Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
But Ren also knew that most freshmen couldn’t build a bug zapper using a six-volt battery, some wooden dowels, and a black light, or craft a portable generator out of a solar panel recovered from the county trash heap and a twenty-dollar inverter. There would be more ways than one that Ren wouldn’t fit in. Her goal was to show every person she met that she had something unique to offer, and that she wanted to learn from them, too.
Miriam stretched out and rolled to her stomach, swiping her thumb across a small screen. Ren craned her neck to get a better look at the person Miriam was watching do their makeup.
“Do you have your own mobile phone?”
Miriam went still before slowly turning her head. A flat “What?” floated out of her mouth, carried on a disbelieving smile.
“In your hand. Is that yours?”
Her roommate blinked. “Yes…?”
“I’ve seen some people with them at the farmers market, and I’ve read about them. But I’ve never held one. The technology is amazing.”
“They told me you were coming from a farm,” Miriam said. “I—” She mimed an explosion coming out of her temple. “Like, I do not even know how to process that you’ve never held an iPhone before.” But even so, she didn’t offer to hand hers over, and Ren mentally logged this: People are protective of their devices.
“Have you lived here all year?” Ren asked.
“Yup.”
“Who was your roommate before?”
Miriam didn’t look up. “Her name was Gabby. She flunked out.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she failed her classes.”
Okay, so basically what Ren thought. “How?”
Miriam laughed. “Uh, by never going?”
“Oh.” Ren studied the other woman, trying to puzzle this out. Someone would enroll in school to…not go to school? “Why didn’t she go?”
“How would I know?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Miriam said, “that makes two of us.”
“Was she nice?”
“I guess.”
“What did she study?”
Miriam huffed out a laugh. “Obviously she didn’t study anything.”
“I just meant…” Ren let the thought trail off. Maybe Gabby hadn’t found the right thing, she wanted to say, but didn’t bother. Somehow, suddenly, the idea that there was a passion buried inside everyone felt starkly naive. “Where did you grow up?”
Miriam bit her lip and looked over at Ren. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude, but I kind of need to do this right now.” She pointed to the phone screen, where the person was now drawing a flower on their eyelid, and then put a small white earpiece in each ear before rolling to face the wall.
Ren pulled her trunk from where Steve had tucked it beside her bed and began unpacking. On top were her prized possessions: a set of new paintbrushes, tubes of oil paints and colored pencils, thick paper, and sketch pads. Wrapped carefully just beneath them was the treasured painting that had hung above her bed since she was capable enough to put the memory down on canvas: a handheld sparkler lighting up the night sky. The style seemed amateurish compared to what Ren was able to create now. The sparks of fire looked like blossoms in her childish strokes, and the cornflower twilight didn’t nearly capture the vibrance of the sky in her recollection; the stars weren’t nearly as sharp. But even so, the crude painting managed to convey the scene permanently tattooed across the inside of her lids. Once she’d painted the brilliant explosions of light, she never stopped: Ren had painted them across the walls of her room, the headboard of her hand-carved bed, the inside of the barn, the outside of the chicken coop, and, of course, pages upon pages in her notebooks.
Assuming she wasn’t allowed to put nails in the dorm walls, Ren propped the canvas on her desk and moved to unpack everything else: clothes, a towel, her bedding, her brush, toothbrush and toothpaste, and her going-away-to-college treat: a block of her favorite farmers market honey soap wrapped in wax paper. All of it was neatly stowed away in her armoire in a matter of minutes.
Buried beneath all that was her beloved collection of fiction. Willa Cather, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Franz Kafka, and Shakespeare, all found at the local thrift store or flea market. Each one—whether hardy hardcover or well-loved paperback—was carefully lined up on the top shelf of the new-to-her desk, with the second shelf reserved for her favorite reference texts: the Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Strunk’s Elements of Style, Kovacs’s Botany, Abramowitz’s Handbook of Mathematical Functions, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Gray’s Anatomy, Sagan’s Cosmos, Hawking’s The Theory of Everything, Integrated Chinese, L’Huillier’s Advanced French Grammar, The New World Spanish/English English/Spanish Dictionary, and her set of well-loved German textbooks.
Ren stepped back, assessing. Unlike Miriam’s half of the room, this space didn’t look lived-in quite yet, but it would. The last item in her trunk—her small wind-up clock—was set right in the middle of the desk, where it ticked comfortingly, telling Ren that she had fifteen minutes until she would need to leave for—