Cecily Von Ziegesar (8 page)

“I like it,” Shipley told her defiantly.

“You would,” Eliza shot back.

“Brewski anyone?”

Sea Bass and Damascus danced over to them and passed out plastic cups full of Busch beer. A yellow bandanna was tied around Damascus's unruly black curls. His wobbly stomach poked out above the waistband of his jeans. Sea Bass had done something to his sideburns. Their shape was more severe now, like sled runners zooming across his cheekbones toward his nostrils.

“Marry me?” Sea Bass asked as he handed Shipley a beer.

“Sorry, but she's already spoken for.” Tom reached for a cup and downed most of it in one go. It had taken him all of a week to notice what everyone had seen from the start: Shipley was the best-looking girl on campus. And it wasn't like they had to spend a lot of time getting to know each other. They were practically from the same town. They even went to the same dentist—Dr. Green, in Armonk.

I'll be damned if any of these clowns is going to nab her first, Tom thought. It would only be a matter of days before she'd be burning patchouli incense out of her belly button and dancing around topless in the grass. He could think of better things to do with her topless. He dropped his plate on the ground and slipped his arm around Shipley's waist, claiming her before anyone else could.

“Tom?” Shipley demanded. “What are you doing?”

Tom pulled her toward him. He liked how small she was, how neat her waist felt under her thin dress. He yanked her plate out of her hands and dropped it on the grass. The fact that Damascus and Sea Bass and Nick and Adam and Eliza and half the campus were staring at him enviously increased the size of his balls. “Kissing you,” he announced before kissing her.

Shipley had been kissed a few times during party games in ninth and tenth grade, but as she got older and more concerned with propriety—in the face of her brother's impropriety—she'd stopped going to parties. She kissed Tom back eagerly, even daring to press her fingernails into his back. Tom smelled so manly. Kissing him made her feel like the star of a movie, except it was better than a movie because it was real. Her first week of college and she already had a boyfriend.

“Look how cute they are together,” Eliza commented with disgust. “I heard while I was waiting on line in the employment office today that some insane number of Dexter students wind up marrying each other. Like sixty percent. Guess there's not much else to do here besides fall in love.” She retrieved the dirty plates from the ground and stalked off to dump them in the trash.

Adam sipped his beer without tasting it. He shouldn't have come. He certainly wasn't going to get any “action,” as his sister so aptly put it. Not that he'd wanted any. He just wanted to talk to Shipley, and maybe hold her hand.

“And it's just a box of rain, I don't know who put it there. Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare….”
Nick sang out loud so as not to notice that Shipley and Tom were still kissing.

“I'm totally not marrying you now,” Eliza told him when she returned.

The Grannies finished the song and put down their instru
ments. Nick thought he saw one of them exchange money with another student. Scoring some pot was crucial if he was going to have to watch Shipley and Tom kissing in the next bed for the rest of the year. Even more crucial was his idea of erecting a yurt out in the woods somewhere. He would need a place to go, an escape pod, a zen retreat. He might even get credit for building it.

“Welcome to Dexter.” Darius Booth, the first Home-born president of Dexter College, took up a microphone in his frail hands and beamed at the crowd. He was eighty-two years old and had started as a janitor at the school, slowly working his way up the ranks and to the front page of the
New York Times
on his inauguration day. It was just the kind of small town story the
Times
liked to report during the summer when there wasn't much newsworthy news and most of the writing staff was in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod. Mr. Booth was beloved by the college faculty and staff for his devotion to Dexter and for his steadfast, by-the-book leadership. The consensus among the students was that he was a bore. “This is the second or third or even fourth barbecue for some of you, but for our first-year students this night is very special. Why don't we lead them in a round of ‘Bravo, Dexter, Bravo'? They're going to have to learn it sometime. I'll give you a hint, boys and girls,” he said in his hokiest Maine accent. “The tune sounds a little bit like ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.'”

The Grannies dutifully picked up their instruments and played an intro to the college's corny anthem. As long as they humored their dotty old president, he'd never bust them for doing and dealing drugs, or stealing ether from the chemistry lab.

“
Upon this hill, through winter's chill, Dexter so divine. Snow swirls round our heads, trees wrapped in its glistening glory. Brave men and women write their own stories. Bra-vo, Dexter. Bra-vo.
”

Everyone was so busy trying to learn the song or mock the lyrics, no one noticed the tall, beautiful, dark-haired girl stride across
the grass on the opposite side of the lake. It was Tragedy, looking like she'd gotten lost somewhere between Rio and Bangor, in a yellow bikini top, a flippy white miniskirt, and bare feet. She'd come to spy on Adam and the blonde from Connecticut, getting busy, and was disappointed to find Tom getting busy with the blonde instead. Adam held up his hand, signaling her to wait. He left the group of singing, dancing, kissing freshmen and circled the water, glad to have talked to Shipley for a little while at least. Maybe she'd think of him in November, when it came time to vote.

A
nd so it went. Shipley lost her virginity to Tom that night. It was a Friday night, and Root's halls and walls thrummed with music and general insouciance. Tom's room was in the basement, near the dorm kitchen, and the air smelled perpetually of curry. Two windows at ground level faced the woods behind the dorm. Nick had decorated the white walls on his side of the room with trippy tapestries made from the same sort of cloth as the Grannies' skirts, and the window ledge nearest his bed was strewn with candles and incense burners. The walls on Tom's side of the room were bare. Beneath his bed was a pile of balled-up dirty socks. The bed was made up with the plaid flannel sheets his mother had had shipped directly to him from L.L.Bean. Nick's bed didn't have sheets, just a red nylon sleeping bag on top of the ticking-striped mattress, and a pillow in a plain white case.

“I've never done this before,” Shipley murmured as Tom slipped her white dress over her head.

“That's okay,” Tom said. “I have.”

Some girls might have been grossed out. They might have begun to imagine Tom with other slutty, possibly diseased girls. They might have imagined that Tom was an egomaniacal player, roving from girl to girl, always hungry and never satisfied. Some girls might have had a creeping fear that he would use them and then toss them out. But Shipley was not like other girls.

She slipped beneath the covers while Tom lit one of Nick's candles and put on his favorite Steve Miller Band tape. Then he tore off his clothes, threw them onto the floor on Nick's side of the room, and grabbed a Trojan from his toiletry kit.

Shipley lifted up the covers to welcome him in. “I knew you were the right man for the job,” she giggled nervously as Tom took her in his arms and began the quick work of deflowering her. As is the way with all rites of passage, it seemed to be over almost as soon as it had begun. It was inelegant, thrilling, and routinely monumental.

Afterward, they fell asleep in each other's arms. They were sleeping still when Nick crept in around one in the morning, eyes strained from reading up on yurts in the library, grateful for the cozy warmth of his sleeping bag.

 

C
ut to October. The air was nippy and the foliage was on fire. Dexter College had never looked finer, a shoo-in for every prettiest college campus award in the country. So far no one had fallen from an upstairs window after taking too much acid, or driven into a tree. No professor had molested a student. The president of the college hadn't had a stroke, or been arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a saloon downtown. Not a blade of grass was out of place. The errant black Mercedes with Connecticut plates did occasionally disappear from the parking lot, but it was always returned, albeit with an empty gas tank.

Most nights, Shipley slept in Tom and Nick's room. She even kept a few outfits in Tom's closet to avoid the morning Walk of Shame back to her dorm. There was nothing shameful about her and Tom. By now they were practically married.

Nick was well on his way to finishing his yurt. He'd researched the construction carefully. Hundreds of pamphlets on yurt-building had been published on the World Wide Web, and scrolling through them had actually been fun. One yurt builder extolled the virtues of yurt dwelling in such a seductive way that Nick was sure he was onto something:

“On clear nights you can lie inside the yurt and see the stars through the open crown. In poor weather there is plenty of room for you and your friends to sit comfortably around a warm stove, listening to the storm rage. From outside, the yurt radiates a welcoming glow….”

It didn't have to be big. Just big enough to lie down in and entertain a visitor or two. And the smaller it was, the easier it would be to erect. Nick was no carpenter. The most complex structure he'd ever put together was a balsa wood airplane.

At last he discovered an outfitter in Colorado who sold yurt kits with the timber cut to size, the screw holes already drilled, and a weighted wax canvas cover and flap door that Velcroed on and off. The company claimed it would only take six hours to put it together. Nick ordered the fourteen-footer—the smallest and most inexpensive kit they offered. He used his mom's credit card number, promising to pay her back with the earnings from his AV job. Three days later, the giant box arrived via Federal Express.

He'd borrowed a stepladder and tools from the guys at Buildings and Grounds, found the perfect building site bordering the woods behind Root, and followed the kit's simple instructions. Six days later, it was still a wobbly work in progress and his hands
were blistered from hammering, but he was determined to get it done. Once it was complete, he could sleep there instead of staying up late reading in the library or watching TV in the common room until Shipley and Tom had finished fooling around and gone to sleep.

This was just such a night. From outside the door, Nick could hear Steve Miller Band's “Fly Like an Eagle” playing on repeat, a good sign that Tom and Shipley were still naked. Nick wandered down the hall to Root's ample kitchen, where Grover, Liam, and Wills, the juniors who made up the Grannies, were making curry. Unlike the residents in Dexter's other dorms, Root residents could opt out of the meal plan and cook for themselves. This was particularly attractive to students with special diets, like the Grannies, who were vegan.

“All right, man?” Wills greeted Nick.

Nick had met the Grannies in person a few weeks before when he'd missed breakfast in the dining hall and wound up in Root's kitchen, foraging for cereal. Most of the food in the kitchen belonged to the Grannies, and they were generous with it. They were also generous with their pot. They'd already given him a Ziploc bag full of it for $20, way less than it cost in the city. Nick had only just finished smoking a joint out behind his unfinished yurt. Now he was starving.

“Brewtarski?” Wills opened the fridge, pulled out a can of Busch, and handed it to Nick. Tonight Wills wore a red tiered skirt with black cats batiked all over it and a red and black plaid wool shirt. His platinum blond hair was plaited into messy half cornrows, half dreadlocks that pattered against his shoulders as he stirred the enormous pot of curry simmering on the electric stove.

Nick cracked open the beer and pointed at the curry. “Hey, you guys mind if I have some of that?”

Wills grimaced. His bloodshot eyes rolled around dramatically. “Aw, man, we just chucked in a gigantic eggplant. Stuff's raw. Plus, we need more tasty vegetable ingredients. Wanna come divin' with us?”

“Diving?” Nick wasn't sure he'd heard right. The nights were already cold, and the coast was at least an hour away.

Grover hitched up his blue-and-white-striped OshKosh B'Gosh train conductor overalls and stuck a wad of chewing tobacco in his bearded cheek. Nick had heard that Grover was from Bethesda, Maryland, an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, but he dressed like someone from the Deep South at the time of the Great Depression.

“Dumpster diving,” Grover explained. “We hit the Dumpsters out behind the Shop 'n Save. Stuff they throw away you wouldn't believe. Last week I found a perfect pineapple. The best pineapple I ever tasted.” Grover ran his hand over his shaved head. Most of the time he wore a red bandanna tied like Aunt Jemima's, but tonight he was going commando. “Come with us. You'll see. Best food you've ever had, completely free. And the store doesn't care cuz they're throwing it out anyway.”

Nick frowned. He liked the idea of free food, but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Was there some profound philosophical point being made by rooting around in Dumpsters for your food? After all, the tuition at Dexter was pretty high. The Grannies could probably afford groceries. But it seemed like something Laird Castle would have done.

“Let's hit it!” Liam jangled his car keys. His orange and gray wool flap hat was pulled down so far that his murky hazel eyes were almost completely obscured. Nick flipped up the flaps on his own hat in an effort to distinguish himself.

Moments later he sat in the back of Liam's red Saab, listening to Phish sing “Proud Mary.” The road into town was dark
and the air was chilly. Nick thought he might have even seen a stray snowflake.

He wondered if Shipley and Tom had finished having sex. The sight of her in Tom's bed depressed him. He didn't like Tom to begin with, and the fact that Shipley had chosen Tom over him or even that redheaded local boy made him question her judgment. Tom ate meat three times a day, he was totally unspiritual, he snored and farted loudly in his sleep, he'd signed up for the expensive laundry service instead of washing his own socks and underwear in the laundry room down the hall, and he wanted to major in Economics with only a concentration in Studio Art. Tom also refused to address Nick directly except to say, “See you later, man.” Tom was a dick.

We are all one and connected, Nick reminded himself. I am you, you are me. Your good fortune is my good fortune. Your misfortune is my misfortune. If Tom is a dick, then I am a dick. Hopefully Tom's redeeming qualities would reveal themselves in time.

Shop 'n Save bore a giant neon orange sign and seemed to be the only place open in town. Even so, the parking lot was nearly empty.

“Shhh,” Wills whispered as they clambered out of the car. “Be werry, werry quiet.”

“Hey dude, you knit?” Liam whispered, tweaking Nick's hat as they approached the Dumpster.

“Nah,” Nick responded. It occurred to him that the Grannies might be a harmless-looking Grateful Dead cover band by day and torturous psycho killers by night. Had they brought him here to stuff his mouth full of brown bananas so he couldn't scream while they took turns scalping him and pulling out his toenails? He pulled the flaps of his hat down over his ears again, steeling himself.

The Dumpster was gigantic and black and stank of rotting cabbages. The Grannies were experts. They had their method down pat. First Grover got down on his hands and knees. Then Liam climbed onto Grover's back and got down on his hands and knees. Then Wills climbed aboard and did the same, his red and black skirt draping elegantly over Liam's shoulders.

“Come on,” Wills called to Nick. “You go first. You gotta experience a virgin dive.”

Nick climbed the human ladder, careful to distribute his weight evenly. When he was up on Wills's back, he peered into the blackness of the Dumpster.

“Go on, get in there,” Liam urged.

The sickly sweet smell of rotten fruit was so powerful Nick could hardly breathe. He closed his eyes and, using Will's back as a springboard, somersaulted into the depths of the Dumpster.

“Cannonball!” Grover shouted as Nick dropped down into the garbage.

His back hit something hard and he rolled away from it, pain shooting down his spine to his coccyx. Before he could orient himself, a harsh light shone in his eyes. Fuck! Was Shop 'n Save Security after him already? Nick blinked, making out a pair of pale blue eyes behind the flashlight's beam. The furry-faced creature brandishing the flashlight held up a heavy book with an illustration of an erupting volcano on its cover.

“Hello,” Nick said cautiously. He sneezed. “Sorry to disturb you.”

The blue eyes blinked and a voice mumbled something complicated about the survival of a unit of life.

It was Sunday. Patrick had been reading his book inside the Dumpster for over an hour, waiting for the bakery staff to throw out all the out-of-date bread, a regular Sunday night Shop 'n Save ritual. French bread, Tuscan farm bread, kaiser rolls, and bagels.
Sometimes there were muffins and donuts too. He'd fill the trunk of the Mercedes and live on the stuff all week. The last thing he wanted was to share his cache with a bunch of stoned Dexter idiots.

Trembling, Nick took an unsteady step forward on the stinking heap of garbage. A grapefruit swelled and then gave way beneath the sole of his Birkenstock, bursting with the sweet, acrid odor of overripe citrus. He squinted into the harsh ring of light, trying to get a better look at the guy. Maybe he was just another Dumpster diver, who, without the comradeship of the Grannies, had gotten lost along the way.

Nick took another wary step and sneezed again. “We're just looking for some…tasty raw vegetable ingredients? For our curry?” he told the guy, feeling stupid.

“Hey!” The flashlight swung toward him. “Get the hell away from me!” The stranger's voice was throaty and vicious. “Leave me alone!”

“Okay, okay. Sorry.” Sheepish and terrified, Nick backed away. “Guys, can you help me? I want to get out!” he called out to the Grannies. He didn't care how many perfect pineapples he left behind. He jumped up and clawed helplessly at the Dumpster's inner wall before toppling back inside it again.

“Get anything good?” Wills asked, dangling his arms inside the Dumpster. He spotted the flashlight, still pointed at the back of Nick's frightened head. “Holy shit! Come on, man.” Wills flapped his hands at Nick urgently. “What the hell? Who is that?”

Nick grabbed his hands and Wills heaved him out of the Dumpster. The other two Grannies were still in their two-tiered Ringling Brothers formation, but the force of Will's heaves and Nick's extra weight sent them crashing.

“Aw, ya broke it! You broke my neck!” Grover screamed, writhing around on the pavement. The other three boys crouched on the chilly asphalt, breathing hard, the orange Shop 'n Save sign glowing above their heads.

Liam giggled. “Dude, you're not dead, right? If your neck was broken you'd be way dead.”

“Jesus,” Nick muttered, rubbing his sore hands together. “Hey, can we go now? There's someone creepy in there.” He stood up and started for the car, wanting to run, but fearful of looking like a huge chicken.

“Someone's in there? Holy cow!” Grover exclaimed. He leapt to his feet and sprinted toward the car.

“Damn, why didn't you say something?” Liam chased after him.