An Off Year (11 page)

“Has it?” I actually hadn't noticed it, but I guess it had been a long time since I'd gotten it cut, probably right before that drive to Kenyon. It was usually about shoulder length when I had it down, which was not often, because it was curly and I didn't feel like bothering to make it look not freakishly frizzy. I pulled it down and could see that it was hanging below my shoulders. I wondered how long my nails would have grown if I'd stopped cutting them as well. I'd look like a crazy mountain hermit man.

“I wonder if I can make a beard out of this,” I said, pulling the ends up under my nose.

“You look like Chewbacca,” Mike said.

“I bet you wouldn't have conversations like this at Harvard. Deep serious ones.”

“You're right,” Mike said. “I made the right choice.” I felt bad for him, for putting himself on the line like that and maybe not making the right choice. But at least he had a plan, a reason for doing what he did. And I could tell he would be a superstar no matter where he ended up. Jesus Christ, I can't believe I hung out with him so much and never realized how amazing he is. Maybe things would go well for me, too, I thought. I put the yearbook back on the shelf and, without thinking, ran my hand across all the spines so they lined up. I glanced at him to see if he noticed—he was watching me but didn't say anything, didn't raise an eyebrow or smirk.

“So did you have a hard time?” I asked. “I mean, meeting friends and stuff? During the transfer?”

“Not really,” he said. “I think it's almost harder
not
to make friends in college. It's programmed that way, practically. You really have to go out of your way to avoid meeting new people.”

“Meeting new people isn't the same as having friends,” I pointed out.

“Are you scared of not having any friends?” he said. “Don't worry about it. You'll be fine. You have friends now, right?'

“Barely,” I said. “I mean—”

“Get over it,” he said. “I'm your friend, right?”

“Maybe I can walk around with a button that says ‘Has at least one friend!' on it.”

“There you go. But why wouldn't you make friends with people? You're funny. You're fun. You're creative.”

“I think I just hung out with funny, fun, creative people. Because I'm not feeling very funny, fun, or creative right now.”

“You just need to find people like that, then, and get associated with them.”

“Easy!” I said. “Thanks, Mike!”

“So do you think you'll go back?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. Probably. I still don't have any idea why I'm suddenly so defective.”

He shrugged. “You can cultivate an aura of mystery about you. You're inexplicable and you can't be pigeonholed and no institution can tie you down!”

“I don't think that's true.”

“Nobody knows that, though. When I got to UK, people had already heard about me. I felt like explaining to them, ‘Actually, I'm more than just the guy who transferred here from Harvard to be with a girl,' but in the meantime, hey, at least they thought something about me. And it's a good story to tell at a party.”

“So I just need to get invited to some parties,” I said.

“Good luck with that.”

My hot chocolate had finally cooled off enough to drink, and I decided to go home soon. I was worried about staying up too late, getting too chatty, trying to share too much, and looking foolish. Even though Mike and I had been left alone in his house or my house together several times, I was aware for the first time that I was alone with a guy in a while. I was afraid of staring at his face too much. I was afraid of acting strangely and getting called out on it. But I was glad that I saw him. He was still my friend. I couldn't fuck that up.

“I don't want to put pressure on you,” I said when we were at the front door. “But you have to keep in touch. Not all the time. Not even that frequently. But just . . . sometimes. Because if I don't talk to you, I'm not talking to anyone.”

“What about Kate?”

“Kate's changed.”

“She seems like she's coming out of her shell to me,” said Mike.

“I didn't even think that she had a shell,” I said. “But seriously. Only friend. Obligation.”

“I have to tell you, it takes a lot of balls to be that pitiful,” said Mike. Mean but true.

“Just send me the occasional e-mail or call me, will you?” I said. “I'll try calling Kate, too, so the pressure's not all on you. But she'll probably be too busy having drunk sex.”

He widened his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “That came out of nowhere. It's just—”

“Don't worry about it,” Mike said. “What am I going to do, go tell her you said that?”

“You're going to go have drunk bar sex with her.”

“All right,” Mike said, opening the front door. “Yes, I promise I'll keep in touch. But only because we weirdos need to stick together.” If Mike was a weirdo, I didn't know what I was. A freak of nature.

“Well, see you,” he said, putting up a fist. I bumped it.

“Not if I see you first.”

“I don't even know what that saying means.”

“Me either.”

I drove the five minutes home in silence. I felt more real after seeing Mike. I also felt lonelier than I had in a while. But at least I had something to tell Jane.

 

 

By my next appointment, the weather had turned freezing and slushy—my jeans were already stained with salt and I'd only gone from the house to the garage to the car to the office building—yet Jane looked pristine in a cream sweater, green tweed skirt, and shiny black stiletto boots. Maybe she changed at the office. If I ever chose to dress to impress, I'd have to ask her her secrets.

“Hey, it looks better in here,” I said when I entered her office, which now was painted a warmer taupe color and carpeted in navy.

“Yeah—the carpet's that crappy industrial stuff but still better than hearing my voice echo in here. So what's new with you?”

“So I guess I'm losing Kate,” I said. “I don't know. I feel really sad when I hear a song that we used to sing together or remember some stupid joke that made us laugh until our stomachs hurt. I doubt we'll ever be that close again.”

“Well, you don't know,” said Jane. “A lot of people grow apart at first and then get back in touch once they've settled down and figured out who they are at college.”

“Kate hasn't had a problem figuring out who she is,” I said.

“Why do you think that?”

“I don't know. She doesn't sound like it. She sounds like she's having a lot of fun, and she's really popular, and she's, like, drinking and being
totally cool
.” I started getting really sarcastic in the second half of that sentence. “And she fucks everything that moves,” I said.

“Whoa.”

“Okay, I didn't mean to say it like that,” I said. “She's having a lot of sex, I guess, or so she tells me. I guess that's what you do in college. That's fine. I can admit I'm sort of inexperienced or prudish, so maybe I'm jealous. But it's like—she seems to think it's making her cool. And she was . . . already cool before. It makes me sad.”

“Maybe she's just not meant to be your friend anymore,” she said.

“She outgrew me.”

“Who says?” Jane said. “Just because she's in college? Or she let a guy put his penis in her vagina? That doesn't automatically mean she got more mature than you.”

I shrugged.

Jane smiled. “Did you consider that maybe she's not that cool if she's leaving you behind in the dust?” she said. “Maybe she actually kind of sucks.”

“Well, still. I'm not wearing a sombrero and having people drink tequila out of my belly button,” I said. “Nobody's drinking anything out of my belly button. But you know what, I don't blame her. I feel like I forfeited the right to have friends or something.”

“How so?”

“I don't know . . . why should I expect my friends to take their precious college time to talk to me, to pity me just because I couldn't move on somehow?”

“What about your friend Mike?”

“Mike's a nice guy. Everyone likes him.”

“But if everyone likes him, wouldn't that mean he'd also be too busy to talk to you?”

“Maybe he just wants to talk to me because I make him feel better about himself—like maybe he might have transferred from a really good school just to be with a chick, but at least he's in school. Talking to me makes him feel better.”

“Why would you bother talking to someone who just pities you, then?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Have you and Mike ever hooked up?” Jane asked. I snorted. “Why is that so funny? Are you guys not saying ‘hooked up' anymore?”

“No,” I said. “We just don't have that kind of relationship. He dates other girls. I'm his pal. I wouldn't want to make things weird. Even if I
could
make things weird, which I wouldn't. I haven't even tried.”

“You don't want to go there,” she said. I rolled my eyes. “People don't say ‘go there' anymore? I'm the youngest person in this office, but I feel so old when I talk to patients like you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “No, I haven't wanted to ‘go there.' ”

“Hmm, okay, so maybe you didn't go there with Mike—what about other guys?”

But the truth was, overall, I hadn't even really thought about guys very much since coming back from my day at college. It was hard to feel seductive or cute or just not ridiculous when you lived at home with your dad because you ran away from school. It was easy to ignore the fact that I had no romance in my life so far. There was very little to remind me of such things until I did see Mike and I was suddenly reminded of said things, and it reminded me how much nicer it was to pretend these things didn't exist.

My experience with guys was pretty limited at this point. And, by and large, I didn't mind it: the guys in high school didn't impress me too much, and typically they didn't seem to be worth breaking up a friendship over, which is what they typically seemed to do. The only experience I had to speak of was the summer between sophomore year and junior year of high school, when Kate and I were assistant counselors at a sleepaway camp in Michigan. My campers loathed me, and I hated them right back. They were spiteful, bitter little sixth graders who had hoped for a counselor who would help them curl their hair and make bead bracelets as opposed to rolling her eyes throughout their talent-show practices and refusing to buy them candy on her night out. One of the only things I really liked about camp was that it was totally acceptable to do things like quit shaving your legs and stop wearing makeup. I took advantage of this by going as long as I could without washing my hair, which I kept in a permanent set of braids.

Camp was more stressful in some ways than school, because everybody matched up and hooked up, despite the greasy hair and mosquito-bitten legs. Kate found Joe, a freakishly tall and thin fellow with long blond hair who was actually from Michigan (ooh la la). The two of them would hold hands and quietly disappear into the woods together. In those days, she didn't feel the need to report every detail of her love life, plus there was only one guy to keep track of.

I can't remember if I just decided to have a crush on Ethan or if I actually did have a crush on him. He was a year older than us. He was certainly all right enough, but sort of B-class material, the guy who would hang back and laugh as his friends performed silly antics. He was pretty cute, with a thatch of overgrown reddish hair and big dark brown eyes. We had nothing to talk about, but after dark, when the counselors slipped out of the cabin to our “staff meetings” and all made out or smoked pot, Ethan and I would sit together on the field along with the other counselors who weren't screwing or smoking. He gave me awful back rubs, soft and ineffective, but it was still nice to have someone touching my back, even if it was in a lackluster manner.

“You liiiike him,” Kate said after the first night the two of us hung out, walking back to our cement-floored cabins.

“Shut up.”

“Laaaaaaaah,” she said. She was just excited because she let Joe touch her boob that night.

“He
is
cute,” I admitted, begrudgingly.

“What do you guys talk about?” she asked. “Cuteness and liking each other?”

“Oh good god, I could never talk to him!” I couldn't. It felt really embarrassing for some reason. Just sitting next to each other and being cuddly felt okay, though.

“CECILY HAS A BOYFRIEND!” the sixth-grade girls all sang when I tried to open the screen door to the cabin without making a sound.

“You little slags better shut up,” I hissed, and went to my bunk, excited and terrified about seeing Ethan the next day. The senior counselor had put on a Coldplay album to listen to while she fell asleep, and for the first time it sounded kind of romantic and not just bland.

We were both too shy to really do anything except maybe put our heads on each other's shoulders, but on the night before we were due to go home, he asked if I wanted to go for a walk.

“Okay,” I said, and my heart started beating hard, because obviously this was the point where I was going to have sex and have a baby. Actually, we'd probably just kiss, but the obviousness of it, the soon-it-will-be-time-to-kiss-ness of it gave me plenty of opportunity to get nervous.