Here We Lie

* * *

By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.

“Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.

There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.

I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”

One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”

“Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”

Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”

The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”

Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”

“We’re practically twins,” I said drily.

When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.

* * *

That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.

Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”

“I did okay.”

She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”

“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.

“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.

“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.

“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.

* * *

The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.

“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”

Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.

“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”

“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”

“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”

Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”

After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.

* * *

Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.

“Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.

“Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”

I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”

“Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”

“No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”

He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”

“Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.

“Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”

“Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”

Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”

* * *

That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.

Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”

“The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.

“But this is just for one assignment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.

“For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.

Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”

I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.