Soon, but not yet, Nora will look up and she will see me, sit­ting at a distance. In the wet grass, the imprints of Nora’s shoes will fill back slowly, and I won’t suspect that she is walking towards me.

After Nora meets me on the bench, it will be difficult to recall that in the beginning there were moments so plain and unconsumed that I felt I could watch them like a distant view. Like hills rolling away.

Once she holds out her hand and asks, Do you mind if I sit, no other memory will exist without brushing backwards or for­wards over the moment her eyes looked down at me. The soft and penetrable skull of the world will suddenly harden and everything will be seen through the damp and wilful light of our first meeting.

one

At first, the trees behind the McKinnon dorm had looked like a real woods. The leaves were facing up as though it might rain. I stood by the bedroom window, my nose accidentally touching the glass, and I watched my parents walk down the path towards their car.

On the drive, the car window hadn’t been shut all the way. The wind had buffeted as we drove, killed all conversation. My mother, a few times, looked over her shoulder at me. Arm press­ing against the back of my father’s seat so that she could crane her neck to see. I wanted her to ask if I would be all right. I wanted her to turn to my father, say, “Are we really going to leave her?”—the beginning of a tearful conversation. But the next time my mother turned, she met my eyes and she mouthed, That’s making a lot of noise, and I realized, she hadn’t been looking back at me, but at the sound of the wind rushing by.

I felt like I’d had a terrible day even though I hadn’t. The day had been long, not terrible. But, being alone, everything I thought was true, so I thought, What a terrible day, and I sat in my room.

My suitcase was still open. Before they’d left, my parents had made the bed for me. I thought of them pulling the sheets up, patting the duvet. I’d noticed the wrinkles on their hands as they smoothed out the sheets. Tight gold rings around their fingers, were they old? I’d wanted to lie down and have them make the bed over me as though I were a child. But I’d stayed standing. Watching unhelpfully as they worked.

It didn’t take long before everything was made, unpacked. My parents had looked around the dorm room and then they’d looked at me. The walls around us were white and bare, absolute possibility. When I met their eyes, I felt like promising them something, but what to promise eluded me, and with the bed already pressed so flat, my father said, “Okay, we should leave.”

In the afternoon there were a lot of introductions. We stood in circles all over campus. We found a landmark, played a get-to-know-you game. The grass had been wet and soft, like washed hair. At four o’clock we stood under the arch of an old tower and our guide, a girl a few years older, said, “At some point you’ll hear the carillon.” We nodded. “That’s fifty-one bronze bells.” I looked at all the heavy stones that had been placed, one onto the other, to reach the height of the tower. “It’s pretty cool,” the guide said. I accidentally met her eyes. She smiled at me assuredly, and I suddenly wished that she would take me aside and tell me that I should stick with her. That we should hang out. But before I could smile back, or consider another more compelling expression, she and the rest of the group had started to walk away.

Near the dorms, we played another game. As instructed, I said my name and then a hobby, and then two truths and a lie. Everyone guessed the lie correctly, and I wondered how I could be transparent already. It had been a bright day. We wore match­ing red shirts that said Frosh. They smelled like vinegar and by evening the printing had already started to peel, making some of us rosh and F osh.

We ate in a big group, arranged by dorm floor. We kept talk­ing and talking. I watched the girl across from me chew, while the girl beside her asked, “Where did you go to high school?”

A slipstream of questions and answers. Was it Ashley who had gone to Oakwood? Was it Fiona sitting across from me, and was it rude to ask, and how often was it rude to ask, if that was in fact her name?

I wanted something unequivocal to bond us. But all together, our voices chattered and choired, indistinct. I wished that one of our voices would catch. I thought a couple good, hard words could maybe start a fire. That was all we needed. Smoke under­neath us, the table crackling—at first, we would all be slow to react, but then we would get going. Nothing to blow the fire out with, we would have to use our breaths. As we stood over the table, smoke would billow to the high ceiling of the dining hall, and the flames would go out. We would all be red-faced and tired, so bonded and accomplished that we would probably be able to leave school without degrees. Our one meal, life-long—

“Do you guys want to go out?”

It was a warm night. Everyone’s makeup was darker than their skin. Our shoes sounded wet against the ground. We moved off-campus towards a bar.

Inside, we sat at a table near the wall. A girl named Clara raised an arm over her head to get our attention. She wore a strapless shirt and I felt like I’d looked at her armpit for too long, and that she noticed. She told us to make sure we knew our birthdays if we were using fakes. She was already nineteen.

“Do you have a fake?” I shook my head at the girl beside me, who showed me an ID that belonged to her cousin but that she thought would work because their eyes were similar. She thought their differently styled hair would actually play to her advantage, because changing your haircut could really affect the look of your face. She went ahead of me and didn’t have any problems. I had an underage wristband put around my wrist.

Everyone ordered beers because no one wanted to order what their mothers ordered, and we’d seen men order beer. The girl who looked like her cousin poured some of hers into an empty water glass and I drank from it. The tabletop was sticky. On the walls there were string lights and bicycle parts. It looked as though someone’s garage had been turned into an art installation.

“You said you’re from up north?”

“Yeah, you said you had two sisters?”

“Where up north are you from?”

“Are you close with your sisters?”
“What do your parents do?”

The girl across from me had a tattoo. A snake coming down her arm. I thought if I ever got a tattoo, it would be of a husband telling his wife that he wanted to move from their nice house to live in the wilderness. And then on the opposite arm I’d get his wife, her eyes held in the longest blink.

I said, “My parents own a lodge—”

It was actually called Lakeside Inn and Resort. But I thought calling it a resort would give the wrong impression. I could have said inn, but I thought lodge sounded more wooden. My parents had renamed it Lakeside Inn and Resort when they bought it. Before, it had been called Timothy’s Lodgings. The place was a cluster of five cabins. There was a main house with a front desk and a dining room, and there was an outdoor firepit where people cooked packs of hot dogs, and just-caught fish.

If you were to enter our town from the left side, coming north to south, you would find one grocery store, one restau­rant, and four churches. The day before I left, one of the church marquees said, If you got arrested for being a Christian would there be enough evidence to prove it? I’d heard my dad say once that the only thing the town could really support was people praying for money, and the room had laughed. I thought of repeating this to the girl on my left, Annie.

“That’s cool,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s on Lake Temagami.”

Annie shook her head. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“It’s really small,” I said. “Not the lake, but the town.”

She gave me a small laugh and looked down at the table. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing because I was embarrassing myself or if she was laughing because we were at a bar and drinking and we didn’t know each other.

We all swapped beers. We were deciding what we should like. I was tempted to say that I liked the one that was dark brown, the one the bartender had said was hoppy. But it wouldn’t be true, and I thought everyone would be able to tell.

The girl with that tattoo rubbed her hand against her knee and said, “I think I like the dark one.”

We all looked at her. She shifted in her chair and then drank another sip. As everyone went on talking, I watched her eyes slip from the conversation to her glass. And for a moment I felt steady, right to have said nothing.

On the way home from the bar, the group separated. A few girls went to a second bar and some went to a frat house. For the rest of us, the way back to the dorm seemed long.

“You know, just because we’re going back to the dorm doesn’t mean we have to go to sleep,” Clara said.

When we got up to our floor, I left the group quietly and sat back in my room. I felt like a remnant. The pressure of eyes looking at me had been lifted, but my throat was hot from drink­ing and when I went over to the window, I could still see the soft bends of my parents’ backs as they walked away.

I could hear talking through a vent. Laughter intermittently. I felt stupid for leaving myself out. I sat on my bed. I watched a video called “crunchy chicken cooked in the middle of the forest (NO TALKING).” The man builds a fire, runs his hand through a nearby stream, pets a cat that’s been following him. Then he brings out his heavy cast iron pan, shows us his salt and oil. The only sounds are of the stream, the fire, and the chicken crackling. When the chicken is almost brown, the man crouches and starts cutting basil on the flat of a tree stump. He cuts with a slow, smug rhythm that seems self-aware, and suddenly the natural calm of the brown forest floor and of the moss and weeds that surround the firepit feels inflicted. I stopped the video. And then I noticed that the dorm had gotten quiet.

I stepped out of my room. I wanted to go outside to the trees beyond the window, they reminded me of Temagami. I won­dered if standing among them would make me feel sad or happy about leaving. If I felt happy, then it was simple. It would mean that I didn’t have to worry, and that the choice to come to school was justified, already good for me. If I felt sad, well, it wouldn’t mean the opposite, necessarily. I decided to expect to feel sad. And then I also decided that neither feeling should mean very much at this stage.

Annie was sitting in the common room. She held a book open against her chest. She was wearing a little toque that made her look cold. It occurred to me that if I asked her to come outside with me, we might have the kind of moment that makes people friends. We might both stare at the trees, unusually grey, unable to think of a colour brighter. Our steps would be louder than usual on the sidewalk, and for a moment we would mistake ourselves as the only two people alive and this would bring a sudden gladness. It would vanish every question we had about our possible futures, and we would become suddenly strong, and purposeful.

Annie smiled. “Are you going back out?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. A finality that made her nod politely. I opened my mouth as though the space between roof of mouth and tongue might give more conversation, but because I said nothing, Annie just looked at me, and I had to whistle until the elevator arrived.

Down by the trees, the black sky seemed more distant with­out stars. Behind the dipping branches, the city was easy to see.

The light from high windows made burrows of white and yellow through the night. I tried to look into the blackest row of trees. A place where they had been planted narrowly together, a thicket where the needles of their branches overlapped. But between each tree, there was a space where the darkness fell away, not like Temagami. I could look and look but the darkness would never look back at me. I waited a minute for realization. For the assur­ance of some resounding feeling, but all I could think was that the trees here did not make a real woods, although, with the sound of the street nearby, people’s voices and cars, there was the same sense of unknown company.