Lessons in Love by Emily Franklin Read Free Book Online

it’s been sullied by…” She stops herself and clears her throat. “Mary, please take Love to your double…room fourteen. Second floor.” Mary grins, having scored numerous points apparently, and pulls me out of the room with her.
    I’m psyched and relieved, all of my limbs slightly shaking with the myriad emotions of the past few minutes.
    “You,” Mary says, hefting a monogrammed duffel over her shoulder and a laptop bag around her neck, “Are in for the most awesome surprise. We scored big time on the room front.”
    She doesn’t ask for thanks, though I’m grateful that she potentially pulled me from Lindsay’s wrath. She just nods for me to follow her up the stairs to the room we’ll share for a year. Only when I’m halfway up that flight, my wrists straining with the weight of my bags, do I realize what’s on the other side of the coin. Downstairs, looking small, left all alone with Lindsay the Parriah, is Chili, who looks at me, but doesn’t wave.

Chapter Four
    My alarm buzzes, hauling me from my brief sleep into the present:
    As of today, I am officially a Hadley Hall senior.
    Poppy Massa-Tonclair, my writing professor in England — who is also a world-reknowned novelist — told me once to treat my eyes like a film camera. I do this now, waking up in the position I fell asleep in, on my side, with the blankets pulled up, my feet exposed to the morning air.
    Just as Mary Lancaster told me, the room is a pleasant surprise. More than that. Catalgoues always depict boarding school rooms as bookshelf-lined and paneled with dark wood, but the truth is, most of the dorms were redone in the seventies, when the students were politically active and rallied against the “old regime”. Along with the no pants for girls rule, they also succeeded in “modernizing” many of the dorms rooms to reflect the current styles. Flash forward to now and the rooms are either total kickbacks to that hazy dazed time — with fading paint on the walls and shag rugs in the closets — or they are minimally overhauled at the request of many parents who visit and find their kids’ digs grim. Your basic Hadley room is a square, plus or minus a window, with two twin beds (or three if it’s a triple), white walls, standard issue dresser that with three narrow drawers were, when the school had uniforms, useful, but now hold virtually nothing.
    So that’s what I’d prepared myself for: plain white room or moldy oldy.
    But with my camera eye, I take it all in: the odd shape — like a V with a flattened point, four windows, hardwood floors, freshly painted white walls and wonderful light. The quality of light is important to me — this much I learned from my squalid room in London. My natural happiness is much closer to the surface when I’m closer to light — and if it sounds high-maintenance, I can live with that.
    At this moment, the campus bells have yet to ring, mottled morning sunlight ripples on the hardwood floor, and on the other side of my room, Mary Lancaster is asleep with her back turned to me, all five feet eleven inches of her spread out on the too-short bed.
    “Hey,” she says, sensing that I’m awake. She rolls over so we’re facing one another, but still in sleep position. “What’s up?”
    I don’t know Mary, not really. She’s the kind of acquaintance that if we passed in the hallway we might say hello — or not — and if we were seated next to one another in class, we’d probably smile but not exchange much in the way of conversation. So to suddenly be plopped in a room with her, in my pajamas, with all of senior year rolling out before me, it feels slightly odd. But also kind of good. Fresh.
    “I was just thinking of how blank this room is now,” I say and sit up. I brought a duvet (white with white swirled pattern on it) and white sheets. I’m in a phase of all white — purity of mind while I sleep. Or maybe it’s because my mind hasn’t been filled with such pure thoughts now that my