Free Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik

look around, surprised at how few of the faces are familiar. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, because, apart from Nica and Maddie, I never paid much attention to anybody younger. There is one person, though, I do recognize right away: Jamie. He’s standing by the far wall, long-boned and slouchy, hip cocked against the foosball table, eating an ice cream sandwich and talking to Mr. Tierney.
    Mr. Tierney runs the ceramics and woodworking studio and is resident faculty in Minot. He’s a good-looking guy, young, only a couple years out of Oberlin. Is popular with his students, particularly the girls, and every term he seems to strike up a special friendship with one of them. Nica was a recent enthusiasm. The spring she died she was spending most of her free periods hanging out in the basement of Knox, working on her 3-D Studio Art project—a giant pinwheel with neon plastic curls and a bugged-out eyeball at the center.
    When Nica broke up with Jamie and was cagey as to why, Jamie got it in his head that Mr. Tierney was the reason. He talked about it obsessively during our late-night telephone conversations. I saw the logic of his thinking: Nica, who was never close-mouthed, was close-mouthed; close-mouthed then not for herself, for another, another whose job was possibly on the line. Still, though, I doubted Nica and Mr. Tierney actually were involved. There was something aboutMr. Tierney that rubbed me the wrong way—an insincerity, acting as if he didn’t know how cute he was, how excited the girls would get when he’d sit behind them at the pottery wheel, cover their hands with his. Nica had better taste than that. Jamie began watching Mr. Tierney, spying on him, basically, which is how Jamie found out that Mr. Tierney was having an illicit affair, just not with Nica. With Mrs. Bowles-Mills, wife of Mr. Mills, Chandler’s CFO and general counsel. One night Jamie followed Mr. Tierney out of the dorm, spotted him sneaking in the back door of the Millses’ house when Mr. Mills was out of town on a fund-raising trip. After that, Jamie’s suspicions subsided, at least as far as Mr. Tierney was concerned.
    And it sure looks like Jamie and Mr. Tierney are on okay terms now. Jamie is laughing at something Mr. Tierney’s saying. And when Mr. Tierney’s name is called by Mr. Wallace—the only teacher at Chandler younger than he is, as of last year not even a teacher, a teaching assistant in the English Department—to let him know his toasted bagel’s ready, he squeezes Jamie’s shoulder before strolling up to the counter.
    Jamie stays by the foosball table. A television monitor is above his head, scrolling the intramural sports schedule across its screen, and he aims his delicate, red-rimmed eyes at it as he licks melted ice cream off his knuckles. He’s wearing a yellow polo shirt, the one with the rip in the underarm, faded jeans. This is the first time I’ve seen him since I weaned myself off drugs. And as I watch him, I get that old familiar feeling—the quickening of my senses, the shifting of my weight to my toes, the dizzy rush I associate with going from sitting to standing too fast—and realize that the medication functioned for me like a string of garlic. It protected me from his beauty, warded it off. Now I’m once again defenseless before it.
    It’s not that Jamie’s all I ever think about. Or that I’m never interested in other guys, never get crushes. I do get crushes. Geoff Holzheimer, sophomore year. Caleb Knapp and Tony Chen, junior year. CoreyWorman, senior year. Sometimes my crushes even get crushes back, and I wind up pressed up against one of them in the darkened corner of a party, or stretched out beneath one of them on the cramped seat of a car. These encounters, though, always end up feeling—not wrong, that’s an overstatement, but not totally right, either. As if I’m settling or compromising. And