The Paper Wasp

I’d always been the one with promise. Top of my class, ticket to anywhere. Or that’s what they’d all assumed. It’s easy to predict a straight path for others, a flat run for those with conspicuous abilities. It’s easy to dismiss them that way. And it’s more telling of the class of people I come from than anything else—this notion that just by unlocking the door to a real college I’d forever be handed key after key.

I shared this faith at first. I felt a burst of freedom as I left town, sailing east toward Ann Arbor in my loaded car. But in a clog of traffic around Lansing, the cars in front of me split and doubled. My lungs seemed to malfunction, the bottom halves suddenly defunct. I couldn’t catch my breath, and it felt as if my head would balloon away. This kind of panic had sometimes awoken me at night but had never come in the daytime before. I pulled off the highway to a Sunoco, locked myself in the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and gripped the handicap bar. The blood rushed so violently in my ears that I barely heard the knocking on the door. “Just a minute,” I wheezed. I cranked paper towels from the dispenser, wiped the sweat from my face, splashed myself all over with water. I was red and blotched in the mirror, pupils dilated like a cornered animal. I slunk out, shouldering past the old woman waiting outside, and with a dollar in my wet hand bought beef jerky. I sat in the car, chewing, until I could finally drive again.

The town dangled a welcome when I arrived that first day: the restaurants and shops gaily tailored to students, the giant football stadium so much like a womb. I would be all right, I told myself. I would let myself be hoisted by the collective pride of state and school, this institution’s blind faith in my ability. But as the days progressed, the other students struck me as smugly contemptuous. Few seemed to be from Michigan. They were from places