Chapter 3: Room 237

Losing Greg deeply affected the way I viewed life. Death was not something totally unfamiliar to me—my father was stroked by death before I had even entered the world. My conception was marked by loss. I was the give to the take. Yet, I never knew him. My mother illustrated such fantastical stories about him that I felt he was just a character in one of the films I loved. His stories and pictures were there in front of me, but he never was. I had lost a father, but I never had the love to grieve that loss.

Before Greg's death, life was summer humidity and winter rain. It was candy shops and bicycles. It was playing cards and movie theaters. It was scraped knees and Sunday dinners. It was French homework and science fairs. It was simple. Life was a collection of experiences and sensations, of loud joy and docile moments of quiet. Although I was well into becoming an adult, I had never grasped the idea of death and loss. I was a childish, innocent girl. Now, life was more than just simple pleasures and tangible glee. Life was something to be taken away. It was something fragile and delicate, painfully temporary and brief. Life was now the meaning and measure of death.

The summer after high school and before college has not stuck well in my memories over the years. When I think back to those few months, I can only remember blur and a deep ache that still resides in the pit of my stomach. I no longer danced around the house with Mama. I no longer went to see the summer blockbusters at Prytania. I no longer wrote my movies. I was thrust and deeply embedded into an adhesive state of slowness and silence. I believe I only talked a handful of times throughout that entire summer. Numbness had seeped into my body and petrified me like a tree in a marsh. I was already a quiet girl, but I turned into a ghost.

Through my grief that burned slow and steady in me like a fire made of ice, I kept a stronghold on my will to seek higher education. I was accepted into the University of New Orleans and spent the last weeks of August packing my things and preparing to leave. A new grief formed inside me. Though I was essentially only moving to the other side of the city, I was leaving the tiny home that had watched me grow up. The kitchen table had seen me through eating baby food to eating adult meals. The sofa had seen me through watching cartoons and television programs. The bathroom mirror had seen me through being a young child who saw the mirror as just a whimsical invention, to becoming a young woman who saw the mirror as a reminder of my imperfections and as a vessel to compare myself to the women in magazines who had become thinner and thinner over the years. My bedroom had seen me through nightmares and tears, through hours of homework and hours of voluntary reading, through study sessions with Greg to grieving him. Now it had seen me pack it up until it was bare, staring at the blank walls with nothing to give in return for all it had given me but a few childlike tears that it gracefully wiped away as I walked through its doors. I didn't know it was possible for someone to feel as if one had committed a selfish wrongdoing against four inanimate walls made of wood, but the guilt sunk deep within me as I walked out of that room.

Leaving Mama alone was the hardest part. She had never sought to remarry, and since she worked long hours, her only friends were me and Greg's mom. I decided that they would both need each other during these months where their houses both felt equally silent for different reasons, so she would not be too alone. Before I left, there were more than just tears for seeing me grow up in her eyes, but there was also fear. With my bags in my hands, I opened the door and turned to her wordlessly. She was clutching the tissue that she had cried into a disintegrated mess all morning.

Suddenly, she came forward and grabbed my face. "Becky," she breathed. I had only ever seen Mama cry at Greg's funeral. Seeing your mother cry twice in your life and both times being within a few months of each other was not a comforting feeling. "I know that you're gonna do great. You're a smart girl, the smartest one I've ever known. And I know your daddy would say the same if he was here." She stroked my hair, and it reminded me of all the times she told me it felt just like my father's hair. "You're gonna meet so many new people and learn so many new things. But no matter what you do, don't you ever let the world get to you."

I dropped one of my bags to clasp my hand gently around her wrist. She used to have the softest skin, but I could feel the age in her wrist. I couldn't feel the tears running down my face. That was always the worst kind of crying.

"The world likes to swallow people like you up—good people, sweet people. You go into the world once, and it gets sight of you, and it takes you away. It takes... It took your daddy..."

"Mama," I cried, holding her wrist and watching her lose her words. She never lost words like that. I thought about Greg, too. Greg was good and sweet, and the world had taken him away.

"I'm just sayin', Becky. Don't let the world get you. For your Mama's sake."

Mama stood on the porch as the taxi drifted me away, and the farther it got, the more my chest hurt. I turned around and watched her through the back window until I could no longer see her pink polka-dot dress and her black hair curled at her shoulders.

When I turned around, there was a pulling feeling in my chest. It felt like my heart had planted an arm in that house, and the farther that the taxi drove away from it, the more it had to stretch to stay inside my chest. It felt like it was ripping right in half, like it was about to snap between the space in my ribs and tear right through me. It hurt so bad that I started to cry, and this time I could feel the tears. They were flowing furiously down my cheeks like a faucet, and I could feel my face get red and hot. A sob broke through me like a child, and I started to think of Greg. I thought of how our mothers used to say we would get married. I thought of him and Roger in the park that fateful day. In my mind, they were sitting on a bench by the pond. They were talking and laughing. They were sitting a little too close. Their hands grazed each other's without thinking. Some boys nearby accidentally saw it. They tried to run, but the world was there in front of them, and it swallowed them up just like Mama said. It took.

I no longer felt like an eighteen-year-old woman as I sat in the back of that taxi sobbing so hard that the driver, without speaking, reached his arm into the backseat and held out a tissue for me. I felt like I did that time when I was a child and fell off my bike and scraped my knee on the street. I felt that same uprooted, unbalanced feeling of losing gravity and being tossed up and down. I felt that brief feeling between being seated on the bike and falling to the ground. I was stuck in the air. When that happened so many years ago, Greg had jumped off his bike and rushed over to me. My knee was bleeding a lot, and I instantly started to cry. Greg had freaked out and instantly started crying too, as if he could also feel the pain in his knee, sprinting to my house and screaming at Mama that I was hurt. I remember still sitting on the road, blood trickling down my knee, bits of concrete stuck in the wound, and looking up to see Greg and Mama running to me. Now I was crying and hurting just like I had then, but I didn't have Greg and Mama running towards me. All I had was the driver's tissue and my bag clutched to my stomach, staring out the window as we drove into the city.

Since the university had only recently opened, the campus was small. Yet, it was bigger than my tiny house, and it took greater effort to find my way to my room than it did back at home. I found the girls' dormitory and walked into the building, being met with dozens of young women in the hallways. It seemed like everyone was already friends and talking to each other as I made my way through the sea of long hair and perfumes.

I went up the stairs to the second floor and found that the upstairs hallway was just as packed and noisy. I squished through people, accidentally bumping into a few girls who, from what I could hear due to my innate need to not make eye contact with anyone, sounded very offended. I was already on the verge of crying again by the time I finally found my room. The door, which was halfway open, read 237. I crept inside the room and saw four white walls and two tiny beds on each side of the room. My eyes went to the empty one first and then to the other one, finding a redheaded girl sitting on top of it. She was wearing a pink and orange striped tank top tucked into a pair of long jean shorts. I couldn't see her face because her fiery orange hair was covering it. She was sitting with her legs crossed on the bed, holding a bag and taking various make up items out of it.

I thought perhaps I went into the wrong room, but right as I started to back away, she looked up suddenly. I froze under her green stare, my face going red as if I had been caught doing something wrong.

"Sorry," I whispered, but I don't think she heard me because suddenly she stood up from the bed.

"Hi!" she exclaimed, giving me a bright freckled smile. She seemed short even standing across the room from me. "You must be Rebecca."

I wondered if the tears on my face had fully dried, and I also wondered if my homemade collared dress made me look like a church girl.

"Oh," was all I could say. I suddenly felt as if I had never interacted with another girl my age in my life, which was partially true since my only friend had always been Greg. The mere thought of him made my eyes feel wet again.

Her smile didn't dim as she walked near me, and I backed away instinctively. She pointed to a piece of paper taped to the door. "Rebecca Hayes, right?"

I hesitated before nodding, nearly forgetting if that was my name or not.

Her finger moved to the name written above mine. "Georgia Greene," she said, looking at me expectantly. I only nodded again. "That's my name. Looks like we are roommates this year. You're a freshman, right?"

"Yes," I said again, not meaning for the word to come out as a whisper.

"Me too!" She giggled and walked back over to the bed she was sitting on, plopping down on it. "Oh... I didn't choose this side for any reason, by the way. I just kinda sat on this bed and started unpacking." She laughed nervously, obviously a little offput by my stillness as I stood in the doorway still holding my bags and staring at her like a lost child. "Did you want this side?"

I looked around and analyzed the room as if I had any opinion on which side I wanted. There was a window right between the beds and two dressers at the foot of each, perfectly symmetrical.

"I'll take this side," I murmured, walking over to the other bed and carefully setting my bags down. Georgia already had her clothes spread out across the floor, halfway folded into the dresser as if she had started putting them away and then got distracted by her makeup bag.

After setting my bags down, I just sort of stood there, avoiding Georgia who was staring at me and trying to figure out what was appropriate to do next.

Suddenly, she asked me a question. "Do you wear makeup?"

I looked to her again, seeing that she was holding a powder compact in her hands. "No."

"You've got really pretty eyelashes," she said immediately after, giving a small smile. She looked at me for a moment before going back to her makeup, taking at least twenty different items out of the little bag.

"Thanks," I said, unsure of how a person could have pretty eyelashes. What defined pretty for eyelashes? Were they long? Extra dark? Pondering this, I felt a little more at ease from the compliment and decided to carefully sit down on my bed, instantly displeased at the sound of mattress springs popping. I took a deep breath and started to take my belongings out of my bags, finding that there was a much less amount than Georgia's belongings which had already characterized her side of the room.

That first night, as I rolled restlessly and noisily around on the squeaky bed, listening to the sound of girls in the other rooms talking and laughing and the sound of Georgia snoring like an old man, I couldn't stop thinking about my last image of Mama standing on the porch in her pink polka dot dress. I also couldn't stop thinking about what she said about not letting the world take me. Somehow, I felt like the world was there, standing at the foot of my bed, watching me sleep.