Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
“I got you a plant,” says Emily, extending a teacup-size terra-cotta pot to Maddy. The plant is the exact shape of a rose, but the petals are shiny, green, and thick, like rubber.
“Is it real?” asks Maddy.
“Yeah, it’s a succulent. You barely need to water it, only when the soil is bone-dry.”
“Thanks.” Maddy places it on her desk and then plops down onto her bed.
“I like your room,” says Emily, her observant eyes wandering as if she were browsing artifacts in a museum.
“It’s smaller than last year’s.”
Her dorm room is a tiny boring box. There are two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, two desks and chairs, and no room for any additional furniture. At least she and her roommate, Manoush, have a private bathroom.
The wall over Manoush’s bed is adorned with PEACE and LOVE stickers, photos of friends and family, and a Jonas Brothers poster. Maddy taped her Taylor Swift Fearless poster over her desk and placed a photo of her and Adam in a heart-shaped frame on the shelf under it. She gave an identical photo and frame to Adam to keep at his dorm.
“How’s school going?” Emily asks.
Maddy shrugs. “Okay.”
She doesn’t love any of her classes, but it’s only the first full week of school. Maybe they’ll get better. Or they could get worse.
“The beginning of the year with my kiddos is always crazy. It’s like herding adorable little chickens all day,” says Emily. “I always forget how young they are. They grow up so much in a year.”
Emily walks over to Maddy’s desk, picks up the framed photo of Maddy and Adam, studies it for a moment, and then places it back down. She pulls out the desk chair, angles it toward Maddy’s bed, sits down, and crosses her legs. She’s wearing platform wedges, wide-legged white linen pants, and a lavender silk top, her long blonde hair blown out and styled wavy. The afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows catches her two-carat diamond engagement ring and casts a rainbow on the wall to the right of the Fearless poster. Emily looks so put together, so mature. She always does, always has.
When Maddy was little, she idolized Emily and dreamed of growing up to be just like her. As a teenager, Emily was a cheerleader for the basketball team, confident and popular. She had three close girlfriends, besties since kindergarten, who slept over at the house a lot, and she was never without a boyfriend for long. Everyone loved Emily. They still do. She’s a ball of sunshine, and Maddy used to wish she were older so she could be a planet in her sister’s orbit.
While a five-year age difference doesn’t feel like much now, and they’re both considered Gen Zers, it felt like an entire ocean of development between them when Maddy was younger. While Maddy was playing with Emily’s abandoned American Girl doll and watching Wizards of Waverly Place , Emily was dating boys and driving her friends to the mall. Emily was into shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter , TV series their mother said were too mature for Maddy, and she was sent out of the living room to go play somewhere else when Emily watched them. When Maddy was in middle school, flat-chested and still hadn’t had her period yet, Emily got into Vanderbilt, went to prom, graduated high school, and moved out.
But there were still moments when Maddy was able to capture her busy older sister’s attention, time spent together that felt special to Maddy, life moments that would take up significant space in Maddy’s memoir and that Emily probably doesn’t even remember. Emily had every imaginable color of nail polish and always said yes when Maddy asked for a mani-pedi. She usually had time for a game of Crazy Eights or Yahtzee but never Monopoly because it took too long. And sometimes Emily would join her under a blanket on the couch for an episode of Hannah Montana .
Maddy remembers watching Emily and her friends practicing their cheerleading routines in the backyard. Maddy loved their sassy dance moves, their scandalously short skirts, and their navy-and-white pompoms. Go, Blue Devils!
She wanted to be a cheerleader when she was old enough, just like Emily, until one day, when she saw the girls’ basketball team stepping off the bus in front of the school after one of the boys’ home games. She asked Emily, “Where are their cheerleaders?”
Emily replied, “The girls’ team doesn’t have them.”
“Why not?” Maddy asked.
“They just don’t,” said Emily, unbothered.
She remembers feeling confused and instantly unsettled in her stomach, as if she’d been punched there or eaten something that had gone bad. She was ten at the time and didn’t possess the life experience or cognitive skills yet to translate her WTF feelings into coherent thought. She said nothing further, but she knew she didn’t want to be a cheerleader anymore. This was the first moment that she can remember when she didn’t want to be just like Emily. More would follow.
“Where’s your roommate?”
“I don’t know. Probably the library.”
Manoush gets up every morning at six, studies at the library before class, returns to the library after dinner, and stays every night until nine or ten. Maddy almost never sees her. They won’t be best friends, but she doesn’t foresee any drama.
“So what do you want to do?” asks Emily.
They made plans at the beginning of the week to get together this afternoon after Emily was done teaching, but Maddy forgot to enter it into her calendar. And she was so preoccupied with her new fall-semester schedule all week, anxious about finding the buildings and then the classrooms inside those buildings and getting everywhere on time, that she completely spaced on her date with her sister and only remembered when Emily materialized at her door, smiling with a potted succulent in her hand.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you hungry yet?”
“Not really. It’s still early.”
“Is there a party or something we can go to?”
“No idea.”
“What would you be doing if I weren’t here?”
“I don’t know. Napping. Nothing.”
“You seem a little off. Is everything okay with you and Adam?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m just a little tired.”
“That’s okay. We can just chill around here. What are your friends up to?”
“I don’t have any friends. It’s hard to get to know people here.”
There are ninety-six students on her floor, almost a thousand in her dorm building, but she doesn’t really know any of them. She feels anonymous, like a guest in a hotel. NYU has no actual campus, no quad for gathering. Their dorms and academic buildings are scattered around Washington Square, a public space they share with tourists, skateboarders, the homeless, and the rest of New York City.
Her friends through middle school were the girls she met in preschool, friendships born out of playdates chosen and scheduled by her mother. Her one best friend was always Sofia. In high school, her friends were primarily Adam’s, mostly the guys on the basketball team and their girlfriends, whom she liked enough to hang out with as couples but never made plans with anyone individually. Her social life was prepackaged, the parts already put together, batteries included. College is different. Granted, she spent pretty much the entire first year wallowing over Adam and wasn’t emotionally available for forging new friendships. Even so, she hasn’t yet found her people.
Emily tilts her head and shoots Maddy a look as if to say, That’s silly. Why are you overcomplicating this?
“Who lives across the hall?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come with me.”
“Em, no.”
But Emily’s already walking out the door. Maddy gets up and follows her. Emily steps up to the door opposite Maddy’s and knocks.
“What are you doing?” Maddy yell-whispers. “I don’t know them.”
A girl opens the door.
“Hi, I’m Emily. This is my sister, Maddy. She lives across the hall.”
“Hi, I’m Nina.”
Nina has shiny dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, sapphire-blue eyes, and a dainty silver nose ring. She’s a size zero in a black sleeveless crop top and high-waisted jeans, barefoot, her toenails painted glossy white. Maddy can see another girl, presumably Nina’s roommate, sitting on her bed, phone in hand, her back against the headboard, peering at them over her knocked-together knees.
“What are you guys doing?” asks Emily.
“Nothing really, just hanging out.”
“Can we hang out with you?”
Mortified, Maddy tugs hard on Emily’s sleeve while struggling to hide behind her.
“Sure. Come on in.”
As Maddy reluctantly shadows her sister into Nina’s room, Emily looks back at Maddy and smiles with her eyebrows raised as if to say, See, wasn’t that easy?
But everything comes easily to Emily. Her life is a stroll down a smooth, sun-dappled path, not a pebble in her way, always a pleasant breeze at her back. Things used to come easily enough for Maddy, too, but that was back in high school, when each day was laid out for her like a matching outfit on a bed, when both her inner and outer worlds felt organized, predictable, happy, and light. Life was handed to her like a potted succulent, small and tidy and requiring little effort to maintain, and she accepted it. She remembers herself then, only a little over a year ago, and it’s as if she were a different girl in another lifetime. She can’t pinpoint exactly how, but she doesn’t feel like she used to feel.
Something’s not right.