The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Author:Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Twenty

Massachusetts, 2002

The night I’m accepted to law school, I break in.

Harvard Yard is a long, empty expanse of black now that it’s nearly midnight. The glow from the streetlamps in the Square pinpricks through the trees. Standing on an empty wooden porch, I shiver. The night is colder than I thought it would be, windless and clear and silent, the kind of Boston night that will always remind me that the city is on the water and that water becomes ice.

At twenty-three, finally graduated from college after a second try, I live in New Jersey with my boyfriend, Adam, and the dog we’ve adopted whom we’ve named Professor. We share the first floor of a house that’s tucked into the armpit of a highway exit ramp. The road from my parents’ house—an hour and a half north of ours—to the one Adam and I share is a snarl of factories that light up shiny and gray as the slick of fur on a rat’s back in the highway headlights, that Jersey Turnpike smell like it’s always summer in the city and you’re always standing over a sewer. Our house is pretty enough, with a slap of peach paint and even a picket fence that used to be white. But at night, lying on my back in bed while Adam sleeps next to me, l listen to the husband and wife next door yell at each other for hours. Their voices scare me. All that clabbered bitterness.

It’s too close to how I feel, still living in New Jersey. Still circling my parents’ house, around memories I don’t want inside me and can’t escape. After a year of being in their house I went back to college, this time in New York, at Columbia. I did well, making straight As, but before two years were up I’d moved back in with them to finish school, commuting over the bridge. Living in the gray house makes me depressed, but when I’m depressed, to live there feels right, like the walls are confirmation of the memories. After graduation I moved in with Adam, but that didn’t help, either. Then, in a Hail Mary pass to the future, I applied to law school. The old route that had worked for my parents. The old love from my childhood. And it turned out that all those afternoons I’d spent lying on my stomach on my parents’ office carpet as a kid, doing logic games in books from the newsstand downstairs, prepared me well for the LSAT: I got into Harvard.

Now, as we stand under the motion sensor light on the porch in Cambridge, there’s a bag at Adam’s feet that holds two matching sweatshirts from a newsstand in the Square, the only store that is open at this hour. The acceptance letter arrived this afternoon while Adam was at work. When he came home I was still sitting cross-legged on the carpet, staring at it in open-mouthed, catatonic disbelief. “Baby!” he said, and spun me around until my tears stopped and I laughed.

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