As Marcia headed back to her new friends, Sophia started toward the rear of the barn, the crowd thinning out as she moved farther from the dance floors and the band. A few men tried to catch her attention as she maneuvered past them, but Sophia pretended not to notice, refusing to be sidetracked.
The oversize wooden doors had been propped open, and as soon as she stepped outside, she felt a wave of relief wash over her. The music wasn’t nearly as loud, and the crisp autumn air felt like a cool balm on her skin. She hadn’t realized how hot it was inside the barn. She looked around, hoping to find a place to sit. Off to the side was a massive oak tree, its gnarled limbs stretching in all directions, and here and there, people were standing in small groups, smoking and drinking. It took a second for her to realize that they were all inside a large enclosure bounded by wooden rails radiating from either side of the barn; no doubt it had once been a corral of sorts.
There weren’t any tables. Instead, knots of people mostly sat on or leaned against the rails; one group perched on what she thought was an old tractor tire. Farther off to the side, a solitary man in a cowboy hat stared out over the neighboring pasture, his face in shadow. She wondered idly whether he, too, was in graduate school at Duke, but she doubted it. Somehow, cowboy hats and Duke graduate school just didn’t go together.
She started toward an empty section of the railings a few fence posts down from the solitary cowboy. Above her, the sky was as clear as a glass bell, the moon hovering just over the distant tree line. She propped her elbows on the rough wooden rails and took in her surroundings. Off to the right were the rodeo stands, where she had watched the bull-riding contests earlier; directly behind them was a series of small enclosed pastures, which held the bulls. Though the corrals weren’t lit, a few of the arena lights were still on, casting the animals in a spectral glow. Behind the pens were twenty or thirty pickups and trailers, surrounded by their owners. Even from a distance, she could see the glowing tips of the cigarettes some of them were smoking and hear the occasional clink of bottles. She wondered what the place was used for when the rodeos weren’t in town. Did they use this place for horse shows? Dog shows? County fairs? Something else? There was a desolate, ramshackle feel to the place, suggesting that it sat empty much of the year. The rickety barn reinforced that impression, but then what did she know? She’d been born and raised in New Jersey.
That’s what Marcia would have said, anyway. She’d been saying it since they were sophomores, and it had been funny at first, then had worn thin after a while, and now was funny again, a kind of long-running joke just between the two of them. Marcia was from Charlotte, born and raised only a few hours from Wake Forest. Sophia could still remember Marcia’s bewildered reaction when she said she’d grown up in Jersey City. For all intents and purposes, Sophia might as well have said she’d been raised on Mars.
Sophia had to admit that Marcia’s reaction hadn’t been completely off base. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Marcia was the second of two; her father was an orthopedic surgeon, and her mother was an environmental attorney. Her older brother was in his last year of law school at Vanderbilt, and although the family wasn’t on the Forbes list, it definitely resided comfortably in the upper crust. She was the kind of girl who took equestrian and dance lessons as a girl and who received a Mercedes convertible on her sixteenth birthday. Sophia, on the other hand, was the child of immigrants. Her mother was French, her father was from Slovakia, and they’d arrived in the country with little more than the money they had in their pockets. Though educated – her father was a chemist, her mother a pharmacist – their English skills were limited and they spent years working menial jobs and living in tiny, run-down apartments until they saved enough to open their own delicatessen. Along the way, they had three more kids – Sophia was the oldest – and Sophia grew up working alongside her parents at the deli after school and on weekends.
The business was moderately successful, enough to provide for the family but never much more than that. Like many of the better students in her graduating class, until a few months before graduation she’d expected to attend Rutgers. She’d applied to Wake Forest on a whim because her guidance counselor had suggested it, but never in a million years could she have afforded it, nor did she really know much about the place beyond the beautiful photos that were posted on the university’s website. But surprising no one more than her, Wake Forest had come through with a scholarship that covered tuition, and in August Sophia had boarded the bus in New Jersey, bound for a virtually unknown destination where she’d spend much of the next four years.