Wildalone (2 page)

We followed several secluded corridors, then Klaus unlocked a door and wheeled my suitcases in. “It's a bit dark right now. But don't worry, you'll get a lot of light during the day. Your room overlooks the golf course.”

On the wall across from us, a window reached almost to the floor. I opened it and inhaled the dark air—still humid, yet already waking the lungs with the first fresh touches of night. Sounds invaded the room: a faint rustle of wind in leaves, the echo of sticks broken by invisible feet, syncopated calls of a nightbird. And water, whispering things into the black sky.

Stepping out on the grass took me only a second.

“Technically, you aren't supposed to use it as a door.” Klaus showed me
a sticker on the glass that warned this was not an egress. “And I would try to stay off the golf course; it's not school property. You may also want to lock the window latch. Even when you're home.”

Home.
I looked at the dorm room that had the impossible task of replacing my home: it held nothing but a few pieces of furniture, passed down by the ghosts who inhabited it briefly each year. Mute carpet. Crippled ceiling. Pale cinder blocks, desperate to mimic bricks but doomed to the anonymous vibe of a motel. It was the smallest room I had ever seen.

“I have to say it's a bit strange.” Klaus leaned against the chair while I pushed my luggage into a corner. “Lucky for you, but strange.”

“What, that one can reach everything in this room just by standing in the middle?”

“No.” He smiled politely, and I realized how spoiled my own joke had made me sound. “That they would let you live all by yourself.”

“They?”

“The powers that be in Admissions.”

I turned around and looked at him. How much did this guy know? Was he testing me? Hinting at things that were supposed to be long forgotten yet still lurked somewhere, in an old Princeton file, pointing to me as the last person who should be left all by herself on this campus?

I kept searching his face for clues. “Why wouldn't they let me?”

“Because most of the first-years have roommates.” He smiled again—a vacant smile that assured me he knew nothing. “The foreign students especially. We are paired up with Americans, to ease the transition.”

“I think I'd rather transition solo.”

“You say that now, but the place will get to you, trust me. This isn't some big European city like the one you come from; it's the middle of New Jersey. Fields, forests, and factories. You'll be bored out of your mind.”

“From what I hear about Princeton, I'll be too busy to worry if I'm bored or not.”

“That's exactly the problem. Too much solo time with the books can drive anyone crazy.”

“Not someone from the Balkans. We are crazy already.”

He struggled for what to say next, careful not to risk crossing the line at which ethnic stereotypes stopped being funny. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that I had lived my entire life around people who said things to your face, no filter needed. But I followed his example and kept my thoughts to myself, trying to imagine four years of this. Of small talk with strangers.

“Speaking of expatriates, there should be a list in your welcome package.”

Our eyes met over a large envelope he had given me earlier. It wasn't hard to guess what would be on that list: names of other Bulgarians who were attending Princeton. Or who already had. The only question was how far back in time the powers that be had decided to go.

I rummaged through the stack of sheets and found the list, all the way at the bottom.

“You should be proud; few countries come even close. A Bulgarian or two every year—that's quite something.”

I scanned the names while he spoke. Twenty or so, each with an e-mail address and a phone number. Next to them—the class years, starting from 1994 (the first Bulgarian to graduate from Princeton after the fall of Communism). It was an impressive list, yes. But Klaus was wrong about one thing: there hadn't been a student every year. The number missing in that column was 1996.

“It makes sense that there are so many of you, actually. The ‘YES' man is said to have been very impressed with Bulgarians.”

“The what man?”

“The ‘YES' man. Dean Fred.”

I still had no idea whom he was talking about.

“Fred Hargadon, Princeton's dean of admissions. They say he owns the unofficial trademark to that ‘YES' on the letter.”

It was the one acceptance letter I would never forget, the only one that didn't start with “
We are pleased to inform you
. . .”—just a simple “
YES!”

“I don't recall seeing his name on it.”

“Because he left in 2003. Used to handpick each student here for many
years, knew everyone by name. Rumor has it his resignation brought the whole school down in mourning.”

It might have. But for me that resignation had been perfectly timed. If the man who remembered names so well had stayed at his job only four more years, my application to Princeton would have had a very different fate.

After Klaus finally left, a door clicked shut in the hallway behind him. Then everything settled back into silence: Forbes was deserted. For now, I was probably the only living soul in the place, summoned a week early for preorientation with a few other foreign students elsewhere on campus.

I pulled a set of sheets out of my suitcase and began to make the bed, trying not to look over at the page whose content was supposed to make me proud. “Don't hesitate to call any of them; they'll be more than happy to talk to you,” Klaus had said about the names in that column. But he didn't know that the only person I wanted to call was not on the list, someone from the class of 1996 who had never made it to graduation but who, just like the others, had been handpicked by the “YES” man—back in 1992.

Later that year, a tragedy had quietly unfolded on the dark hills of this same college campus, leaving no ripple, no trace, every detail meticulously locked into the safe vaults of things past. Yet the secret had remained hidden, deep inside those hills. Stubborn and unconcerned with time, it had waited patiently—knowing, all along, that one day it would be brought back to life.

THE DAYS BEGAN TO VANISH
into one another with mechanical, hurried precision. Unpack. Settle in. Set up phone account. E-mail account. Bank account. Cafeteria plan. Memorize campus geography. Dash to events. Learn names, link them to faces. Connect. Socialize. Barely checked off, each task fueled the next as if a giant clockwork had been set in motion, requiring every tooth on every wheel to fall, quickly and elegantly, into place.

I tried to keep up with all this, with each detail that makes a new place feel unmistakably foreign. Nodding for yes and shaking my head for no—the opposite of what I was used to. Waiting for a green light to cross the street and having to remind myself, at the white flash, that it wasn't the color but
the image that counted. And food, unlimited quantities of food everywhere. It was easy to pile up too much on my plate, or to pick the wrong thing and then feel guilty for wasting it. Not to mention the tricky foods, the ones that only looked familiar but weren't: feta cheese turning out to be tofu, cilantro disguised as parsley. No matter how odious the taste, I couldn't just spit it out in front of everyone, now could I?

But worst of all were the mornings. For a while, I woke up convinced I had heard my mother's voice from the kitchen. Then one day the sound of the alarm carried nothing except its own voice, and it hit me for the first time: the distance from home and the panic that comes with it.

When the word
America
had first dropped from my lips the previous summer, my parents warned me not to even think about it—without an explanation, or a hint that their voices hid much more than fear of sending an only child away from home. We argued for months. But to study abroad had become my dream, and they gave up once I threatened not to apply to college if they forced me to stay in Bulgaria.

That fall I took exams, wrote essays, filled out financial aid forms—all my friends were doing it. Lucky to have been admitted to the most elite high school in the country, we had spent years studying English, being taught in English, virtually drowned in English from the moment we entered the classroom. And with it came a craving for the real thing, for a life in that magnetic continent across the ocean where not just the language but everything else we saw on TV and read about in books would become ours—real, tangible, natural like breathing.

Now I was already here. But nothing felt natural about it, and to even catch my breath seemed a luxury. Within a week of arriving at Princeton, I was drained—from lack of sleep, from stress and the incredible speed of everything. Then, just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, they did.

“Theodora Slavin, yes? Pleased to meet you, very pleased—our new piano prodigy who is loaded with talent like a machine gun. I don't envy anyone who stands in your way.”

Guns were an odd topic for a welcome reception at the music department, and the man who brought them up (blue velvet jacket, unruly hair, the
unshaven charm of a boy refusing to grow up even in his fifties) didn't exactly fit my idea of faculty. Yet he knew about my piano background and had to have seen my file, so I ran with his metaphor:

“Is Princeton really a battlefield?”

“Yes, and not only Princeton. But don't worry, you're uncovering the rules of combat as we speak. My job is to make sure you strike with every shot. Your job”—he winked as if to soften the impact—“is to resist the urge to do the opposite of what I tell you.”

I still couldn't figure out who he was, but luckily he reached out for a handshake. “Nathan Wylie, your music adviser. Do we call you Theodora, or is there a shorter version?”

“Just Thea. Pleased to meet you too. Although I believe I am assigned to Professor Donnelly.”

“Correct. Sylvia is your go-to for all things academic; she can propel you at school better than anyone. But in terms of stage track record, we figured you'd need a villain more than a fairy godmother. By the way, here she is—”

He waved a woman over just as she was stepping through the door. Even if the halo of short brunette curls and the red lipstick might have fooled you from a distance, everything else about Sylvia Donnelly—the composure of her heavy walk, the inquisitive eyes that scanned the crowd without hurry, the strain of authority in the air while she waited for one of us to speak first—made it clear that she had been teaching much longer than Wylie, possibly even longer than any other professor in the room.

He introduced us and turned to her. “Perfect timing, by the way. I was just telling Thea that you and I have agreed to share custody.”

“Then it bodes well for us that she isn't running for the exit already. I can imagine what other things you must have told her.” After a thorough look at me, the scrutiny in her eyes softened up. “Tell me, dear, how has it been so far?”

We started chatting about the trip from Bulgaria and my first impressions of life on campus. Wylie had excused himself to take a phone call.

“Try not to be intimidated by Nate. His sense of humor is peculiar, but also quite refreshing once you get used to it.”

“It doesn't bother me.”

“Good. That's the one ally you can't afford to lose.”

“Because he is my adviser?”

“That too. But he also happens to be department chair. Which means he can align things for you, so long as—”

The rest was lost. Wylie had come back and his face promised nothing but bad news. “They've postponed the Paderewski concert; Moravec is ill. Francis needs to fill the gap right away and asked for the usual: a showcase of students across the department. I told him no way. I'm sick of potpourri.”

“Of course you are; so is everyone else. But the concert is this week. We'll never find a replacement.”

“Then we need to come up with an alternative by tomorrow morning.” He fixed me with his eyes, as if remembering only now that I was still there. “Actually, I think I just did. What if we opened the season with a shocker? Say, by showing off one of our newest students?”

I had no idea how to react. Could he possibly mean me? There had been a mention, in a handout somewhere, about Princeton's Paderewski Memorial Concert—an annual affair honoring the Polish pianist and politician. That year's concert, by the famous Czech pianist Moravec, was supposed to be on Friday and I had planned on going. Now Wylie seemed to think I should be the one onstage.

Donnelly's reaction took a few seconds: “You aren't serious, right?”

“Why not? We can afford a risk, for once.”

“This isn't risky, Nate. It's reckless. Thea is only a freshman; we can't put her through a solo recital yet.”

“A freshman who looks better on paper than many of our seniors combined. And you've heard her demo; you know what she can do.”

The “demo” was a recording I had submitted as part of my college application; it was never meant to outlive the admission process. Practicing for it had taken months, and now they expected the same performance on less than a week's notice. There was no way.
A solo recital at Princeton.
It was an unbelievable opportunity, a chance I wouldn't have dreamed of. But it could also turn into a grand fiasco. Who cared how I looked on paper? So far,
everything in America was proving much harder than I had imagined. Even my English—impeccable on transcript—was already failing me miserably. For years, I had been cramming my brain with rules of grammar, idioms, and Latin word roots; I had read Shakespeare in the original and scored higher on the SAT than Princeton's admission average. But a chat with native speakers had nothing to do with the intricacies of linguistics. It felt like watching champions play table tennis while you stood on the side, forced to swallow Ping-Pong balls.