If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you where she went to college, what her roommate’s name was, how they had the exact same majors and minor. She will tell you that she did not graduate at the top of her class, but she was a solid student all the same. She will tell you about all her sorority sisters, tri-delt! their wild parties, how at one of them she managed to kiss three boys she crushed on, in one night! She will tell you about her first college boyfriend, Ben, how she was such a bitch to him because he liked her more than she liked him. She will tell you about the asshole fratboy who raped her and then she will tell you how she’s never told anyone else about it, not even her best friend, her roommate. She will confess all this to you, and then she will tell you about her favorite Professor, how he wore mismatching socks and smoked a pipe as soon as he walked out of the classroom. She will tell you how this reminded her of her father, who also smokes a pipe, and maybe she will laugh and say how she doesn’t even like her father because he’s a jerk but no, don’t get the wrong idea. She loves her father, she really does. She’s not the type of girl to not love her own father! She will tell you that in all reality, she didn’t even like his class, that she can’t remember a single lecture he gave, that she doesn’t even know which department he taught in. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you about all her college projects, study groups, late night writing sessions at the local diner, smoking way too many cigarettes and drinking enough coffee and eating enough addies to keep her awake for days. She will tell you about the crush, the one guy she never got. She’ll tell you his name was Josh and he had long curly brown hair and the longest eyelashes, like ever. She’ll go on about how he was Vice President of Feminist Voices and she was just a freshman and he was a junior and what happened when they happened to cross eyes, whew. She’ll tell you about the serenity in his eyes and how real it was and that made her happy and jealous and angry all at once. She’ll say this earnestly. She’ll say that everyone else around her had flustered and overwhelmed eyes but not Josh. Never. She’ll tell you about this time he wore a skirt into Stats. The woman down the hall will tell you how she was so shy that she’s never even had a whole conversation with Josh, she was always choking out words if she was talking to him. She will tell you that in the end, after all her anxiety and dreaming, he probably — to this very day — has no idea who she is, but she’ll tell you that she’s fine with it, that she’s happy now, that every few months she’ll check in on him on Facebook, never friending him, just taking a quick peek. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you the most minute of details about all her memories of her college experience, her first time away from home, it changed her forever, just like in the movies, it’s the one place that’s made her who she is today, but all of her stories are lies. She never went to college.
The truth of it is that the woman down the hall went away and her life was forever altered, just like she’d swear up and out, but she didn’t go to college, no matter how much she insists, because all of it, every single bit of it, is a lie that she embroidered into her memory, into fact.