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College was supposed to be a fresh start.
It’s what I’ve been looking forward to since the acceptance email showed up in my inbox, holding out hope that a true reinvention, the kind I’d never be able to pull off in high school, was just around the corner. And despite the roommate debacle, I’m determined to love it. New year, new Barrett, better choices.
After a quick shower, during which I narrowly avoid falling in a puddle I’m only half certain is water, I put on my favorite high-waisted jeans, my knitted cardigan, and a vintage Britney Spears tee that used to be my mom’s. The jeans slide easily over my wide hips and don’t pinch my stomach as much as usual—this has to be a sign from the universe that I’ve endured enough hardship for one day. I’ve never been small, and I’d cry if I had to get rid of these jeans, with their exposed-button fly and buttery softness. My dark ringlets, which grow out as opposed to down, are scrunched and sulfate-free-moussed. I tried fighting them with a straightener for years to no avail, and now I must work with my BJH instead of against it. Finally, I grab my oval wire-rimmed glasses, which I fell in love with because they made me look like I wasn’t from this century, and sometimes living in another century was the most appealing thing I could imagine.
It was an understatement when I told Lucie the freedom had gone to my head. Every other hour, I’ve been hit with this feeling that’s a mix of opportunity and terror. UW is only thirty minutes from home without traffic, and though I imagined myself here for years, I didn’t think I’d feel this adrift once I moved in. Since Sunday, I’ve been shuffling from one welcome activity to another, avoiding anyone who went to Island, waiting for college to change my life.
But here’s something to be optimistic about: it doesn’t seem to matter if you eat alone in the dining hall, even as I remind myself that I’m New Barrett, who’s going to find some friends to laugh with over all-you-can-eat pasta and the Olmsted Eggstravaganza even if it kills her.
After breakfast, I cross through the quad, with its quaint historic buildings and cherry trees that won’t bloom until spring, slackliners and skateboarders already claiming their space. This has always been my favorite spot on campus, the perfect collegiate snapshot. Past the quad is Red Square, packed with food trucks and clubs and, in one corner, a group of swing dancers. Eight in the morning seems a little early for dancing, but I give them a you do you tilt of my head regardless.
Then I make a fatal mistake: eye contact with a girl tabling by herself in front of Odegaard Library.
“Hi!” she calls. “We’re trying to raise awareness about the Mazama pocket gopher.”
I stop. “The what?”
When she grins at me, it becomes clear I’ve walked right into her trap. She’s tall, brown hair in a topknot tied with UW ribbons: purple and gold. “The Mazama pocket gopher. They’re native to Pierce and Thurston Counties and only found in Washington State. More than ninety percent of their habitat has been destroyed by commercial development.”
A flyer is thrust into my hands.
“He’s adorable,” I say, realizing the same image is printed on her T-shirt. “That face!”
“Doesn’t he deserve to eat as much grass as his little heart desires?” She taps the paper. “This is Guillermo. He could fit in the palm of your hand. We’re hosting a letter-writing campaign to local government officials this afternoon at three thirty, and we’d love to see you there.”
I’m annoyed by what we’d love to see you there does to my camaraderie-deprived soul. “Oh—sorry,” I say. “It’s not that I don’t care about, um, pocket gophers, but I can’t make it.” My interview with the Washingtonian’s editor in chief is at four o’clock, after my last class.
When I try to hand her back the flyer, she shakes her head. “Keep it. Do some research. They need our help.”
So I tuck it into my back pocket, promising her I will.
The physics building is much farther away than it looked on the campus map I have pulled up on my phone and keep sneaking glances at, even though every third person I pass is doing the same thing. It wouldn’t be as bad if I were excited about the class. I’ve been planning to switch out—registration was a nightmare and everything filled up so quickly, so I grabbed one of the first open classes I saw—but damn it, New Barrett is a rule follower, so here I am, trudging across campus to Physics 101. Monday-Wednesday-Friday, eight thirty a.m.
My T-shirt is pasted to my back and my perfect jeans’ perfect buttons are digging into my stomach by the time I spot the building. Still, I force myself to remain hopeful. This probably isn’t an omen. I don’t think omens are usually this sweaty.
In my pocket, my phone buzzes just as I’m walking up the front steps.
Mom: How do I love thee? Joss and I are wishing you SO MUCH LUCK today!
The text is time-stamped forty-five minutes ago, which I attribute to the campus’s sketchy service, and there’s a picture attached: my mom and her girlfriend, Jocelyn, in the matching plush robes I gave them for Hanukkah last year, toasting me with mugs of coffee.
My mom’s water broke in her sophomore year British Poetry class, and as a result, I was named after Elizabeth Barrett Browning, most famous for How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. College is where the two best things in my mom’s life happened: me and the business degree that enabled her to open the stationery store that’s supported us for years. She’s always told me how much I’m going to love college, and I’ve held tight to the hope that at least one of these forty thousand people is bound to find me charming instead of unpleasant, intriguing instead of off-putting.
“I’m just so excited for you, Barrett,” my mom said when she helped me move in. I wanted to cling to her skirt and let her drag me back to the car, back to Mercer Island, back to the HOW DO I LOVE THEE? cross-stitch hanging in my bedroom. Because even though I’d been lonely in high school, at least that loneliness was familiar. The unknown is always scarier, and maybe that’s why it was so easy to pretend I didn’t care when the entire school decided I wasn’t to be trusted, after the Navigator story that changed everything. “You’ll see. These four or five years—but please don’t get pregnant—are going to be the best of your life.”
God, I really hope she’s right.
Chapter 2
PHYSICS 101: WHERE EVERYTHING (AND Everyone) Has Potential, declares the PowerPoint. Beneath the text is an image of a duck saying “Quark!” I can appreciate a good pun, but two on one slide might be a cry for help.
The lecture hall is thick with the scent of hair products and coffee, everyone chattering away about their class schedules and the petitions they signed in Red Square. The professor is tinkering with a cluster of cables behind the podium. It’s one of the larger auditoriums on campus and fits nearly three hundred students, though so far it’s only a quarter full. Or three-quarters empty, but I’m trying not to be a pessimist this year.
I’ve never been a back-of-the-classroom person, despite how much some of my old teachers might have wished I’d been, so I climb the stairs and pause by an empty seat at the end of the fifth row, next to a tall, thin Asian guy glaring at his laptop.
“Hey,” I say, still a little out of breath. “Are you saving this for anyone?”
“It’s all yours,” he says in a flat voice, without even looking up from his screen.
