Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

At the end of the driveway, I whipped from left to right, my heart hammering. There hadn’t been a single car on the road from our dorm. Stella must have gotten confused, driven in the wrong direction. I started walking that way, deeper into the woods, carefully but quickly. The road was icy and tunnel-like between the tall snowbanks, curving as it hugged the edge of the river. The moon was bright and full, and the stars were thick as spilled sugar.

“Stella?” I called into the empty woods. The sound of my voice, almost erased by the wind rustling the evergreens, was small and useless. She could be anywhere. How the hell would I find her? “Stella?” I shouted, louder this time.

The road dead-ended. I retraced my steps, and turned down another road. It was nearly 5 a.m. Calm down, I told myself. Maybe Stella was safe and sober. Maybe she’d taken another way home and was already asleep in bed.

After another dead end, then another, my fingers and toes had gone numb. That’s when I saw a glimmer down the road. A shine of metal and glass, easy to miss in the snow.

New York plate, Mercedes medallion, MTK and ACK bumper stickers. The car had veered off the road, coming to a stop against a tree. “Stella!” I shouted, running to the front door. She was slumped over the steering wheel. A trickle of blood descended from her hairline.

“Wake up,” I said, shaking her. She was breathing, but her skin was cold. The blood on her forehead had started to dry. “Wake up!” I shouted again, pushing her into an upright position, shaking her even harder.

She blinked several times. Then she shook her head, her eyes sliding back into focus. “What?” she said. “What happened?”

“Are you okay?” I said. “Is it just your forehead?”

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Slide over. I’m going to drive.”

“Last night was crazy,” Stella said the next day, over a late brunch in the dining hall. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten that drunk. When I asked if something had gotten into her drink—“you know what I mean,” I said darkly—she rolled her eyes and said I watched too much TV. She took dainty bites of her toast, stirred a packet of sugar into her coffee. She kept recognizing people across the dining hall, smiling and waving at them.

“Stella,” I said. “This is serious. You could have died. ”

“You’re so dramatic,” she said. “You shouldn’t worry so much.”

“But what if I hadn’t found you?”

She laughed. “That’s my point. You did find me. So who cares?”

“You’re sure about this?” Diane Molina said, when I told her about my decision.

This was the week after I’d returned from seeing colleges. Mrs. Molina, my history teacher, had encouraged me to apply to the best schools, to every possible scholarship. The fact that I was throwing away a full ride at Duke surprised her as much as it did me.

“I already sent in the paperwork,” I said.

“What do your parents think?” she said, cutting a square of lasagna from the pan, the melted cheese stretching into strings. I had dinner with the Molinas at least twice a week.

“They won’t even care,” I said.

“Of course they will.” Diane frowned. She insisted I call her Diane at the dinner table. “Sometimes you’re too hard on them, Violet.”

“Well, they’re hard on me.” Like a reflex, my finger touched the scar above my eyebrow. My mother liked to throw things—bottles, plates—to make her point. Years ago, when my father took me to the clinic to get the gash on my forehead stitched up, he smiled and told the nurse how clumsy I was, falling on the playground.

“I think you have to be the bigger person here, sweetheart,” Diane said.

Diane was the closest thing I had to a friend in my hometown in Florida, but sometimes she was too nice. Too forgiving. Her kindness didn’t prevent my mother from resenting her. “Teacher’s pet,” she spat, every time I went over to the Molinas’. “You act so high and mighty, Violet. But they’re trash, you know. Those people are trash.”

No matter that the Molinas had college educations and a tidy split-level ranch, and we lived in a mildewed apartment with roaches. Despite how poor we were, my mother was a snob of the worst kind. Teachers weren’t better than her. She paid taxes, which meant teachers worked for her.

“Not possible,” I said to Diane.

“People can change,” she said. “You’d be surprised.”

Diane knew what it meant to be stuck in the wrong place. She had followed her husband to Florida for his job, and she was determined to make the best of it. Corey Molina was a reporter for WCTV, the CBS affiliate in Tallahassee. Before school, during the segments at 7:25 or 7:55, I’d watch him reporting on local robberies or fires or car crashes. He always arrived late to the dinner table, sighing with exhaustion. My fascination with Corey’s work was the real reason I liked spending time with the Molinas.

That night, I was grilling Corey for more detail about his latest story when he laughed and shook his head. “You ask a lot of questions,” he said, serving himself more lasagna.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Just an observation, not an accusation,” he said. To Diane, he cocked an eyebrow. “She’d be a good reporter, wouldn’t she?”

She smiled. “She’s going to be too busy with her Rhodes Scholarship for that.”

“That is ridiculous,” I said, though I was flushing with happiness. Those spring days on the eve of my departure felt heady with liberation. I was leaving behind a miserable town and miserable family forever. The freedom was intoxicating. I had just picked a school, and a future, based on a five-minute conversation with a stranger. But when you’ve grown up without money, and therefore without options, it’s liberating to finally make this kind of reckless choice.

“Plus,” Diane said, “she’s got too much moral integrity to be in your business.”

Corey looked at me, ignoring his wife’s teasing. “I mean it,” he said.

As luck would have it, Stella and I were in the same dorm. Within a week, Stella decided that she disliked her assigned roommate. Within a week and a half, the school happily accommodating, given her parents’ donations, I’d switched places with this girl, taking her bed while she took mine. Stella told people that her old roommate had sleep apnea and the machine kept her up at night. The truth, which she told me alone, was that she found this girl pious and mousy.

Got it, I remember thinking. Avoid those things. When I passed this mousy girl in the dining hall or library, I gave her a sympathetic smile. I felt sorry for this girl, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. My position came with advantages.

“You’re Stella’s roommate?” people always said. “She’s so cool.”

A lush bouquet of adjectives described Stella: cool, funny, clever, outspoken, beautiful. Life was a party when she was around. But her personality had byways and channels that were invisible from most angles. Picture a river from above, and the canals and locks that only open when the conditions are right. I saw the parts of her that most people never did.

“Fair warning,” Stella said, as we drove to her house for Thanksgiving that first year. “My parents aren’t really huggers.”

“Mine weren’t, either,” I said.

She laughed. “You talk about them like they’re dead.”

I shrugged. Instead of saying what I was about to say— they might as well be —I turned up the radio. Stella liked my cynicism, but only to a point.

“Violet,” Anne Bradley said, shaking my hand as we stood in the foyer of their house in Rye, New York. “It is so wonderful to finally meet you.”