by Wendy Lee
I turned at the desperation in her voice.
“You have access to the department, right?”
“Yes.” My work-study job for the past two years had been as an administrative assistant in the art history department.
“I think some materials there could inspire me.”
“You can come in whenever you want and I’ll help you find what you need,” I offered.
“What I need is your help to get in there after-hours.”
I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t know what exactly Kimi had in mind, but it sounded suspicious. On the other hand, she did look like she needed some kind of help, and she was my friend. Besides, I had always felt guilty for taking Sam away from her, no matter how involved or not they had been. I owed my roommate one.
“Okay,” I said.
We arranged to meet later that night. When I told Sam that I was helping Kimi with her thesis, a strange look came over his face.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to get involved with any of her projects,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, that girl is unstable.”
“And you slept with her for, like, a month?”
His face twisted a little from embarrassment. “In that context, she was a good kind of unstable.”
“So you’re saying that I’m boring?”
“No! I just mean, be careful with her, Molly. I know she looks like this free-spirited, artsy person”—the opposite of me—“but she’s actually kind of fragile. Be careful,” he repeated.
When I met Kimi outside of the art history department, I had to laugh. She was completely dressed in black, including a headband with cat ears. “I get it, you’re a cat burglar,” I said. I wondered if this was a joke, one of her performance pieces.
As I fumbled with my key card to open the department door and turned on the light in the office, I told myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had every right to be there as an employee. What if I’d forgotten something at my desk? Or just wanted to make some copies? Was stealing office supplies even a crime?
While I was pondering these things, Kimi wandered through the office. She sat down in the chair of the other admin, Lorene, a local woman in her fifties who had worked at Amberlin for twenty years so her son could go to college for free, and tried on the pair of reading glasses that Lorene kept on her desk. Then she got up and went to the faculty’s mailboxes, where she removed some letters and stuck them recklessly into the wrong slots. I was about to tell her to quit it when she went straight to a cabinet to the side of the room that housed every senior thesis that had passed through the art history department. She opened a drawer and rifled through the papers until she seemed to find one that suited her, and stuffed it into her backpack.
“What are you doing?” I whispered. “You can’t remove that from this room.” Students were allowed to look at those files but not to check anything out.
Kimi waved me away. “I found what I needed. Let’s get out of here.”
The next day, when Lorene searched her desk and said, “Now, where did I put my glasses?” I didn’t say anything. So what if Kimi had taken a thesis? It was one out of hundreds of papers that would never be noticed missing, unless the person who had actually written it came looking for it. Besides, I didn’t know what she planned to do with it. Maybe she was going to cut it up and throw word scraps from the roof of the department, or set it on fire on the main lawn. It was true that I had no idea what she intended to do.
Over the next month, I turned in my thesis on Caravaggio and started talking with Sam about moving to New York after graduation. He wanted to work with inner city kids; I wanted to start some kind of art project, although I didn’t know what. It had been a long time since I’d painted or even sketched for my own enjoyment. Then Dr. Renfeld, the chair of the art history department, called me into her office.
Dr. Renfeld was originally from Beijing and was one of Amberlin’s first foreign students in the 1980s. Before she arrived, the only topics art history students studied were related to European art, and nothing after World War II. It was as if postmodernism didn’t exist. She persuaded the school to add classes in Asian and Middle Eastern art, and then, after she became chair, contemporary art. She’d also married the biology professor, who now headed his respective department, and the “Drs. Renfeld” were a common fixture at campus events. I liked her; she had taught several of my classes and was my thesis advisor.
I assumed she had called me into her office to talk about my thesis now. Then I saw Kimi slouched in one of the chairs in front of Dr. Renfeld’s desk.
“Molly,” Dr. Renfeld said. “Please sit down.”
As I did so, I snuck a look at Kimi, whose face revealed nothing. She didn’t even appear to recognize me. I glanced at the paper lying on the desk and saw that it wasn’t mine, but Kimi’s thesis, entitled “The Garden Within: Landscape Painting during the Tang Dynasty.”
“When I was growing up in China,” Dr. Renfeld began, “there was no such thing as plagiarism. It was referred to as honoring the work of the masters. So I suppose I should have felt flattered when I read this thesis and found my views from twenty years ago quoted almost word for word. Of course, I went by the name Ming Lei back then, my Chinese name.”
Kimi didn’t respond. She was looking out the office window, which had a view of the central lawn, where several students were tossing a Frisbee back and forth. I followed her gaze, wishing I were outside, too.
“I’m sorry to say, Ms. Kitano,” Dr. Renfeld continued, pulling our attention back to her, “that you’re not the only student who’s ever been caught plagiarizing their senior thesis, in this department or at this school.”
Kimi finally spoke, jerking her head toward me. “What does this have to with her?”
“I thought you must have had some kind of help. There aren’t many people who have access to the art history department. Security gave me a log of everyone who swiped their key card after-hours in the past month.” Dr. Renfeld rested her gaze on me. “Turned out there were very few people on that list.”
“How are we going to be punished?” I blurted out. “Will we be allowed to graduate?”
“Ms. Schaeffer, you’ve been relieved of your job in the department. Ms. Kitano, it goes without saying that you’ve failed your thesis. As of now, both of you are suspended from school for the rest of the month. After that, we’ll talk about what you’ll need to do if you want to graduate.”
“I don’t care if I graduate,” Kimi said, standing up. “In fact, I’m dropping out right now.”
I found myself standing up, as well. “Me too.”
“Girls—” Dr. Renfeld started.
But Kimi had already pushed back her chair and was heading out the door. “God, why are you following me?” she snapped as I ran to keep up with her long strides across the main lawn.
“You’re angry at me?” I demanded. “You’re the one who got me into trouble. You’re the one who plagiarized your thesis.”
She stopped so suddenly that I almost ran into her. “It was . . . a pastiche.”
“Bullshit. This isn’t one of your stupid performance pieces. For whatever reason you couldn’t write your paper, so you copied someone else’s. Not just someone else’s—Dr. Renfeld’s.”
“How was I to know that she’s practically the only Chinese student to have ever attended Amberlin?” Kimi muttered. “I didn’t think I would get caught, okay? But dropping out... who’s copying who now?”
“I have my own reasons,” I said. “They have nothing to do with you.”
“Really? Because the way I see it, including Sam, you want to be just like me.”
“Leave Sam out of it!” I shouted.
Kimi screamed as if I’d pulled her hair, causing everyone on the lawn to stare at us, and headed toward our dorm. I guessed it wasn’t a good idea to follow her there and went to find Sam, where I choked out to him what had happened.
He kindly did not s
ay “I told you so” about Kimi. “What’re you going to do?”
“I guess I’m suspended. I’ll have to go live with my parents for the rest of the month.”
“And then? You’re coming back to graduate, right?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to graduate. I just want us to go to New York as soon as possible. Isn’t that what you want?”
“What’ll your parents say?”
“I’ll tell them I’m taking a break. That I’m planning to come back at some point.”
Sam studied me carefully. “You are going to come back to school, aren’t you?”
“Sure. Eventually. But I want to be an artist. I don’t need a degree for that. I just need experience.”
I was far from sure when I said that. But I was sure my parents would eventually come around to my decision. What could they do about it? Refuse to let me come home? They weren’t like that. They’d be angry at first, especially my father, but I’d find a way to soothe them, tell them I was planning to go back to school in the fall, but first I wanted to get a taste of the real world. I was their beloved only daughter.
The next day I received a formal letter telling me I had been suspended from school, as well as an e-mail from Dr. Renfeld in which she implored me to come into her office to talk about my next step. “By the way,” she added at the end, “I was very impressed with your thesis on Caravaggio.”
That still didn’t change my mind. I convinced Sam to let me keep most of my things in his room, and went back to my dorm to get what little remained there of my stuff.
Part of me hoped I would run into Kimi; part of me dreaded it. When I entered the room, no one was there. Most of her things had already been put into boxes, and her bed was stripped. I heard a sound behind me and turned around, expecting to see Kimi, but instead in the doorway there stood a middle-aged couple. The man was Japanese, with Kimi’s eyes and mouth, dressed in a navy polo shirt and khakis. The woman was a tall blonde in a salmon-colored silk shell; I couldn’t see anything of Kimi in her at all, but I knew she must be Kimi’s mother.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Molly, Kimi’s roommate.”
“You mean Kimberly,” the woman said, extending her hand.
Kimi’s real name was Kimberly? No wonder she had changed her name.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Kimi’s mother continued. The way she pursed her lips afterward suggested that what she’d heard lately wasn’t good.
I wondered what else Kimi had made up about her background. “You shouldn’t blame her for what she did,” I said. “I mean, how could she know about plagiarism, being home-schooled with her sisters?”
Kimi’s father gave me a strange look, confirming my suspicions. “Kimberly’s an only child. And she went to private school in New York.”
He excused himself to take the boxes to the post office, but her mother stayed while I tried not to self-consciously pack up my clothes and books. Finally, as I wrestled with trying to fold my sheets, she stood up and took over, holding one end and then motioning me to walk the other over to her. She grasped all four corners and folded the sheets into a neat square, then handed them back to me.
“Kimberly told us you tried to help her,” her mother said. “She said if it wasn’t for you, she’d have done something much worse than plagiarize a paper. Hopefully when we get back home, she’ll be able to see her therapist more regularly.” She paused. “Her father and I appreciate you looking out for her.”
“Of course,” I said. But I hadn’t looked out for Kimi at all. I’d stolen her boyfriend, was hardly around for most of the year, then had been her accomplice in something that had gotten us both kicked out of school. By helping her plagiarize I’d thought I was helping her, but I’d ended up hurting us both.
When I had finished packing, I said, “Please tell Kimi—I mean, Kimberly—good-bye for me.”
Her mother nodded, and I left her there, sitting on the plastic surface of her daughter’s stripped bed. I wasn’t surprised that Kimi had fictionalized her background; it was all part of the performance. If I could, I’d probably have done it, too. I just wasn’t brave enough. I couldn’t even tell my parents why I was going home.
It turned out that I didn’t have to explain myself. The day after I arrived home, I woke up at noon to hear my father roaring downstairs. The last time I’d heard him so angry was when Ricky was in high school and had gotten arrested for intoxication.
When I entered the kitchen, my parents fell silent.
“Caleb, let her get some breakfast in her first,” my mother pleaded.
My father ignored her and addressed me. “Molly, I called your school this morning to see why you left, and they said you helped another student plagiarize her thesis. Is this true?”
“It was my roommate,” I clarified. “And I didn’t know what she was going to do. She only told me she needed to get into the department office for research material, and since I had access, I let her.” This was not entirely true; from the moment Kimi waltzed into the office, I knew she wasn’t going to be content to just look around.
“This is serious,” my father said. “You’re going back there once your suspension is up and apologize to the chair of the department. And then you’re going to get your degree, no matter if you have to retake classes and work twice as hard.”
“Sam and I are moving to New York,” I announced. “Right after he graduates.”
A sound was caught in my mother’s throat. I hadn’t given my parents any hint about my plans after college, but they must have suspected I wanted to go away. I wasn’t going to come back and live at home, like I was doing now, was I?
“What about you?” my father asked. “When are you going to graduate?”
“I need to take some time off from school,” I said.
My father laughed. “Don’t most kids do that their junior year and go abroad? I think it’s too late for that now. And if you don’t agree, maybe you should find somewhere else to stay until you do.”
“Caleb,” my mother said and put a placating hand on his arm. “She just got home. We can talk about her future later.”
“We’re talking about it now!”
“I’m sitting right here,” I pointed out. I wasn’t going to tell them what I had told Sam about wanting to be an artist. “I’ll make a plan. Maybe I’ll go back in the fall. But I just can’t do it right now.” I got to my feet.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked.
“Out for a walk.”
Still in the T-shirt and sweatpants I’d slept in, I shuffled out the door and down the sidewalk. My parents’ neighborhood was filled with old, veranda-enclosed houses, colorful flower beds, pristine front lawns. One of the neighbors was outside in her garden and waved when she saw me.
“Yes, I’m home for a visit!” I preempted her question and walked more quickly.
When I got to the corner, I pulled out my phone and called Sam. “What day do you want to move?” I asked. “I don’t think I can stand it here much longer.”
Eventually, my father calmed down and accepted my refusal to immediately return to school, although I led him to believe that I was going back in the fall. I also convinced my mother about my plan to move to the city with Sam. For the next couple of weeks I moped around the house, sleeping until noon, my conversations with Sam serving as the highlight of the day. He talked about parties I was missing, the end-of-the-year festivities, but I didn’t miss them at all. Already, Amberlin seemed like it was in another country, and I’d lived there in another life.
Then, one day, while rummaging through the attic, I discovered the box of old photos of my mother’s female relatives. For the first time in years, I felt like I wanted to create something outside of myself.
* * *
This weekend, the atmosphere at home was much calmer. My father gave little hints here and there about my enrolling for the fall semester, but I told him how much I loved my job at the Lowry Gallery, which pleased my mother.
>
“I’m learning so much from Caroline,” I said, and she practically glowed with delight.
When I presented her with the gift I’d brought her, she looked at it blankly. “Is that a hedgehog?”
“It’s a squirrel. You can use it as a vase! It came from a ceramics store near the gallery. Caroline thought you would like it.”
“Well, I do like it,” my mother recovered. “Thank you, sweetheart. I think I’ll put it on the mantelpiece in the living room.” I suspected she’d rather use it a doorstop and close the door a little too heavily on it.
It wasn’t just Caroline’s judgment on gifts for my mother I was starting to question. More than once I was tempted to ask my mother whether she thought her old college friend was capable of selling a forged painting, but I knew what the answer would be. My mother never thought the worst of anyone, least of all someone she considered family, or close to it.
Still, I couldn’t keep my suspicions out of my head, or the image of the version of Elegy I had seen at the Lowry Gallery. Maybe I could compare it to the only real Cantrell that was accessible: Meditation at the Museum of Modern Art. So I told my parents that I had to cut my visit short and took the train back to the city Sunday morning, then walked the ten blocks or so from Grand Central to the museum.
After paying the entrance fee—and privately grumbling that a former art history major like myself could hardly afford it—I located Meditation, in its odd placement next to an information desk, and stared at it. I had seen the painting before only in photos, and in real life there was unexpected texture and nuance to the black and blue shades. It was a harsher work than Elegy, which reminded me of a painting by Turner—the grayness reminiscent of a seascape, with the pale white light at the center. His seascapes had always been my favorite paintings by him, before I learned that many of them looked that way because they were unfinished.
“Molly!” someone called.
I turned to see a girl who had just emerged from the women’s restroom a few feet away. It was Kimi Kitano. Wearing a sleeveless blue sundress, she looked so different that I wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d passed her in the street. Her dark brown hair was in a pixie cut, bringing out an odd beauty to her facial features.
