An hour later, there was a firm knock on the door and I froze, sitting on my bed, all my things still in the hand-me-down bags slumped in the center of the room like garbage on its way to the dump. Seconds after, I heard the jangle of keys and then the door swung open, faster than I ever thought something that heavy could move.

Since the day I decided to attend Covenant and live on campus, I’d pictured my roommate, the built-in friend you get on your first day, the partner you have for orientation and convocation and freshman classes. I’d stay up at night, staring at the chipping paint on my bedroom’s bubbling ceiling, and pray that it would be someone different from me. Someone who wasn’t homeschooled. Someone who wore clothes from the mall and watched movies and chewed bubble gum. Someone I could watch and learn from: about school and books and also about boyfriends and vodka and kissing. I spent eighteen years missing out; now was my chance to make that up.

“Hey,” she said as she entered, the first person I’d encountered that day with the temperament of a normal human. I slid off the bed and my shoes landed on the fake tile floor with a slap.

Everything about her was perfect.

“I’m, um, Elizabeth,” I said nervously, already kicking myself for bungling every introduction I’d had so far that day.

“Right,” she said, looking past my outstretched hand toward my khakis, frayed and permanently dirt-stained at the cuffs, and then my shirt, a white Aéropostale tee I’d secretly thrifted and hid under my bed at home specifically for this day. “I’m Ruthie.”

She was tall and thin like Brigid but, unlike Brigid, she had boobs and hips that started growing in puberty and hadn’t stopped since. I’d taken one of those What’s Your Body Type? quizzes in a stolen Seventeen magazine—mine was “athletic with stubborn baby fat”—and I didn’t think the hourglass option was real until that moment. She was as gorgeous as Angelina Jolie and looked like she’d be named Britney or Courtney, not Ruthie. Ruthie was the name of the stray cat my brother and I found in the barn a few years ago, not a beautiful eighteen-year-old with brown hair straight out of a shampoo ad.

She lugged her blue floral duffel—I had yet to be introduced to the immediately recognizable paisley that is Vera Bradley—onto the bed opposite mine. She was wearing new jeans, you could still see the two dots at the lower back from the haphazard tug of the tag, and a shirt that smelled like the Victoria’s Secret perfume insert that had once been left in our PO Box by accident.

Ruthie was exactly what I needed.

“I’ve got some more stuff. I’ll be right back.”