And then we’re in the car together, and I’m driving us out of the Kappa Delta parking lot
and down Greek Row.
“
What are you doing here?” This might be the first time I’ve seen her so emotionless, holding her purse in her lap no different than if she were a woman riding the subway by herself and trying to avoid human contact.
“It’s a National Review,” I say.
“Is that like—did the Nikes do something wrong?”
“Hazing,” I say. “You’ll hear about it.
We’re kicking a bunch of guys out.”
“Wait. They sent you back here to kick out your
own
brothers?”
“Wouldn’t be my first major purge as a Fun Nazi.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
Outside, Halloween has begun. Kappa Sigmas are walking Greek Row in the president masks from
Point Break
, waving like political candidates at intersections and shouting nonsense at passing cars: “Death or taxes!” and “Abort my bill!” and “Amend your own asshole!” Down the street, someone is dressed as a ghost in front of the NKE house, just a bed sheet with eyeholes and arm-holes, and he is standing all alone, an eerie image through my rearview mirror as we roll to the stop sign. I expect him to move, wait a few extra seconds at the stop sign before the driver behind me grows impatient and mouths “
Come on
!”, and then we’re going again.
“Where are we going?” Jenn asks.
She holds up her hands as if our stillborn conversation has already exhausted her. “Where are you driving me?”
On the rental car’s radio, the afternoon DJ’s relaying some news update about McCain, the election just days away now. Then the DJ laughs and the music takes over, “Misery Business” by Paramore. Maybe there was an election joke tying into the song, who knows?
“I don’t know where I’m driving, Jenn,” I tell her.
“
Okaaaay,” she says in the sorority-girl voice that I can’t stand. “Well, can we go…I don’t know…
somewhere
?”
“I can’t stop at my own chapter house,” I say. “They hate my guts now.”
“Well, we can’t just keep driving to, like, nowhere.”
We roll to the final stop sign at the west end of campus. Behind us are the parking garages, the faculty office buildings, the classrooms, the campus quad
, the dorms, the fraternity and sorority houses. Ahead is a long avenue lined with pine trees, medianed by marigolds, the beautiful boulevard by which you enter or exit campus, the buffer zone between “real world” and “college world.” In a quarter-mile, the trees disappear and the commercial glut of Mid-Sized American City takes over: long plazas of textbook stores and liquor stores and coffee shops, edge-of-university Applebee’s and Chili’s, a big-box nightmare a half-mile away where you can go from Best Buy to PetSmart to Kohls all in an afternoon but you need to drive from parking lot to parking lot in order to do so.
“I want to talk, Jenn. And if I stop somewhere, you’ll get away.”
“That’s creepy, Charles.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I just…there’s so much I want to talk about, and I really”—how does one say it, that he is only comfortable in a moving vehicle? That he has forgotten what it means to sit somewhere, to open up in conversation, to be honest about who he is? How does one say that
his home is now
couches
and
car seats
, his friends only memories? “I don’t want it to end, Jenn,” I say.
“What do you mean?” she asks. “It’s already over.”
“If I keep driving, I don’t have to think about that. We can just talk. It can be…I don’t know. Like it was.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re about to cry.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m not.”
We pull onto University, and all is silent in the car.
It’s November in Florida, but there are only occasional dead leaves on the ground, nothing that would constitute “foliage” in the Northern sense of the word. The trees along University are still full-canopied, the road heavily shadowed here in the last gasps of daylight.
“What do you want to talk about, Charles?” she asks. “I’m starting to feel like I’m Kim and you’re Eminem.”
I turn from University to Central, the short “campus town” district jam-packed with the bars and restaurants that carried me through my four years at EU. Hem-Haws, Sangria’s, Bang-Shots. And the old Campus Theatre, too, where we’d go to occasional concerts. Maybe this is some sort of hopeful test: will Jenn ask me to stop so we can go to dinner? Will she be the same Jenn I remember, and point at Supernova where we went to ‘90s Night, tell me that she wants to check out the Presidents of the United States of American Cover Band Cover Band? Will she keep quiet, and just hope that I take her home?
“There’s a Zombie Walk that ends at Indie Saloon,” she says. “Let’s go there.”
“A Zombie Walk?” I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Indie Saloon is at the far end of Central, around the corner on a moldy side-street. But if that’s where she wants to go, that’s where I drive us. Far from the
glitter and stripper outfits of the frat-tastic bars at Central and University, a place far less sexy.
“You’ve never seen a Zombie Walk?” she asks.
“Nope.”
“Obviously, I failed as a girlfriend.”
“This is a real thing? Something that’s been around?”
“A Zombie Walk is when, like, there are dozens of people…hundreds, sometimes, in the bigger cities…and they all dress like zombies, do elaborate makeup jobs, and they just walk together down a city street like the apocalypse has started.”
“That’s…bizarre,” I say. “Nobody shoots them?”
She laughs
, the first time today. “Maybe if they did it in Mississippi.”
“So there’s a Zombie Walk at Indie Saloon?”
“It
ends
there,” she says. “I don’t know the full route, but it ends there, and they’ve got all sorts of undead drink specials.”
“What time do the zombies get here?” I shut the car off, parallel-parked just a block from the bar.
Jenn checks her cell phone, swipes through a web page or a Facebook event or something, then says: “Fifteen minutes. We better get going so we can get drinks before they stumble in.”
“Any of your sisters doing it?” I ask, and now I’m hurrying to catch up with her as she speed-walks down the sidewalk. “Dressed as sexy zombies or something?”
“No,” she says. “You can’t make a zombie sexy.”
“Your boyfriend?” I ask, and she’s at the door to Indie Saloon.
And it occurs to me that—in the next minute—I could lose her for the night, lose her for good. It’s here where she can slip away and maybe find some new pack of friends in whom to take refuge. Wedge herself in, turn her back to me. We’ve left the car, and I’ll never get a chance to say another word to her.
“I don’t have a boyfriend
,” she says. Shows her ID, and the bouncer lets her through to the thick darkness of the bar. “You’ve stalked my Facebook page. You should know.”
The bouncer stops me,
hand to my chest. “In a hurry?” he asks, and it’s just the two of us out here and Jenn has vanished. He stares at my card for what seems a very long time, and I picture myself searching frantically through the crowd, trying to spot that flash of frosty hair but seeing ironic slogan t-shirts everywhere, no Jenn.
W
hen I finally manage inside, the crowd isn’t thick at all, just twenty or thirty hipsters scattered at scratchy booths and on sticky barstools at high-top tables. Long hair, tattoos, beards, flannel, the antithesis of
frat star
.
“Nice costume,” a guy says to me.
I’m wearing the Nu Kappa Epsilon polo.
“Tuck it in,” he says. “It’ll be more fratty that way.”
“Right,” I say, and push the front of the shirt under my beltline.
“Front tuck!” he says and claps. “Perfect, man.
Perfect
. Might as well do the popped collar, too, right?”
“Absolutely,” I say and flip my collar.
“Ha ha! This is the best,” he says.
Jenn is waiting
at a table, already has a cranberry-vodka but there’s no second drink for me.
“They know you here,” I say.
“Wave you inside, have a drink ready for you.”
“They’ve always known me here,” she says.
“I didn’t know you were still coming to these bars.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…the Louis Vuitton doesn’t go over very well in a place like this.”
“I didn’
t bring my Louis Vuitton purse.”
I sigh and hold up my palms. “All right. I guess I’m an idiot, then.”
Jenn reaches over to the next table and grabs a Miller Lite bottle, slides it over to me. “Here you go,” she said.
“Did you just steal that from someone?”
She laughs again. “No. I bought it. I just didn’t want you to
expect
that I’d get you a drink.”
Fifteen feet away, a guy dressed as Sarah Palin is arguing with a girl dressed as George W. Bush. Someone else is dressed as Jared from the Subway commercials, and someone else as Hillary Clinton, but none of the
white hipster crowd seems daring enough to go black-face and dress as Barack Obama. There’s someone dressed as the Verizon guy, too, going from table to table to ask the girls “Can you hear me now?” The monsters are coming, a hoard of zombies in what Jenn assures me will be professional and stunningly grotesque make-up, and yet—here in the bar—every costume is just a different celebrity or public figure.
I
rest my elbows on the high-top. “I need to tell you something,” I say.
“Well, I already know you cheated on me,” she says and holds up her glass as if to cheer me, “so it can’t be much worse, can it?”
“My parents are divorced,” I say.
“
What
?”
“They lied to me,” I say. “For months. I don’t know why. Maybe they told me the reason, but I don’t care
what it was.”
“
Divorced.” Jenn puts her drink back on the table and exhales slowly. “God, Charles, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“Because I lied to you, too,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“They told me
at graduation. When we went out to lunch. But I kept it from you.”
“Back in May?
”
“I’ve barely spoken to them since,” I say. “When they call, I don’t answer.”
“My God, why didn’t you tell me?”
At the front door, the Palins and the Jareds and the
Bushes are clumping together and yanking cameras from pockets and purses, fighting for position to photograph the approaching zombie mob.
“I
wanted you to think I was someone else,” I say. “That’s as honest as I can be.” I swirl the Miller Lite in the pools of condensation that have formed on the table-top. “I spend all my time trying to be these personas. But I don’t even know which one is the real one anymore. It’s like being in a house of mirrors, but as an out-of-body experience…and you can’t find the real
you
anymore. Every time I turn around, there’s some other
me
that I want to be, or some other
me
that I hate and want to erase, and…it isn’t supposed to be like this, is it? I mean. Is it this way for you? When do we grow up and be the people we’re supposed to be for the rest of our lives?”
We hear the first groan, a guttural growl that sounds exactly the way it should
: like a response to my rant. Following it are a series of less-impressive (but still adequate, I suppose) expressions of pain and flesh-hunger. Someone out there is screaming “Brains! Brains! Brains!”, a zombie more picky than the rest.
“I don’t know what to say, Charles.”
“I’m crazy,” I say. “You’re scared of me. You think I’ve snapped or something.”
“You’re not crazy,” she says. And she stands, taps my chest with her fingertips, and motions for me to follow her. We settle at one of the front windows, where—through the scuffs and spilled beer and hardened bubblegum deposits—we can see the first wave of zombies braving the crosswalk and coming toward the Indie Saloon, confused drivers at every corner watching the grim procession.
“Thank you for telling me that,” she says.
“That I’m crazy?”
“Thank you for being
honest
,” she corrects.
Beside
us is a man dressed as Kurt Cobain. Or, at least, I
think
he’s supposed to be dressed as Kurt Cobain. He has his painted-black fingernails pressed to the window, forehead nearly touching the glass as he watches. “That first one,” he says. “Oh man. That first zombie.” And there’s a touch of wonder in his voice, as if there’s more beauty in what he’s seeing than he was even able to imagine.
“Can I tell you something?” she asks.