36. Is This What You Were Hoping for? - Lords of Serendipity

It was the first cold night of the fall semester at Haven, and the members of Katrina and Cham’s residence house decided a fire was in order. Katrina wasn’t on dishes that night, so she offered to build it. There was no wood in the sitting room, so she took the olive-green leather-and-twill wood carrier from beside the off-white marble fireplace and went outside. She breathed in deeply from the front porch. The air was sharp. It hurt a little, but in a good way. It made her think of a line from a Truman Capote book she was reading for her junior seminar, Writing Wrongs. This was apple-eating weather. It was dusk on a Thursday, late October. Things were going well, better than ever before, in fact, since she’d first come to Haven. She was living in a large, newly renovated century home. It was located in the old part of campus, on a flowerpot-lined lane of homes that had belonged to Haven’s original faculty and eventually had been bought by the college and turned into themed residences. A professor and their family continued to live in each, with selected students assigned to the various bedrooms. This year, the houses were named for Sustainability, Justice, Artificial Intelligence, Body Positivity, Climate Change, the Global South, Feminisms, Blackness (which had to be renamed Allyship after the student applications were assessed against the criteria), and Entrepreneurship. Heterodox House was the latest, and it had opened thanks to a major donation from an anonymous alumnus concerned about the college’s lack of viewpoint diversity.

Cham and Katrina were assigned to Heterodox House. They knew why. The administration hadn’t forgotten the Gaudy, even if most of their fellow students had, or at least had moved on to more immediate controversies. The latest was a picture circulating online of the college president shaking hands with the Israeli ambassador at a recent White House reception. A twenty-four-hour protest had started, which involved a doctored version of the image—both the president and the ambassador had blood on their hands, while the ambassador also had bloody fangs and gold coins for eyes—that was projected every night onto the front of Haven’s main administration building. Several junior faculty members had posted essays and videos in support of the free-speech rights of the students.

Katrina wanted nothing to do with that protest, or any other. She just wanted to take her courses and come home to her housemates.

From the porch she could see the pond and the historic buildings that made up the quadrangle and also the glow of light from the all-glass boxes further down the campus green, which made the dark sky look like chalk dust coming off a blackboard. She loaded a few logs from a low pyramid, tested their weight, and decided she could carry a few more. As she was transferring the logs into the bronze half-pipe holder, Dolce and Gabbana came over. The professors’ two rust-colored vizslas started nosing in and around her until they reached the wood, at which point each dog pulled off a piece of bark and trotted away.

And that’s why we keep the wood outside, Katrina, said Aidan, one of the two professors who lived in the house. They were a married couple, both of them trim white male sociologists.

Sorry! said Katrina.

He shrugged.

It’s all right. They’ll take the bark up to our bedroom or one of our offices and chew it apart while we’re downstairs. I’ll make Darcy clean up the mess as payback for making me go to that horrible book launch last week. I keep having to remind him that his colleagues are not necessarily my colleagues.

Okay.

So, Katrina, can we take a minute?

Sure.

You’re well? This is working out? You and Cham are usually the quietest people at dinner, which makes sense with this loud crowd, but, well, is this what you were hoping for?

To be honest, I didn’t have much hope at all coming back after my year abroad, given how my first year at Haven went. You probably know why.

Aidan nodded.

You did something bratty before bratty was a thing?

I guess so, yeah. But living here? It’s going super well.

Glad to hear. So . . . maybe you can start saying a little more in conversations? No pressure, but I’m sure you’ve got something to say. Some opinion, on something? It doesn’t even have to be a contrary opinion. In fact, and this is funny, but to be intellectually consistent, offering a mainstream view would be the most heterodox thing possible at Heterodox House, right?

I’ll try, she said. She took her tattooed hand out of her pocket. She was trying to do that more.

And see if Cham will, too, maybe? said Aidan.

Yes. Sure.

To be honest, and I say this because I know you’re close, I’m more surprised by Cham being quiet than you. A colleague taught her in freshman year and said she always had something to say. Not so much here. But everything’s okay? I’m not prying, it’s a real question, and actually part of the whole house-prof gig.

I’ll ask, but I can say that she’s dealing with some home stuff that’s pretty complicated.

Understood. Okay, I’m going to grab my grading and read it by this wonderful fire you’re building. What are you working on tonight?

Probably my conference paper.

Right! You’re delivering a talk at the symposium? Your paper was selected?

Yes. It’s based on my study abroad semester. Cham’s giving a paper, too.

Congratulations.

Katrina shrugged.

It’s a big deal to have your paper selected.

Really? You think so?

I know so. I’ve been on the selection committee. No one outside Haven is going to care, but around here, for certain kinds of people, it matters.

Certain kinds of people?

People who still think this is a place to come to because you want to find some things out, not make connections and get to the next place. I mean, that matters too, obviously, but that’s not the total point of college. At least, I don’t think it should be, do you?

I don’t know. My dad would agree with you, though.

Maybe I’ll meet him someday and we can convince you together!

He’s kind of working at a university in Sri Lanka right now.

Sabbatical?

Sort of? I’m visiting him, actually.

Lovely! When?

Right when classes end.

So you’re going to miss the therapy puppies?

I thought that was canceled because of the whole puppy mill issue.

These are litters from conflict-zone rescue dogs, so all good, apparently.

Maybe they’ll have them for spring exams. Anyway, my dad’s hosting a big talk by this astronomy professor who supervised Cham’s study abroad research. He wants us both to come. It means I’m going to skip the Gaudy. Which is kind of a big deal in my family. My mother went here, and my dad met her when he saw her perform in the Gaudy, and then, as you know, I was in it, too.

Yes. And you weren’t wrong in the point you were making.

It feels like a really long time ago, to be honest.

Which suggests you’ve moved on?

I think so.

The symposium will help. You’ll see. It really is one of the few things left around here where you’re chosen because you have something to say academically. Not just for political points or your CV. Anyway, I will do my best to come listen to your paper.

Thank you. Also, Aidan?

Yes, Katrina?

Wouldn’t it be intellectually consistent to live here and keep my opinions to myself?

He smiled and turned and left, taking the gleaming, double-wide oak staircase upstairs, two steps at a time. Katrina went back to building the fire, feeling clever and also successful in having concealed the fact that she really didn’t have opinions on much. And having seen the evidence of what people were like, and what happened to them, when they did have opinions at college, she was happy to keep it that way.

She brushed wood bits from her hands into the fireplace and, standing up, saw the blot on her palm. She hadn’t seen Mather around campus and neither had Cham. She didn’t know what she would do, if she did, and she was worried he was living in one of the other houses on the lane. Entrepreneurship? No. Probably Allyship. That motherfucker.

Cham wasn’t nearly as down as Katrina thought she’d be. She felt free. Not from her family—she missed being annoyed by them all—but because her family, with its ridiculous, childish, cruel Sri Lankan way of pretending that she currently didn’t exist, was in this way finally admitting the truth. Even her sister at Oxford was only responding to texts with emojis, mostly faces that said she didn’t know what was going on. Which might have actually been true. She had been so young when it happened. Probably it was kept from her. And it still was, in a sense. Cham’s sister had been in Greece, on an archaeological dig, the August night before Cham left the family’s house in California to go back to Haven. That’s when she did it. Finally just said fuck it, she had to do this or she couldn’t get on with doing anything else. She walked into the kitchen and said to the people who adopted her and the woman who gave birth to her:

Admit it. Admit I’m her daughter.

She still couldn’t call her mother by her true name. Ammi couldn’t even look at her. At any of them, after she said it. They didn’t look at her, either. She made her demand and received total, total silence. They just continued pounding the cumin and peppercorns together in the mortar and cutting the garlic and onions and lamb. All of which, beyond the silence, made her feel so, so bad. Because the three of them had been making a lamb curry for dinner because that was Cham’s favorite and she was leaving the next day. She ended up eating alone in a silent kitchen. Not what she’d been hoping for.

It was only when she was back on campus and not hearing from them at all, not being asked to continue making a mandatory Sunday-night call home, that she began to feel different. Not slammed back by their refusal to admit what they all knew, but freed from it, at least while she was here. She stayed focused on school, on being a good housemate, a serious student, not a jerk.

It was early morning, and she was lacing up her shoes. She wouldn’t take earbuds on her run until after the symposium. Instead, she would go over her paper in her head. She’d been doing this before Katrina told her what Aidan had said, that this was an actual deal, a real thing at Haven, the symposium. And Martin had promised he would Zoom in for her paper, even if no one else was going to.

All fall, Cham had been running along a trail on the far side of the campus pond. It was beautiful. Tall, clean-smelling pines, steam coming off the still water in the cool, bright early morning. Katrina refused to go with her because she only had road shoes and didn’t want to ask her dad for another pair for trail running. She was being thoughtful. Whatever he was getting paid in Sri Lanka couldn’t have been much.