Auszüge

Chapter 1 After their room, the four spent the most time together in the dining hall, so called as though anyone could mistake its vaulted ceilings, tree-length tables, and brassy chandeliers for anything so pedestrian as a cafeteria. Margaret managed, though. Despite being the one most dazzled by the space, she couldn't call it anything other than the cafeteria. When they entered the hall for their first dinner together, she stopped, the flow of new freshmen tripped up first over the obstruction caused by the four, and then by the scattered double takes at Margaret, whose face and body her own suitemates were also still stealing glances at, wondering why they hadn't been warned. Margaret had cheekbones that sliced each one of them open in turn: Ji Sun by their architecture; Alice by how smooth and bright they were, scar-free; and Lainey by the desire to touch them, compare their structure to her own, which she'd always considered the best thing about her face. "Wow, we get to eat in here." Margaret looked around, oblivious to, or unmoved by, the people who turned to look at her-her long, gauzy white skirt and her heart-shaped face made her look like some kind of moon child princess bride, like she trailed glitter, didn't belong on this planet, let alone in a dining hall, even one with chandeliers. "Didn't you see it when you visited?" Alice asked, ushering Margaret by the arm toward the tray stand. "Oh, I didn't visit," Margaret said, choosing a fork as though it might play a song. "I just got in off the waitlist." "Oh," Lainey said, and nodded, tried to think of how best to react. She couldn't imagine admitting this. She'd been wait-listed at Trinity College and even after being offered acceptance, the sting had manifested as lingering resentment toward all things even nominally Irish. "Wow," Margaret said again when they'd finished piling their trays and stood, looking for a place to sit. "Just . . . wow!" She held her tray with one arm and used the other to gesture around the room, as though her suitemates couldn't see it. Her attitude was infectious. Ji Sun, the least impressed by institutional spaces, especially American ones that prided themselves on their "heritage," did feel now like the room was polished gold, sun dust from the fading day washing the students in honeyed light, glinty little sparks bouncing off the lowest glass facets in the light fixtures. "Yeah, hey, wow," Ji Sun said, teasing but warm. They settled at a round six-top that they could tell in their bones would be their table, even as they shared it on this first night with two other freshmen, both of whom seemed more in awe of this foursome, somehow already solidified, than of their surroundings. They traded the usual questions with the two other girls, Where are you from? Which is your residence hall? but none of the four bothered to listen to or remember the other girls' answers, especially after, when Lainey answered upstate New York, they asked again with new emphasis, No, but, where are you from from, like where are you originally from? Lainey rolled her eyes, a signal to her roommates to let Lainey decide when or whether to answer this question, which Alice and Ji Sun might have guessed, but Margaret wouldn't have known. The four had some basic background about one another, and now wanted urgently to know more vital information. Did they have boyfriends? Girlfriends? Had they ever? Had they had sex? Who was smartest? Who would be best loved by the others among them? Who would lead the way? Four was good in this regard, they could see it already, better than three because there was less stasis. Three meant one could always think of herself as the nucleus, the reason, but four were enough to make a bridge, to link arms all sorts of ways, to have no center. After dinner, they stopped outside the closed door to their room, the new whiteboard hung there, pristine when they'd left, now covered in frenzied letters that filled the space: I ALREADY LOVE YOU. MARRY ME.* All of them looked at Margaret, who smiled and shook her head in a gentle way that suggested she both accepted and rejected that she was the proposal's intended recipient. She inched closer to read the small footnote scrawled at the bottom of the board aloud, "hook up w me at least? Oh, please." She groaned and smiled and pushed open the door to their room, leaving the other three to consider that maybe the message hadn't been meant for just Margaret, and anyway, who cared about marriage when they'd just arrived at college? Inside, a scarf Margaret had thrown over one of the lamps gave the room a maroon glow, and though they were tempted to varying degrees to retreat to their bedrooms and make phone calls or arrange the photos they brought (some chosen because they wanted to see the faces therein every day; some brought along out of obligation; and the largest set selected because they liked how they looked in the pictures, either their face, or the way they were surrounded by smiling friends: loved). But none of this felt as urgent as they'd expected it would, and instead they found places on the window seat, Ji Sun cross-legged and upright, Alice stretched out on her stomach, Lainey with her chin resting on her tucked knees, and Margaret seated as though on a porch swing, tapping the brass vent along the baseboards with her heels. The note made it easier to talk about sex and romance right away, earlier than they thought they would. But together on their bench, they shared the sense that their fears and desires couldn't tumble out of them fast enough, and they soon discovered that Alice was the only one who'd had real sex, good sex, the definition of which-they came to a provisional agreement-included penetration (a detail that embarrassed Lainey once she started her first gender studies course later that term) and an orgasm. Margaret admitted that though she'd had sex with two people, she'd never had an orgasm except in sleep. Alice looked blankly at Margaret. "But what's the point?" "I don't know." Margaret blushed. "It's still fun!" "I guess," said Alice, not pretending to look convinced. "You don't have to have sex to have an orgasm, Alice," said Lainey, who would give Margaret her first vibrator for Christmas the following year. Her defense of Margaret reified the sense that they were all seeking Margaret's approval, something Margaret could see and was accustomed to, and which she went out of her way to give to people, so they could relax and fall into a friendship that would be, like any, dictated by jostling for position within the group, but not with her as its prize. Margaret had already touched each of them in turn, squeezed a surprised Ji Sun when they left the dining hall; clasped Alice's hands when Alice offered to take Margaret sailing; and lightly rubbed Lainey's back after she'd mentioned falling out with her high school best friend. "Obviously I know that," Alice said, and made a jerk-off motion with her hand, part dismissal, part instruction. They all laughed at this, and inched closer together on the bench, settled in. Ji Sun leaned back against the window, Lainey loosed her knees, and Margaret swung her legs over Alice's back. They were dizzy with how bound together they felt already, how much of themselves they'd already given over to the others. Alice and Ji Sun had both gone to boarding school, Alice near here, in New Hampshire, for high school, and Ji Sun in Switzerland starting when she was twelve. The way they told it, boarding school all but required you to have sex to graduate, though more of Ji Sun's own exploits had transpired back in Seoul, where she'd grown up and her parents still lived, or in the Philippines, tossed off tantalizingly as where she "typically summered." A few nights later, after a party where they'd all gotten drunk off beer foam and foul tequila (save Alice, who'd smoked a joint she'd somehow procured before the rest of them even knew how to use the library, and who helped guide the other three as they stumbled back to their room, the inaugural act of an unspoken rule that one of them would always stay sober enough to help protect the others), Ji Sun would, in the hours as the sun came up and their buzz wore off, tell the group about the time her then boyfriend had gone down on her in the backseat of a limousine. After they recovered from the surprise of learning that she just went around in limos sometimes, not only for prom, and in fact found them tacky, the details she shared-the heat outside; the mirrored partition where she could watch him work; and the way they'd almost been caught, someone knocking on the window while her dress was only a suggestion, straps down at her ribs and skirt up over her hips-stuck in their minds and lived there like a scene from a movie they'd memorized, or a memory that they couldn't be sure wasn't their own, even if they hadn't yet been eaten out, or set foot inside a limousine. They embroidered their friend's story further, so in some memories she wore a metallic dress, the color and movement of mercury, silk pool slunk around her midsection. One of them turned the partition purple, a kind of gas-in-a-puddle rainbow color that cast everything in the car in a plummy, bronze light. On the way to her own rehearsal dinner, in a stretch limo that embarrassed her (on some level thanks to Ji Sun's dismissal), Margaret let her fiancZ go down on her, an act less like the realization of a fantasy and more like the satisfaction of some foretold prophesy, further confirmation that the four were as enmeshed as they believed themselves to be, for better or for worse, married already, in a way, to one another. Sex addressed, they could move on to the sort of hungry questioning where they wished equally to reach the end, to learn everything about the others, to know them, and also to never stop talking. When their throats got sore, Lainey put on music, and they began to move and dance. Alice plucked the scarf from the lamp where Margaret had draped it, mouthed fire hazard, and tied the scarf around her neck fifties-style, did a little sock hop to the beat. Lainey flipped through the pages of her CD binder, liberated from the usual need to impress with her music. There was time enough for her roommates to hear Bikini Kill wail and Black Star bounce from her bedroom, and she didn't need to prove anything on this, their first night together, only needed to give them that feeling she got in her chest when her favorite songs came on, that they must leap to their feet and throw their arms up into the air, that they must erase any self-consciousness that came from moving their hips in front of others, close their eyes or keep them open, up to them whether they wanted to sing along, but they had to dance together, had to feel some kind of ecstatic freedom from everything that had come before and would come later, bound only to each other for at least the length of the song. None of them had any idea how long they'd been dancing, but they were coated in sweat, hair matted, mascara running, when their RA knocked on their door and told them quiet hours had begun half an hour ago, and could they please start the year off on the right foot. "Think about how your decisions impact others," she'd said, tapping her pointer finger on her own chest, on the Quincy-Hawthorn crest on her T-shirt. But that night, outside the confines of their common room, there were no others. They considered only their roommates, and each one fell asleep to find the other three already waiting in her dreams.   Chapter 2 Though the four shared as many meals together as possible, there were already times, three weeks into the semester, when their schedules necessitated other permutations. Alice and Ji Sun took early dinner together every Wednesday night before Alice went to weight lifting, while Lainey was in rehearsal and Margaret met with her writing tutor. Ji Sun liked these Wednesday nights. They attracted less attention just the two of them, and they sometimes sat at the lone table for two that remained in the dining hall because one of the college's two founders had proposed to his first wife there. She was seventeen to the founder's fifty, and he went on to leave her and their four children for a nineteen-year-old, whom he left, three kids later, for another seventeen-year-old, this time to his sixty-seven, who bore him two more children before he died, losing the chance to do it all again. "Different times," the student guide on their freshman tour had said, and shrugged, before putting his hand over his mouth to whisper-shout the rumor that every class of Quincy-Hawthorn College since 1874 had as a student one of Hawthorn's descendants. Alice and Ji Sun had exchanged raised eyebrows, Alice then pantomiming a glance around with a magnifying glass before shooting Ji Sun a wink. Of anyone she'd met so far at school, including professors, Ji Sun was most impressed with her roommate Alice: her square jaw, her candor, and the ease she had in her body. But Alice wouldn't have guessed as much, Ji Sun knew. If you were reserved and not unattractive, people assumed you were a snob, that you disapproved. Ji Sun allowed that, in her case, they were often right. Alice knew, of course, that Ji Sun cared for her, loved her even, as they all loved each other already, and had said as much, even though Alice and Ji Sun shared in common families that almost never expressed this sentiment aloud. But Alice may not have known that Ji Sun admired her. Alice, with her low, raspy voice and patrician accent, lank blond hair that she wore scraped back into a ponytail where others would surely want to show off its virgin corn-silk color, defied categorization in a way that appealed to Ji Sun. There was a kind of creamy toughness to Alice that Ji Sun found both reassuring and a bit intimidating. Alice already knew she wanted to be a doctor, but she approached her studies with a kind of pragmatism that the other premed students-a number of whom Ji Sun knew from the campus Korean Cultural Association-forwent in favor of agonized rants about organic chemistry and hopped-up, almost masturbatory accounts of the rigors of their current schedules, and the gauntlet of semesters to come. Excerpted from The Other's Gold: A Novel by Elizabeth Ames All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.