Chasing Her

My first introduction to college was that everyone's parents cry in the parking lot and everyone pretends not to notice.

My dad wasn't really crying, you see. He was standing by the trunk of our car with his sunglasses on, even though it was cloudy, blinking a lot and telling me for the third time, "The mini-fridge cord is a little frayed, so watch it. I think it was worse because my mom cried in the car, but it was quiet so I wouldn't hear. And Gigi, my sister, 19 months older than me, and about 100% braver on everything, was carrying my desk lamp under one arm like it was a football, and yelling at a guy in a golf cart to get the hell out of the way because we were "trying to conduct an operation here.

I was standing on the curb outside Whitfield Hall with a textbook in my arms and I was trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person and not someone who was about to give a TED talk when he was having a panic attack.

This was fine. Everything was going to be alright.

I had repeated that sentence in my mind about 400 times since we crossed the state line and it had lost its meaning about 200 times ago, when it was just me mouthing, fine, fine, fine.

Gigi appeared beside me, as if reading my mind, which she did often, and said, "You've got this. She removed the box from my arms without my permission. The only rule is that you're not going to monologue about the Fibonacci sequence in the first ten minutes.

I have never mentioned the Fibonacci sequence without being asked.

“You brought it up at Thanksgiving.”

“Uncle Mo asked, what i was studying?”

He asked you what class you were taking, and you explained recursive functions for eleven minutes, and I timed it. She shifted the box on her hip and began to walk backward up the trail so she could continue to stare at me, which was very much on brand for a woman who had never been concerned with tripping on anything in her life. I'm just saying. Normal human words. ‘Hi, I'm Nikki.’ That's it. That's the whole sentence.

I said, “Hi, I'm Nikki,” and it was so stiff it made Gigi laugh.

The delivery is in progress.

Whitfield Hall smelled like fresh paint, too many bodies, and someone's strawberry body spray, and the stairwell was a mess of duffel bags and yelling and one kid's TV that had been stuck sideways in a doorway for what seemed like the first hour of college. I watched the numbers above each door, 214, 216, 218, and I felt that thing that my heart does, the climbing thing, the stupid climbing thing, the closer I got to 220, the more it climbed,like my body already knew that whoever was behind that door was about to become a fixed variable in my life for the next nine months, and my body has never liked fixed variables it didn't choose. 

A shoe was used to propped open the door.

“Okay,” I whispered, mostly to myself, and pushed it further.

The girl inside was already unpacking for a hundred times, physically and emotionally posters half-taped to the wall, a comforter that somehow fit perfectly in the twenty minutes she'd been in the room alone, an entire personality already established. When the door creaked, she turned around and I registered pretty, before I registered anything else, dark hair in a claw clip, gold hoops, the kind of easy put-together-ness that made me realize that I had not brushed my hair after the six-hour drive, and that I was wearing my dad's old college T-shirt.

“Oh my god, hi,” she said, as if we knew each other, as if I was someone she had been waiting for. "You're Nikki, right? I was reading the door assignment sheet and I've been wanting to know if you were a morning person or not, because I'm not, I need to know that right away for the peace of this room.

I— I opened my mouth and for one terrible moment nothing came out. You've got this. Normal human words. Hi, I'm Nikki. Not a morning person. I mean — I can function. Before ten. If I have to.

She pressed her hand to her chest as though I had taken away a great weight from her, "Thank god," she said. Hi, I'm Danielle. If you snore, we're going to have to talk about it, otherwise I already love you, this room has good energy.

Gigi placed the box behind me, just inside the door, with a thud and extended her hand toward Danielle as if she were negotiating a business deal. “Gigi. Older sister, professional worrier, I'll be FaceTiming you constantly for at least the first month, so prepare to see my face at random times.”

“Noted and respected,” Danielle said solemnly, shaking her hand, and in less than a minute, my sister and my new roommate had become an alliance that, apparently, would rule the rest of my freshman year. There was something that released in my chest, but it was just a little. Perhaps half a degree or so. It wasn't nothing.

---

The next two hours were spent unloading, while my parents made increasingly emotional trips up and down the stairs with boxes, and Danielle narrated her entire life story unprompted, which honestly took the pressure off me completely, because all I had to do was nod and say wait, really? at appropriate intervals. 

She majored in marketing. She was three hours away, which she said was "far enough to be independent, close enough that my mom can't show up unannounced, in theory. She had a color-coded system for organizing her side of the closet that she explained with the seriousness of someone defending a thesis. She asked me one question that made my stomach drop for a second, “What about you, what's your major, what's your deal?” Before I remembered that deal was just Danielle-speak for tell me things, not an actual attack.

“Computer science,” I replied. I like building things. Systems. Things that make sense if you follow the logic far enough.

Oh so you're smart smart, okay, I'm going to need you to help me with my laptop throughout the year, I hope you're ready.

"I can do that."

“See this is why the universe has placed us in a room together,” She held up a picture frame, thinking about where it should be placed, tilting her head at the wall, as if it had an opinion."Okay, real talk, are you nervous? You have very nervous energy. Not in a bad way. In a I don't know, in a 'about to take a test she definitely studied for but is still scared of' way."

I laughed, like really laughed, I was surprised. "That's extremely accurate."

I'm nervous too, she said, more quietly, for half a second, she dropped the performance which made me like her instantly and completely. "Everyone here already looks like they know each other. Have you noticed that? Like everyone already has a group.

I had noticed that. I'd noticed it in the parking lot, in the stairwell, in the boy across the hall who already had four people in his room laughing at something. After eighteen years of standing on the outside looking in on conversations, I had a very sensitive radar for rooms that I didn't belong in, and it had been sounding off since we crossed the state line.

 "I noticed," I said.

"Well." Danielle used a piece of putty to attach the picture frame to the wall, took a step back, realized it was crooked, and began again. Well, we'll just have to become somebody's group, then, give it a week, I have a good feeling about this.

I didn't say anything, but I put that in my pocket a good feeling. If the week was a bit tougher than she bargained for, something to look back on later.

---

My parents left about 6:00, about 40 minutes after I had reorganised everything I'd organised and my father had checked the door lock four times because it might just suddenly fail between now and dinner. Gigi was the last to hug me, in the parking lot, so tight I felt it in my ribs.

You are going to be very good at this," she said in my hair. I know you don't feel it right now, but you are. You have a whole life about to happen in there and it's going to be good, I can feel it.

You sound like Danielle!

Listen to Danielle, Danielle sounds smart. She retracted, gripped my face in two hands like she was looking for a fever, the way she'd done since we were kids, “If it's too much, call me any hour, i’m serious, Niks”.

"I will."

“And don't hide in the room , promise me, I know what you do when it gets loud in your head, don't do the thing where you disappear”.

I promised, because it was easier than explaining that I already felt the loudness beginning, low and steady, somewhere behind my sternum, the particular static of being someplace new and unmapped, where I didn't yet know which hallways were safe, and which people would be kind, and which version of myself I was even supposed to be. I had worked out a long time ago how to not let that static appear on my face. I was good at it. Unfortunately, one of my more developed skills was it.

I watched the car leave the lot until I couldn't see it anymore, then I stood there for a second longer than I needed to, because when I turned around, this was my life now. This building. This room. This was an untouched version of me.

I then turned around and went to find out.

---

Danielle wanted to explore, which was how we ended up in the courtyard between Whitfield and the dining hall around eight that night, eating vending machine snacks because neither of us had figured out the meal plan yet, watching the sun do something soft and orange over the science building.

That was where I first saw him.

I'm being honest about this because I believe it's important, later, that this began like any other story I've ever rolled my eyes at: a boy, across a courtyard, laughing at something with his head tipped back, and something in my chest doing a little, un-permitted flipping before my brain could even catch up enough to have an opinion on it.

He wasn't doing anything special. This was the part that was almost annoying. He was just sitting on the low wall by the fountain with another guy, both of them in the kind of expensive-looking clothes that didn't look expensive at all, and he said something that made the guy next to him almost fall backward laughing, and then he laughed, this huge, unselfconscious laugh, as if he had never once in his life thought about the way his laugh sounded to other people.

“Okay, don't look now,” Danielle whispered, in the same tone that means you will look now, “but that might be the best man I've seen since we got here, and we've been here nine hours.”

I looked. I couldn't help it. Dark hair, jaw you could probably use as a protractor, the kind of easy, settled-into-his-own-body posture that some people just have and some people, like me, spend a lifetime faking. Even from across the courtyard I could tell he was the kind of handsome that wasn't up for debate. Objective. Measurable. A known quantity.

Even though it was clear which one, I said, "Which one?

"Nikki."

"What? I want to know what you mean.

“Obviously the one who never has a bad hair day in his life.” Danielle straightened up a bit, but neither of them were looking our way. "I need to know his name. I need to know his whole life story. I want to know if he is single or taken or one of those guys who is 'not looking for anything serious right now' which is code for

For ‘taken, but not by you, specifically’, I finished, and Danielle looked at me like, ‘What did you just say?

Yes, that's why we're going to be best friends, you understand.

I laughed, but I watched him for a second longer than I wanted to, like he was leaning back on his hands, and the guy beside him was trying to get his water bottle, and he was holding it just out of reach, like it was a reflex he had all his life. It was like it was too easy to watch a person. As if he were designed, in particular, for the eyes.

Not my type, I said to myself firmly, just as you say things to yourself that you don't quite believe. It's a thing guys who look like that know. And guys who know it are always, always trouble.

For the record, I was correct. I want to make it clear right now. I was correct, and it didn't matter at all.

“Come on,” Danielle said, standing up and brushing crumbs off her leggings, as if she didn't care that we were ogling strangers like a nature documentary. Let's see where our first class is tomorrow before I lose my mind on him. This campus isn't that big. I think we'll see him again sometime later in the day, Fountain Boy.

That was correct as well.

I didn't know yet how right. I didn't know that in three days I'd learn his name was Andre, or that the guy trying to steal his water bottle was named Sebastian, or that I'd spend the better part of the next four years of my life doing this exact thing watching him from a slight distance, telling myself it was nothing, being wrong about it in ways I couldn't yet imagine.

But on that first night, I knew only a boy who laughed by a fountain, and the little, unspoken flip in my chest, and the quiet of a dorm room that was not home yet, but perhaps someday would be.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of Danielle still talking to herself in the bed across the room, about orientation, whether to join a club, Fountain Boy's jawline, one more time, for good measure, and for the first time since we crossed the state line, the static behind my sternum went silent.

Not gone. Just quiet.

I figured that was a start.