UW–Madison

UW–Madison becomes a temporary refuge for Maren without ever becoming a place she can openly claim as her own. A ride with incoming senior Kerri-Ann Watt brings Maren and Lee to campus, where a spare dorm bed, the university library, and the lakeside setting offer shelter and routine. But Maren’s access depends on borrowed identification, and the possibility of campus authorities discovering her makes this brief sense of belonging precarious from the start.

Campus as a temporary setting

The university first enters Maren’s journey through Kerri-Ann, who is driving back to school with her car packed with clear storage boxes. After she offers them a ride, she invites the pair to stay in her single dorm room for the night, on the condition that they help her move in. They reach Madison just after four, and the parking lot is full of students in Badger T-shirts and caps, laughing, greeting one another, and exchanging hugs and high-fives. The scene presents campus as an already inhabited social world: students arrive with friends, belongings, and the ease of people who expect to be there.

Maren and Lee help carry Kerri-Ann’s things upstairs. Her room has painted cinderblock walls, gray linoleum, and fiberboard furniture; she hangs posters of Tom Cruise in Risky Business and Right Said Fred while Lee waits. They then go to a campus pizzeria for dinner. On the lakeside path, Kerri-Ann walks beside Lee and touches his arm when she points things out. Maren finds the attention increasingly tiresome and privately concludes that their next plans will have nothing to do with Kerri-Ann. The campus provides hospitality, but it does not dissolve the unequal intimacy of their arrangement: Kerri-Ann is at home there, while Maren is a guest watching her closeness with Lee.

A room offered, a welcome with limits

Kerri-Ann’s offer makes the dorm a practical shelter, not a secure home. She asks Lee to set up her loft bed while she and Maren go into the bathroom to arrange toiletries and cosmetics. The room and its routines belong to Kerri-Ann; Maren’s place in them is conditional on helping with the move and remaining useful. Even the prospect of staying is temporary. Maren anticipates that the following morning will bring a decision about where to go next, and she expects that decision to take them away from Kerri-Ann.

The arrangement nevertheless gives Maren access to ordinary details of student life she has not experienced before. Later, she wears every article of black clothing Kerri-Ann owned and uses Kerri-Ann’s ID card to enter the university library. Her borrowed appearance and card let her pass a bored student at the front desk and through the turnstile without anyone checking whether her face matches the photograph. The access is real, but the identity behind it is not hers: she enters the institution by displaying someone else’s credentials.

The library and an improvised routine

Maren finds the library the largest she has ever seen. She spends hours reading, then wanders among the stacks to stretch her legs. When she sees books waiting on carts with no one apparently reshelving them, she begins putting them away herself. The work soothes her because it lets her care for and order something that belongs to someone else. It is not a university appointment or a formal welcome; it is a routine she makes from observation, available books, and the access Kerri-Ann’s ID affords.

The rest of campus gives this routine a setting. Maren likes the town and the campus, and especially the cafeteria, decorated like a German hunting lodge with dark wood and Gothic lettering. In good weather, students can carry their trays onto a terrace overlooking the lake. The details make the university appealing not through an abstract promise of advancement but through spaces where people read, eat, and spend time outdoors. Maren sees three girls knitting together on the terrace. One smiles and asks whether Maren knits; Maren says she has tried but could not get the hang of it. The exchange offers a small gesture of friendliness, yet it does not become a conversation or a friendship: Maren feels unable to talk to the people around her.

Provisional belonging and exposure

Lee is often elsewhere during the day, but he returns with dinner from McDonald’s or Burger King, usually a burger and a strawberry milkshake for Maren. Their continued dependence on one another sits alongside her growing attachment to the campus. She keeps thinking their time there is nearly over, in part because she likes the town and university so much. That expectation turns the library’s quiet routine into something fragile: she can inhabit it day after day, but has no assurance she can remain.

The dorm also contains a risk that the library’s anonymity cannot erase. While drinking with Lee, Maren imagines someone coming to Kerri-Ann’s room, seeing the light on, hearing their voices, and turning them over to campus police. Alcohol briefly makes that prospect—and her other worries—feel less pressing, but it does not change their situation. UW–Madison therefore serves as both a refuge and a borrowed identity: it gives Maren shelter, books, and a routine, while her access rests on a student’s card and a room that is not hers. The university’s significance in her story lies in that contrast between the life she can briefly practice there and the precariousness of her right to stay.