“I thought we weren’t allowed to have scissors here.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve read the school handbook. Your dad told me you love to read.” She taps her pen against her notepad. “What’s your favorite novel?”
“Moby-Dick.”
“Wow. That’s a big one.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “Are you just saying that to impress me?”
“Why would I try to impress you when I don’t give a shit about you?”
My insult glances off her without so much as a twitch.
“What do you like best about Moby-Dick?”
“Have you read it?”
“Nah. I spent my school years reading nothing but dead white men. Now I read what I want.”
“Well, Melville was a genius. He definitely had some opinions on whiteness, that’s for sure.”
“Is that so?”
I’m expecting her to test me now, to ask me what some of those opinions were so that I can launch into a long disquisition about the whiteness of the whale that will leave her feeling both impressed and intellectually inferior, but instead she pivots the conversation completely.
“You ever read any Native lit? Louise Erdrich? Tommy Orange? Layli Long Soldier? Joy Harjo?”
I don’t answer her. I won’t give her the satisfaction of knowing that I haven’t read those authors. If she thinks that makes me ignorant, that’s her business.
“We have a wonderful little library here on campus, just behind Conifer House. Have you gotten the chance to check it out yet?”
“You mean between group chat and chores and classes and mandatory lights-out at nine o’clock? No, I haven’t.”
“Well, the next time you do get some free time, I think you’d like it there. It’s always unlocked, even at night—like a church. It’s the only place on campus, other than the walking trails, that you can go without permission during designated constructive relaxation hours.”
This interests me—slightly—but does this woman really expect me to demonstrate excitement about the prospect of being allowed to go sit by myself in a library? Me, who was once the proud owner of a fake ID so authentic it had worked everywhere, not just the skeevy strip mall liquor stores but in Whole fucking Foods itself? Is this how pathetic my life has now become? So instead I just shrug and stare out the window at the moving stream.
It isn’t until forty minutes later, when I’m walking out of our session, the main two topics of which are literature and lobotomies, that I realize Vivian didn’t ask me one question about my dad or Alanna; Xander or my other boyfriends; my failing grades or my drinking or drugging or what happened to my mother. I wonder whether she’s trying to pull some Good Will Hunting shit on me, or whether she’s just dumb. I decide it’s the latter. Who cares if she’s got a PhD diploma from some fancy East Coast school hanging on her wall? I would easily be able to get into any of those Ivy League colleges, too—if I could just get the chance to go back to freshman year and do everything all over again, differently.
12
ALL MY CLASSES HERE except English are independent studies. This means that you go into a classroom and sit in front of a computer that’s programmed to block any website that isn’t a part of your personally tailored distance-learning curriculum. Math is the only period of the day that all the girls from my dorm, Birchwood House, are together, so it’s a no-brainer as to where I’m going to sit.
On Friday, the last day of my first week, Vera and I are doing more gossiping than problem-solving while across the room Ms. Gina squints at the master computer, pretending like she’s checking our work when really we can all tell she’s just scrolling through social media.
“So you’re from Manhattan,” I say to her. “Does that mean you’re rich?”
“Oh, you mean you haven’t heard my joke yet?”
“Uh—no?”
“What’s the difference between a troubled teen and an at-risk youth?”
“No clue.”
“Money.” She laughs, and submits a wrong answer on her precalc exercise. The computer bloops at her, and she gives it the finger.
“But seriously, how could my family afford to put me up at this place for two years and counting if I wasn’t disgustingly loaded? It’s kind of embarrassing, actually. I have so much privilege that if I tried to check it, it would take up the whole bottom of the airplane. My dad comes from Bahraini oil royalty. And my mom’s your prototypical Connecticut WASP. Her great-grandmother was British. Like the upper-crusty kind. Here, look.” She leans down and reaches into the clear front pocket of her backpack. She hands me an antique-looking pocket watch, with the clock face on one side and a compass on the other. It looks like it’s made of solid gold, and it’s inlaid with all sorts of swirling floral designs.
“This was hers. Both she and it survived the sinking of the Titanic.”
“Damn.” I turn the watch over in my hands. It’s as heavy and cool as a stone freshly scooped from the ocean. “So she was one of the few to make it onto an escape boat?”
“Are you kidding me? Of course Imogen Swift got a spot on an escape boat. She and her buds were draped in fur blankets and served champagne while all around them, the peasants thrashed and froze in the North Atlantic.”
“Ladies,” calls Ms. Gina, her eyes flicking up from what I can only presume is some sort of cat meme, “it better be exponential functions you two are discussing.”
“I’m just showing her the formula for growth and decay,” I answer, pretending to type something on Vera’s keyboard. “You see, Vera,” I say loudly, “y = a(1–r) to the x power.”
Ms. Gina, who I can already tell is lazy and doesn’t actually care what we’re doing as long as we do it quietly, especially on a Friday, returns to her scrolling.
“I do take some consolation in the fact that not dying on the Titanic seemed to really fuck my great-great-grandma Imogen up,” Vera continues at a lowered volume. “She wasn’t totally soulless apparently. She made it to New York and married some equally aristocratic dude when she got there, but for the rest of her life she suffered from ‘nervous fits,’ as they called them back then. Which is probably as good an explanation as any of how I inherited my issues. They were passed down to me from some corset-wearing snob sipping her bubbly and bobbing along in the ocean while all around her, drowning Irish children used their last breaths to scream for their mothers.”
I consider this for a moment as I submit my own answer to a word problem.
“So what are you saying? That trauma is hereditary?”
“Of course it is! Living through extreme guilt or trauma: that shit alters you on a cellular level. It can be suffered by our ancestors and then bleed down into us, as hereditary as hammertoe or heart disease.”
“And that,” Trin chimes in, “is just another reason why the descendants of slaves should be entitled to reparations.”
“What are reparations?”
“Shut up, Madison,” we all yell in unison, followed by an explosion of laughter, for which we are all punished with an extra half hour of homework.