Entrance

Second floor, end of the hall on the left. As I turn the dented brass door knob, the wooden door creaks open, revealing the narrow expanse of my high school door room. It’s just after seven o’clock on the night of my eighteenth birthday. Setting my ratty canvas tote aside, I find a seat on the old carpeted floor and wait for the day to spoil. 

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The silence feels like another reminder of the passage of time. Only seniors can live in single rooms. After spending my early teenage years sleeping next to strange roommates with foul-smelling microwaveables, I usually cherish privacy. But today, I’d shower in shrimp–flavored ramen for propinquity. My roommates and I almost never spoke, but I wish for closeness. 

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I moved away from the hills of northern California to go to boarding school a few months after I turned fourteen. My high school is only a three-hour drive south—two and a half, if you’re lucky—situated in a little beach town. I left because I loved school perhaps a little too much. This is my fourth year living in dorms. Surveying the walls, the dark wood and cream-colored paint are dotted and scratched with age. Decades of Command hooks and adhesive sticky tape marks cover the walls. I had tried to cover the age by hanging family pictures and post cards from art museums, but they don’t quite fill the gaps. I know that when I try to gently pull them from the walls next month, they’ll just add to the defaced paint—an enotropic right of passage. No more than a hundred square feet, it’s a shoe box, but transitively mine. 

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I wander over to my beige vinyl desk. Opening the center drawer, I peer down at the names Sharpied onto the wood: Callie Harris from ‘07, just-Maggie from the year 2000, and dozens of other signatures from women who have lived in this very room. Over the years, signatures have accumulated all over campus—written inside gym lockers, carved into the wooden tables in the dining hall, and even painted in acrylic on secret cervices in the art room—from students trying to make their mark. Some signatures are more elaborate than others, with flourishing cursive capitals and consonants; others write over previous students’ names with bold, confident letters; but most of the inscriptions are small and neat like good Catholic school girls. The ink on my drawer is beginning to bleed from accidental splashes of water, blending shades of the blue-ish black, red, green, and pink into monolithic brown. Pushing away a stack of Post-it’s, I uncover the signature of Sharon Wallager ‘90 written right in the center with big, calligraphic letters. Who was she? I almost Google her, but decide against it. Better not to kill the mystery.

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The way somebody signs their name can tell a lot about a person. Personal marks that seem to say I was here. During middle school, many of my friends practiced theirs like a mantra on scrap paper. Every time my dad pays for dinner, his pen makes the same scratching noise—slow and curled, and then finishes with a lick. Whenever I sign documents, I gulp and try to write my first name in haphazard cursive as quickly as I can, hoping to make a similar noise as my dad. The desire to create a signature feels so masculine. My unquenchable desire for a gold star makes me nervous to sign my name, and yet, I feel compelled to do so anyway. It's times like these that makes me regret never designing a signature. The permanent pen feels permanent, too irreversible, without an autograph. Except for a handful of dorm faculty, like my Welsh world religions teacher, I doubt anybody will see the signatures but those who will live here after me. One of these days, I’ll find a secret spot and sign my name to the drawer like a yearbook that will never be finished— a lineage that I’ll never know but feel everyday.

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Across from the door, a mirror and a window hang over my desk. There are fingerprints on both from careless mornings. Peering into the mirror, I often like to imagine the reflections of previous tenants looking back at me. My high school—a Catholic college prep school for girls—opened in 1950. I can see my hair cut into a little gauche bob curled at the bottom. My plaid uniform kilt is a few inches longer, but my collared shirt still has the same little embroidered crest on my left collarbone. I think I would’ve been more graceful had I been born then, but I would’ve despised home economics. Making up stories makes me feel less guilty for forgetting to buy Clorox wipes. Sorry, dad. Seeing myself now after another year under the beating sun, I notice how my reflection has changed: my jaw appears narrower and the skin around my cheeks grows drier from the chlorine at swim practice. The inertia of my fleeting youth and the inevitability of getting older scare me. Rubbing the delicate skin around my eyes, I wonder where time has gone. The friction against the glass proves pointless. My physics teacher pops into my mind and reminds me that an object in motion stays in motion. 

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The sun is beginning to set. Looking out the window, the light begins to fade in the distance from golden to pink and orange. At least the sunshine appears to be doing the plants some good. Leaning against the side of the window between bookends are miscellaneous copies of Dover-edition Shakespeare plays, a highlighted Camus, my diaries, a little whiteboard for Spanish verb conjugations, a few old print copies of the New Yorker, and about a dozen classics that I hadn’t read, but made me feel smart for owning. The curtains around my window are barely worth mentioning, except for the fact that they’re light blue, come with the room, and just a little too ugly to be cute. 

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I cast a glance at my two ferns, a pothos, and an old ivy sitting in front of the glass. They’re beginning to take up more space than I can manage. My newest addition is a baby fern from my biology teacher after the national exam. No larger than an espresso mug, I have a bad habit of smashing its little stalks between the pages of my colossal biology textbook, so its pointed leaves have dried yellow and brown spots, instead of dark, judicious green. The rest of them are from a bookstore with a plant atrium in the back. I loved going there during my freshman year on the weekend shuttle—a school bus that looks like half a stick of butter—going south toward the beach to pick out their pots from an eclectic selection of cat heads and funky colors. I picked out white ceramic ones because they had little drainage holes in the bottom, and I have an overwatering problem. 

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I grab my neon orange water bottle named Jamie from on top of the dresser beneath the mirror, unscrew the leaky cap, and divide whatever's left between the four pots. It couldn’t hurt. I thought the ostentatious color would help me not forget him places, though my swim coach and the upper school office would say otherwise. Evoking moans and groans from my friends, he became a micro campus celebrity as a result of the many places I’ve left him—leaning against classroom desk legs, sitting on the edge of the pool deck, hiding under a pew in the campus chapel. Covered in stickers, I can just make out one from a coffee shop nearby—a little tandem bike with a rainbow surfboard. There’s another from a family trip to southern California, one from an affirmative action political protest with flowers in the shape of ovaries, and a few gifted––and a couple stolen––from friends. After dropping Jamie in the rain, bonking him on the side of desks, forgetting him on the pool deck, and letting him fall out of the side pocket of my equally defaced Northface backpack his once-smooth surface has become disfigured. Even so, his scratches and dents make him feel like mine.

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I decide to return to the floor. Grounding myself beneath the sterile ceiling lamp, I slouch against the linoleum drawers below my sleeper-sofa twin-XL. The cold artificial, blueish-white hue is dissatisfying. Through the semi-translucent light shade, I can see a spotted graveyard of dead moths. Only a month before graduation, I felt the room had already begun preparations for my departure. I notice a thick humid haziness gathering in the cubbyhole-sized space. I couldn't help but feel the room was moving on without me. 

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If I really squint, I can see the brownish carpet is composed of different shades of blue, maroonish, and mustard threads, hiding decades of soda stains, hair, remanence of rumpled pastries. and loneliness. Leaning my head against the mattress, I feel the arms of my dad’s old sweatshirt graze against my back, sticking out from the plastic drawers from below my bed. I have a bad habit of chucking soiled clothes in the closet when I’m in a hurry, which pull my neatly hung dresses down with them. Toss in damp, miscellaneous pool equipment from swim practice and you’ve got a party. 

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The soft cotton stitches of my multicolored hippie quilt pull tighter. After a long morning of celebratory phone calls and texts chock-full with emojis, my phone finally stops glowing. My friends are retired in their rooms to prepare for our last round of exams. Bending my knees toward my chest like a child with a stuffed animal, I settle my phone in my lap. Scrolling, I look up at the popcorn ceiling and back down again, waiting. For what, I wasn’t quite sure––everyone I hoped would text or call already had. Swiping between videos from politics to celebrity drama to cute dogs in little hats, the distractions weren’t distracting enough. Finally, I open my photos app instead, and begin to look at old photographs from my childhood. 

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I was born on the first of May—May Day—a holiday marked by flower crowns and ribbons. I remember that time of year best during elementary school. The school year would be almost over, the blacktop would begin to make a mirage again from the growing heat in the afternoon, and the grocery store watermelon would finally stop tasting so mealy. I share my birthday; I have a twin sister, but boarding school is so not her thing. Since I left, we haven’t spent a birthday together for years.

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My dad loved to throw shared birthday parties for my twin sister and I. Shared cake, shared cards, shared friends. We both secretly wished we could have separate celebrations, as if to somehow prove we were, in fact, separate people. Luckily, we’re fraternal. I remember sitting side by side at the kitchen table while our family sang happy birthday off-beat––two names instead of one. She hated the song, but I loved looking at how our dad smiled when he sang to us. As kids, I think we both believed sharing a birthday somehow meant we were half as celebrated. But every year since I left for high school, I find myself reminiscing about her, wishing she’d teleport. I realized she was the celebration. 

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On our eighth birthday, we invited both of our elementary school classes to a tropical-themed party. There were rainbow balloons, cut fruit, heavy water guns, cupcakes, and inner tube galore. Our friends screamed and laughed, wearing dark Nike swim shorts and flower patterned cover ups. Rays reflected off the pool and made our skin glow. As the afternoon sun waned, it was time for my dad’s pièce de résistance: the watermelon relay race. I loved being competitive, but I had, and still have, terrible stage fright. Standing at the ledge, we were divided into two teams and organized into lines. 

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“Sara, why don’t you go first?” My dad asked, smiling. He still has the pink polo he was wearing then. 

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“Do I have to?” 

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“Come on—it’ll be fun! Here, take this.” While he was trying to downplay it, my dad asked me to go first because, well, nobody else wanted to. I can’t remember who started the other team. But then, materializing seemingly out of thin air, he handed me a gargantuan watermelon. Hugging it to my chest, my arms ached from its weight. I prayed my melon wouldn’t split in half and put on my best game face while my dad walked to the other side of the pool to referee. Yelling, he told us to swim—there and back! The victorious team won stickers and first dibs on dinner. Raising his fingers for the countdown, I prepared to jump. 3…2…1…

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But looking back at cupcakes and sun-kissed cheeks on the boundary between adolescence and adulthood, getting older feels like nothing to celebrate. I remember when I thought my childhood would never end, when I thought being seventeen would mean lockers, boyfriends, and house parties until three. My seventeen looked more like study hours from 7:30-9:30 monitored by the dance teacher, Accutane, and mandatory mass on Sundays. A transitory age, the ordinariness makes me feel like I took the fast track to adulthood. 

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The curve in my spine begins to ache against the bedframe. Setting my phone aside, I watch the setting sun’s rays stretch through the window like a cat arching its back. As I reach for the door, the aged wood shines. After so many years of chipping, knocking, and jamming, the ridges of the smoothed trunk still glow bright beneath the worn varnish. Sliding on my dad’s rubber sandals, I wander back down the hall again. 

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