Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [46]
I watched the space underneath the stall door, waiting for Kimmie’s feet to move. They didn’t. I’m fine, I told myself. Everything’s fine. But it wasn’t. It was my senior year and I was finishing four years on a campus full of people who I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Not even my boyfriend knew how, on Mondays, I took the bus by myself to the mall and ate alone at the food court. Nobody knew the truth about my family; no one knew the story of my dad. Instead of real friends, I had acquaintances, interchangeable classmates I could sit with at dinner, who’d go in with me on a late-night pizza or walk with me to the clubs, people whose names I wouldn’t remember a year after graduation. Now it was June. Too late for fun, and instead of fond memories, I’d be left with nothing but regrets.
Suddenly the tears were back. I buried my face in my hands, choking back sobs.
“Jules?” came Kimmie’s soft voice. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me, and managed to croak out an answer. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.” Peeking through the seam between the door and the wall, I could see her, standing in front of the row of mirrors. Kimmie had glossy black hair, so long it brushed at the small of her back, a sweet face with a pert nose and neat white teeth, and a figure that was notable only in the way in which it resembled that of a ten-year-old boy. She wore Keds, laced and tied in bows, and had a slightly pigeon-toed walk.
Kimmie was a biochem major, and she played violin in the orchestra. Freshman year, I’d see her in the mornings, leaving the dorm for the day, with her black violin case in her hand and, on her back, a blue backpack as pristine as the day it had arrived from the L.L. Bean store (more than once I’d wondered if she had a closet full of dozens of navy-blue backpacks and just kept rotating through them).
The two of us were friendly enough. We’d laugh as we sorted through stacks of applications, rolling our eyes at the obvious ways the high-school seniors tried to game the system. “Do you think anyone,” Kimmie would ask, pinching an essay between her thumb and first finger, “actually wants to spend a summer teaching English in Bosnia?”
“I don’t think I’d even want to spend a weekend there,” I replied. We’d trade off taking panicky phone calls from the students or, more often, their parents, and sometimes at the end of our shift we’d walk to the student center and split a slice of cake (I’d have coffee, she’d drink tea). We weren’t friends, exactly, but that winter, Kimmie had started dating one of Dan’s friends, a high-fiving, barrel-chested lacrosse player named Chet who had, in the uncharitable parlance of my classmates, a touch of yellow fever. He’d dated a series of Asian girls since his arrival on campus—Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, conducting his own private waist-down tour of the Far East. For the past few months, I’d been seeing shy little Kimmie everywhere—sitting across the table from Chet in Firestone Library, trotting lightly up the stairs to his third-floor dorm room in Henry Hall, taking little birdie sips of her go-cup of beer in the Ivy basement, her hand with its short, unpolished nails resting lightly on Chet’s brawny forearm.
I waited until I knew I couldn’t avoid coming out and letting her look at me. I flushed the toilet, rubbed my eyes, slipped the elastic off my ponytail and shook my hair out around my face, hoping it would cover up some of the blotchiness.