Nan by Alyson McDevitt
Two dozen chandeliers dripped from the dining hall’s churchlike vault, illuminating each table below. High above, hammer-beam trusses overlayed a stenciled ceiling, and stained-glass windows lined all four walls. Ornate windowpanes of blue, red, and green complimented the interior’s rich walnut paneling.
Unlike her blue-blooded roommates, Joy never got used to eating here. But feeling out of place had its upside: she could admire the grandeur. Who knew if such opulence would ever again grace her existence when college was over? It seemed unlikely. Even at nineteen, she knew this much about the immutability of her circumstances.
When she tore her gaze from the ceiling, her eyes fell upon one roommate sitting opposite her, frowning.
“You never listen to me.”
“I was listening.”
“And?”
“And what, Blair?”
“What do you think?”
“I think...” Joy raised a spoonful of oatmeal to her mouth, chewed slowly. Beside her, their other roommate, Della, saw through the stalling act and snorted into her cornflakes.
Joy could have taken a stab in the dark at the topic. Fifty-fifty chance it was something to do with Blair’s on-again boyfriend. She put down her spoon with a gentle clink and punted, opting for the words Blair—and everyone at Harvard—liked hearing best.
“I think you’re right.”
The sudden arrival of Matt, a boy she knew from a fall seminar, saved her from further filibustering. Tall, athletic, and handsome, he was hard to miss. He asserted his presence by leaning his arms on the end of the table, pitching forward so his upper half towered over the girls. It amazed Joy how boys took up so much space. She envied the unabashed confidence.
“‘Sup, Joy! Morning, ladies.”
Matt was the fun-loving, playful sort. The kind of guy Joy usually went for, much to her peril. She’d learned the hard way, not from Matt but from others of his breed, that charisma was only skin-deep.
His eyes passed swiftly around the table, finding pleasure in the rapt audience before settling back on Joy. “How are we doing? What are we shopping for today?”
Joy smiled. “Oh, I already picked my classes. I don’t like shopping.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Just the idea that teenagers should be allowed to browse world-class professors like produce at the grocery store feels a bit...I don’t know.”
Entitled, she thought. It was like the dining hall: nameless builders had constructed those hammer-beam trusses overhead. Countless professors had labored half their lives to become the best minds in their fields here at this institution. In the eyes of Harvard freshmen, those people were all stagehands; they, the students, were the stars of the show.
“Hi.”
A new voice cut through Joy’s train of thought. It was assertive and a tad cloying, like someone imitating a precocious child. It belonged to a girl who, just then, wrapped her arms around Matt’s torso.
She was about a foot shorter than he was, dressed casually in sweats and a loose tee shirt; a large patch of sweat bloomed through her shirt. When she squeezed Matt tightly, she was nose-level with his armpit.
“Hi, babe. How was your workout?” he asked.
“It was good,” she said, her face buried in his rib cage. She peeked out from the nook she’d burrowed under his arm. “I ran five miles.” Smiling wanly, she eyed the girls who had been chatting with her boyfriend.
Joy had three simultaneous thoughts.
One was that the girl was quite stunning.
Another was that she looked like she had been born coated in liquid gold. Everything about her appearance gave off a glow: olive complexion, honey highlights at the temples, caramel undertones just dark enough to disqualify her as a blonde. Even her saucer-like eyes had flecks of gold in the amber.
The third thought was that Matt’s new girlfriend had no reason to feel threatened. He was nuzzling her adoringly, and even dropped a kiss on her forehead.
But she was threatened. Joy saw it.
It was a fleeting moment, but it was there: a burning look of suspicion that flickered and then was gone, snuffed out by cool composure. The speed of it impressed her. Joy prided herself on noticing the minutiae of social interactions, and now she observed the girl pulling away from Matt’s body to face them: curious, testing her dominance, sniffing out any competition.
“I’m Nan,” she announced to the table. Her real voice, if this was it, was lower.
Della smiled up politely; Blair batted her lashes, wearing a bored expression. Annoyed with their aloofness, Joy spoke up.
“I’m Joy. This is Della and Blair.”
“Joy and I were in Freshman Seminar together,” Matt explained. “And she’s from Boston, too.” He offered Joy a wooden and clumsy fist bump. She reciprocated, knowing it was his way of assuring Nan that she was no threat, just one of the guys.
Nan’s face remained cautious, fixed in a thin smile. “That’s nice,” she said.
“Where are you from?” asked Joy
“You’ll laugh,” she said. “Nantucket.”
Joy didn’t see the humor. She knew Nantucket as a place where well-to-do people summered, as only the well-to-do could. Then it dawned, and she did laugh. “Oh, duh. Because your name is Nan.”
The girl bobbed her head sheepishly. “Nan from Nantucket. My parents didn’t have the wildest of imaginations.” This, Joy found endearing. She forgot, for a moment,
that she herself had never stepped foot on Nantucket’s dune-backed beaches in her life.
“That’s cute,” Blair said flatly.
“If I’m not mistaken, Joy’s considering the same concentration as you, babe,”
Matt said, perhaps sensing choppy waters on the horizon. Though maybe Joy gave him too much credit. He squinted quizzically at her. “English, am I right?”
She nodded, masking her surprise. She’d mentioned her major only once, months earlier. Ironic how a sunny disposition could sometimes make a person seem dim. Matt wasn’t that.
“I’m still considering a lot of concentrations,” Nan protested, craning her neck to stare up at her boyfriend. “That’s just one of them.”
Matt shrugged.
“Are you taking any English classes this semester?” Joy tried.
Nan lifted her eyes to the ceiling and balled her fists. “Yes. No. Maybe. I still don’t know what I’m taking,” she lamented. Her despair was theatrical, meant to be entertaining—and it was, especially paired with her angelic face. It seemed to be a persona she’d performed before, one that received a favorable response.
Matt grinned and slung an arm over her shoulder. “You’ll figure it out,” he said, plopping another kiss on her forehead. She leaned into him and laughed softly, their two-person routine concluded.
Joy felt herself smiling, realizing then that the display of dramatics diffused her own tension too, made her feel more at ease with her own start-of-the-semester aimlessness. It was nice to laugh at the anxiety, to put it out there like Nan did, instead of stewing privately, letting it fester and grow and cripple her.
“I have a list of, like, eight classes I want to shop today,” said Nan.
“Likewise,” said Blair. Della, by her approving expression, seemed to agree eight was a perfectly reasonable number.
Nan ticked her list off on her fingers: “A French lit elective on Proust, a philosophy course on Justice, a class on Shakespeare after Hamlet—”
“I’m taking that one,” Joy piped in.
“Which one?”
“The Shakespeare class. But I was also considering Justice.”
She wasn’t stretching the truth. The Shakespeare class was an English requirement. As for Justice, that was one of the most popular undergraduate courses there was. Every term, students packed the thousand-seat Sanders Theater, where the professor, lawyer-like in a full suit and tie, presented his scenarios on moral reasoning and the value of human life. Save five lives by pulling a lever to kill only one? Joy had already watched some of the lectures online. She knew the right answers, the kinds of discussion that would ensue. So she had decided to be contrarian and take a different, less popular ethics class, but now she wasn’t sure. Maybe everyone else was on to something.
“Let’s sit together,” suggested Nan.
Joy smiled. “Alright. Want to meet up in the back?”
Nan shook her head. “I’ll snag two seats upfront.” She pulled a little flip phone from her sweatpants pocket and peered at the screen. “It’s getting late. I have to eat and shower before my 10am.” She rose on tiptoes to peck Matt on the cheek, her perky ponytail catching the light of Annenberg’s chandeliers.
“I can wait for you,” he said.
Nan looked pleased. She turned to the table of roommates one last time and waved a hand. “Nice to meet you all.”
Matt, uttering his own goodbyes, trailed his girlfriend into the kitchen space. The roommates rose from their seats to deposit their plastic trays of dirty bowls and glasses on the dining hall’s conveyor belt. Joy’s eyes tracked a brown banana peel drifting down the belt toward a cafeteria worker who was discreetly stacking dirty china in an industrial sink.
Joy was reminded of her summer job working in a high-end restaurant: the rote task of clearing one food-crusted plate after another, never an end in sight. Customers always voiced their appreciation for the food, the experience, the service. But true appreciation should have gone to the back-of-house operations, who handled the grotesque business of keeping the meal train moving. Of course, the beauty of a fancy restaurant lay in its ability to conceal the labor behind it. Joy waited for the kitchen hand to notice her so she could relay her gratitude with a smile. But the woman never looked up.
“I’m not a fan,” muttered Blair on their way out.
“Of Matt or his girlfriend?” asked Joy, knowing the answer.
“The girlfriend.”
“Why not?”
“She is incredibly fake. Plus, I’ve seen her out at the Fox on more than one occasion,” she whispered, referring to her favorite final club, “and she’s always drunk off her ass and flirting with everyone in sight.”
Glass houses, Joy thought. “What did you think, Della?”
“She was alright,” the other roommate replied airily as if the question were immaterial. To her, it probably was. She was already miles away mentally, rummaging through her bag for an agenda book and pen, readying herself for the shopping day.
The three roommates walked out of the dark and cavernous dining hall to be greeted by blinding sunshine. They splintered off in different directions, two with purpose and one without.
Joy wasn’t taking any classes until noon. She dragged her feet as she ambled through the Yard. On instinct or laziness, she drifted in the direction of her dorm, thinking perhaps a long, hot shower would jumpstart her mood.
She pulled her hair up into a ponytail. She picked up her pace, and as she did, the wind gusted, making her eyes wet—but it felt refreshing, somehow, to stride straight into it. Her feet touched the pathway at a faster clip, connecting more meaningfully to the earth. She scanned the Yard for onlookers, but no one was watching.
Oh, what the hell. She’d try a jog.
Her feet lifted off the ground, probably with more force than necessary. She hadn’t properly run since she was a kid. Beads of sweat formed on her brow as her pulse quickened, her body warming beneath her coat. The dorm was coming into view. She could already envision what would come next: the tearing off of clothes, the water set to scalding, the pleasure and the pain of unearthing new skin.
Alyson McDevitt is a data and research journalist at Compliance Week. Previously, she was an editor/author at Thomson Reuters. She also has a background as a teacher and writing coach.