Penelope (3 page)

“I agree,” said Nikil.

“So I would say, ‘I am concentrating in English,’ when actually I am majoring in it?” said Penelope, feeling that awful giggle in the back of her throat.

Nikil’s eyebrows arched downward, as if too exasperated to hold themselves in place.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Oh,” said Penelope. “OK, well, I’m gonna go. It was really nice meeting all of you. I just live upstairs so, you know, you can come up there anytime. I don’t have any checkers though, but ah, well, OK. Good-bye!” She left. Ted followed her.

“Do you live on the third floor?” asked Penelope.

“No,” said Ted. “I live in that room. Like I told you before.”

“Oh,” said Penelope.

They walked up the stairs in silence.

“I think the panel is getting out soon,” said Ted.

“Oh, do you? That’s good. I have yet to meet my roommates. Have you met them?”

“What are their names?”

“Lan and Emma.”

“Nope,” said Ted. “There are some real winners here though.”

“That’s good to know and, also, self-evident,” said Penelope. Fortunately they were practically at her room.

“Thanks for walking me back,” said Penelope.

“That’s OK,” said Ted.

“OK, bye!” yelled Penelope as she darted into her suite and shut her door briskly behind her. It was the fifth-longest conversation she had ever had with a boy. She lay down on the futon with a pit in her stomach.

Emma came back first. She was prettier than Penelope had thought she would be, in a pointy kind of way. Even her forehead came to a point in the middle of her head.

“Hey, are you Penelope?” she asked Penelope, who was still lying prone on the futon. Penelope jumped up.

“Oh, hi!” said Penelope. “Yes, that’s me. Are you Emma?”

“Yes, hi.” She held out her hand and Penelope shook it. “How long have you been here?”

“Oh, not long,” said Penelope. “I talked to some kids downstairs for a while. They’re a little weird.”

“Oh,” said Emma. She put her bag down on the double. She was the Madeleine Albright owner.

“How was the panel?”

“The panel was really informative, actually. The application statistics were horrible, of course, but, I mean, when are they not?” Emma exploded into a hooting laugh. Penelope watched her in awe. She continued. “You know, I interned in a hospital for six summers, so I kind of get the whole culture of hospitals. It’s a very very intense work environment, which I would be totally fine with because that really fits my personality, but I think I’m just too compassionate for it. I feel other people’s pain a little too much, you know? I mean, I cry just thinking about hurting someone, and imagine if you had to cut someone open? I just can’t imagine doing it. I don’t really know how doctors go home every day and live with themselves, to be honest. So I don’t think I want to go to medical school, but I thought it was pretty important to check it out, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Penelope.

“I just want to keep all my career options open at this point. In high school, I was involved in twelve extracurricular activities, all of which helped me explore my future. And it was this totally great experience. Fencing was really my first love—”

“When did you get here?” Penelope blurted out.

Emma blinked.

“We got here yesterday. I stayed with my parents in the hotel and we moved in early this morning. You have to make the reservations like a year in advance, so the minute I got the letter last year my parents made a reservation at the Charles Hotel. They just left.”

“Oh, cool,” said Penelope.

“My father is going out of the country on business next week.”

“Neat,” said Penelope.

“He speaks fluent Russian. It really helps when you travel the world. Russian is a world language now, which is pretty amazing.”

“That is amazing,” said Penelope. “Does he walk around in a fur hat in Moscow?”

“No,” said Emma. “He’s not even going to Moscow. He just knows Russian because he is a very erudite man.”

“I have always wanted to wear one of those hats,” said Penelope.

“Oh,” said Emma. She went into her room, which was also Penelope’s room. Penelope sat back down on the futon and kicked her foot against the floor a few times.

“You’re from Connecticut, right?” said Emma from the bedroom. “I think I read that on your contact information.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Choate?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, like, did you go to Choate? As in Choate Rosemary Hall? I know some kids there.”

“Um, no,” said Penelope.

“Oh,” said Emma, who seemed disappointed.

There was a pause.

“Do you think you will miss your high school?” asked Penelope.

“In what way?” said Emma, popping her head out of the bedroom.

“Oh, I don’t know. Like your friends or something.”

“I loved high school. It was really challenging. I mean literally, we had some of the brightest people in the country there. The math department taught college-level differential equations to sixth graders. We spent most of the day recreationally betting on the stock market.”

“That sounds fun,” said Penelope.

“So yes, I think I will miss it. But not as much as I will like it here.” Emma went back into their room and started to organize her part of the closet, which seemed to take up the entire closet.

“Oh, me too,” said Penelope. “Have you met this Lan woman?”

“Lan? Yeah, we said hi.”

“What is she like?”

“She’s nice,” said Emma. She closed the bedroom door. Penelope lay down on the futon again. She fell into an unsettling half sleep, while Emma jabbered on the phone in the next room. Penelope didn’t usually sleep with the lights on, but apparently Harvard made her have narcolepsy. She kept lapsing into a dream where a giant car seat was coming to eat her and all she could do was plead with it for mercy in Latin. Which was really weird because she didn’t even speak Latin.

Penelope woke up with a start. A person who must have been Lan was hovering five inches from her face.

By the time Penelope sat up, Lan already seemed bored with her discovery. Almost instantaneously, she seated herself on the windowsill and started to roll a cigarette.

“Hey,” said Lan in a completely inflectionless voice. Long bangs obscured the top half of her face. She was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a decal of a snowman wearing sunglasses.

“Hi,” said Penelope. “I’m Penelope.”

“I know,” said Lan. She started to lick the paper of her rapidly
forming cigarette and then paused. “Do you want one?” she said, gesturing to her creation.

“No,” said Penelope. “I don’t smoke, but a lot of my friends do, ha.” That was a lie. None of Penelope’s friends did anything but occasionally miserably meet up at a local Chili’s.

“OK. I wasn’t really going to give you one,” said Lan. She lit her cigarette and blew smoke out the window.

“Did you go the panel?” asked Penelope.

“Yeah,” said Lan.

“Oh,” said Penelope. “Did you like it?”

Lan was silent.

“What did you do afterward?”

“I watched a movie.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” said Penelope.

“Not really,” said Lan.

“I guess not,” said Penelope. “Who did you see it with? Have you met anyone cute? Boys, I mean?” Penelope winced. Lan was silent again.

“Um, what are you going to concentrate in?” asked Penelope.

“Biomedical engineering,” said Lan.

“That’s really cool. I can’t do anything with numbers, or engineering. I’m more of a language person myself, or maybe history, but I kind of hate history, so I don’t really know.”

“How can you hate history?” said Lan, throwing her cigarette out the window.

“I mean, I don’t hate the fact that there is history in the world. That would be stupid. But sometimes I think it’s kind of boring. I don’t know.”

“OK, I’m going to bed,” said Lan, and stalked into her room.

Penelope was alone in the common room. She immediately fell asleep on the futon.

The day of the placement exam, Penelope woke up with a stiff neck. At first she forgot she was at Harvard. Then she remembered.

Penelope had a full day ahead. She had a placement test, a proctor meeting, and an ice cream social. Even though these activities seemed to be conceived with an immature seventh grader in mind, she was glad of their existence. She had spent the last couple of days watching
Oprah
while everyone else studied for the placement exam, and it was getting very emotionally tiring.

Penelope padded over to the bathroom to take a shower. Emma was gone and her bed was immaculately made. Lan’s room was dark and locked shut. Penelope thought she smelled pot emanating from under the door. She knocked.

“Hey, do you want to get breakfast?” she asked through the door. There was no answer. “OK, you don’t have to.”

Penelope showered. She put on her favorite jeans and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She partially blow-dried her hair, braided it, and went to breakfast.

Annenberg Hall, where breakfast was served, was a gigantic Victorian gothic structure tempered only by the tenets of Christian Science from reaching true
Harry Potter
levels of grandiosity. The ceilings were cavernous. The stained-glass windows depicted Christopher Columbus and various Greeks. Marble busts of forgotten governors of Massachusetts decorated the walls. Breakfast didn’t really deserve this building. The breakfast offered—a cold, cheerless affair involving fried chicken—definitely suffered for the comparison.

Penelope saw Emma right away. She was sitting at a long table in the corner, animatedly talking to four other girls. All the girls were wearing pastel iterations of the same jacket, which looked like it was originally made for fox hunting. Penelope scanned the room. There was Emma, and then there were miles and miles of sparsely populated tables. She decided to sit down with Emma and be friendly.

“Hey, can I sit here?” asked Penelope.

“Oh,” said Emma, “we were just leaving.” The girls nodded in agreement. “We have to study for the placement exam.”

“Isn’t that exam just to test out what you know, so they can put you in the right class?”

“But don’t you want to be in the highest class possible? I mean, I am at least going to try to get into Math 55.”

“What is Math 55?” asked Penelope.

“It’s the hardest math class! It’s actually the hardest math class in the world. It takes geniuses like eight hours to do the problem sets. You’re so funny. Anyway, we have to go,” she said, and left. The gaggle of girls traipsed out behind her.

Penelope sat down at the deserted table. She toyed with her fried chicken, which she now realized was stuffed with broccoli. She looked around the dining hall. Everyone had their old calculus books out to study for the math placement exam. Penelope started eating her chicken very quickly.

Then Ted sat down next to her.

“Oh, hi,” said Penelope.

“Oh, hi,” said Ted. “Were those girls your roommates?”

“One was,” said Penelope. “They had to go. Why aren’t you sitting with your roommates?”