Free Why Can't I Be You by Allie Larkin Page A

tipped our heads back to catch flakes on our tongues.
    After they went to bed, I sat in the TV lounge and watched the way the snow stuck to the tree in front of our dorm. It felt like the first time I’d ever really seen snow. I snuck back into my room and grabbed my coat and walked around campus alone, taking in the silence the snow brought with it, the big clumpy flakes falling in the streetlight, and the fact that I had the freedom to watch the snow any way I wanted.
    I was shy and quiet. I watched people more than I was a part of anything. But for the first time, I was starting to live. I worked at the college art gallery and sketched in my notebook while I monitored the sign-in sheet. I took the bus into town and read about the Maasai in Tanzania over steaming cups of espresso in a small dark coffee shop in the Commons. I had freedom.
    In my spare time, I mostly hung out with Yarah. She was a violin major, and she practiced as much as I did homework. Late at night, when we were done working, we’d eat ice cream in the TV lounge and watch
Welcome Back, Kotter
reruns on Nick at Nite. Yarah was never drunk. She never had harsh words for me. We were polite to each other, careful, and our room was a safe, simple, happy place. It was the first teeny-tiny little hint that life didn’t always have to be what it had been.
    Luanne lived down the hall from me junior year. She was this loud girl from Larchmont whose mom sent her care packages filled with fancy perfume and cigarettes. We were in most of the same comm. classes, but we weren’t friends. When her mom came to visit, she’d take half the dorm to Joe’s for dinner. I was never invited. I was never one of the girls who came home with a Styrofoam box of eggplant parm to eat in the TV lounge the next day.
    My mom never sent me care packages. She never came to visit either. A two-hour drive may as well be a trek across the Sahara on a camel to a mom who’s always drunk or hungover. She never came to visit me and I didn’t have a car, so for four years, in between major holidays and her obsessively needy, almost daily phone calls, I got to be someone other than Marie Shaw’s daughter. Second semester freshman year, I decided I needed to pursue a double major: communications and anthropology. Sophomore year, I picked up the studio art minor. It meant I got to spend my summers at school too.
    Sometimes on Sundays, when Yarah had to put in time at the practice rooms, I’d go with her. I’d sit on the floor in the hallway, turning my knees into an easel, drawing while I listened to Yarah’s violin mix with all the other music pouring into the hallway. I made vows to myself about what my life would be.
    I was going to find a job at a big PR firm in New York City after I graduated. I’d have a little loft, work on my paintings on the side. Take slides to galleries on my days off. It was a practical plan, but it left room for dreaming.
    But by the time I graduated, the economy was in the toilet. I couldn’t even get interviews with New York firms. I did, however, get an interview at Levi & Plato. So did Luanne. It was my only offer, and I took it. I think Luanne had a choice between Levi & Plato and an unpaid internship in Yonkers, so she took the job too.
    Luanne didn’t know anyone in Rochester, so suddenly we were “old friends from college.” Yarah moved back to São Paulo after graduation, and even though I had my own apartment, I was sucked back into the vortex of taking care of my mother when I wasn’t working, so I was more than happy to be Luanne’s dear old friend. Having Luanne drag me out for drinks at Pearl on Thursday nights was easier than trying to set up some vague semblance of the life I’d wanted for myself. I forgot all over again that I had choices. I got good at being my mother’s daughter and Luanne’s friend. I still painted on Sunday afternoons—it was a vestige of who I’d wanted to be. But then I met Deagan, my paints went to storage,