Freshgirls by Rosetta Young

We had arrived with vague ideas of city life: a sea of unfamiliar faces, winding avenues, the public gardens. Now, we shuffle around the dorm with the other girls from the suburbs. We feel more comfortable in slippers and athleisure, shaking bags of microwaved popcorn, than out on the street. The prices at restaurants confuse us, the numerals from a different economy completely. The places we can go are the same ones from home, but made strange. Instead of bland and expansive, they are small and dirty, filled with vagrants and old people.

Instead of going out, we watch TV and talk about boys. College boys are the raw material from which we construct fictional characters. Together, we invent personalities for the good-looking ones. We snap them into predilections like we once tabbed clothes onto paper dolls. For all our effort, these boys still seem less real to us than the sitcom stars we watch night after night almost kill themselves from the strain of mimed living.

We rove together as a pack, a shield against invisibility. Every once in awhile, upperclassmen and café baristas will look at us and roll their eyes—Freshgirls, they say to each other. And that’s how we know we’re real.

We hate a girl from our writing seminar. She wears red lipstick and striped shirts and has a boyfriend in the MA program after our first week. She always volunteers to read out loud in class and, when she does, she uses a flat, masculine monotone, unlike her real voice. We never volunteer. When we are asked to read, we always laugh, like we have received an unwanted compliment. In class, we refuse to speak. We cannot imagine speaking. We cannot imagine being more ill at ease. On the rare occasion we do speak, it is a mistake. Our voices sound wrong. We come to enjoy maintaining, during class discussion, an almost sacred vow of silence. We come to pretend that during class we aren’t there at all.

We torture ourselves with the dining hall buffet. We sit at the plastic-coated tables for hours, never mentioning the food, but painfully aware of what we eat, who starts with salad and then slides into the chicken wings and then gives in to an oversized sugar cookie and then another and another. We have come to the city hungry for experience. When we go home for Christmas, our mothers wordlessly supply us with new jeans.

Back for the spring semester, we collect free drink tickets from a man handing them out on the street. We buy dresses from Forever 21 and pharmacy lip gloss, like we did in our tweens, except for this time, we tell ourselves, it is for real: we are really going out. We shave our legs in the communal bathroom after a winter of neglect. We watch the soft hair stream down the drain. We anticipate men salivating over our youth. We talk about the danger of creeps, of old creeps, and we are scared, walking into the darkened, half-empty nightclub, of what might find us there. This is living, we think at first when we hear the pounding of the music, the popular songs we have heard a thousand times.

We are too shy to speak to anyone but the bartender. We feel sophisticated sipping on little straws, but the vodka makes us sleepy. Instead of leering, the men seem so attuned to our inexperience that they are physically incapable of noticing us.

Later that same semester, but not much later, we go home with a boy. We say, a boy, but, really, he is an adult, like us, over 18, but only just. He isn’t one of the dream boys, one of the boys that we have embroidered personalities onto like our grandmothers put phrases onto pillows, but, rather, a normal boy, like ourselves, plain and unremarkable. The problem is that there is only one of him. In a dimly-lit party in another cinder block dorm room, where we feel neglected and drunk, he offers himself up to all of us. He looks at us with a smirk and says, You could come back to mine.

We don’t want to share one boy, but he is the offer we have.

We don’t know when it happens, but, once we notice it, it is already too late. We get mistaken for each other in class. When a professor hands back an essay that is not our own and when we go up to her and say, gesturing towards the paper, This isn’t us, she looks back with a question in her eyes so terrifying that we realize that something has happened beyond our control.

When others refer to us now, when we walk into a café and take a coffee cup that does not have all of our names written on it, they say, I don’t know who took it, some girl, and then we know we have lost our plurality, our pack, and have hardened into one.

We sleep with more boys and they do not even notice that we are more than one girl. We try and say, Don’t you see all of us?, And they say, Uh-huh, their eyes focusing on the place where we all merge.

Pretty soon, we are stuck in the peripheral vision of others. We cannot remember when we were supposed to graduate, when the semester ends, when summer was supposed to start. We stay in our cinderblock dorm room, watching TV, stalking the streets to get late night Panera, haunting the entrances of bars we are forever too young to enter. We don’t grow any older. We are many trapped as one. We dream of the day someone will notice us and say, I have been looking for you, and all we will have to do is follow.

Rosetta Young is a writer living in Brooklyn.