lipstick. Ellie could never tell if her roommate really meant it or if she was just being polite, and a part of her was curious what would happen if she actually said yes. But in the end, it didn’t really matter, because she never did.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said again and again.
Sometimes she sat with them in the dining hall—Lauren and her two friends from the floor above, Kara and Sprague—and they were all perfectly nice to her, even though Ellie mostly just ended up smiling and nodding like some kind of good-natured idiot when she was around them.
But it was pretty obvious she didn’t fit in. If this had been a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, even a three-year-old could have picked her out. It was partly that they wore expensive clothes and talked about vacations to places like Bali and Rio as if they were nothing. And they all used similar phrases, a shorthand that was like a whole new language to Ellie. Even their names—a surprising number of which sounded like last names but were actually not—suggested a certain kind of background: Collis and Smith and Conway and Sprague.
But it wasn’t just that. It was that they were all so effortlessly cool. And they all seemed to know almost instinctively how to navigate something as big and unknowable as college: how to find parties, how to schedule their classes just right, how to look like they belonged.
Because they did belong. In fact, they all seemed to know one another already: from boarding school at Andover or Exeter, from lacrosse camp in New Hampshire or their country clubs in Connecticut, from summers in the Hamptons and ski vacations in Aspen and carpooling up from “the city” (which Ellie had wrongly assumed meant Boston but had turned out to mean New York).
Nobody, of course, knew the financial-aid kid from a small town in Maine.
Watching them, Ellie often felt like a scientist observing some strange new species of bird, these girls who were so impossibly confident. She couldn’t believe that they had bags as expensive as her entire wardrobe, and that none of them had ever had a paying job, and that they never thought twice about throwing down a credit card. In turn, they seemed to be just as mystified by her, endlessly amused when she pronounced Greenwich like Green-witch or said things like good grief or declined an invitation to a party because she wanted to finish writing a poem that wasn’t an assignment for any sort of class.
Ellie didn’t mind. They weren’t friends in the way that Quinn—whom she’d known since she was little—was a friend, and they probably never would be. But whatever this was seemed like a first step on the path to belonging, and that was enough for now.
So yesterday, when Lauren mentioned they were going away this weekend and asked if Ellie might want to come along, she paused before saying no.
“Really?” she asked, looking up from her psychology book.
Lauren had shrugged. “Well, my parents are out of town, so we have the apartment to ourselves. And we were thinking it’d be nice to do some shopping, get manicures, that sort of thing. I just really need a New York fix, you know?”
“Totally,” Ellie said, afraid to admit that she’d never been to New York. She glanced down at her pajama pants, which had little ducks on them and which she hadn’t taken off all day, and surprised herself by saying, “I’d love to come.”
Lauren had been making her bed, and she paused with a blanket in her hands, the corners lined up, mid-fold. “Well, great,” she said, clearly taken aback. But Ellie was relieved to see that she looked pleased too. “We’ll leave right after my econ seminar.”
And so this morning, Ellie had sat in the backseat of the car as it flew down the expressway, singing quietly under her breath as the other three girls shouted the words to song after song, the music so loud it made the doors vibrate. When they reached the city—a jagged landscape of
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said again and again.
Sometimes she sat with them in the dining hall—Lauren and her two friends from the floor above, Kara and Sprague—and they were all perfectly nice to her, even though Ellie mostly just ended up smiling and nodding like some kind of good-natured idiot when she was around them.
But it was pretty obvious she didn’t fit in. If this had been a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, even a three-year-old could have picked her out. It was partly that they wore expensive clothes and talked about vacations to places like Bali and Rio as if they were nothing. And they all used similar phrases, a shorthand that was like a whole new language to Ellie. Even their names—a surprising number of which sounded like last names but were actually not—suggested a certain kind of background: Collis and Smith and Conway and Sprague.
But it wasn’t just that. It was that they were all so effortlessly cool. And they all seemed to know almost instinctively how to navigate something as big and unknowable as college: how to find parties, how to schedule their classes just right, how to look like they belonged.
Because they did belong. In fact, they all seemed to know one another already: from boarding school at Andover or Exeter, from lacrosse camp in New Hampshire or their country clubs in Connecticut, from summers in the Hamptons and ski vacations in Aspen and carpooling up from “the city” (which Ellie had wrongly assumed meant Boston but had turned out to mean New York).
Nobody, of course, knew the financial-aid kid from a small town in Maine.
Watching them, Ellie often felt like a scientist observing some strange new species of bird, these girls who were so impossibly confident. She couldn’t believe that they had bags as expensive as her entire wardrobe, and that none of them had ever had a paying job, and that they never thought twice about throwing down a credit card. In turn, they seemed to be just as mystified by her, endlessly amused when she pronounced Greenwich like Green-witch or said things like good grief or declined an invitation to a party because she wanted to finish writing a poem that wasn’t an assignment for any sort of class.
Ellie didn’t mind. They weren’t friends in the way that Quinn—whom she’d known since she was little—was a friend, and they probably never would be. But whatever this was seemed like a first step on the path to belonging, and that was enough for now.
So yesterday, when Lauren mentioned they were going away this weekend and asked if Ellie might want to come along, she paused before saying no.
“Really?” she asked, looking up from her psychology book.
Lauren had shrugged. “Well, my parents are out of town, so we have the apartment to ourselves. And we were thinking it’d be nice to do some shopping, get manicures, that sort of thing. I just really need a New York fix, you know?”
“Totally,” Ellie said, afraid to admit that she’d never been to New York. She glanced down at her pajama pants, which had little ducks on them and which she hadn’t taken off all day, and surprised herself by saying, “I’d love to come.”
Lauren had been making her bed, and she paused with a blanket in her hands, the corners lined up, mid-fold. “Well, great,” she said, clearly taken aback. But Ellie was relieved to see that she looked pleased too. “We’ll leave right after my econ seminar.”
And so this morning, Ellie had sat in the backseat of the car as it flew down the expressway, singing quietly under her breath as the other three girls shouted the words to song after song, the music so loud it made the doors vibrate. When they reached the city—a jagged landscape of
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