The Roommate Who Called Me Kept

The email arrived at 9:14 on a Tuesday morning, and I read it standing in the dorm hallway with a towel around my wet hair. Department of Economics. Summer Research Fellowship. Final cohort, twelve names. Mine was the fourth. I read it four times. Then I read it a fifth time, because the radiator was ticking and someone was running a blender in the communal kitchen and I wanted to be sure I was not hallucinating under the influence of cheap coffee and four hours of sleep. Marissa Calloway. That was me. Junior, economics, cumulative GPA 3.91, research assistant to Dr. Feldman since sophomore spring, the girl who had spent two years in the basement computer lab running regressions on county-level employment data while everyone else was at tailgates. I stood there so long that water dripped from my hair onto the linoleum and formed a small dark circle at my feet. Then I did what any person would do. I called my mother. She picked up on the second ring, which meant she had her phone in her hand, which meant she had probably been waiting for this exact call. "Hi, honey." "I got it." My voice came out strange, thin and high. "The fellowship. I got it." There was a pause, and then a sound I had not heard from my mother in years, a full, unguarded laugh, the kind that came from somewhere low in her chest. "Oh, thank God. Thank God. Your father is going to cry. He will absolutely cry. He's in the garage, hold on, let me get him." I leaned against the wall and listened to her footsteps and her muffled shout, and I closed my eyes. Here is the thing about my family. We were not poor, exactly, but we had spent the last decade being careful. There was a period when I was twelve and thirteen when my father's hardware supply business nearly collapsed, and I remember my mother cutting coupons at the kitchen table and wearing the same black coat for four winters. I remember being told, gently but clearly, that the summer camp I wanted was not happening that year. That was over now. The business had recovered, then expanded, then recovered from the expansion. But the habit of carefulness had stayed in all of us, like a scar that still aches when it rains. Which is why I never bought anything. Not really. My laptop was four years old and held together with electrical tape on the charging cable. My winter coat was from a discount outlet. I ate cereal for dinner three nights a week because it was cheap and I did not care. And that was fine. That was my plan. Keep my head down, get the grades, get the fellowship, get the graduate funding, and eventually get the kind of life where a four-dollar coffee did not require twenty minutes of mental accounting. My father came on the line. He was breathing hard, like he had run from the garage. "Marissa." "Hi, Dad." "Your mother says." "Yeah." There was a long silence, and then he said, in a voice that cracked slightly, "You know what, this is a good day. This is a very good day. I want to do something. Let me and your mother do something." "Dad, you don't have to—" "I know I don't have to. Let me do something anyway." I told him he did not need to do anything. He told me to shut up and go to class. I laughed and hung up and stood in the hallway grinning at the radiator like an i***t. The dorm room I shared with three other girls was on the third floor of Halston Hall, a brick building that had been built in 1962 and renovated in 1998 and was scheduled for another renovation that everyone knew would never happen. The room had two bunk beds pushed against opposite walls, four desks, four wardrobes, and a window that did not fully close, which meant that in February the room was approximately the temperature of a refrigerator and in April it was approximately the temperature of a greenhouse. Jules was on the top bunk of the left side, lying on her stomach with her phone propped against her pillow. Priya was at her desk, which was covered in biology notes and empty yogurt cups. And in the lower bunk on the right side, sitting up with her back against the wall and a library book open on her knees, was my roommate of two years, the girl I had once considered my closest friend in this building, whose name was Erin Voss. When I walked in, Jules looked up first. She saw my face and started screaming. "Oh my God. Oh my God. You got it. You got it!" "I got it." The room exploded. Jules jumped off the top bunk in a move that should have broken her ankle and did not. Priya threw her arms around me and got yogurt on my shirt. Even Jules's boyfriend, who was visiting and who I had never particularly liked, stood up and clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Congratulations, that's huge." And Erin sat on her bed and watched all of it, and after a moment she set her book down, and she smiled, and she said, "Congratulations, Marissa. That's really wonderful." I hugged her too. She was stiff for half a second and then she hugged me back, and I remember thinking, in a vague and unexamined way, that she felt smaller than usual. I should have paid attention to that. But I did not, because my parents called back twenty minutes later and told me they were driving up on Friday, and that they wanted to take me out, and that they had already made a reservation. And I said yes before they finished the sentence. I should have asked where.