There once were three girls, who
had never met, and a dog named Katie. In August they moved into the basement,
luckily made friends, and lived through an entire first year of college. Angie
and Grak and Caity; they studied together and joked, they watched TV shows and looked
at clothes online (if only they had the money to buy from JCrew or
Anthropologie), they took distorted pictures of each other and only very rarely stocked fellow classmates. They
listened to songs that Derb should never know about and reviewed lectures and
were quite heretical, I’m sure. Friday nights found them in jeans and
sweatshirts, kneading dough and stretching pizza crust. Friends would come over
with pepperoni and cheese and sit around until it was late, talking and
laughing.
The basement had it’s own special
qualities. The microwave threatened to explode anytime the Start button was
pushed and the washer leaked a lake, but only once in a while, and the
sink…well, that faucet was persnickety—turned on low and it dribbled, flipped
on full blast it was like a fire-hose. There was no in between. Even stranger
was the basement’s aptitude for collecting other people’s possessions (a pair
of shoes, a towel, an empty purse, a pair of kid-snowpants, and a book, to name
a few). The guests never claimed them, but every now and then one of the items
would disappear, I assume to find a new home.
What a year they had, had: early
morning classes; cinnamon rolls and coffee, greek yogurt and chocolate chips; a
broken trashcan and dim flickering lights; one mouse and just a few spiders, on
the whole, the eight months they lived in the basement were not too bad. They
even missed each other over the summer.
After a few months of break, only
one of the three returned. Grangie, as the two inseparables were tenderly called,
moved away leaving the house practically empty. The faces were different this
next year and the number of words spoken per second grew to tremendous heights:
this little corner of E and Howard was not the same. There were now four
roommates: the Asian one, the hockey one, the tall one, and Caity; Mr. Burnett
called them his sorority. It’s was not as perfectly neat-and-tidy, nor as
coldly lonesome; the counter tops were perpetually cluttered with tea and
coffee mugs and there were at least two curling irons plugged in at any given
time. Pictures and paintings made their way onto the walls and spread to the
fridge too, covered with magnets and papers and notes. Books no longer stayed
in their designated spots on the shelves and pots and pans seemed to leap out
of the cabinets. Evenings were spent “studying,” playing games, and crying
through smiles, a commonplace book kept to record all their unfortunate
quotables.
And now one more year has almost
past. The constant bubbling of excited stories and retelling of school drama animated
those dreary days of that sophomore year.
