Page 3 of Tangled Up In You
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“Every Friday,” Gloria said with finality. “Five o’clock sharp, we’ll be there to bring you home.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ren looked across her lap to the passenger side-view mirror, to where the last nineteen years of her memories receded behind them with the homestead until they were just tiny specks of brown broken up by naked trees. “I’m sure I’ll already be outside waiting.”
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.