Page 12 of Tangled Up In You
The other man noticed Ren, and a slow grin curled across his mouth. “Who’s your friend, Petrolli?”
“Oh, her?” Jeb said and sat down, looping a heavy arm around Ren’s shoulders. “Yeah. This is my new friend, Jen.”
“Ren,” she corrected quietly.
“Ren,” the second man said with a seductive depth to his voice. “Where’d you come from, sweetheart?”
Britta called out from across the room: “Don’t be gross, Nate.”
Nate looked over in feigned shock. “I’m not being gross, Britta, I’m being friendly.”
“Well, Nate, don’t be too friendly,” Ren warned him with a genuine smile. “I’m new here, so how would you know whether I’m sweet or not?”
She startled when the three women in the back began clapping.
“That was awesome,” said Britta.
“Savage,” Jeb said.
“I’m savage?” Ren asked, surprised, and he grinned over at her.
“Totally.”
A hush fell over the room, and Ren followed everyone’s attention to the doorway, expecting the professor.
But it wasn’t the professor, it was Fitz, and for a strangled moment, Ren’s heart forgot how to function. She understood, on an intellectual level, why everyone fell quiet when he stepped across the threshold and into the room. He was tall without being imposing; his features were beautiful without being too perfect. Ren imagined drawing a portrait of him and knew she wouldn’t be able to get the straight line of his nose right, the correct sharpness to his jaw, the paradoxical teasing softness of his brown eyes. No posture she could draw would capture the way time seemed to slow as he moved through the room with confidence and ease. And though it made sense to her heart why it would stutter, it didn’t make sense to her brain how she was distracted enough by Fitz to miss the entrance of the world-famous Dr. Michel Audran.
Because when Ren finally pulled her eyes away from Fitz and toward the front of the room, there stood the man himself. Tall, thick browed, and with the firm slash of a mouth Ren had seen in countless textbooks, Dr. Audran looked out at the class, waiting for everyone to settle into quiet. Ren felt something vital and solid turn over in her chest.
For so long she’d wondered whether there would be a crystalline moment of transition, one when Ren would know for certain that her life was truly beginning. And it struck her, as Dr. Audran clapped his hands and greeted them with a simple “Well. Let’s begin,” that that delicious, perfect, long-awaited moment was right now.
STUDENT PROFILE: CORONA’S GOLDEN GIRL
by Allison Fukimora
with contributions from Corona Press Staff Writers
She’s unlike anyone you’ve ever met before. Someone your age who has never used an iPhone, laptop, iPad. Who has never set foot in a movie theater. Who has never been on an airplane, walked into a Starbucks, heard of Taylor Swift, or gone swimming in a chlorinated pool. And paradoxically, the reason she agreed to this profile at all is also the same reason she’s unlikely to ever read it: It can only be found online at the Corona Student and Faculty Portal.
“I know it sounds old-fashioned,” she says, “but I don’t use the internet unless it’s for a class. I made a promise.” Her preternaturally enormous green eyes meet mine, and I feel the same visceral protectiveness experienced by many of my peers rocket through me as she very earnestly adds, “Promises mean something, don’t they?”
Her anonymity was a requirement for doing this article, but it was also easy to assure because it is irrelevant. Even without a photo to accompany this profile, anyone who’s walked on campus in the last month and a half knows who the Golden Girl is. She is the streak of blond hair rushing gleefully across Willow Lawn when the sun finally pushes its way through the clouds. She is the tiny ball of hunched-over determination helping Corona’s master landscaper fix the broken irrigation line out near the north shore of Lake Douglas. She is the student with her hand high in the air in every classroom. And she is, without question, one of the most captivating people to ever cast her shadow on the grounds of the school.
Captivating now, but almost universally annoying at first. That’s the general consensus, at least. Uncool, naive, overeager—these are some of the descriptions given by students when I asked their initial impression of her, and always with a guilty wince, like they were confessing a sin, owning up to a character flaw simply by not adoring her from the start.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it? She would be uncool—she was born near the debut of the iPhone but has been fully and intentionally unplugged for her entire life. She would be naive—she’s never been to school of any kind before. She would be overeager—it took her months of convincing her parents to let her come to college at all; being here is literally her lifelong dream.
“No, no, everyone here has taught themselves!” she protests when I suggest that she’s done the impossible by learning subjects such as calculus, organic chemistry, physics, European history, and written Mandarin all on her own. “You all were learning complicated rules and logistics about the world. I have to do all of that now, and I feel about as smart as a brick.” That plain vulnerability passes over her face again, but, as always, she’s smiling. “I was overwhelmed just getting in line for dinner that first day! I had no idea how to call the elevator in Hughes Hall. My parents would say I’m self-sufficient, but I think my peers would say I’m book-smart, not street-smart, and that’s okay, because it’s true!” At this, she laughs.
And about those parents. Did they raise her as part of some isolationist cult or religious sect? Are they political extremists, plotting the overthrow of our government? Apparently not; by her own account, Golden Girl’s parents simply prefer to make their own way in the world. They built their own house and barn. They have cows and horses, chickens and pigs. A pond full of fish, several fields of crops to harvest three of the four seasons. A house full of books their daughter used to educate herself beyond what most of us could have wrung from our paltry public-school curricula. That’s all she’ll share about her upbringing, but nothing in what she told me made her parents sound like fringe isolationists. Maybe they just don’t like people very much.
But their daughter does.
She’s everywhere, and after only six weeks on campus, she’s left quite an impression. Ask any student on the quad, and they’re likely to have a story. There’s the story of the night she found Dean Zhou’s cat outside with a broken leg and splinted it until the cat could be taken to a vet the next day. There’s the rumor about how she repaired the Admissions Office copy machine with a toothpick, a piece of aluminum foil, and a bobby pin. And, of course, there was the afternoon barely a week ago when she did the impossible and fixed the campus theater popcorn machine that most of the student body assumed was just a piece of vintage art. She’s a member of the Corona Women’s Choir, the Agricultural Economics Society, Project Climate, School Spirit Council, and several foreign language clubs. So what if it’s a little weird that she never steps foot off campus unless it’s to leave with her parents every Friday promptly at 5 p.m.? She’s allowed to be a little weird because she is otherwise amazing.
And here’s the thing: She’s also truly, deeply nice. Nice in the way that initially makes you worry, like the steel-toed boots of the world will surely stomp it out of her. But when you meet her and spend time with her—good luck finding some; when she’s here during the week she’s got nearly every waking hour scheduled—you’ll realize that in fact she’s the kind of nice that saturates every layer. The kind of nice that immediately shares lunch when yours turns out to have a bug on the lettuce. The kind of nice that makes the interview run nearly an hour over because she has as many questions for you as you do for her. The kind of nice that genuinely means it when she asks the ubiquitous throwaway question, “How are you?”
The world might peel away one or two of those layers—and no doubt it will—but what’s in there deep down is precisely what’s at the surface. “What do I want people to know about me?” she asks, laughing at my final question. “Why would they want to know anything? I’m the least interesting person on this campus! I don’t have any stories yet! I want to hear yours.” She pauses, looking out the window of the dining hall, where it rains, and rains, and rains. Rivers of muddy water make the sidewalks nearly impassable, and the sky hovers overhead a sickly blue-gray. And still, her expression says she’s never seen anything more beautiful. Finally, she turns back to me and nods, satisfied. “I’m so happy to be here. I think that’s enough.”