Page 1 of Ten Years and Then…
Chapter 1
The first few weeks of the Fall Semester—Albion College
Nora-August 25, 1988
Nora Langley hopped off the bus, just barely keeping on her feet. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen; falling on her face before she even set foot on campus would have been a crummy way to start a whole new life.
Maybe she should look at it the other way: it was a good omen that she almost—but didn’t—fall. Keeping her balance despite being weighed down and in unfamiliar territory might be a metaphor for…
No. She muttered to herself, “Stop overthinking everything!”
It didn’t mean anything. There were no omens, good or bad. Just a new world, new people, new places, maybe a new her, too, if she could manage it.
The first thing was to find her dorm and drop off the fifty pounds—well, it felt that heavy, anyway—of stuff she’d brought from home. She headed away from the bus stop, scrunching up her nose to keep out the fumes, and walked straight through the main gates of the campus.
She stopped on the far side of the gates for a moment, taking everything in. Between memories of her visit here last fall, and the campus map she’d stared at for a good hour on the train from Providence to Albany, she knew where she was supposed to go. Morris Hall, her home for the next year, wasn’t quite visible from here, but it ought to be right behind the red brick tower in the distance that had to be Carlisle Library, just off the main quad.
It took a half hour to make it there; she stopped every twenty or thirty feet to absorb a new view. She imagined herself on every bench she walked by, every window she looked in. Nora felt like she’d lived her whole first semester by the time she walked into the lobby of Morris Hall.
It was barely controlled chaos; an older woman, maybe in her mid-twenties, sat behind a little table stacked with papers and yellow envelopes, calling out to anyone who would listen. She had to be the dorm director, but nobody was listening to her. Before Nora herself could go over to her and—she assumed—sign for her room keys, she felt a tug on her arm. She turned to see a freckled, redheaded girl a couple of inches shorter than her.
“Nora? Nora Langley?”
This had to be her roommate. After Nora had been accepted, and her father had paid the tuition deposit, she’d been promised a letter with information about her roommate. She hadn’t ever received it, but this girl clearly had.
“That’s me. My letter must have gotten lost in the mail, sorry.”
The girl laughed. “Nothing’s perfect, right? I’m Kim. Kim Hartman. So we’re up on the third floor, let’s get out of the way here before we get run over.” Nora allowed Kim to take her hand and lead her up the stairs.
Daniel-August 27
Daniel Keller couldn’t believe his luck.
He’d walked into West Hall, checked in with the RA, Monica Shields. Her boyfriend had been the RA back in Morris Hall last year so he’d seen her around. She had given him the news that his roommate wasn’t coming to school this fall. “He transferred to Cornell,” Monica said. “And they’re not replacing him, so it looks like you’ve got a single room at least for this semester.”
It hadn’t been so bad having a roommate last year. Phil Jensen had been reasonably clean, generally polite, never once kicked him out of the room because he wanted to bring a girl over—it hadn’t been a possibility for either of them, sadly—and he’d even taught Daniel how to play Battletech, which had been very cool of him.
But without a roommate, there’d be no snoring. No having to go through the phone bill line by line to divide up the long distance charges. No horrible smells from the weird tofu cookies Phil’s mother insisted on sending to him every couple of weeks. Daniel wouldn’t miss any of those things.
And if—unlikely as it seemed, and unlikely was probably a generous assessment—there ever was a situation where he wanted to bring a girl up to the room, he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone being there.
All in all, it was a promising start to his sophomore year.
Nora-August 28
This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. She shouldn’t be tiptoeing into her room at three o’clock in the morning, hoping she wouldn’t wake her roommate up. First because it would be rude, but more importantly because if Kim woke up, she’d see that Nora’s makeup was smudged beyond recognition, and her clothes were a rumpled mess.
She’d know exactly what Nora had been up to. She’d decide that Nora was still the girl she didn’t want to be anymore. The Nora she’d hoped she could leave behind and start a whole new life here.
It was one time, right? Peter, their freshman orientation leader, had invited everyone in their group—Nora and eleven other freshmen from Morris Hall—to a party in his off-campus apartment. Kim had been one of them, but she’d begged off. Only three other people besides Nora had shown up: Eileen Marshall from California, and Rick and Dan, roommates whose last names she’d failed to catch.
Nora had been the last to leave, and she should have known better. She should have gone with Rick and Dan when they left around one o’clock. They hadn’t asked her to come with them, but they wouldn’t have had a problem with her walking home with them. It had been stupid to stay. She’d known what would happen once she was alone with him, and of course it had. He’d refilled her drink, and his hand was on her knee, and she hadn’t said anything about it, let alone done anything to let him know she wasn’t interested.
She put the key in the lock gently, turned the doorknob ever so slowly, pushed it open an inch at a time, and went inside one hesitant step at a time. Kim didn’t seem to stir, and Nora made it over to her bed, undressed as quickly and quietly as she could, and got under the covers.
And that’s when she saw Kim’s eyes blink open, and even in the dark she could see the disapproving frown on her roommate’s face. The same frown she’d seen in her own mirror too often back in Providence.
She didn’t want to see that frown anymore. But the only person who could make it go away was the girl she didn’t know how to be.
