On Monday, December 7th, two seasoned reporters from the Nassau Weekly got the scoop on the Warwick Rowing Team of Warwick Rowers Calendar fame. The rowers release a naked calendar each year to raise money for the team. The proceeds … Read More
I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.
Princeton’s campus is insulated from the dangers of a city. It teems with P-Safe cars. But for much of the community, in the privacy of our dorm rooms and our own mattresses, it is not safe.
