Rules for Being a Girl

Eventually we pull off the highway and into downtown Providence, past the big mall and the river and the cute shops and restaurants nestled along Thayer Street.

“I’m going to go find a Starbucks to read in,” my mom says once she finds a place to pull over near campus, leaning across the gearshift and wrappi

ng me in a lavender-scented hug. “Text me when you’re done.”

She leans back and looks at me for a moment—tucking a piece of my hair back behind my ear, then smiling. “You nervous?” she asks.

“Nah,” I lie.

“Mm-hmm. Just be yourself,” she says—unfooled, clearly, and reaching over to hug me one more time. “If they’re smart, they’ll love you for it.”

I can’t help but smile as I shut the passenger door behind me: after all, it’s exactly what I told Grace the other night, isn’t it? Just be yourself. Never mind the fact that lately I’m not 100 percent sure who that is.

I’ve got a little time to kill before I meet my interviewer, so I take a lap around the bustling campus—I do find Beckett Auditorium, and my stomach turns a bit—before taking a seat on the student center steps to wait. I spy a girl in a head scarf with a guitar case strapped to her back and a dopey-looking white guy with an absurd hipster handlebar mustache and two pretty brunettes sharing a green-tea doughnut, their gloved hands intertwined. The best part is the way none of them are gazing back at me with any particular interest, like in this place I could be whoever I want.

My interviewer is a Brown alum named Kalina who graduated a few years ago but stayed on campus to work in the admissions office; she’s tall and willowy-looking, her dark hair in long dreads down her back. We sit in the café on campus while she asks me about my classes and my extracurriculars, what projects I’d worked on that meant the most to me.

“I read the piece you sent,” she says, taking a sip of her latte. She’s wearing a bright orange silk blouse and a slouchy pair of wool pants, and I immediately want to be exactly like her when I grow up.

“‘Rules for Being a Girl.’ I have to tell you, I was really impressed.”

I smile and duck my head, pleased but not wanting to seem too cocky—which, I think suddenly, is probably something I wouldn’t worry about if I were a guy. I force myself to lift my face again, looking her square in the eye.

“Thanks,” I say, and my voice hardly shakes at all. “I worked hard on it.”

“I could tell.” Kalina nods. “What prompted you to write something like that?”

I hesitate. Well, my AP English teacher kissed me at his apartment doesn’t seem like a great story to lead with in a college interview—but that’s not even the whole reason I wrote it, really.

“It feels like there are all these double standards for guys and girls,” I explain finally, wrapping my hands around my coffee cup. “In life, I mean, but especially in high school. Once I started noticing them, it was like I couldn’t stop. And it seems to me like before we can do anything—before we can, like, start to undo them—at the very least we need to point them out.”

Kalina nods at that, jotting something down in her Moleskin notebook. She asks me what I see myself doing after college—journalism, I explain, though I know it’s hard to make a living that way—and eventually the conversation meanders around to living in Providence and whether it’s actually going to snow here later like the forecast says.

“I hope not,” she says with a grimace. “I’m from Texas, and I’d never even owned a pair of snow boots before I moved here. I’m still getting used to New England winters.”

“Was it a difficult adjustment?” I ask.

“I was definitely homesick at first,” Kalina says, sitting back in her chair and seeming to consider it. “And honestly, this campus is pretty white. It’s better now than it was when I was a student, but there’s still a long way to go.”

I think of the students I saw milling outside—to be honest, it seems a lot more diverse than my high school, and it occurs to me with a jolt how little I’ve thought about that. The same way most guys don’t realize what it’s really like just being a girl, I realize now, I definitely haven’t given enough thought to what it’s like just being black or brown, or speaking another language, or being from another place.

“I can appreciate that.”

Kalina nods. “So I think that’s all I’ve got for you,” she says, shutting her notebook and offering me a wide smile. “Here, let me give you my card, so you can be in touch if anything comes up. I’d wish you luck, but honestly, Marin—with your grades and extracurriculars, you shouldn’t really need it.”

“Really?” I can’t keep the dorky excitement out of my voice. “You think so?”

“Really,” she says, reaching across the table to shake my hand like a promise.

Sixteen

The next day I head over to Sunrise to see Gram. She’s working on the Globe crossword puzzle when I knock on the door of her suite, tapping a ballpoint pen idly against her lipsticked mouth.

“Granola bars,” I report, setting the Tupperware on the coffee table in the sitting area. “Gracie made them.”

Gram raises her eyebrows. “Sounds healthy,” she says ominously.

“They’ve got chocolate chips,” I tell her, settling down beside her on the narrow love seat and breathing in her familiar grapefruit and tropical-flower smell. “You can hardly taste the chia.”