Page 5 of Tangled Up In You
“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.”