“Why are you emailing my roommate’s mother?”

“Why not?” Mom’s voice is snippy, as if there is no reason for me to be asking about this, as if there is no reason for her not to be present in every single part of my life.

“Well, can you not call Kali’s cell? It’s a little weird.”

“It’s a little weird to have your daughter go incommunicado for a week.”

“Three days, Mom.”

“So you were counting too.” She pauses, scoring herself the point. “And if you would let me install a house phone, we wouldn’t have this issue.”

“No one has landlines anymore. We all have cells. Our own numbers. Please don’t call me on hers.”

“Then return my calls, Allyson.”

“I will. I just lost my charger,” I lie.

Her aggrieved sigh on the other end of the line makes me realize I’ve picked the wrong lie. “Must we tie your belongings to you with a rope these days?” she asks.

“I just loaned it to my roommate, and it got put away with her stuff.”

“You mean Kali?”

Kali and I have barely shared a bar of soap. “Right.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting her and her family. They seem lovely. They invited us to La Jolla.”

I almost ask my mother if she really wants to get chummy with people who named their daughter Kali for California. Mom has a thing about names; she hates nicknames. When I was growing up, she was kind of fascist about it, always trying to prevent anyone from shortening my name to Ally or Al. Grandma ignored her, but everyone else, even teachers at school, toed the line. I never got why, if it bothered her so much, she didn’t just name me something that couldn’t be truncated, even if Allyson is a family name. But I don’t say anything about Kali because if I get bitchy, I’ll blow my cover as Happy College Student. And my mother especially, whose parents couldn’t afford to send her to the college of her choice and who had to work her way through college and later support Dad while he was in medical school, is very intent that I be a Happy College Student.

“I should go,” I tell her. “I’m going out with my roommates tonight.”

“Oh, how fun! Where are you going?”

“To a party.”

“A keg party?”

“Maybe the movies.”

“I just saw a great one with Kate Winslet. You should see that one.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Call me tomorrow. And leave your phone on.”

“Professors tend to frown on calls in classes.” The snark comes out again.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. And I know your schedule, Allyson. All your classes are in the mornings.”

She would know my schedule. She basically created it. All those morning classes because she said they’d be less attended and I’d get more attention and then I’d have the whole rest of the day for studying. Or, as it turns out, for sleeping.

After we hang up, I shove the alarm clock into a box in my closet and take the cookies and bring them into the lounge where the rest of my roommates have started in on a six-pack. They’re all dressed up and ready to go out.

When school started, the rest of them were so excited. They really were Happy College Students. Jenn made organic brownies, and Kendra drew up a little sign on our door with all our names and a moniker, the Fab Four, atop it. Kali, for her part, gave us coupons to a tanning salon to ward off the inevitable seasonal affective disorder.

Now, a month in, the three of them are a solid unit. And I’m like a goiter. I want to tell Kendra that it’s okay if she takes down the little sign or replaces it with one that says something like Terrific Trio* and Allyson.

I shuffle into the lounge. “Here,” I say, handing over the cookies to Kali, even though I know she watches her carbs and even though black-and-whites are my favorites. “I’m really sorry about my mom.”

Kendra and Jenn cluck sympathetically, but Kali narrows her eyes. “I don’t want to be a bitch or anything, but it’s bad enough having to fend off my own parents, okaay?”

“She’s having Empty Nest or something.” That’s what Dad keeps telling me. “She won’t do it again,” I add with more confidence than I possess.

“My mom turned my bedroom into a craft room two days after I left,” Jenn says. “At least you’re missed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What kind of cookies are they?” Kendra asks.

“Black-and-whites.”

“Just like us,” Kendra jokes. She’s black, or African American; I’m never sure which is right, and she uses both.

“The racial harmony of cookies,” I say.

Jenn and Kendra laugh. “You should come out with us tonight,” Jenn says.

“We’re going to a party over at Henderson and then there’s this bar over on Central that apparently has a very liberal carding policy,” Kendra says, twisting her just-straightened black hair up into a bun, then thinking twice about it and pulling it down. “Lots of fine male specimen.”

“And female specimen, if that’s your thing,” Jenn adds.

“It’s not my thing. I mean, none of it is my thing.”

Kali gives me a bitchy smirk. “Think you enrolled in the wrong school. I believe there’s a convent in Boston.”

Something twists in my stomach. “They don’t take Jews.”

“Back off, you two,” Kendra says, ever the diplomat. She turns to me. “Why not come out for a few hours?”

“Chemistry. Physics.” The room goes silent. They’re all liberal arts or business majors, so invoking Science shuts them up.

“Well, I’d better get back to my room. I have a date with the Third Law of Thermodynamics.”

“Sounds hot,” Jenn says.

I smile to show I actually get the joke, then shuffle back to my room, where I diligently pick up Foundations of Chemistry, but by the time the Terrific Trio are heading out the door, my eyes have sandbags in them. I fall asleep under a mountain of unread science. And thus begins another weekend in the life of the Happy College Student.

OCTOBER

College

I put off thinking about Parents’ Weekend as long as I can and then the Thursday before they’re due to arrive, I look around my dorm and see it not as I see it—walls, a bed, a desk, a dresser—but as my parents will see it. This is not the dorm of a Happy College Student. There’s dirty laundry spilling out of every drawer, and my papers are everywhere. My mother despises clutter. I ditch my classes and spend the day cleaning. I haul all the dirty laundry down to the washing machines and sit with it as it turns and gyrates. I wipe down the dusty surfaces. In the closet, I hide away all my current schoolwork—the Mandarin worksheets, piling up like unread newspapers, the Scantron chemistry and physics exams with their ominously low scores scrawled in red; the lab reports with comments like “Need to be more thorough” and “Check your calculations!” and the dreaded “See me.” In their place, I set out a bunch of decoy notes and graphs from early in the term, before I started obviously bombing. I unwrap the duvet cover we bought at Bed, Bath & Beyond last summer and put it over the plain quilt I’ve been sleeping under. I grab some of the photos from the boxes and scatter them around the room. I even drop by the U bookstore and buy one of the stupid banners with the school name on it and tack it above my bed. Voilà. School Spirit.

But somehow I forget the clocks. And this gives me away.

When Mom comes into the dorm, after cooing over our tiny dump of a lounge, she oohs over Kali’s pictures of Buster and then looks at my relatively bare walls and gasps. By her look of horror, you’d think I’d decorated with crime-scene photos. “Where’s your collection?”

I point to the boxes in the closet, unopened.

“Why are they there?”

“They’re too noisy,” I quickly lie. “I don’t want to bother Kali with them.” Never mind the fact that Kali blasts her radio at seven in the morning.