We Are Okay

It’s too cold to walk around campus, so Marin gives Mabel a tour from the windows of the dorm. She points out where her classes are, the dining hall, and the gym. Mabel is surprised to hear that Marin is no longer a Literature major, but rather an “Undeclared” major and is thinking about switching to Natural Sciences. Marin says she finds Literature “too ambiguous,” but Mabel reminds Marin that the ambiguities were what Marin used to like most about the subject (18). Mabel seems annoyed but asks for the bathroom instead of continuing the conversation. In the dorm room, Marin holds and smells Mabel’s clothing and thinks of all the easier, happier times she spent with Mabel in California. Mabel returns and calls her parents to let them know she’s arrived safely; Marin, afraid they’ll ask to speak to her, excuses herself to go check on the groceries in the refrigerator.

This chapter flashes back to May of the same year, during the end of Marin’s senior year of high school. She lived at home with her grandfather (Gramps). Marin lived in the front bedroom of the house, while her grandfather occupied the two rear rooms. The layout of the house separated their rooms, allowing for privacy: “we could pretty much do whatever we wanted without fear that the other would be listening” (21). The two never entered each other’s bedrooms but spent a lot of time together in the house’s common areas.

In the flashback, Marin wakes to her grandfather singing; he’s made her a cup of coffee. Marin thinks about the bonfire the night before that she, Mabel, and their friends had attended. With their senior year ending, they “were nostalgic for a time that wasn’t yet over” (22).

In English class at her Catholic school, the teacher asks the students to find support for two contradictory statements about The Turn of the Screw: “One: the governess is hallucinating. Two: The ghosts are real” (23). Marin volunteers a third option: “The staff is conspiring against her. An elaborate trick” (23). Mabel complains that this makes the assignment too complicated, but Marin prefers it that way. Mabel will be writing her final essay on orphans. Mabel goes home with Marin after school, discussing Marin’s intention to write her final essay on ghosts. Gramps sits them down to deliver a lecture about their habit of buying four-dollar coffee at the coffee shop. He’s made them a bundt cake, which they enjoy while joking about whether to save some cake for his friends. Marin suggests he overnight mail a piece of cake to Birdie, Gramps’s long-standing pen pal.

Mabel and Marin walk to the beach and watch a pair of surfers on the waves. As the surfers leave, they stop, recognizing Marin, and give her a shell that was Marin’s late mother’s favorite kind of shell. Marin has so many of this type of shell now that she’s filled three large mason jars in her bedroom. Marin’s mother, a surfer, died in the hospital after a surfing accident when Marin was very young. Gramps never speaks of her mother, but locals who knew her often recognize Marin and give her free gifts of things that her mother liked. Her father, “a traveler, back somewhere in Australia before the pregnancy text” has never been around (30).

Marin remembers when the school counselor told Gramps it was important that he help Marin to remember her mother. Marin had recently skipped some classes and written a short story in which a girl had been raised by sirens who, “guilt-ridden over murdering the girl’s mother,” had ”told the girl stories about her, made her as real as they could, but there was always a hollowness to the girl that they couldn’t fill” (32). Marin apologized for missing the classes, but Gramps argued angrily with the counselor. In the car, Marin asks if he’s heard from Birdie today, and he replies, “You write two letters, you get two letters” (34).