Where She Went by Gayle Forman Page B

bowl; just drank champagne while Bryn schmoozed. I mean who drinks champagne at a bowling alley?
    Inside Leisure Time, it smells like beer—and wax and hot dogs and shoe disinfectant. It’s what a bowling alley should smell like. The lanes are full of an unusually unattractive grouping of New Yorkers who actually seem to be bowling for the sake of bowling. They don’t look twice at us; they don’t even look once at us. I book us a lane and rent us each a pair of shoes. Full treatment here.
    Mia’s practically giddy as she tries hers on, doing a little soft-shoe as she selects a ladies’ pink eight-pounder for me to bowl with on her behalf.
    “What about names?” Mia asks.
    Back in the day, we always went for musicians; she’d choose an old-school punk female singer and I’d pick a male classical musician. Joan and Frederic. Or Debbie and Ludwig.
    “You pick,” I say, because I’m not exactly sure how much of the past we’re supposed to be reliving. Until I see the names she inputs. And then I almost fall over. Kat and Denny .
    When she sees my expression she looks embarrassed. “They liked to bowl, too,” she hastily explains, quickly changing the names to Pat and Lenny. “How’s that?” she asks a little too cheerfully
    Two letters away from morbid , I think. My hand is shaking again as I step up to the lane with “Pat’s” pink ball, which might explain why I only knock down eight pins. Mia doesn’t care. She squeals with delight. “A spare will be mine,” she yells. Then catches her outburst and looks down at her feet. “Thanks for renting me the shoes. Nice touch.”
    “No problem.”
    “How come nobody recognizes you here?” she asks.
    “It’s a context thing.”
    “Maybe you can take off your sunglasses. It’s kind of hard talking to you in them.”
    I forgot that I still had them on and feel stupid for it, and stupid for having to wear them in the first place. I take them off.
    “Better,” Mia says. “I don’t get why classical musicians think bowling is white trash. It’s so fun.”
    I don’t know why this little Juilliard-snobs-versus-the-rest-of-us should make me feel a little digging thrill, but it does. I knock down the remaining two of Mia’s pins. She cheers, loudly.
    “Did you like it? Juilliard?” I ask. “Was it everything you thought it’d be?”
    “No,” she says, and again, I feel this strange sense of victory. Until she elaborates. “It was more.”
    “Oh.”
    “Didn’t start out that way, though. It was pretty rocky at first.”
    “That’s not surprising, you know, all things considered.”
    “That was the problem. ‘All things considered.’ Too many things considered. When I first got there, it was like everywhere else; people were very considerate. My roommate was so considerate that she couldn’t look at me without crying.”
    The Over-Empathizer—her I remember. I got cut off a few weeks into her.
    “All my roommates were drama queens. I changed so many times the first year before I finally moved out of the dorms. Do you know I’ve lived in eleven different places here? I think that must be some kind of record.”
    “Consider it practice for being on the road.”
    “Do you like being on the road?”
    “No.”
    “Really? Getting to see all those different countries. I would’ve thought you’d love that.”
    “All I get to see is the hotel and the venue and the blur of the countryside from the window of a tour bus.”
    “Don’t you ever sightsee?”
    The band does. They go out on these private VIP tours, hit the Rome Colosseum before it’s open to the public and things like that. I could tag along, but it would mean going with the band, so I just wind up holed up in my hotel. “There’s not usually time,” I lie. “So you were saying, you had roommate issues.”
    “Yeah,” Mia continues. “Sympathy overload. It was like that with everyone, including the faculty, who were all kind of nervous around me, when it should’ve been