She looked at him. “You’re really saying that to me?”
It was still a sensitive topic, his being at Princeton and her being at Ryland. And she was still so angry with her parents, who had caused this to happen. But lately the environment felt different—both at school and inside her, that little province you carried around throughout your life, and which you were unable to leave, so you had to make the best of it. Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.
At the beginning of college, she had felt lonely and furious and aimless. But lately the Ryland campus was brighter and more welcoming. Sometimes conversations and events and classes and even just walks to town with a friend were exciting to her. Greer wondered what she was missing being here at Princeton this weekend; she was sure she was missing something. She didn’t seethe and stew anymore. No more sitting in the Woolley lounge in despair. Even the boy from Iran had found his way by joining the Model Rocketry Club; the other members, a cheerful, eclectic group, often stopped by Woolley with their motors and their plywood, and yanked him from his room. He spent less time mourning his faraway family, and more time in this dynamic world.
You needed to find a way to make your world dynamic, Greer knew. Sometimes you couldn’t do it yourself. Someone had to see something in you and speak to you in a way that no one else ever had. Faith Frank had swept in and had that effect on Greer, though of course Faith had no idea that she had done anything like that. It seemed unfair now that she didn’t know. It seemed wrong not to tell her.
Greer often thought about how Faith had paid attention and been patient and kind and interested and inspiring that night. She had a frequent, grandiose fantasy of writing to Faith and saying:
I want you to know that after you came here, things changed for me. I can’t really explain it, but it’s true. I’m different. I’m involved. I’m more open, less resentful. I’m actually (to use the technical term) happy.
“Why not write her?” Zee had asked recently. “She gave you her business card. It has her email on it. Just send her a little note saying whatever.”
“Oh yes, that’s what Faith Frank really wants and needs. To be pen pals with a freshman at a shitty college that she has no memory of visiting.”
“She might like to hear that things are good with you.”
“No, I can’t write her,” said Greer. “She wouldn’t remember me, and anyway it would be abusing the privilege of having her email.”
“‘The privilege of having her email,’” said Zee. “Listen to you. It’s not a privilege, Greer. She gave you the card, and I think that’s great. You should use it.”
But Greer never wrote. Occasionally, professors paid attention to her, but it wasn’t the same. One of them, Donald Malick, taught her freshman English colloquium, and he put a “See me” note on the last page of the paper she wrote about Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as anti-heroine. The syllabus had taken the class headlong through very different kinds of novels, but Greer had particularly loved this one. Becky Sharp was awful in her naked ambition, and yet you also had to give her credit for being single-minded. So many people seemed muddled in their desires. They didn’t know what they wanted. Becky Sharp knew. After the paper was returned to her, Greer went to Professor Malick’s office, which was a ruckus of slanting books.
“You did a fine job with this,” he said. “The concept of the anti-hero, or in your case anti-heroine, isn’t something that everyone intuitively understands.”
“I think what’s interesting is that we like reading about her. Despite the fact that she’s unlikable,” said Greer. “Likability has become an issue for women lately,” she added self-importantly. She had read an article about this in Bloomer, to which she now subscribed. She wished the magazine were more consistently interesting to her; she wanted to love it, because of Faith.
“You know, I’ve written a whole book on the anti-hero,” Professor Malick explained, “and I’d like to lend it to you.” He reached out and ran a finger along the spines; it made a clickety sound like a quiet xylophone. “Where are you, anti-hero?” he asked. “Come out and show your anti-heroic face. Ah! There you are.” Then he yanked out the book and pressed it on Greer, saying, “I can see from your papers, which apparently you actually write yourself—will wonders never cease—that you have a good mind. So I thought you might want a little extra reading.”
But he was a sour man with breath like scallions, his teaching and writing style difficult and self-referential, and no, never really likable. And though sometimes in class she let images from novels carry her away, soon she had been carried too far away, out of literature entirely and into something unrelated. Being with Cory in bed, or whatever she, Chloe, and Zee were doing on campus that night.
Later, Greer read her professor’s book, because she was the kind of person who felt she had to read it because he had given it to her. Unfortunately it was resistantly academic, and, flipping through to the page of acknowledgments, she saw with some irritation that he had thanked his wife, Melanie, “for being willing to type my long manuscript for her hopelessly ‘butterfingers’ husband, never once complaining.” He added, “Melanie, you are a saint, and I am humbled by the gift of your love.” Greer thundered through the book as she’d said she would, bored by the maddening text that refused to yield. She didn’t know what to say to him about it, so she said nothing, and in any case it wasn’t a problem because he never asked for it back.
Greer had been spending a lot of time lately with Zee and Chloe, and also with Kelvin Yang, a Korean-American drummer who lived upstairs, and his roommate Dog—named affectionately by his family because dog was the first word he’d spoken. Dog was a big, handsome, and effusive person in a parka who often said, “I love you guys so much,” and embraced his female friends with a sudden seizing-up of emotion. They all went to parties together, though never again at any of the frats. They traveled in one group, like children inside a camel costume. They went on snowy hikes, and took a Chinatown bus down to a climate change rally in DC, and they sent one another links to articles about the environment, or US involvement in endless wars, or violence against women, or the whittling away of reproductive rights.
That semester, Greer and Zee had been volunteering at the Talk 2 Us women’s hotline in downtown Ryland. They spent long evenings in the storefront sitting around playing Boggle as they waited for the phone to ring. When it did ring every once in a while, they would listen to stories of nebulous sadness and self-hatred, or sometimes more focused despair. They would speak soothingly, as they had been trained, and stay on the line as long as necessary, finally connecting the caller with the appropriate social-service agency. Once, Zee had to dial 911 because of a girl on the phone who said she had swallowed an entire bottle of generic Tylenol after a breakup with her boyfriend.