Free Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan Page B

they’d made. They had already planned their reunion over Bree’s fall break, imagining out loud how they would run to each other inthe airport, just like characters in an old movie (her vision), and have sex in his dad’s Oldsmobile before even leaving the parking garage (his).
    Bree had seen him almost every day of her life since kindergarten. They had been a couple for more than three years.
    “I can’t believe I have to wait until October to be with you again,” she said.
    “Well, if you stay here with me, you won’t have to,” he said.
    Two flights and several hours later, Bree arrived in Northampton, just in time to register and run to the first house meeting. It was time enough to determine that this was not her mother’s Smith College and that she wanted out. Back in the seventies, good Southern parents sent their girls off to the Seven Sisters to stay out of trouble and away from men. Bree would bet anything that her mother had never heard about shower hours, and if she did now, she’d yank Bree right out of this place.
    On her way into registration, Bree had seen someone’s dad point at a group of shaved-headed lesbians sitting in the grass. He said to his daughter, “I don’t think you’ll have trouble meeting boys around here. They’re everywhere.”
    “Those are women!” the girl hissed.
    The father looked like he’d been shot.
    Bree skipped dinner that night and called her parents, and then Doug, from her room.
    “Jacobson and Jones are having a kegger in their suite tonight,” Doug said excitedly. “All the guys from home will be there, and Kathleen said to tell you we’ll give you a good drunk dialing later.”
    “Oh,” Bree said. “Sounds fun.”
    She had watched these boys drink beers on countless nights, in parking lots, and at the drive-in, and out at the old stone quarry. Would their next four years be any different from their last? She felt jealous of and sorry for them all at once.
    “I miss you,” she said.
    “Hey,” he said. “Me too, babydoll. I hate hearing you so sad.”
    Doug tried to sound soothing, but in the background people were laughing and yelling and shouting his name, and he had to keep asking her to repeat herself.
    Eventually Bree said, “I’m fine, baby. Go have fun.”
    He didn’t argue.
    Bree went to the bathroom with a towel slung over her shoulder, and her little pink shower caddy in her hand. She stood alone before a row of sinks, bathed in fluorescent light, and scrubbed off her eye makeup, her blush. She flossed her teeth and thought—she couldn’t help it—about how fat all the older girls at the house meeting had been.
    Down the hall, someone let out a squeal of recognition, the sound you make when you see a familiar face that you haven’t seen in ages. Bree’s loneliness was so strong that she half expected it to take the form of another person and materialize there beside her, perched on the ugly Formica countertop in a fuzzy bathrobe and hot rollers.
    She walked back to her room and shut the door. Before leaving home she had ripped dozens of pages out of her bridal magazines and placed them in an envelope marked
Wedding Inspiration
. She pulled them out now, lovingly smoothing the pages as if they were photographs of old friends. She tacked them to her bulletin board, one by one.
    She tried calling Doug again, but the phone just rang and rang. Back in Georgia, she knew, he was off to the party, probably surrounded by gorgeous Southern college girls with their fine summer dresses and smooth, glossy hair.
    It was only ten-thirty when Bree crawled into bed, intent on crying herself to sleep. As she always did when she was scared or sad, she tried to mentally recall each and every date she and Doug had ever been on. (She usually fell asleep or calmed down by about the fifth or sixth.) First date: They went to the movies with Melissa Fairbanks and Chris Carlson. Doug paid for her ticket; Chris did not pay for Melissa’s. Second date: The