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“Tess?” Nellie had a small compact in hand, holding it above her head. Her hair was coiffed to perfection—she looked like a brunette Marilyn Monroe, or maybe auburn, the way the light glanced off her curls.
Tess mumbled an inquisitive acknowledgement and turned her nose back into her Dickinson a millisecond before she could feel Nellie's eyes on her.
“Do you think they'll like me?” There was a crack of anxiety in Nellie's tone, the kind Tess felt in her own mind and voice all the time.
“Who?” Tess mustered the will to look up at her roommate. She pulled at her pin-straight, dull blond hair, yanked back into a ponytail with strands hanging out, and likened the hungry-anxious feeling in her throat to what it must truly be, though the term somehow didn't fit quite right: envy.
“The audition people.” Nellie snapped her compact closed and began pacing the room until she stopped to lean over Tess, who was sitting upright on the bed. Nellie rested her arm on the alcove and bent down casually to look Tess in the eye. Tess tried to swallow down the dryness in her mouth.
“Well, yeah,” Tess near-whispered, looking away again. “Everyone likes you.”
“Tess, don't be like that.” It was a phrase Tess had heard her father use on her mother so many times that she flinched with the implication.
“Like what?” Tess said into the pages of the book, then repeated it, a little too loud, looking at Nellie that time.
“You know,” Nellie sat on the bed next to Tess, pressing her thigh against the other’s. Nellie was wearing a jade green wool skirt that ended at the knee; it was riding a little bit up her thigh, and was technically against Welton regulations. Tess quickly averted her eyes. She wished, suddenly and desperately, that Charlie was there to hand her one of her “top-notch” Marlboros, and at the same time felt already so exposed that Nellie's presence was almost too much as she stared into Tess's eyes. “People like you, too. Me, for example. I like to think—” Nellie draws a slow, slightly shaky breath. “I like to think you like me too.”
“Of course I like you.” Tess said, a little bemused and, for reasons she didn't understand, very nervous. Nellie only sighed in response. Tess turned back to Emily Dickinson.
“What are you reading?” Nellie, as if she was actually trying to send Tess up and around the walls, rested her head on her shoulder to read the text aloud. “Her breast—” Nellie wiggles her eyebrows and elbows Tess in the ribs, somewhat gently; Tess manages an eye roll—“Her breast is fit for pearls, but I was not a “Diver”—her brow is fit for thrones, but I have not a crest. Her heart is fit for home—” She read the last three lines silently.
“What?” Tess said softly, after a long, excruciatingly gentle moment.
“It sounds like she's in love.”
Another, even longer moment.
“That's…” Tess wiped the sweat of her hands off on her thighs. “That's not…I'm…”
“You're what?” Tess could barely hear Nellie over the rushing of blood in her ears, but she could still see, through tunnel vision, Nellie's brown eyes, like a puppy’s, intense and worried.
“I'm not.” Tess shuffled away to the the far end of the bed. Inexplicably, she decided to tear her hair out of its ponytail.
“I am.” Nellie spoke evenly, her gaze dead on like the scope of a hunting rifle. “I think you are, too.”
And so the bullet flew. The tug in the stomach, the jump in the throat—it wasn't envy. It was a seperate sin entirely, one that Tess had thought about in short, sliced moments between yellowing leaves and bright, shared smiles. A sin, and yet weren't all the poets sinners? Besides, it couldn't be the same for a man as for a woman. On the other hand, these were poorly disguised excuses.
Tess realized, in the shadowy realm beyond immediate action, that she ought to move; towards or away from Nellie, she could not decide in time, as the indecision froze her and seemed to move the newly-discovered apparent object of her affection. Hands on Tess’s face, gentle and warm, cleared strands of hair from her cheeks. Eyes on Tess's eyes anxiously tracked her expression. And, naturally—though, of course, she could hear a ghostly choir of admonishers insisting the perversity of the action—lips on Tess’s lips.
After a short break in contact and what Tess hoped was a satisfied, short gasp from Nellie, Tess was stirred into movement. One, the angle wasn't quite comfortable, with their torsos each contorting toward each other, so she adjusted and sat straight on towards Nellie. Secondly, at least when it was a man and a woman—Tess tried to put the inherent difference out of her mind—they generally both participated, so she, with a mechanical precision she needed if only to keep her from fainting, placed her hands lightly on Nellie's hips.
It probably didn't last too long—surprisingly, Nellie was the one to break it, with a giddy laugh-sigh and a whispered “Theresa” (to which Tess replied, ridiculously, “Helen”)—but Tess still reeled from it as if coming off a fair ride, breathing even more heavily than she had been on her first day at Welton.
“Nellie?” Nellie had her head back against the whitewashed wall, a wide smile on her face.
“Yeah?”
“Are you—are you going to your audition?" Nellie looked at Tess, and for a half a second an expression of hurt crossed her features, before panic took over.
“Damn it!” She scrabbled to put her cloak and purse on.
“L-language, Miss Perry.” Nellie barked a laugh at that. “Good luck,” Tess said as Nellie was half out the door.
“Don't say that, Miss Anderson!” Nellie peered around in mock suspicion. “It'll jinx it. Say ‘break a leg’ instead.”
“Break a leg, then,” Tess said, laughing in disbelief. Nellie hesitated on the threshold, then lunged back in to give Tess a peck.
“See you later.”
Tess echoed her words only after the door closed. She sat on the bed until she could no longer hear Nellie's footsteps down the hall, then knelt to pray.