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Somehow I’m not sure this fun fact will make me any instant friends—but if it ever would, this is certainly the place.
After I check in and get my keys, I wait for the elevator to take me to the sixth floor. The dorm is a flurry of move-in commotion, most doors thrown wide open and the hallways crammed with more cardboard boxes than I’ve ever seen. And one detail I hadn’t anticipated but probably should have: everyone is here with their parents.
Fighting off a too-early pang of homesickness, I make a vow to myself. Whatever it takes, I’m getting my mom back out here.
The hall is decorated with construction-paper cutouts of New York landmarks: the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. And there’s my name on the door to room 608: NEIL MCNAIR.
Over the summer, I’d made an appointment to legally change my last name but backed out before paying the fee. I hadn’t been ready, even after I spent so long convincing myself I was. The idea of having a different last name from my sister when she’d been too young to remember everything that happened with our father—it held me back.
I told myself I could wait until I was truly certain, and even now, seeing my full name on the door, it doesn’t seem strange to me. I thought I wanted to start college with no ties to the man who gave me that name, but I’ve been Neil McNair for eighteen years. It’s on the academic awards and certificates of achievement and high school diploma. Yes, it’s his name. But it’s mine, too.
Before I see anyone in the room, I hear two male voices with thick New York accents having a loud but not angry conversation about either baseball or football, I’m not sure. I’m exhausted and sweaty and in desperate need of a shower, and my adrenaline has given way to anxiety. I’ll be sleeping next to a complete stranger for the better part of a year, which is obviously a very normal part of the college experience and yet suddenly seems like a hell of a lot to leave up to chance.
Gingerly, I knock on the door, despite having a key. I don’t want to interrupt anyone. When it opens, I’m faced with two broad-shouldered guys nearly the spitting image of each other: brown hair and blue eyes, casual in jeans and T-shirts, though one is five inches taller and probably thirty years younger.
Skyler Benedetti is a Staten Island native I messaged on NYU’s roommate app over the summer. I sent a paragraph; he sent back awesome man can’t wait!!
“Hi, I’m Neil,” I say with an awkward wave. I point to my name on the door, as though needing it to back me up.
“Hey!” Skyler straightens to his full height, so tall that I’m unsure these beds can contain him, and gives me a half handshake, half high five. He’s in a New York Yankees T-shirt and has the most symmetrical face I have ever seen. “Skyler. Good to meet you!”
“Sorry, I hope I’m not interrupting—”
“Nah, my dad and I were just saying that I could handle living with a Giants fan but probably not a Mets fan.” His face turns serious. “Don’t tell me you’re a Mets fan.”
“I, uh, don’t follow sports.”
I take a moment to glance around the room. The two sides mirror each other: beds and wooden bookshelf-desk combos and two tiny closets. Plain white walls, except for where Skyler’s tacking up an NYU pennant. A plain blue comforter is draped haphazardly across one bed, a suitcase spilling open on top of it. I haul my largest suitcase onto the other bed.
“Probably the safest answer. You’ll avoid a lifetime of disappointment that way,” Skyler’s dad says with a chuckle. He extends a hand. “Marc Benedetti. Your parents around here somewhere?”
I clear my throat. Exhale. This isn’t a test. “I just flew in from Seattle. My mom wanted to come, but she couldn’t get the time off work.” It sounds better than we couldn’t afford it.
“Lucky,” Skyler says, so brazen even in front of his dad. Finished with the pennant, he extracts a sweatshirt from the duffel bag on top of his bed, STATEN ISLAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL blazoned across it, along with an image of a seagull. It doesn’t escape my notice that his school’s name is abbreviated as SITHS, which makes my inner Star Wars nerd—and probably outer Star Wars nerd, let’s be honest—wildly jealous I didn’t go there. “My dad’s obsessed with reliving his glory years. He went here too.”
“Those were some good times.” Marc props an arm on Skyler’s desk chair, his eyes lighting up. “Did I ever tell you about when my friends and I dared each other to go streaking through Washington Square Park at midnight?”
A groan from Skyler, indicating he’s probably heard this story many, many times. “Unfortunately.”
His dad holds a hand to his heart. “I met your mother that night. The most romantic night of my life.”
“We can stop there,” Skyler says. “Dad. Please don’t scare my roommate away.”
I can’t help laughing at all of this as I unzip my suitcase, pulling out towels, pillowcases, extra-long twin sheets. For a moment I wonder about my dad’s glory years, whatever they might have been. I don’t allow myself to think of him often, but being confronted with the Benedettis right here in the space in which I’m going to live for the next nine months makes it inevitable.
I do know that for a while, my parents were happy. They met at work in their early twenties as cashiers at a home improvement megastore, but my dad had dreams of starting his own smaller shop one day, and my mom got pregnant with me after they’d been dating for a year. Although she had hoped to go back to school once she saved enough, she put that on hold, working nights while my dad worked days and her sister helped take care of me. Neither of them had big extended families—my mom’s parents, who moved the family from Philly to Seattle when my mom was sixteen, had been only children, and though my dad was rooted in the Northwest, his parents were much older and he didn’t have any siblings. They didn’t have a lot of money, but from everything my mom has told me about that time in their lives, it didn’t matter. They had each other, and they were building a family together.
Then there was the hardware store my dad opened that struggled to turn a profit. The drinking. The angry outbursts.
The night he caught a couple kids stealing when he was about to close up, and the moment he grabbed a bat from behind the counter and changed our lives forever.
The felony conviction when I was just eleven years old, a mouthful of words that even a child who loved words could barely understand.
Assault in the first degree.
A fifteen-year sentence.
Our lives, entirely warped.
