Chapter Two Ren
If Ren were asked to describe the Corona College campus, she would probably just open her mouth and sing. Holy moly. She thought the homestead was beautiful, but she’d never seen anything like this. There were lawns that stretched for as far as she could see. Fluffy sugar maples that would turn vibrant in the fall. Regal pine trees that reached, tall and spindly, to the clouds. With the small Lake Douglas and a sharp bend in the Spokane River at the heart of the campus, Ren felt like she’d left her homestead to enter a jeweled, glimmering heaven.
Gloria and Steve didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm for the view, but that was no surprise. Closer to Spokane, when Ren had become ever more talkative in her excitement, they’d grown fidgety and restless, lips pressed so tight the edges grew pale. As they exited the freeway, their eyes had lingered on graffiti and billboards, storefronts advertising sales on laptops and phones, piercings and tattoos. Their silence had been brittle, but at least it allowed Ren to let loose her wild flurry of dreams. She imagined echoing lecture halls with some of the greatest minds in the sciences and humanities. She imagined attending a Socratic seminar and standing in front of a group of her peers, speaking her opinions aloud. She imagined long nights spent studying at the library, tucked away inside a polished oak carrel, devouring her assigned reading.
Gloria consulted a map, navigating them closer, and the campus Ren had only seen in photos rose before them: the stone arch signaling the boundary between surrounding neighborhood and college, the wide lawn of the Commons, and, at the apex, the regal brick face of Davis Hall. On this day before the new term began, students were everywhere outside even in the dreary weather: standing in groups, walking in pairs, crossing streets without a thought to the cars around them, calling to each other in greeting after the long winter break. Stuck in the middle seat, Ren longed to be near the side window. She wanted to press her face as close to the view as she possibly could.
Gloria exhaled a disgusted huff at the sight of so many of Ren’s peers with their necks bent, eyes directed at the bright screens of their phones. Steve scowled at two students kissing openly on the sidewalk. Her parents’ judgment had become a heavy, palpable presence, but as the truck rumbled down the manicured Corona Drive, nothing could interrupt Ren’s joy. She was finally doing it.
She was going to be a college student.
The old red truck groaned around a final street corner, and her dorm, Bigelow Hall, rose into view. The exterior was two-tone brick, broken up by stretches of long rectangular windows with warm yellow lights glowing inside.
Ren leaned forward to see all the way to the top through the windshield. “It looks so fancy,” she whispered.
With a rumbled settling of the engine and a tiny puff of exhaust, they parked at the curb in a space marked LOADING ZONE.
Ren scrambled out after Gloria, stretching her arms to the sky and spinning in a slow circle. “Look how beautiful it is!”
After giving her a handful of seconds to take it all in, her mother waved her to the back of the truck bed. “Come on, Ren. Give us a hand.”
“If they tow my truck,” Steve began as Gloria took hold of one trunk handle and Ren took the other, “I’m gonna raise hell.”
With that, they followed Steve inside to find Ren’s new Monday to Friday home: room 214.
Bigelow was an all-female dorm—a requirement of her parents if she was going to be allowed to live on campus—and her dorm room was objectively unremarkable: two twin beds, two wardrobes, two small desks. Even so, Ren was immediately in love. The room was neatly split down the middle, with exactly one half decorated chaotically in a collage of photos, postcards, ticket stubs, and posters of rock bands, and the other half—Ren’s half, she realized—left starkly white. The mattress on her bed was bare, the desk empty.
A blank slate. It sent Ren’s pulse soaring.
A girl stood from her desk chair when they entered. She was tall and pale, with thick dark hair, and dressed entirely in black. Ren tried to mask her double take at the various piercings through the girl’s nose, ears, lip, even what she thought was a real piercing through the girl’s septum, like an actual bull.
“Hi,” Ren said, holding out her hand. “I’m Ren. I’m your new roommate.”
“Yeah.” The girl shook it, limply. “Miriam.”
“These are my parents, Steve and Gloria.” Who, unsurprisingly, were studying Miriam and her room decor with silent disapproval.
Miriam let out a quiet “Cool.”
“Are you enjoying Corona so far?” Ren asked.
Miriam’s eyes flickered to Steve and Gloria and then back to Ren. “Sure. It’s fine.”
“Have you chosen a major yet?”
“Communications.”
Ren felt her brows slowly rise and fought the urge to make a good-natured joke. Instead, she said only “How wonderful.”
Her parents were always sparse with their words, and Ren never had a problem being the chatterbox of the family. But the mood right now didn’t seem to call for friendly small talk. Ren found herself facing a social brick wall as awkward silence settled over the room and Miriam fidgeted with the rings on her fingers before slowly returning to her chair, shoulders stiff.
Ren turned back to her parents, whispering, “Do you want to stay for the campus tour I have in a half hour?”
“Nah.” Steve shoved his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable. “We’ve got the drive home to make.”
It felt so abrupt, after everything, for them to leave so unceremoniously barely five minutes after arriving. But Ren knew her parents too well to see it going any other way. They hardly spoke to people in town back home; they sure weren’t going to draw out a sentimental goodbye with Miriam sitting right there. Ren’s excitement shaded bittersweet as she rushed to hug each of them in turn. “Okay. Be safe. Thanks for bringing me.” She stretched to kiss each of their sun-weathered cheeks. “Don’t worry, I remember the rules.”
With one more “Be smart, Ren,” and a final look to caution her against the dangers of city life, Steve gestured for Gloria to lead them back outside.
Ren knelt on her bed, staring out the window to watch her parents climb into the truck and disappear back the way they came. Apprehension swarmed inside her chest like bees on honeycomb. She was here. She turned, ready to dive into college life. A hundred more questions for Miriam popped up, each begging to be answered.
But her roommate spoke first: “Your parents seem pretty chill.”
There was a weight to her words that Ren couldn’t quite translate. “Chill?”
“Easygoing.” Miriam moved to sit on her bed, crisscrossing her legs. She pinned her elbows to her knees, rested her chin on steepled fingers. With her black T-shirt, black leggings, even chipped black polish on her toes and fingernails, Miriam looked to Ren like a beautiful shadow stepping right out of Bram Stoker’s world and into the modern day.
Ren smiled. “Oh, they are very easygoing. I mean, with everything going on at home, I’m lucky they let me do this.”
Miriam’s dark brows furrowed, bloodred lips flattening. “I was being sarcastic. They seemed seriously intense.”
“Oh.” Sarcasm. Right. Ren had never been good at spotting it. “They don’t like the city much,” she explained.
Ren wasn’t unintelligent. She’d read enough contemporary literature to know that her upbringing was unconventional, and she was sure Miriam wouldn’t be the last person at Corona to notice or even call her out on any perceived weirdness. Ren didn’t dress like other women her age; everything she wore was handmade or purchased secondhand. She didn’t watch live television or listen to the radio; she wouldn’t catch many of the slang or cultural references at school. She knew most college freshmen weren’t twenty-two years old, and she knew even fewer would be obligated to go home to their parents on the weekends. Modern-day freshmen gained fifteen pounds and learned their limits with alcohol. They flirted and “hooked up” and lost their virginities to people who broke their hearts afterward.
But Ren also knew that most freshmen couldn’t build a bug zapper using a six-volt battery, some wooden dowels, and a black light, or craft a portable generator out of a solar panel recovered from the county trash heap and a twenty-dollar inverter. There would be more ways than one that Ren wouldn’t fit in. Her goal was to show every person she met that she had something unique to offer, and that she wanted to learn from them, too.
Miriam stretched out and rolled to her stomach, swiping her thumb across a small screen. Ren craned her neck to get a better look at the person Miriam was watching do their makeup.
“Do you have your own mobile phone?”
Miriam went still before slowly turning her head. A flat “What?” floated out of her mouth, carried on a disbelieving smile.
“In your hand. Is that yours?”
Her roommate blinked. “Yes…?”
“I’ve seen some people with them at the farmers market, and I’ve read about them. But I’ve never held one. The technology is amazing.”
“They told me you were coming from a farm,” Miriam said. “I—” She mimed an explosion coming out of her temple. “Like, I do not even know how to process that you’ve never held an iPhone before.” But even so, she didn’t offer to hand hers over, and Ren mentally logged this: People are protective of their devices.
“Have you lived here all year?” Ren asked.
“Yup.”
“Who was your roommate before?”
Miriam didn’t look up. “Her name was Gabby. She flunked out.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she failed her classes.”
Okay, so basically what Ren thought. “How?”
Miriam laughed. “Uh, by never going?”
“Oh.” Ren studied the other woman, trying to puzzle this out. Someone would enroll in school to…not go to school? “Why didn’t she go?”
“How would I know?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Miriam said, “that makes two of us.”
“Was she nice?”
“I guess.”
“What did she study?”
Miriam huffed out a laugh. “Obviously she didn’t study anything.”
“I just meant…” Ren let the thought trail off. Maybe Gabby hadn’t found the right thing, she wanted to say, but didn’t bother. Somehow, suddenly, the idea that there was a passion buried inside everyone felt starkly naive. “Where did you grow up?”
Miriam bit her lip and looked over at Ren. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude, but I kind of need to do this right now.” She pointed to the phone screen, where the person was now drawing a flower on their eyelid, and then put a small white earpiece in each ear before rolling to face the wall.
Ren pulled her trunk from where Steve had tucked it beside her bed and began unpacking. On top were her prized possessions: a set of new paintbrushes, tubes of oil paints and colored pencils, thick paper, and sketch pads. Wrapped carefully just beneath them was the treasured painting that had hung above her bed since she was capable enough to put the memory down on canvas: a handheld sparkler lighting up the night sky. The style seemed amateurish compared to what Ren was able to create now. The sparks of fire looked like blossoms in her childish strokes, and the cornflower twilight didn’t nearly capture the vibrance of the sky in her recollection; the stars weren’t nearly as sharp. But even so, the crude painting managed to convey the scene permanently tattooed across the inside of her lids. Once she’d painted the brilliant explosions of light, she never stopped: Ren had painted them across the walls of her room, the headboard of her hand-carved bed, the inside of the barn, the outside of the chicken coop, and, of course, pages upon pages in her notebooks.
Assuming she wasn’t allowed to put nails in the dorm walls, Ren propped the canvas on her desk and moved to unpack everything else: clothes, a towel, her bedding, her brush, toothbrush and toothpaste, and her going-away-to-college treat: a block of her favorite farmers market honey soap wrapped in wax paper. All of it was neatly stowed away in her armoire in a matter of minutes.
Buried beneath all that was her beloved collection of fiction. Willa Cather, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Franz Kafka, and Shakespeare, all found at the local thrift store or flea market. Each one—whether hardy hardcover or well-loved paperback—was carefully lined up on the top shelf of the new-to-her desk, with the second shelf reserved for her favorite reference texts: the Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Strunk’s Elements of Style, Kovacs’s Botany, Abramowitz’s Handbook of Mathematical Functions, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Gray’s Anatomy, Sagan’s Cosmos, Hawking’s The Theory of Everything, Integrated Chinese, L’Huillier’s Advanced French Grammar, The New World Spanish/English English/Spanish Dictionary, and her set of well-loved German textbooks.
Ren stepped back, assessing. Unlike Miriam’s half of the room, this space didn’t look lived-in quite yet, but it would. The last item in her trunk—her small wind-up clock—was set right in the middle of the desk, where it ticked comfortingly, telling Ren that she had fifteen minutes until she would need to leave for—
“Is it going to do that forever?”
Turning, Ren found her roommate staring over at her. “Is what going to do what forever?” she asked.
“That clock.” Miriam lifted her chin to Ren’s desk. “That loud ticking.”
Ren’s stomach dropped. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“It sounds like a bomb. You know, they make digital clocks in this century.”
This time, Ren easily read her roommate’s tone, and her confidence wavered. “I’ll look into it.”
With a sigh, Miriam rolled onto her back. “Just order one from Amazon.”
Ren paused, sure she’d misheard. “Order a clock from the Amazon?”
Miriam barked out a disbelieving laugh. “It’s a shopping site.” She quickly tapped her thumbs to her screen and then turned the phone for Ren to see. “For like twelve dollars, it can be here tomorrow.”
Ren didn’t know how to tell Miriam that twelve dollars was about all she could spend in a month, let alone within her first twenty minutes on campus. “That’s a good idea,” she said with a grateful smile. “I’ll definitely order one.”
But for now, she opened the back of her clock and disengaged the mechanism from the hands. Luckily, she still had her watch—hand-wound by force of habit, and always reliable—which showed she only had a handful of minutes to get to where she needed to be.
Ren ducked to peek out the window, and, as if it was preening under the attention, the sky cracked with a roar of thunder and the clouds opened up in a downpour.
A laugh drifted over from the other side of the room. “Welcome to Spokane.”
“So I’ve heard.” Smiling, Ren rebraided her long hair, wrapping it into a twist that fit beneath her beanie.
Her roommate’s voice again rose out of the quiet. “Your hair is so pretty.”
“Thank you.” Ren had a strange relationship with beauty; to her mind, strength and capability were beautiful, but photographs in magazines on the racks at the Hill Valley Five and Dime often featured models who were fake tanned, emaciated, and staring idly out into the distance. Strangers had complimented Ren’s waist-long golden hair frequently enough that she had to believe it was objectively pretty, but as for the rest of her, she’d never had the faintest idea.
Miriam watched Ren slip into her big coat. “Where are you going?”
Ren looked over her shoulder as she tugged on a boot. “I have an appointment to meet another student at the Registrar’s Office in ten minutes.”
Miriam sat up, attention suddenly piqued. “Who are you meeting?”
Ren pulled the sheet out from her coat pocket, glancing down. “Doesn’t say.” To herself, she read the short letter from the dean again—
Ren,
We’re delighted to welcome you to Corona College. I am aware that this will be your first experience with school of any kind, but your test scores leave me more than confident that you’re up to the task. I’ve arranged to have a student meet you at the Registrar’s Office in the atrium of Carson Hall at 1:30 p.m. on January 31, the day before spring semester classes begin. He will give you a tour of the campus. Please stop by my office at some point in your first week here so that we can chat. I know our campus newspaper is very interested in speaking to you! Your story is quite unique.
Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Best,
Dr. Yanbin Zhou, PhD
Dean of Corona College
Her stomach tilted uneasily at the prospect of interviews with the school paper, but after everything Dr. Zhou had done for her, she would find a way to make it work within her parents’ guidelines…somehow.
“Does it say he or she?” Miriam asked.
“He.” Ren looked up. Her roommate’s expression had gone razor sharp. “What?” she asked. “Should I not go?”
“Definitely go. I think you’re meeting Fitz.”
“It doesn’t say Fitz here.”
“It’s Fitz. If the dean arranged it, it’s absolutely him. Dean Zhou loves Fitz.”
“Should I be scared?”
Miriam laughed. “Only if extremely sexy and charismatic men scare you.”
Ren immediately dove for this chance to play along: “Like John Travolta sexy? Or Patrick Swayze?”
Miriam burst out laughing. “Oh my God, Ren, you are a trip.” She slid from her bed and walked closer, typing something on her phone. “Have you ever seen Austin Butler?”
“Who?”
She turned her phone to face Ren. “He played Elvis.”
“Oh,” Ren said, frowning. “I only know Kurt Russell to have played the King.” Miriam stared at her, and Ren obediently turned her eyes to the screen, saying, “He is indeed very handsome.”
“If you took the raw confidence of Florence Pugh, the bone structure of Austin Butler, the charm of Jenna Ortega, and multiplied it by the effortless sensuality of Timothée Chalamet, you’d have Fitz.”
Ren had no idea who any of these people were, but agreed, “That does sound very sexy.”
“He’s a senior, and everyone falls for him. But it’s a trap, Ren.”
“A trap?”
“He’s charming as hell and will flirt with you until your pants are on the floor. And that’s all he wants.”
Paling, Ren shook her head. “I don’t think—”
“Do you hear me?” Miriam cut in, pointing a cautionary finger. “Be smart. Because his ego is bigger than Alaska.” The much-taller woman bent at the knee so that the two were eye-to-eye. “Are you from Alaska?”
“Idaho.”
“Well, I take it you know how big Alaska is.”
Ren nodded, mentally fortifying herself at the prospect of meeting an attractive man with an ego that was nearly seven hundred thousand square miles.
“Good. So don’t let him seduce you.”
A flush crawled up Ren’s neck. “Oh my gosh, would you stop suggesting that?”
“I mean it. He’ll only break your heart.”
Flustered, Ren turned to open the door to flee. But when she was only a few steps away, Miriam leaned out of the doorway. “Ren!”
She turned. “Yeah?”
Her roommate’s voice reverberated up and down the packed hallway: “Do not let that man into your pants!”
Ren felt every pair of eyes land squarely on her back as she walked the straight path to the stairwell. She’d studied in every moment of her free time—studied hardest these last few months in preparation for college. But a new truth was very quickly becoming apparent: Some things in life were impossible to prepare for.