If you were to interview a handful of students as they emerged, static-haired and blinking, from their rooms in Pollock Halls, some smelling inexplicably of horses and others more explicably of charred cheese, you would learn that breakfast at the John McIntyre Centre was not widely viewed as an inspiring meal. But Pen, who was ravenous in the mornings, looked forward to it.
It was a Tuesday, the third in the term. Pen arrived at the green and brown building in the middle of the residence compound at five minutes to eight. Cold, wet air was reaching under the collar of her raincoat. She stopped into the convenience store for a newspaper. At the last second, her heart thudding its disapproval, she also requested a ten-pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. The man behind the counter didn't even glance at her. She was back under the portico, folding newsprint against the wind to scan the headlines and thinking about the letter she had just read when Jo arrived with Alice trailing behind.
Her friends stood out. Jo Scarlett Moore because she looked so wholesome, with her pale hair wound in a braid across her forehead, that it did not seem possible for her to belong to this century of internet porn and ocean trash, and Alice Diamond because Alice stood out ever where.
"Morning, Stinky," Jo said, touching her lips to Pen's cheeks.
Alice, who had not yet shaken her national reflexes, bent down to hug Pen. As had become their custom since Jo had "discovered" Alice on the dance floor of the Opal Lounge (or had it been the other way around?) during the five-day game of chicken with mononucleosis known as Freshers' Week, the three went in to breakfast together.
By the time of their arrival in Edinburgh, Pen and Alice had been fixtures in one another's lives for over a decade. Throughout high school, afternoons had found them sprawled on Pen's white duvet, their legs up the wall in a pose that Alice insisted was good for thinking deep thoughts, their bare feet brushing the Polaroids and ticket stubs on Pen's bulletin board, awaiting the beginning of life.
Although they shared many common circumstances—both had been raised on prosperous, tree-lined Toronto streets by loving parents who believed they hid their unhappiness well—Pen and Alice had no shortage of points of difference to find fascinating in one another. Alice had grown early into a tall and striking young woman with the coloring and survival instinct of a lioness, while Pen, a late bloomer, had usually been the smallest and quickest in their class, with the glow-in-the-dark eyes and skittish flinch of a black house cat.
Each had learned much of what her parents preferred not to talk about from books, but while Alice devoured anything that contained either an ambitious hero's dogged pursuit of his true destiny or technical descriptions of sex—and these she underlined for future reference-Pen became devoted, around her fourteenth birthday, to plowing through her mother's entire collection of thin-paged, densely typed nineteenth-century novels. At that age, their truths reached her only in the way one might catch a whiff, from across the fence, of a neighbor's dinner cooking on the barbecue. Alone in her room, she ran her eyes along the surfaces of their sentences, trying to convince herself that the enduring and transformative love they so often described must be observable somewhere in the real world.
Pen later learned that many of her favorites had been written by women for whom marital bliss had remained, for one reason or another, forever out of reach.
