Not Just Like Us

chapter three

He shivers, his body curling spider-like around the pillow so his elbows dig into his knees.

"Dad relax," I say, "It's just a boarding school." That my sister died at.

His eyes are large and filmed with tears, lighter than my eyes, a brown so soft they're almost yellow. "I just have the strangest feeling that I'm never going to see you again."

"You'll see me in three months for Christmas," I laugh. I hug my dad close in the bright dorm room, breathing in his familiar Old Spice cologne. Light spills through the window and onto the study table, stark white alongside the butter yellow bedspread. I tell myself this dread my dad has is the only fear of loss, the realization that I'm really grown up now, and growing away from me.

My parents are small people and I'm expanding all the time, pushing at the barriers of what they understand. That's all it is. I am simply too much for them to see all at once.

When Aunt Laura returns with the adapters, we unpack the rest of my clothes. We put up the flamboyant clothes I'd been wearing lately – feathers and silk, swirl prints and fringe. Once we're done, Aunt Laura hugs me and bids me goodbye. My dad offers to buy me a return ticket back again.

I shake my head and say I won't need it. He tells me to text him if I ever need an emergency flight out.

You see I didn't know how much I'll regret it later, of course. Not having taken that return flight home.

-

The girl in the dorm next to me is a talker. Her name is Brittney Talbot and she apparently lacks the need for oxygen. She starts talking the moment I exit my room after Aunt Laura and Dad leave. While she blab, I look around as I see the other girls starting to move in. I try not to feel out of place as they're excitedly chatting on their cell phones, folding their two-hundred-dollar jeans, toting their Kerastase hair products into the bathroom.

How they all seem as if they already know one another. They approach one another easily and talk like old friends—as if they have all lived here together their entire lives, cultivating private jokes and creating a specific style that I will never be able to match, having come to the game so late. There isn't a single item in my closet that wouldn't make me stick out like a Podunk loser, items collected from thrift shops and flea markets.

As I take in my surroundings, Brittany goes on and on about how she's so excited for boarding school in England, how it took forever for her to convince her parents to switch her from private school in Manhattan to Briarwood. But there's a part of me that suspects they might have kicked her out for continuously disturbing the peace.

Her favorite topic of conversation? Herself. In the five minutes I know her, I find out that she is an only child, that she is new to Briarwood like me, that she had attended a private school called Kensington Prep and could have kept going there but feel the need to "expand her horizons," that her dog is unfortunately named Cookiebutter, and that she has a boyfriend back on the Upper East Side even more unfortunately named Warner.

"Honestly, the uniforms here are so much cuter here than the one back home. I used to go to Kensington Prep and honestly I thought I would be so homesick from New York but I love the fact that we're only forty-five minutes away from London. Also I'm so excited to see who the Elites are; I bet they're nothing compared to the girls in Kensington since I used to be in the year below as Carmen Calloway. Did I mention that I went to school with Carmen Calloway?"

She has.

"Not that I wasn't the Elite back home, I mean I was invited to all the parties....but I'm also really excited to see what the social calendar entails. I'm already hooked on the Briarwood Eight account. Are you?"