Free The Prize by Jill Bialosky Page B

attributed his college acceptance and the lingering sense that he was a fraud and with it the feeling that forever followed him—that he wasn’t deserving and intellectually equal to his peers. All summer before his freshman year, his father in and out of hospitals, he didn’t think he’d talked to anyone other than his parents. The last few days in August, his mother packed up his trunk and duffel while he sat on the bed in denial that he was leaving. He told her he’d defer for a year and help take care of his father, but she insisted he go. On the Greyhound bus, nauseated from the smell of gasoline fumes, he pressed his face against the window and watched New Haven fade into the distance. A gray bird soared skyward and a weight lifted off his chest, and for a few moments he experienced a flicker of happiness until guilt took hold.
    His first few weeks at Amherst, he couldn’t remember how to make conversation. His roommate, a stubby kicker from Minnesota, was either at practice or at the frat. They had nothing in common. When his roommate was out, Edward spent painful hours propped against the cement wall on his narrow bed feeling unsure of himself, afraid to come out of the dorm room for fear of bumping into anotherstudent and having nothing to say. To calm himself, he sometimes thought of his sexy English professor and jerked off. Alone in his room, an image came to him of his father lying lifeless on his bed miles away in New Haven, the glare from the light turning him into his pillow. The man who quoted lines from Keats and Wordsworth, threw a football with him in the backyard, read his English papers zealously correcting his grammar, had all but vanished. Edward went to the gym and kicked soccer balls against the wall.
    He met Tess in his art history class the second semester of his junior year. Occasionally he turned to look at her seated at the end of the row, wearing a snug Amherst T-shirt over her small chest, her hair in a high ponytail, and she returned his stare. He was impressed by how poised she looked in the lecture hall, while many of the other students were slumped in their seats, falling asleep. Sometimes he saw her in the library in one of the carrels by the window. Once she caught his eye, looked up, and smiled. Nothing was ever said between them, but he found himself remembering her when he was walking home from the library at night or after soccer practice or right before he fell asleep. In his memory he could make out the darkness of her brown eyes and her very white skin, and the way she moved her head up and down taking notes, and knew that she was extraordinary. But more profound was her voice, warm and alive and stirring with emotion when she raised her hand in class and spoke about the hues in Vermeer’s work or Rembrandt’s empathy. He mentioned her name to his buddy Chris Blake, trying to find out something about her. He’d heard that Chris and Tess had gone to the same high school in Michigan. “Her mom died from breast cancer when she was a kid. You didn’t know?” Edward didn’t, and knowing it moved him. He tried to find her in the libraryduring study hall the next day, but once he saw her in the wooden carrel, underlining passages in a book, stroking her finger back and forth across her lips in concentration, he walked away. He spent his days going from class to the cafeteria to soccer practice, and his evenings shut in his dorm room getting stoned, listening to music, locked in a deeper interior fog of her. And then one day, when they were looking at slides in the auditorium, Tess leaned over in the darkness and asked his name. After class he walked her back to the house she shared with four roommates, and on Saturdays they met in the library to study and that became their routine. Afraid to make a move out of fear of being rebuffed, he resigned himself to their becoming close friends.
    Shortly after he received the phone call from his