Odd Girl Out. Ann Bannon

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       One

      The big house was still, almost empty. Down the bright halls and in the shadowy rooms everything was quiet. Upstairs a few desk lights burned over pages of homework, but that was all.

      There was one room in the sorority house, however, where no reading was going on. It was a big, warm room, meant for sprawling and studying and socializing in, like the others. Three girls shared it and two of them were in it now on this autumn Sunday night.

      One was a newcomer. Her name was Laura and she had just finished moving all of her belongings into the room. It was a scene of overstuffed confusion, but at least she had somehow succeeded in squeezing all her things in and now there remained only the job of finding a place for them. Laura sat down to rest and worry about it. She tried to ignore the other girl.

      Beth lay sprawled out on the studio couch with her head cushioned on a rambling pile of fat pillows at one end and her feet dangling over the other. She was drinking a Coke, resting the bottle on her stomach and letting it ride the rhythm of her breathing. She wore slim tan pants and a dark green sweatshirt with “Alpha Beta” stamped in white on the front. Her hair was dark, curly, and close-cropped.

      Laura sat by choice in the stiff wooden desk chair, as if Beth were too comfortable and she could make amends by being uncomfortable herself. She was nervously aware of Beth’s scrutiny, and the sorority pledge manual she was trying to read made no sense to her. Beth seemed like all good things to Laura’s dazzled eyes: sophisticated, a senior, a leader, president of the Student Union, and curiously pretty. She had a well-modeled, sensitive face with features not bonily chic like those of a mannequin, but subtle, vital, harmonious. She wasn’t fashionably pretty but her beauty was healthy and real and her good nature showed in her face.

      Laura flipped nervously through her pledge manual, not even pretending to read any more. Finally Beth saw that she wasn’t reading and smiled at the ruse.

      “One hundred and thirty-seven pages of crap,” she said, nodding at the manual. “All guaranteed to confuse you. I don’t know why they don’t revise the damn thing. I’ve passed an exam on it and I still don’t understand it.”

      Her attitude embarrassed Laura, who smiled uncertainly at her new roommate, thinking as she did so how many times she had smiled in the same way at Beth, not sure of how she was expected to react.

      She had never known quite how to react to Beth from the first day she had seen her. It had been shortly after Laura’s arrival at the university, when everything she saw and felt excited her to a high pitch of nervous awareness. Even the sweet smoke of bonfires in the early-autumn air smelled new and tantalizing.

      Laura walked around the university town of Champlain, down streets chapeled with old elms; past the new campus with its clean, striking Georgian buildings and past the old with its mellow moss-covered halls; past that copy of the Pantheon that passed for the auditorium; past the statues; past the students walking down the white strip of the boardwalk, sitting on the steps of buildings, stretching in the grass, and talking … always talking.

      It thrilled her, and it frightened her a little. Some day she would know all of this as well as her home town; know the campus lore and landmarks, the Greek alphabet, the football heroes, the habits of the campus cops. Some day she wouldn’t have to ask the questions—she would be able to answer them. It made her feel a sort of grateful affection for the campus already, just to think of it this way.

      She had been in school a week when she went up to the Student Union to join an activity committee. It seemed like a good way to meet people and get into the university’s social life. Laura had an appointment for an interview at three o’clock. She sat in the bustling student activities center on the third floor waiting to be called, clearing her throat nervously and sneaking a look at herself in her compact mirror. She had a delicate face shaped like a thin white heart, with startling pale blue eyes and brows and lashes paler still. A face quaint and fine as a Tenniel sketch.

      She waited for almost half an hour and the sustained anxiety began to tire her. She stared at her feet and up to the clock, and back to her feet again. It was when she glanced at the clock for the last time that she saw Beth for the first.

      Beth was standing halfway across the room, tall and slender and with a magnetic face, talking to a couple of nodding boys. She was taller than one of them and the other acted as if she towered over him, too. Laura watched her with absorbed interest. She tapped the smaller boy on the shoulder with a pencil as she talked to him and then she laughed at them both and Laura heard her say, “Okay, Jack. Thanks.” She turned to leave them, coming across the room toward Laura, and Laura looked suddenly down at her shoes again. She told herself angrily that this was silly, but she couldn’t look up.

      Suddenly she felt the light tap of a sheaf of papers on her head, and looked up in surprise. Beth smiled down at her. “Aren’t you new around here?” she said, looking at Laura with wide violet eyes.

      “Yes,” Laura said. Her throat was dry and she tried to clear it again.

      “Are you on a committee?”

      She was strangely, compellingly pretty, and she was looking down at Laura with a frank, friendly curiosity that confused the younger girl.

      “I’m here for an interview,” Laura said in a scratchy voice.

      Beth waited for her to say something more and Laura felt her cheeks coloring. A young man thrust his face out of a nearby door and said, “Laura Landon?” looking around him quizzically.

      “Here.” Laura stood up.

      “Oh. Come on in. We’re ready for you.” He smiled.

      Beth smiled, too. “Good luck,” she said, and walked away.

      Laura looked after her, until the boy said, “Come on in,” again.

      “Oh,” she said, whirling around, and then she smiled at him in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

      The interview turned out well. Laura joined the Campus Chest committee and turned her efforts toward parting students from their allowances for good causes. Every afternoon she went up to the Union Building and put in an hour or two in the Campus Chest office on the third floor, where most of the major committees had offices.

      It was nearly two weeks later that Beth stopped in the office to talk to the chairman. She sat on his desk and Laura, carefully looking at a paper in front of her, listened to every word they said. It was mostly business: committee work, projects, hopes for success. And then the chairman told her who was doing the best work for Campus Chest. He named three or four names. Beth nodded, only half listening.

      “And Laura Landon’s done a lot for us,” he said.

      “Um-hm,” said Beth, taking little notice. She was gathering her papers, about to leave.

      “Hey, Laura.” He waved her over.

      Laura got up and came uncertainly toward the desk. Beth straightened her papers against the top of the desk, hitting them sideways the long way and then the short way until all the edges were even.

      “Beth, this is Laura Landon,” the boy said.

      Beth СКАЧАТЬ