CROSSROADS

I am the new girl, a late enrollment. My parents and I are ushered into an expansive office with heavy drapes for an interview. They sit in the back on a plush couch, me up front in a straight-back chair across a hefty desk from the assistant headmistress, a smallish woman with thick oval glasses. She begins, “What have you read, Miss Huntley?”

I stare at her owlish face and freeze, incapable of telling her about our smalltown library a half block from my house. Ever since fourth grade I’d been allowed to walk there on my own and stay as long as I liked. The two librarians, Ms. Shep and her sister, allowed me access to all the rooms, even the attic that housed the Civil War archive, where they let me wander among the armed and uniformed manikins. Other days I pore over articles and discover Seventeen in the magazine alcove. Somehow I pass the interview. I tell my parents goodbye.

Most of the dorm rooms are doubles but, because I’m late, I’m assigned the single the other girls call “the pink ballerina room.” It’s a small room down a cornered hallway with an exterior window ledge almost large enough to crawl onto. I’m happy to have ballerinas dancing on the walls in pink tutus and toe shoes, reminding me of the program in third grade when I wore a ballet costume borrowed from a girlfriend. In the short tulle skirt, a sequined top and matching tiara, I played a wood fairy and learned a poem by heart. My mother pin-curled my hair the night before the performance, and I got to wear lipstick.

I play my music in the ballerina room, a collection of 45’s that includes Motown, The Doors, Johnny Rivers, The Beatles, James Taylor, Bread, The Guess Who and Carole King. Some of the other girls ask to borrow them. Weeks after moving in, one classmate in particular keeps dropping by. She’s the first person I know who wears round John Lennon glasses, setting off naturally curly hair, a sly grin and quirky laugh. I find out she’s a cartoon artist.

She starts chatting about her roommate, making it sound like I’m missing out. She says if I want a roommate, she has the best; and I can trade places with her, move to a double on a main hall. This way, she promises me, I’d have a roommate. I won’t be alone anymore. I fall for it and we swap, privacy for friendship. But the thought of the pink ballerina room never fully goes away. Like time alone in the town library, I enjoy solitude, the space to think. The girl with the John Lennon glasses finagled this gift for herself.

But I do like having a fun-loving roommate. After dinner we hold “dance-outs” in our room to my 45’s. It becomes the place to be, the place where 16-year-old ballerinas truly come to life, in the bargain of a lifetime. And I say this now because the new girl then did not know when she landed the private room tucked down the small hallway, off to itself, it was just the sort of place that fit the person she would become. The way of the universe was to give her a smalltown library and a few weeks in the pink ballerina room as a taste of independence. Each left its imprint.