helped Poppa load up the car, while Joanna double- and triple-checked her packing list. She hadn’t wanted to risk bringing too much and alienating her roommate, a girl from Westchester named Sasha, so she’d limited herself to three suitcases, a backpack, and a cardboard box. Even with such a small load, her room felt different when she finally walked out of it.
The drive was cheery enough, but the trio grew quiet about 30 minutes from Roosevelt. Erik held Joanna’s clammy hand in the backseat; they caught each other’s eyes every now and then and smiled thin smiles. Joanna was beginning to think that this whole thing might be a mistake.
When they pulled into campus, Joanna looked out the window and saw a bevy of confident, self-assured upperclassmen in their Roosevelt Welcomes You! t-shirts and shrank back in her seat, feeling awfully young.
That displacement only got worse when they had finished unloading the car and unpacking. Sasha had arrived, unpacked, and left before Joanna even got there, and she had apparently had none of Joanna’s qualms. Her side of the room looked like an actual person lived there, with magazines stacked on her shelf, posters and what looked like a shimmery, mirrored shawl tacked on the walls. No matter how haphazardly Joanna stacked her books or hung her clothes, her side appeared hopelessly prim in comparison. One hour into college, and she was already doing it wrong.
You wanted this, she reminded herself.
“Well—do you want to walk around a little bit?” Poppa asked brightly. Joanna gave him an emphatic no. So, instead, the three of them stood in her room, making awkwardly idle chitchat for the next thirty minutes or so. The door was open to a steady stream of her hallmates passing by, loaded down with their bags and boxes. All of them looked cool and confident. Some of them were even walking in pairs or small groups.
How do they have friends already? she thought miserably. She looked out the window. It was a beautiful campus, but not one tiny thing looked the least bit familiar. And, even this close to the coast, she was farther from the water than she’d ever been in her life. The air smelled different. What was she supposed to do with herself here?
Joanna managed to keep those thoughts to herself throughout the special family dinner they’d signed up for and the walk back to the car. They’d met Sasha and her mother briefly, as well as Joanna’s RA and a few other people whose names had immediately fallen out of Joanna’s head. Erik’s eyes had been darting around all afternoon, taking everything in; now, he grabbed her hand and slowed her down, so they were a few steps behind Poppa. He and Poppa were staying in a hotel that night and driving home the next day. Joanna had a hall activity scheduled in a half hour, so she had to say goodbye now.
When they reached the car, Poppa gathered her in his arms. “I love you,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m proud of you.” Then, he cleared his throat a bunch of times and avoided her eyes as he stepped back and got in the car, leaving Erik and her standing awkwardly together, neither one quite sure what to do. It occurred to Joanna that they’d never had to say goodbye to each other before.
“Do you think I’ll get a lecture if he sees me kiss you right now?” he finally asked, smiling stiffly.
“Do you care?”
He shook his head a few times slowly, his face now serious. He reached for Joanna and gave her a long, insistent—thrilling—kiss.
“Well,” he said when it was over. “One month till fall break.” She nodded as he brushed the hair out of her face. “And I’m gonna figure out the first chance I can come down, okay?” She nodded again. Erik sighed. “You better make sure all these pretty boys know you’re taken.” She didn’t respond. “That was a joke, baby,” he murmured, his eyes crinkling.
“Erik—” Her voice broke. “I…I don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t want you to either,” he said bluntly. Then, “But. There’s not much we can do about it right now. You’re here—try to make the best of it. You’ll make friends. Everything’s going to be okay.” His jaw was tight, and his lips were thin. Joanna didn’t want him to leave upset, so she nodded, as confidently as she could, and gave him a small smile. “Here.” He pulled off the hooded sweatshirt he’d been wearing, one of her favorites, and handed it to her. “Hang onto this for me, all right?” She slipped it on and glanced up at him, feeling warmer all over. Erik smiled, and then he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “I love you.”
She stared at him, her mouth hanging open and spreading into a smile. They’d never said that to each other, though they’d been within a breath of it thousands of times over the last two years. Erik didn’t wait for a response; he winked at her, traced the line of her jaw with his forefinger, and then kissed her one more time before joining Poppa in the car.
She waved and then turned, heading back to her room. Sasha was lounging on her bed, flipping through an issue of Glamour with Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz on the cover. She glanced up at Joanna and then flipped a few pages before saying in a bored voice, “Your boyfriend is a total fucking hottie.”
You’re absolutely right, she crowed in her head, biting her lip and smiling. And he loves me!
+++
The high from Erik’s pronouncement aside, Joanna felt lost for the next several days. It didn’t help that Sasha and she turned out to have nothing in common and didn’t know how to talk to each other. Joanna missed her home, her sweet little town, her cozy bedroom; she missed being in a place where she knew what to expect. She had no idea what to expect here, and it made her anxiety come rushing back: she was afraid to get into a car with other students; she was afraid to walk around campus after dark; she was afraid of going into the caf—that cavernous, boisterous room filled with people who knew what to do and where to go. She was almost paralyzed with fear the first time she walked into the theater building and added her name to the audition list.
But she did it. She’d given herself a stern talking-to while lying in the dark that first night (silently, as she knew even then that Sasha would have something to say about a roommate who talked to herself) and established a list of rules for herself:
Do scary things
Trust people
Audition for everything
Stay out of the room during the day
She stuck to those rules with a tenacity that would have been impressive, had she told anyone else about them. It helped that her classes were uniformly, almost disappointingly, easy, leaving her with plenty of time to focus on theater. By the end of the first semester, she’d closed two shows and been cast in three more. She’d fallen in with a group of other theater students and was beginning to feel, much of the time, like she belonged somewhere. She had even gone to New York enough times to stop staring at the skyscrapers when she emerged from the subway tunnels and had taken the train to Amherst to spend the day with Mary. Every time she saw Erik that semester—during her breaks and his visit to her in November—she was able to tell him more about what she’d done, what she’d seen, whom she’d met. She began to feel like she’d grown up a bit.
+++
When she came back for her second semester, she felt very much like she was coming back to where she had a place. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t Josh’s baby sister. She wasn’t the orphan here. She was just Joanna. It made her feel bigger, more expansive. Her limbs, her fingers, even her hair, unraveled and stretched, luxuriously, to fullness. Every day, she encountered a person—whether in class, in a book, or on a stage—with a whole story she’d never considered before. What a privilege it was, to sit back and observe!
Even more exciting, Mr. S. had been exactly right about Roosevelt’s theater program. Its head, William Cooper—Coop—was a world unto himself. His office on campus was practically unusable, so stuffed was it with sketches, CDs, fabric samples, scripts, writing paper, books, old props and set pieces, tools, and the like. Anyone who met with him on campus usually went to the little coffee shop bordering the Green. He had affectations and a precise way of speaking; together, these made him so exotic to Joanna. When he was excited, and he was easily excited, he would whip off his glasses and hold them daintily with slightly trembling fingers as he came closer to whatever was stimulating him. He was patient, but demanding, in rehearsals (“Jo, let’s just try a little something here,” he would say at least a dozen times each night, nimbly hopping up on stage to whisper something in her ear), and he got Joanna to embody depths of raw, primal, animal emotions she didn’t know she’d had. He loved to start rehearsals with vocal warmups that sometimes got out of hand—she lost her voice on more than one occasion because of all the screaming and grunting they did. Once, she sprained a finger after hitting an iron bedframe one too many times during a particularly tough rehearsal. She cried on her way out the door more often than not. Coop exhausted her.
But she needed what he offered. And she scarfed up as much as she could: mainstage shows, senior projects, film class projects, holiday revues, one acts, community programs. By the time she finished her freshman year, she’d performed in almost as many shows as she had throughout all of high school.
Free weekends were a rarity, but whenever she had one, she spent it in New York with her theater friends seeing brand new shows at deeply discounted prices, thanks to the friends that Coop still had in the city. Those hours walking the sidewalks and soaking in the shows seeped into her like honey. She loved how busy everyone was in the city, like they were all rushing somewhere important. It made her feel important too. She loved that there were so many things to feel there: handrails, revolving doors, subway seats, ATMs, sticky coffeeshop counters. Everything was cold, and hard, and she felt herself growing similarly cold, similarly hard, in return. She loved that she blended in and that her heels made a clicking sound on the sidewalk. She loved the hush of the little, anonymous venues her friends found and then the noise of the crowded bars they always piled into afterwards. She even loved how much people hit on her in the city; she’d been part of a couple for so long, she’d forgotten that other people could see her too.
Erik said he could always tell when she had been to the city—her voice was higher, he said, and she talked faster. He came with her a couple of times that year, but he didn’t like it. It made him feel claustrophobic and like he just didn’t get it. He was happy, still in that rundown cabin. Bruce, his landlord, had taken him on as a maintenance guy for his other properties, in exchange for a lower rent. That, the construction crew, and his cataloguing work with Ro, kept him busier than ever, but he still made it down to Roosevelt three times that first year, and it was like the first breath of fresh air after a long time under the water. Girls, and some guys, fell all over themselves when he was on campus, and why wouldn’t they? He was tan, muscular, handsome, and the kindest person most of them had ever met.
But their lives were beginning to head in disparate directions, she could tell. Maybe he could tell it too. Once, on the phone, when Joanna had gone on and on, gushing about Coop and her new friends and this world she’d discovered, Erik chuckled and said, “I’m glad you’re happy. I just miss you.”
“I miss you too,” she told him, though—truth be told—she wasn’t sure she did. She just didn’t have that kind of time.