"Hockey players," the tall blond began as she grabbed the bottom of her blue cotton t-shirt and flipped it over her head, "aren't scared of shit!"
Then she kicked off the rest of her clothes and jumped. Elena and half of the other incoming freshman screamed, running over to the precipice to look over the ledge. The blond girl flailed her arms and legs out for half the fall before straightening to cut through the water's surface like a dagger.
Elena let out a gasp when the girl finally surfaced, unscathed by the rock formations that jutted out around her splash site. She flipped the bird to four male swimmers who had been taunting her from the ledge. She backstroked towards the near shore of the lake, apathetic to the fact that her tits and bush were showing to the fifty or so people who gathered to watch. Elena didn't understand why the girl had gotten into such an argument with the guys from the swim team, but she had clearly won. None of the swimmers followed her lead--in fact, they all retreated inside to the cafeteria after the jump.
One-by-one, Elena and her group stepped away from the precipice and walked back to the tables where they had been eating lunch. It was still summer, a good five weeks before the end of vacation. They were on campus for a weekend to get a preview of the dorms (the official program was called "The Great Escape") where they would be living this fall. The various athletic teams they'd seen perusing the cafeterias and using the shared dorm facilities were training during the off-season.
The cliff diving stunt became the most talked-about event of the weekend. It was re-told every time someone from the program ran into someone who hadn't been there to witness it. It was mentioned in almost every conversation they had whilst out on the town--and they did go out a lot: Elena found that this was the first opportunity for most of her companions to escape their parents' spheres of influence.
Elena made jokes about it, poked fun at the swimmers and the blond alike with the scathing sarcasm she'd learned to protect herself with from an early age. Despite the laughs, the image of the blond backstroking through the water stuck with her. On Sunday, she made some excuses to her new friends about wanting to see biology labs and history lecture halls and facilities for a couple other majors she wasn't studying. Elena wandered the entire campus. She didn't run into the blond girl.
In all, it was a fun and informative weekend. When it ended, she boarded the bus back to St. Paul to catch a midnight flight home. All the tours and all the people she met confirmed for her that she had made the right choice. Allenbach Lakeside University seemed like a truly odd selection for a reasonably accomplished Angeleno like Elena. Her grades gave her the pick of the Cal States and her demographics gave her a good shot at the mid to upper-tier University of California campuses.
Instead, she had chosen a near-unknown private school halfway across the country. No one would know her. No one would follow her. She couldn't explain why she put such a premium on that (she was a shy girl, short with her words) but it just seemed right that she start things completely new after high school. Make new friends, meet new people.
* * * * *
Elena took the Greyhound to St. Paul to claim her dorm room about two weeks before school started. The trip took two days. A flight would have been much faster and more convenient but it was significantly more expensive. It would have been cheaper if mom had given her money to book the ticket ahead of time--but such was life.
She lived with mom. Mom had fed her and clothed her, brought her to school, made her go to church--but mom was always broke. Dad was rarely at his house. He was constantly busy with his work life, living abroad for months at a time, helping new branches open overseas.
His checks filled in the gaps left behind by financial aid--at least, most of them, anyway. His most recent check came in late (some snafu with PayPal, he said; Elena didn't believe him, she'd never had a problem with PayPal before) and cost her her slot for the reserved rooms in the freshman building. Now, instead of rooming with Carla, a nice Minneapolis girl she'd met during the Great Escape weekend, she would be randomly assigned a domicile.
She followed the poorly printed out map of the dorms, and, with some help from the Mexican groundskeeper, found the entrance to building sixteen wedged between the gym and the pool. Three girls exited around the same time she entered--their headbands, track gear and duffel bags gave her a good idea of exactly which dorm she had placed in. She suddenly felt self-conscious of her extra weight as she held the door open for the girls, who hardly seemed to notice her. It was the first time she'd thought of it since leaving Los Angeles.
The building didn't have an elevator, which was awfully inconvenient. Her arms were numb by the time she'd dragged her suitcase all the way up to the top floor. She shook the strain out of her limbs and retrieved the key--a plastic card with a magnetized strip, just like they use in the hotels--that the university had mailed her.
Room 602
, the letter accompanying the key had said,
your roommate: Jane Smith
. Elena bit her lip. She regretted not trying to find Jane on Facebook. Knowing a few things about her would have made these introductions less awkward.
Elena opened the door and found the room to be exactly like the other she'd stayed in at the great escape. Two beds on either side of a window, with two desks, facing the walls opposite each other.
Jane was sitting at her desk, going over something in her laptop. Even seated, she looked tall. She had blond hair and blue eyes and thin, gaunt features. She wore a sports bra and basketball shorts and nothing else. Elena stopped. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end when she recognized Jane as the girl that had jumped in the lake and taunted the swimmers.
"Hello?" Jane said dubiously.
"Hi," Elena managed. "Um--uh--you're Jane, right?"
"Yeah," she said. She frowned. "Elena...Elena Watkins?"
Elena pushed forth a smile and set her backpack down on her desk. "Yeah," she said. She had meant for it to sound more enthusiastic. "That's me."
"You're black," Jane said.
She locked her knees and nodded, feeling awkwardly compelled to confirm what was already evident. "Have been my whole life."
Jane raised both brows and nodded along as though it were the most astonishing thing in the world. Then she turned back to her computer and resumed surfing the Internet.
* * * * *
Elena was taking six classes--a fairly rigorous schedule, even for a full-time student-- and spent most of her study time in the library rather than at the dorm. With Jane's cycle of daytime exercises, afternoon/night classes and weekend practices, the two girls hardly saw each other.
Elena spent her Wednesday (the only day she didn't have class) and weekend free time hanging out with Carla and her friends, instead. That started getting old fast. Carla and her friends enjoyed going to frat parties, which Elena discovered to be quite similar to the handful high school parties she'd been to in Los Angeles. There was smoking, drinking games and sex.
Elena didn't enjoy partying then and she really didn't enjoy it now. Still, she went along with it for a couple weeks. She played King's Cup at the Zeta Beta Tau house, tag-teamed with Carla for a couple games of beer pong, smoked a little weed with some Tri-Delta girls and had a some superficial conversations with other students that filtered in and out ("oh, what's your major? Where are you from? Los Angeles?
Reaally
?").
After a couple weekends out, she started to feel more like a bodyguard than a party girl. Carla was a lithe, well proportioned girl with red hair and Celtic features that drove the frat boys crazy. And she spent most of her time following Carla, stuck to her like a flower painted on a wall. Less people were interested in the fat black girl, though all of them respected the fact that she was a
friend
and deserved some attention too.
So Elena stopped going out on weekends. She started staying in or going to the library to get ahead on reading, then fell into patterns of behavior that were familiar and comfortable. She missed Carla, though. All her best times at Lakeside were, thus far, spent with Carla. When they hung out on Wednesdays, away from all the extraneous people that showed up on Friday and Saturday nights, they could really connect.
There was that, and the fact that Carla reminded her so much of an old friend she hadn't seen since junior high. Elena looked up from her fantasy novel and frowned. She hadn't thought of this in a long time, so long that she couldn't even remember...It hurt to even try, but she did and a quarry of jagged images and sounds came to her when she closed her eyes. There were flashes of red hair, roses in a garden that was nicer than anything her mother had ever planted, and scattered laughter that quickly turned to silent awe.
And then Sister Agnes was practically banging down the door of the shabby little studio apartment she and her mother shared. Agnes' face was red and splotchy as she shouted:
I don't want her coming near my daughter again!
