Beware of Love in Technicolor (30 page)

             
On nights when I had classes the following morning, I would opt to stay overnight at Bristol, sending John off, on the rare occasion I had to, with a kiss and the knowledge that he was not as committed to attending the last few weeks of classes as I. I needed to know that I would be on campus on certain mornings.

             
Now, when it comes to the holiday season, I have about as much cheer as the next girl. I would have been willing, as I had been last year, to participate in a lame round of Secret Santas with my fellow floormates, even if I couldn’t tell one girl from another. But this was not my Resident Advisor’s style.

             
No, what she and her other RA’s pulled off was far uglier and more evil than Secret Santas.

             
It was the night I had stayed in the computer cluster until three a.m. I had three days until I had to turn in fifty pages of bad fiction writing, as well as a clip book of my best news articles, plus three new ones. Topher was working a late shift at the cluster that night, so at 3am, when he was done, he walked me back to Bristol on his way home. Gwen was still at work on her marketing case studies. When I came in, she put her books away, and we must have chatted for about a half hour before we finally decided to get some sleep. I had a ten o’clock nutrition class that would be spent reviewing for the final. I had skipped so many classes, this review was my only chance to get a grip on what would be on the exam.

I probably fell asleep around four a.m. Not more than thirty minutes later, there was a banging on our door, and on all the doors down the hallway. Then the yelling began.

“Get up! Get up!”

“Outta your rooms! Everyone! Now!”

Both Gwen and I sat up in our beds, confused in the hazy darkness of pre-dawn.

“What the hell?” she started to ask when the banging on our door started again. Frenzied, startled conversation began buzzing through the halls, adding to the cacophony that had ripped me from my sleep. Pulling a sweatshirt on over my t-shirt and shorts, I cracked the door slightly and peered into the hallway.

“C’mon Greer! Let’s go, Gwen!” our RA suddenly appeared in front of me wearing a goofy Santa hat and tacky Christmas sweatshirt. “You need to be in the upstairs lounge in two minutes!”

“Why?” I asked angrily, annoyed that there was not a fire ripping through the halls. There was no other reason for me to be awake. “I was sleeping.”

“We were all sleeping,” she answered, waddling her way back down the hall. “The lounge, one minute.”

***

Gwen and I were the last ones to shuffle into the lounge on the second floor. There must have been about sixty girls squeezed into Bristol’s largest room, each with her own brand of bedhead and morning breath. But nobody seemed pissed off, which I found weird. They actually seemed to be enjoying themselves.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” called out a skinny Santa perched on a metal folding chair at the head of the room. He had to have been one of the Resident Advisors’ boyfriend.

“I hope everyone has been nice this year,” he bellowed. I looked at Gwen and rolled my eyes.

“Ok, good morning, ladies,” the RA from the second floor called out. The three advisors stood together next to Santa, presenting a united front. The room quieted down, and we all waited for some sort of explanation for why we were here this early in the morning.

“Welcome to the Bristol Hall Holiday Party!” they cried out in unison, each so very pleased with herself and their covert party planning. They launched into an explanation of how hard it is to get sixty-something girls in one place during normal daytime or evening hours, and how they figured that the butt crack of dawn would be a super time to celebrate the holidays together.

“And we have presents for all of you!” our RA sang out.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned.

I looked for backup from Gwen, but she was talking to our next-door neighbor, whose name I didn’t even know. I looked around the room. I realized that I did not know a single person well enough to even say “hello” to. And in my typical manner, I felt the need to flee.

“Greer, where are you going?” my RA asked me when she saw my beeline for the door in the back of the room.

“To bed,” I retorted quickly.

“We’d all like it if you stayed,” she tried. “Your mother took the time to send a gift, the least you can do is stay.”

Damnit. Mom guilt. She was playing hardball. But more than I hate cheap devices such as the one she had just flung at me, I hate being challenged if front of people. I don’t know how to back down.

“Yeah,” I answered slowly, meeting the chubby RA’s steely gaze with one of my own. “She already told me about the sweater she had to send for this thing,” I lied. I was just guessing that my mom would send a sweater.

“So, you think you don’t have to stay, because you know what your gift is? We spent a lot of time planning this for you girls. Do you care at all about the efforts of others?”

“Look, Laurie,” I said, lowering my voice to be sure we kept it between the two of us. I walked out into the hallway, with her close behind. Inside the lounge, the skinny Santa was ho-ho-hoing, and beginning to hand out gifts. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful, or ruin anything, or anything like that. I’m tired. And I’m busy. And did I mention, I’m tired?”

“We are all busy at this time of year, Greer,” she countered. I remember wondering if she was at the law school. Her tenacity was impressive, if not annoying.

“I’m going back to bed,” I said, shrugging at her. She and I both knew she couldn’t make me stay. “You can give my gift to Gwen. Thanks for the party.”

She scowled as I walked away and disappeared down the front stairs.

***

Later that afternoon, after a good nap and a bitch session with Topher over chickwiches in the dining hall, I marched myself down to the housing office, and petitioned to be allowed to move off campus the following semester.
It was not that I had any specific alternative in mind, but I had seen a few studio apartments available for rent in town.

It was a futile effort, and I knew it. The university rarely let students move off-campus once they had paid their tuition. But I figured it gave me a better chance than most in moving out of Bristol and into a different dorm. Into a single.

I hated to leave Gwen, but the thought of another semester in Bristol was already starting to stress me out, and we hadn’t even left for winter break yet. In my meeting with the housing advisor, I stressed the importance of a personal telephone to a journalism major. I needed to be able to conduct all those interviews, and be available for sources to reach. The hall phones of Bristol had already cost me some of my best stories, I told her.

She promised to look into the matter and get back to me quickly. When three days went by, I began a series of phone calls to her office, inquiring about the status of my application. Finally, on the day of my nutrition final, I was told my application had been denied, but my name had been placed high up on the waiting list for a single. Knowing the rough percentage of how many students would not return in January, I figured my chances were pretty good.

Chapter Eighteen

Christmas that year was a bit less extravagant than it had been the year before. John requested we really, truly, stick to our spending limit for gifts, as he was running low on cash.

“I mean it, Greer,” he said to me over the phone. Even though he was finished with finals, he was staying at Cloud 9 until Christmas Eve, when he would stop by to see me before heading home to his his parents’ house.

“Ok,” I laughed. “I’ll stick to the limit. What is the limit, by the way?”

“Thirty.”

“Dollars?” I asked with surprise.

“No, beads,” he retorted. “We can each trade thirty beads for gifts this year. Yes, you airhead, thirty dollars. No more.”

“You’re really funny,” I answered him, sneering and smiling through the phone. “You should take that act to the Improv.”

“Thirty dollars,” he said again.

“Fine,” I answered finally. I didn’t really care about his gift to me being cheap. That didn’t matter to me. But it limited what I could give, and I hated that. Gift giving was supposed to be extravagant. How could I be extravagant on thirty dollars?

I racked my brain for an entire day. Cologne? Books? CDs? I seriously considered breaking our agreement and just getting him the Nintendo system he and all his roommates had been dying for. But I didn’t want to embarrass him, and I knew that I would if I spent three hundred while he spent thirty.

“You need to get him something,” Penny insisted as we cruised through The Sharper Image for the millionth time. “Get him a sweater or something.”

“For thirty dollars?”

“He’s the one who came up with the limit,” she shrugged. “Maybe he deserves a cheap sweater.”

***

My trip to the mall was turning into a waste of time. My hands were empty, my budget still as wide open as thirty dollars could be. Penny’s bags were full of gifts for Tim. Leather gloves, new wallet, two new sweaters, a few new CDs. The list went on, as did her spending.

“Does Whats-her-name still work here?” Penny asked as we were approaching the food court, and the accessories store where Abby had worked last holiday season.

“I think so,” I answered as nonchalantly as possible. I had been wondering the same thing since we had pulled into the parking lot. My heart actually started beating heavier as we approached the wide-open doorway of the store. I remembered back to last year, how I had studied her, been fascinated by the drama of her, without knowing it was
her
. I thought about what she had been through recently, and tried my best not to hate her.

But I had to look, at least. As we walked slowly past the store I gazed in, searching through the mass of harried shoppers huddled in the tiny confines of a store called AfterThoughts.

And she was there, as dark and scowling as I remembered, standing behind the counter and observing her customers with an intense but expressionless appearance on her paler than pale face. Though it was not my first time seeing her, I still found myself surprised at her appearance. She did not seem completely of this world, especially in the cheerfulness of the Christmas season. It was as if Halloween got lost at the North Pole.

But the one new thing I did notice about her this time around was how skinny she was. Really thin and tiny, like a possessed porcelain doll. I thought about John being able to wrap his hands around that tiny waist, and thought about the five or six pounds I had gained over the past few months. I imagined that she must be a size zero, and thought about the size six I was currently filling out.

And just like that, I had a whole new reason to hate her.

***

That year, I received a hardbound copy of
Wuthering Heights,
and a pink child’s pencil with a silver dangling princess crown hanging on a delicate, silver link chain, taped to the wrapping paper, which was really nothing more than the Books section of the Sunday newspaper. I was as happy with that gift as I had been with a lap full of them last year.

As for my gift to John, I bought a copy of
Popular Science
from the newsstand at the exit of the mall, and filled out the card to order him a one year subscription. With the leftover money, I bought rolling papers, a lighter with a cheesy bald eagle and American flag on it, and three scratch lottery tickets.

So romantic. His entire Christmas came from a newsstand. But even better, he loved it. And won fifteen bucks on one of the scratch tickets.

We coasted along nearly problem-free until Valentine’s Day on the equity built on those thirty dollar gifts.

***

Aside from the exchanging of gifts, there was little drama throughout the holiday break. On New Year’s Eve, Penny and Tim were supposed to join John and me in Boston for First Night, but in what was to become a regular occurrence, the two broke up the day before the event, and so John and I were on our own. She and Tim were back together again within a week.

In late January, just days before returning to school, I received a notice there was a single waiting for me in Hadley Hall, should I still be interested. Hadley Hall was part of the group of dorms that made up the lower quad, and it was perpendicular to Rice Hall, where Topher lived. Each room had its own private phone line. The RA was a guy who lived on the other wing, where it was likely I’d never have to deal with him. I immediately phoned the housing office to accept, telling myself I’d think about Gwen later.