“You okay, honey?” Laura asked.
“Definitely.” Show no weakness, she told herself.
Cady opened the door to an empty room. It had a funny layout, the sort that comes from retrofitting a larger space to become multiple rooms; the common room was long and narrow, with an off-center window on one end and the two bedrooms off the side. She crossed to the window and looked out.
“How’s the view?” Laura asked, joining her.
“That’s Grays over there, that was Eric’s freshman dorm. I remember from when we moved him in.”
“How does that make you feel?” Laura asked, sounding like a therapist.
“Good, close to him, in a way.” Cady was surprised to hear the truth coming out of her mouth. “Is that weird?”
“No, it’s nice to remember him.” Laura put a hand on her arm. “Just keep in mind, life is for the living.”
Cady nodded. She knew it was a common saying, but it sounded so harsh to her ears now. Life was for Eric, too, even if he’d lost sight of that. Maybe they’d lost sight of him.
There was a knock at the door, and Laura went to let Cady’s father in. “Is it just you?” he asked, and for a split second, Cady didn’t know what he meant. She flashed ahead to a lifetime of not being enough for her parents. Just you?
He set the box down with a grunt. “Are you the first to arrive?”
“Yeah. We’re first.” Cady readjusted the duffel bag in her arms, still holding it close to her chest. “I know we have more to get from the van, but I want to pick my room before anyone else gets here. Do you mind if I unpack a little to claim my space? I promise I’ll be right down.” It was a lie, one of Cady’s two roommates had already requested the single room over the summer, leaving her with the double.
Laura waved her hand. “Of course, call dibs.”
“Don’t be long. We have to move the car,” her father said.
Cady watched them leave and waited a few beats to be sure. Then she darted into the larger bedroom and dumped the green duffel on a bare mattress. She unzipped it and dug under the layer of bras and panties, the final Dad-barrier, to uncover the two items she couldn’t let her family see. She’d taken them from the box of personal effects her family had received from Harvard after Eric’s death. They’d kept the box in his bedroom at home, but Cady had secretly visited it so often, she had its contents memorized. Most was junk, he’d gotten so messy toward the end, but these two items spoke to her more than the others. As souvenirs or as protective talismans, she needed these relics close to her, especially here.
The first was sentimental: Eric’s rumpled gray Harvard hoodie. She lifted it to her face; it still smelled like him, a blend of fresh soap and warm toast. Her parents might’ve given her this if she’d asked for it, but she couldn’t risk their thinking she was emotionally fragile, they’d barely let her come here as it was. Around them, Cady had to hide that crumbly feeling whenever it threatened the corners of her mouth or crept up the front of her throat, and Eric’s scent triggered it. But sometimes she needed that feeling, liked it even, to release the pressure. She hugged the sweatshirt to her chest before pushing it to the back of the bottom drawer of one of the dressers.
The second buried item was a clue: a blue spiral-bound notebook labeled lab notes at the top. Lab notes were as close as Eric would’ve ever come to keeping a journal, so it was the closest she could get to a window into his mind. Cady opened it, flipping through pages soft with wear. She ran her fingers over her brother’s familiar handwriting, the ballpoint-embossed lettering speaking to her heart like Braille. The earlier pages were vintage Eric: organized and neat, with logical headings and experimental diagrams, tidy as a textbook. As she flipped farther ahead, however, the notes grew more disorganized and illegible; the math devolved into wobbly columns of numbers and slanted, incomplete equations. These scribblings didn’t look like advanced physics, they looked like nonsense. Toward the end, the commentary appeared unrelated to the calculations: dates, times, initials—she noted most often “M”—and jottings of complaints or observations about unnamed people’s behavior, likely those deemed suspicious. His paranoia had taken over by then. Cady hid the notebook in the same drawer as the sweatshirt. She would look more closely at it later, when she felt stronger.
With those items safely out of sight, she could relax enough to get a look at her new room. She didn’t mind having a bunkmate—sharing a room was such a normal misfortune, she found it comforting—and the double was the corner bedroom, large and sunny. She sidled around the haphazard arrangement of metal bunk beds, desks, dressers, and bookshelves. The boxy, light wood modular furniture looked as if it had been built in the nineties; the desks bore decades of pen marks, the dressers were dinged at every corner. She could smell the fresh paint of the white walls, and Cady stuck her fingernail into a soft glob, wondering how many lives in this room had been painted over. Judging by the sloping hardwood floors, the deep windowsills, and the massive trees outside, she guessed about a century’s worth. Someone was moving into Eric’s old room in Leverett Tower right now, probably finding it as clean and white as this one; they wouldn’t know what had happened in it just last year. Cady wasn’t here to paint over anything. She was here to chip away.
The bedroom window was open, and Cady pressed her fingertips to the screen, but it didn’t give. Eric had removed the screws from his window screen in advance, the police found them and the screwdriver tucked neatly in his desk drawer, that was how they knew it wasn’t an accident. Though she supposed that no one really thought it was an accident.
Cady looked out at the busy Yard below. Every new student was acting happy, but no one was at ease. There was all the normal first-day-of-college stuff, living away from home, meeting roommates, and the rest, but Harvard was more than a school. It was validation. It was history. It was expectation. The place crackled with potential energy. She could see the crowd around the John Harvard statue, a reminder that the college was founded in 1636, before the country itself. The legacy of the past and the onus of the future freighted the present moment, like time collapsing inward. It was saying, This is the launch pad for your extraordinary future, if only you don’t blow it. Behind the smiles and hugs and introductions, the self-doubt: Am I smart enough, talented enough, driven enough to deserve my place here? Will I make good on this golden ticket, or will I crack under the pressure? They were questions for every student here, but only Cady knew the stakes: If I crack, will I survive?
Only the parents seemed unequivocally happy, basking in the proof of their parenting job well done, a sharp contrast to the pall over Cady’s family. She thought of her mother with a twinge; Cady missed her today, but didn’t blame her for not coming. She knew how her going to Harvard so soon after Eric’s death looked from the outside: bizarre, callous, unhealthy, morbid. And the last thing she wanted to do was hurt her parents. They had been through too much, she knew that. But she wished they could see she had her reasons.