The Year of Disappearances

“Not running,” Dashay said. “You are going to school. Retreating, maybe. Nothing wrong with that.” She passed me a bowl of red popcorn, liberally sprinkled with Sangfroid.



I took the bowl. “What about the University of Virginia?” It was my father’s alma mater.



My mother said, “It’s too far away.”



Dashay said, “Sara, you are a fool.” But she said it with affection in her voice.



“Where did you go to college?” I asked my mother.



“I went to Hillhouse. It’s a liberal arts school in Georgia.”



“Were you happy there?”



She smiled. “Yes, I was. It’s only five hundred students or so. But it’s an alternative school. They don’t assign grades—they give written assessments instead. I don’t know if it’s rigorous enough for someone like you.”



“Do you mean I’m smarter than you?” The words came out before I’d considered saying them.



My mother laughed. Dashay said, “Ari, you watch out. That’s your mother you’re talking to.”



I began to apologize, but Mãe said, “It’s okay. It’s a legitimate question. Yes, I think you are much smarter than I was at your age.”



“Thank you,” I said, trying to keep my voice modest.



She added, “And nearly half as smart as I am now.”



While my mother and Dashay surveyed university web pages, I decided to do something else: take an aptitude test online.



I scored high in the areas of science, art, and writing, and low in sales, clerical, and administration. My ratings for investigative and artistic thinking were much stronger than those for being attentive or conventional.



“You should major in liberal arts,” Dashay said. She said she’d done that at the University of the West Indies.



“I think that Raphael wants Ari to go into medicine one day, but liberal arts is a good foundation for anything,” Mãe said.



My father had never told me he wanted me to “go into” anything. “Ari is sitting right here,” I said. “Why do you keep talking about me in the third person?”



“This is a big moment,” Dashay said.



“Not that big.” Mãe knew I was apprehensive and didn’t want to make things worse. “You can choose one school now, have a trial year, then transfer later on. You have all the time in the world to figure things out.”



All the time in the world. Even for vampires, it’s hard to think in those terms.



“Ari’s big problem is, she hasn’t learned how to tell time,” Dashay said.



That night didn’t want to end. Later I sat on a bench on our new deck, trying out the new mount for my telescope. I loved the idea that I was looking up at stars seen by Plato and Aristotle. Time seemed to dissolve when I stargazed.



Orion’s belt jumped out at me: three white-blue stars, each more than twenty times the size of our sun, formed more than ten million years ago. And along the sword that hangs from the belt was the reddish swirl called the Orion nebula, a cloud of dust, gas, and plasma. Nebulae are where stars are born.



I sensed someone behind me and my body tensed, then relaxed when I smelled rosemary. Dashay used rosemary oil as a hair conditioner.



“You having fun out here in the dark?” she said. She wore an embroidered caftan, and her head was wrapped in a towel.



I pulled away from the eyepiece. “Want to have a look?’



She shook her head. “What’s up there doesn’t interest me much. What’s going on down here is more than enough for me to think about.”



“But it’s so beautiful.” Even without the telescope, the night sky pulled my eyes to it. The patterns of stars, planets, and haze were embedded stories. “Do you know the story of Orion?”



“I’ve heard the Greek story.” Dashay tilted her head and stared up. “The hunter killed by his lover.”



“By accident,” I said. “Artemis was tricked by her brother into shooting Orion with an arrow.”



“Yes, yes.” Dashay looked at me. “What’s the point of that story, Ari?”



“The point?” I didn’t know the answer.



“What’s the moral of the story?”



I didn’t think constellation stories had morals. “The point is: love is misery,” Dashay said, and folded her arms.



My tour of colleges was short and to the point. Mãe and I decided to visit four: two large state universities and two smaller private ones, all within three hundred miles of home.



Hillhouse was one of the private schools. I’m not going to name the other places we went; I don’t want to influence anyone else’s opinions of them.



It’s enough to say that the large state schools did not appeal to me. Their campuses were overbuilt and ugly, despite elaborate landscaping that seemed entirely out of keeping with the utilitarian designs of the buildings. We’d been promised meetings with faculty members, but none was available. At each school we took a tour of the facilities, which included stops at dormitories that made me think of dog kennels. Our tour guides at both places were young women—pretty, blond, unflappable women whose cheerfulness knew no bounds.



“Here’s the quiet dorm,” Jessica said, leading us into a brick building at State U-A, down a corridor, and into the middle of a living room where seven people were smoking marijuana. “Oops,” Jessica said, and, still smiling, led us out again.



“This is a state-of-the-art classroom,” Tiffany announced at State U-B, opening the door of a room with beige cement-block walls and fluorescent lighting that hurt my eyes. A prison cell might have more personality, I thought. Why would anyone design such antiseptic, uninspiring spaces as classrooms?



Mãe didn’t like either state U any more than I did. “We could try one more,” she said, her voice doubtful.



“If we do, I won’t get out of the truck.” I was having second thoughts about going to college at all.



The first private school we visited was a marked improvement—an older, well-designed campus, all red brick with doors and window frames painted white, shaded by sycamore trees. The classrooms had posters and framed art on their walls. The dormitory lacked the zoolike qualities of the others we’d seen; students huddled over laptops at their desks or talked in small groups. I could almost imagine myself living there. Almost.



“Everyone is white,” I whispered to Mãe.



When we talked with the admissions director, he said the school tried to recruit “a diverse population.” I guess that population didn’t want to come to a school where everyone else was white. The director seemed excited by my last name and appearance; I heard him think, Our first Latina.



One aspect of being home-schooled, I realized, was that I’d never been labeled, by others or by myself.



“I don’t want to go to a school where I’m called the first Latina,” I said to Mãe.



We were back in the truck, headed south. “Okay,” she said. “It seemed a little prissy, anyway.”



We drove onto the Hillhouse campus on a sunny afternoon in October. Mãe had told me what to expect: the rural campus was built around a working farm, and all of the students had jobs either on the farm or elsewhere, helping to operate and maintain the campus.



The first thing we saw: a lawn with oak, sycamore, and maple trees, and students raking leaves. I hadn’t seen a rake since leaving Saratoga Springs. And the students were a diverse assortment, ethnically and otherwise. They had hair of all colors, dyed vivid green and blue and orange and red, and many dressed in clothes that looked like stage costumes: jesters, gypsies, pirates, and rock stars. While some worked, others were jumping and rolling in the piles of leaves. They reminded me of a pack of raccoon babies I’d seen back in Sassa, tumbling down a slope for the sheer pleasure of it.



As I watched, a boy sprang out of a mound of leaves as if he’d been launched; the leaves scattered everywhere, and some of the others picked up handfuls and tossed them at him. “Thanks a lot, Walker,” one said.



He had wavy hair the color of sand, blue eyes, flushed cheeks, full lips, white teeth. He smiled and took a running leap into another leaf pile. I wondered why I was noticing so much about him. I wondered why I hoped he’d notice me.



We parked the truck and made our way to the administration building. The buildings were made of dark-painted wood, with long narrow windows that looked out onto the lawns and fields. Most had porches, and every porch had a row of rocking chairs.



While Mãe and I waited for the admissions officer, I read a pamphlet entitled A Brief History of Hillhouse. The school’s philosophy was modeled on that of Summerhill, a progressive school in Britain. Hillhouse was run as a cooperative community, to which everyone contributed at least fifteen hours of work a week. Everyone was expected to attend weekly governance meetings. Class attendance was voluntary; students designed their own curricula, and they received written reports on their progress rather than grades. The coursework was designed around a series of projects planned jointly by the students and professors.



The policies sounded sensible to me. I didn’t realize how unusual they were until later, when I read the catalogs we’d collected at the other schools. The catalogs emphasized credit hours, exams, grade point averages: a system premised on penalties and rewards, with the underlying assumption that students were children who had to be pressured in order to learn.



Hillhouse didn’t require applicants to take entrance exams or submit grade transcripts. Application decisions were made on the basis of the interview and on three essays submitted with the application.



The admissions officer, Cecelia Martinez, was a young woman with wide eyes and an open face. Like everyone we’d met at the other schools, she seemed relentlessly cheerful.



“So,” she said, after we were introduced, “I understand that you’re a legacy.”



I’d never been called that before.



“Yes,” Mãe said. “I graduated from Hillhouse twenty years ago.”



Cecelia Martinez wondered what sort of plastic surgery my mother had had. “You two look like sisters,” she said.



My mother didn’t look more than thirty, I realized. And Cecelia Martinez wasn’t one of us. I wondered if anyone at Hillhouse was a vampire.



Mãe left the room when the “formal” interview began. (Nothing was truly formal at Hillhouse.) First, Ms. Martinez asked me about my education. She asked me to describe my favorite teacher.



“I was home-schooled,” I told her. “My father was my teacher.” What should I say about him? I described his biomedical research, his work into the development of artificial blood. I talked of our lessons in mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature. I didn’t say, And he’s a vampire. He can read thoughts and turn invisible, but he prefers not to.



“That’s great,” Ms. Martinez was saying. “So you’re an only child. Do you have lots of friends?”



I said I’d had a few close friends. I didn’t say, Both of them disappeared.



Then she asked about my hobbies and interests, and I told her about my telescope, about horseback riding and kayaking, about learning to cook and surfing the Internet.



“Terrific,” she said. “And what do you think you’d like to major in, if you come to Hillhouse?”



“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I think I’d like to work on interdisciplinary projects. I’m interested in the ways different cultures communicate within themselves and with each other. Maybe I’ll become a kind of cultural translator.” Or a shaman, I thought.



She loved that answer. “You should talk to Professor Hoffman,” she said. “He leads the interdisciplinary studies department here.”