Roomies (2 page)

The next chance I have to think is five hours later, after Dad’s come home, after we’ve gotten through the ordeal that is dinner, after baths and toothbrushing and all the bargaining and coercion and threat-making that help those things happen, and after Francis is down but the rest of them are living up the twenty minutes before story time and, at last, lights-out.

It’s the first opportunity I’ve had to look at my e-mail in three days. There are two screens of new messages, mostly spam. As I sort through it, I find some stuff from my best friend, Zoe—links to videos and sites I’ll probably never have time to look at—and a message from my dad. He sends these one- or two-sentence notes from work when he’s bored or thinking of me. This says,
Garfield has been violated.
Investigating.
There’s a picture attached of the mug I gave him when I was in first grade. It’s got a big lipstick print on the rim. I write back:
That is a bold red. Inquire among VIPs.

On the third screen, the page of oldest messages, there are a few from Berkeley. One of them has to be about my housing request. I’ll save those to open last; I’m too nervous now. I go back to the first screen to start clicking off the spam and find a message I didn’t notice the first time. The subject line is
Hi Roomie!
and I almost junk it for porn, but when I see the preview of the first line, a chill comes over me.

I open and read it through.

Then I frantically click over to the Berkeley messages and find the one telling me about my roommate.

So it’s true. My request has been denied. “Crap,” I mutter.

“Can I play Dora?” It’s Gertie.

I minimize the window—I’m not sure why; it’s not like Gertie cares about my e-mail or can understand what she’s seeing. She breathes down my neck, her sticky hand already leaving a mark on my desk, which I’ve just cleaned for what feels like the tenth time today, making use of the industrial-size tub of Clorox Wipes I pay for with my own money. “No,” I say. “Can you go… occupy yourself or something?”

I try not to sound mean. I’m already in trouble for being “mean” to Jack, even though he’s the one who completely spilled cranberry juice all over my favorite sweater, at some point between the interruption of my nap and dinner. I’d saved up for like a month to buy that sweater. I yelled at Jack and called him a moron, and when Mom found me and said, “He’s six, Lauren. He didn’t do it out of malice,” what came out of my mouth was “I wish I were an only child.” And Mom gave me that look she has and walked out, reminding me to apologize to Jack before dinner. At which point he didn’t care anymore, having moved on to the crucial task of making sure his various food groups didn’t touch.

So even though I want to physically toss Gertie out of my room, I don’t. Because actually it’s not my room. It’s
our
room—I share it with Gertie and P.J., my sisters. Jack and Marcus are down the hall. Francis still sleeps in my parents’ room in the bassinet.

“Here,” I say to Gertie, getting up and pulling my old Mr. Potato Head down from the high shelf in the closet. Her brown eyes widen. I rarely let her touch Mr. Potato Head. Grandpa Cole gave him to me, and all the pieces are there and the box is still in good shape. Mr. Potato Head has sentimental value, so he’s one of the few things I’m not forced to share. “You have to play with this in here. Sit on the bed and be quiet, okay? It’s almost lights-out.”

She nods, probably afraid that if she says anything else I’ll change my mind.

I get back to the e-mail.

This is what I want to write:

Dear EB,

(Already I’m calling her Ebb in my head, even though I’m sure that what she means by EB is Eee Bee.)

I requested a single. All I’ve wanted for the last decade is a room of my own. Some privacy. A place to be alone with my thoughts where they are not constantly interrupted by someone else making some kind of racket, or even someone else just quietly trying to exist in the same space as me. When I got the full scholarship I knew it would probably be pressing my luck to ask for a single, but the box was there to check so I checked it. A “roomie” is really not what I had in mind. Really not what I had in mind at all.

Of course, I don’t write any of that. It’s not Ebb’s fault my parents wanted a big family.

Dear EB,

Hey. I hadn’t really thought about appliances.

(Where am I supposed to get the money for this stuff? My magic money tree? I can probably find a decent microwave at Goodwill if I look every couple of days. Mini-fridges are harder to come by.)

Why don’t you do the fridge part and I’ll take care of the microwave.

San Francisco is okay. We live in a foggy neighborhood on the south side of the park so it’s not like we have a view of Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars going by or anything. Only the smelly old Muni trains.

I reread her e-mail. I feel as though it would be polite to acknowledge what she said about her dad, or about New Jersey, or ask a question, or something, but P.J. runs in and lunges for Mr. Potato Head so I wrap it up.

Nice to meet you.

Lauren Cole

“
’Tato head!
” P.J. shrieks. I scan the e-mail one more time and I know it looks kind of rudely abrupt, but I have to save Mr. Potato Head. And anyway, I wanted a single.

I click Send, close my laptop, and put it up on the high shelf. Gertie lets out a dolphin-pitched death scream and when I turn around, P.J. has got one of Mr. P.’s ears and is about to run away with it. I grab her by the waist. She screams. Gertie screams.

If Mr. P.’s mouth were attached, he would probably scream, too.

TUESDAY, JUNE 25

NEW JERSEY

That’s it?
was what I thought when I first read Lauren’s e-mail late last night. And now that I’m reading it aloud to my friends, Justine twists her face into a grimace and says, “That’s it?” Even though the end of the school year was a little bit strained, Justine and I have been friends for so long that it sometimes feels like we can read each other’s minds.

I toss my phone down onto the beach blanket in front of me. “That’s all she wrote, as they say.”

Justine and Morgan—a newer friend of ours, mostly from senior year—are trying to get me on a strict early-morning beachgoing schedule between now and when I leave for Berkeley, so as to maximize surfing and time together. We’re coated in sunscreen and sitting in chairs under umbrellas, reading articles in shiny teen magazines about things like dorm decor and tips for living on your own for the first time, while Alex, Danny, and Mitch surf. Justine tosses her magazine onto our blanket before saying, “Maybe she was busy. You know. Dashed it off without thinking.”

I shoot her a look that says,
Come on
.

“Well, I tried.” She turns to face the water and I see a smile form at the corners of her mouth. “What’s her e-mail address, Ice Queen at condescending-mail-dot-com?”

Morgan lets out a chuckle but doesn’t look up from her mag.

I say, “
That’s
more like it,” and look back at the article I’ve been reading about the Top Ten Things to Pack for College. A pillow. Headphones. Flip-flops for the shower…

I wish I could pack a few friends.

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” Morgan holds her magazine out to me but I’m not ready to trade so she tosses hers onto the blanket, too. “You’ll find some super-dorky shrubbery major like yourself and you’ll barely be in your room anyway. You’ll be too busy planting bushes.”

“It’s not called shrubbery,” I say for the gazillionth time.

“You know she’s just messing with you.” Justine flashes a smile at Morgan, who returns it.

I let it go. But there’s a part of me that’s still annoyed that my friends don’t get it. That no one in the whole of Point Pleasant gets it, except for Tim at Beech Design—and even he looked at me like I had two heads when I walked up to him while he was working on the Schroeders’ backyard last summer and told him, with six-month-old Vivian Schroeder on my hip, that I wanted a job. He said he couldn’t pay me and I said I didn’t care—that I’d keep my babysitting job to make the money I needed. So he told me to come in the next morning to talk about hours. I’d been watching him and his small staff for weeks—carving up that yard and putting it back together again so that it felt like there were rooms outside, places worth being. I knew
I’d found my calling. I’ll be a paid full-time employee this summer starting Friday, and I still babysit for Vivian occasionally at night.

“I’ve never understood why you have to go all the way to California when there’s a great program at Rutgers,” Justine says. “Plus,
I’ll
be there.”

“We’ve been through this,” I say, thinking,
Yes, you’ll be there
, and Danny and Alex and everyone else we know, except for Morgan, who’ll be a short drive away at NJIT, and Mitch, who’s going to Seton Hall. “Too close to the mother ship.”

“So you say.” Justine gets up and grabs her board.

Morgan gets up, too. “Coming in?”

I haven’t surfed much so far this season—there’s no surfing during peak beach hours, which end up generally being when I’m free. And I’m not even sure I’m going to try to surf out in California, though my friends are all convinced that that is secretly part of the whole point of my going west. Bigger waves.

“In a minute,” I say, and they both turn and walk off toward the boys—their boyfriends and mine; Justine, much to my chagrin, likes to call us the six-pack. Then I pick up my phone and read the e-mail again, trying to decide if it really is sort of rude (like I actually thought there were cable cars on her street?) or just straightforward. I’m not sure. But I feel dumb for having told her that stuff about my dad. Justine always says she loves that I wear my heart on my sleeve, but I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put on a few layers when I leave for school. I guess I thought it’d be easier to get some of the weird stuff out over e-mail. That way, when this Lauren person and I settle in for our first night sharing a room and I say, “Oh, my dad’s gay”—when I’m forced to tell the whole story, like I inevitably
will be—maybe she’ll be a little bit prepared. I could do without the “no ways” and weirdly sympathetic “really?s” followed by those “not that there’s anything wrong with its.”

I honestly
don’t
think there’s anything wrong with it.

The wrong thing, let’s face it, was abandoning me.

I hit Reply and think for a minute about how to respond—whether to even bother—while watching Alex ride a pretty big wave for a good long while. I’m going to miss him and his wild salty hair and goofy laugh, but things have been tense lately so I’m not sure how much.

Lauren,
I type. And then I go back to the subject heading and delete the
Roomie!
bit—leaving only the
re:
and the
Hi
—because it seems dumb now. We’re clearly not going to be e-mail buds.

Mini-fridge it is
, I type, but what else is there to say?
Forgive me for blabbing about my dad? Would it kill you to ask a question, maybe get a little e-mail volley going? Do you eat Rice-A-Roni, “The San Francisco Treat,” like, every night?

I take a deep breath and write,
I’ll see you in August!
, then delete the exclamation mark and then put it back and delete it again a few times. I sign it
Elizabeth
.

“EB!” Alex is standing at the water’s edge. He cups a hand to his mouth when he yells, “Come on in!” and for a second, I close my eyes against the sun and see my mother in a black bandeau suit and me as a young girl in a polka-dot bikini—right here on the same beach—and we are happy and playing in the surf and then busy making sand castles and forts and then, later, knocking down those castles and forts and flying kites in the shapes of mermaids and bats and dragons.

That was all when she was happy.

That was all before.

I get up and grab my board and set out in Alex’s direction, suddenly very much hoping I didn’t send the exclamation mark but feeling pretty sure I did. A wave crashes behind Alex, right at his ankles, and he gets thrown off-balance and has to recover. I think,
I feel like that most of the time
, and when I reach him, I decide I’ll kiss him—right there on the beach with anyone watching who wants to—and see if it steadies me.

THURSDAY, JUNE 27

SAN FRANCISCO

I’m breaking down cardboard boxes behind the Financial District deli where I work, imagining a future job for myself that doesn’t involve mustard or mixing up five gallons of tuna salad at a time. Of course there’s my other job—filing and data entry for an insurance company—but it’s not much of an improvement, taking into account paper cuts and keyboard cramp.