Tangerine

She was standing in our room, her single suitcase already situated at the bottom of the bed closest to the window, her eyes taking in the barren walls that surrounded her. I had paused in the doorway, quietly observing the girl I would be living with for the next year. And yet, girl, I thought, standing there, examining her, struck me as somehow wrong. I watched as she reached into the pocket of her jacket, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. I had never smoked before, not even once, and I watched, fascinated, as plumes of smoke enveloped her, spreading throughout our room, as if hungry to mark the corners of it, to claim it.

Although we were both just seventeen, there was something about the stranger standing before me that seemed infinitely older—wiser perhaps—than myself. The difference was evident even in our clothing. I looked down at my dress, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed a childish frock, covered as it was with a pattern of flowers and ivy and reaching to the floor in a ballerina-inspired cut. In contrast, my new roommate wore a dark, emerald-green jacket with a peplum waistline, accentuating her enviable hourglass figure, paired with a slim black skirt. And while neither the jacket nor the skirt looked particularly new—there was a strange weariness about both of them, I thought, as if the owner had worn them once too often—she emitted a sophistication that I had only before seen in the pages of magazines.

I entered slowly, sounding a soft knock against the door. She looked up, fixing me with a thoughtful gaze that I could not read, but that caused me to turn away and blush.

“Hello,” I murmured, placing a timid smile on my face.

She stared back, blinking.

“I’m Alice,” I said, realizing too late that it looked as though I was waiting for an invitation to enter. I quickly closed the distance between us. “I was afraid you might have forgotten,” I said, extending my free hand.

She accepted it, with a slight tilt of her head. “I’m Lucy.”

There were no gloves on her own hands, I noticed, silently chiding myself for selecting the lacy ones that my aunt had purchased in anticipation of my matriculation to Bennington. They seemed somehow wrong, in the bareness of the room and against the plainness of my roommate. She wore no makeup, so that I felt foolish with my pink lips and wing tip eyes, like a little girl caught playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

Lucy glanced behind me, in the direction of the door. “Are your parents with you?”

I looked down. “No, they’re not,” I said, taking a deep breath. It was a line that I had rehearsed in the bathroom mirror of my aunt’s house countless times over the summer. I knew the question would eventually be broached, it always was, though I had since schooled myself on how to make the answer appear casual—or as casual as it could ever be. I was tired of the typical reaction: the scrunching of the nose, the furrowing of the brow, that expression that conveyed pity and yet something more as well. A fear. As if my parents’ death was something that was catching and I, the sole survivor, a contaminant that threatened them. I had seen it happen, had experienced it firsthand. At school, they had all huddled around me at first, their bodies pressed against my own, conveying regret and sadness, hugging me tight with assurances that it would all be fine, that we would survive this together. But then a week passed, and then two, and one girl was gone and then another. Soon, their closeness was replaced with small, tight smiles as we passed by one another in the hallway, or a brief wave from across the grounds. By the time that school let out, their relief was palpable, surging underneath every interaction. I was not surprised when the phone calls and visits died away. By the time my bags were packed for college, not a single one of them was to be found. And so, I said the words again, bracing for the worst, expecting it. I imagined the reaction I would receive—a downward tug of the lips, a brief yet awkward hug, and then my roommate would move on, searching among the countless other girls, looking for one that was not already damaged, tainted, marred by tragedy.

But then she only looked at me from beneath her heavy-lidded eyes and said: “Mine have passed away as well.”

I blinked, startled, unprepared for such a possibility. And though I supposed it should have pained me, in that moment, I felt nothing but joy. Sheer and utter relief flooded through me, and it was all I could do to keep from smiling. I told her this, later, hours after we had known one another and had already marked each other as fast friends. She had produced a stolen bottle of sherry—“My aunt will never notice,” she had assured me, referring to the relatives she had stayed with over the summer—and together we had set off to explore, passing the bottle of strange, burning liquid between us as we walked. I listened as our feet crunched against fallen leaves and branches, the sound seeming to stretch out and across to the trees that encroached upon us on either side. It was already mid-September. Bennington had a later start date than most colleges, and as we made our way across campus, the night already setting in, fast and dark, a cool breeze stole across so that we moved toward each other, instinctively, as if we were already a pair. As we walked I could feel my tongue loosening, could feel my stomach sound in hunger—most of the other girls would be at dinner, I knew, but I didn’t mind, the newness of the relationship between us more important than a hot meal. The wall that had been erected upon my parents’ death, like some great impenetrable perimeter, at last began to yield, tempered by the alcohol, by Lucy’s presence.

“How old were you?” I asked, tentatively, unsure whether her wounds were still fresh like mine, or even whether she would want to talk about it at all, recent or not.

“Five years old,” she replied, that same nonchalant tone lacing her words, so that I found myself hoping I would one day be able to answer such questions in a similar tenor, that my voice would not shake and quiver as it fought to pronounce each word, to form sentences that conveyed who my parents had been and just how much I had lost with their deaths. “I don’t really remember my father anymore, he’s more of just a hazy impression—a suggestion, really,” she continued, whispering. “I know he worked at a garage, but beyond that, I don’t remember anything much about him. But my mother—sometimes I think I can remember everything about her, even the little things. Like a tube of lipstick, honey colored. Or the strange little glass bottle of perfume that she used to keep on her vanity—it was brown glass, with a clear top.” She shifted. “Anyway, I try not to think of her anymore.”

She stopped then, and I could feel the curls of her hair, so close, tickling my face.

“Does that work?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” I could feel her shrug. “It’s harder in the morning.”

I knew what she meant. “Sometimes I forget,” I said. “I wake up in the morning and it’s like my mind has completely reset. And then I remember, and I have to live through it all over again.”

She nodded, but I could see that something else had pulled at her attention.

“Look,” she whispered.

Jennings Hall, the mansion that sat just beyond the main campus, unfolded before us. The college’s very own Gothic story, made real. There were always whispers about mysterious footsteps, ghostly voices, and strange noises that could never be accounted for, stories about various hauntings that had occurred over the years since it had been donated to the college. Perhaps it was only the sherry, but I was struck in that moment with how ridiculous a notion the idea actually was. Its outside was covered almost entirely by ivy, which had turned a blazing autumnal red in the weather, highlighted further still by the setting sun. It was beautiful, I thought, the walk through the forest more frightening than anything the building in front of us seemed to promise.

And so when Lucy tilted her head toward the entrance, a silent invitation between us, I took a quick, deep breath and followed.

“Is this what your home is like, in England?” she asked, turning toward me as we made our way into the hallway, a queer expression on her face.

I frowned, wondering exactly what type of image Lucy had managed to sketch from the letters we had exchanged. Aunt Maude was well-off, that much was true, but she had lived alone prior to my parents’ death—a spinster, they might have called her only a few years before—and had not seen any reason to change things when her niece had unexpectedly arrived. “No,” I said, with a slight shake of my head, “there’s only just the two of us.” I looked around at the vast emptiness of the hallway. There was little in the way of furniture, and our voices echoed as we moved across the marble-tiled floor. “We wouldn’t know what to do with this much space.”

Lucy, I thought, looked vaguely disappointed at my words. I waited, then, for her to say something about the place she had grown up in, but she remained silent.

“Look at this,” she exclaimed. She crouched so that she sat half-hunched, balancing on the balls of her feet, only inches from the object of her excitement: two stone lions that sat side by side in the large, and apparently unused, fireplace. Reaching out her hand, she let it rest on the carving’s head.