Fan Girl (3 page)

Chapter
4

It is the
second Monday of June,
and as Summer walks towards her first class as a sophomore (General Psychology,
seven-thirty
AM
, Social Sciences
building, room 117), she reminds herself that this school year will be no
different from the last. She reminds herself that she will continue eating
lunch at the cafeteria alone, listening to other students making plans to go
out for dinner or a movie, watching couples strolling hand-in-hand along the
campus’s tree-lined streets. She reminds herself that if she expects nothing,
then nothing ever has to hurt.

(She
wishes she can go up to each and every wide-eyed freshman girl and tell her
exactly this. She can spot them from a mile away—those innocent,
enthusiastic, overdressed sixteen-year-olds getting lost around campus and
wearing too much lip gloss and perfume. She can see them trying to be noncha
lant as they check out the hot upperclassman
jocks and the young, hip, handsome professors. She can see them trying to
appear cool, calm, and collected, fighting back the wave of anxiety as they
navigate the unfamiliar corridors swarming with unfamiliar faces. She can sense
their nerves and their fear, and yet she can also sense their tragic compulsion
to please everyone and their even more tragic tendency to believe that this
feat is possible if they only try their very best. She believed the very same
thing a year ago, and now she can’t help but wish someone had approached her at
that time to convince her otherwise.)
    

When
Summer arrives at her classroom, it is barely one-fourth full, which means she
gets dibs on where she wants to sit for the entire semester. She chooses the
seat at the far end of the room, right beside the window, in the second to the
last row. She takes out her notebook and pens, makes sure her phone is on
silent mode, puts her bag under her chair, and waits for her classmates. They
traipse in mostly by pairs, sometimes in groups of three, all fresh from the
break, talking about their family vacations in San Francisco or New Jersey or
Sydney or France. Their stories spill out of their mouths eagerly: a Boracay
trip that went wild, an internship at a snazzy company, a hot summer fling, and
hey, did you hear who hooked up with whom last month
? The
guys wear flashy sneakers and a clean shave; the girls fluff their
newly-colored, expertly-trimmed hair and flaunt their updated wardrobe. The
first day of school is always reserved for making a statement; everyone shows
up with the sole purpose of showing off.

Summer
observes as her classmates discreetly size each other up—they have come
from different blocks, and although they recognize each other’s faces, run in
the same circles, or know each other’s cousin or prom date or ex-boyfriend,
they are not yet friends. Summer has to admit she likes this idea and how it
levels the playing field for someone like her, who sits at the far end of the
room in the second to the last row.

Just
before the bell rings, someone takes the seat beside her. Her new seatmate is a
lanky guy with bushy eyebrows and a mass of curly hair. His mustard and maroon
striped sweater hangs loosely, awkwardly from his skinny shoulders, and he
brushes imaginary lint off it. Summer notices how his fingers are smeared with
dirt and how his oddly-shaped nose is too big for his face, and immediately
feels bad for him. He looks like the kind of guy whose head always got flushed
down the toilet by six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound high school bullies, and
whose heart always got stomped on by careless girlfriends. He sees her looking
at him and gives her a forced smile that makes her think of spoiled leftovers and
sour milk.

Summer
feels like she’s met him before, and she racks her brain for an answer. “Hello,
I’m Zachary,” he says, enunciating carefully and holding out his hand formally.
He establishes eye contact and maintains it for more than the required two seconds,
which is creepy. Then she remembers—Zachary is Fleece Hat Guy from report
card distribution. She resists the urge to roll her eyes at him; instead, she
shakes his hand for as briefly as she can get away with, and says curtly,
“Summer.”

“Nice
to meet you,” he says, and she wants to retort, “That’s funny, because I didn’t
have a nice time meeting
you
last
March.”

The
teacher stands in front of the class and introduces herself as Miss Diaz. She
begins the roll call, and in between “Bartolome” and “Bernardo,” heads swivel
towards the door, through which Scott Carlton makes a grand entrance. The
stubble on his jaw from the last time she saw him has grown into a full-on
beard, and he now wears his dark hair in a tiny ponytail. His chest and arms
seem to have filled out nicely over the break, and he looks cheerful and
well-rested. He waves at a few girls, nods at a few guys, and takes the empty
seat in the middle of the room. Miss Diaz says in a stern voice, “Should we be
honored you can join us today, Mr. Carlton?” but the corners of her mouth are
pulling upwards, and Scott’s apology is accompanied by a cocky, unapologetic
grin. Zachary mutters, “What a giant douchebag,” and starts brushing imaginary
lint off his sweater again. Summer turns her face away from the middle of the
room and fervently wishes she could fast forward to the end of the class, to
the end of the day, right to the end of the entire semester.

Still, when Scott
calls her name after
class (she’d tried to rush out the door before he could spot her but some
stocky guy with a mohawk was conveniently blocking the way) and asks her what’s
up and if she wants to grab a snack, she manages a casual, friendly smile and a
noncommittal response. She won’t—she can’t—lash out at him for pretending
the last two months didn’t happen. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t get in touch
with her sooner, and anyway, who the hell was she to demand he did?

“So?”
he says expectantly. “Burgers and fries? I didn’t have time for breakfast.”

“Can’t,”
she says, opening her clear case and pretending to study a printout of her
schedule. “I have a class.”

“No,
you don’t,” he says, grabbing her schedule from her—yesterday, she had
labored over a color-coded Excel spreadsheet, obsessing over the margins and
fonts and whether the subjects and room numbers should be underlined or
bold—and squinting at it. “Your next class isn’t until, let’s see here…
one-thirty.”

“I
just had a burger last night,” she tells him. She doesn’t even know why she’s
being so difficult. She wants to go and grab a snack with him, of course she
does.

He
says, “So you’ll have another one today,” like it was the simplest thing in the
world. And maybe it was. “Come on, it’s just a burger,” he tells her. And then,
“I tried to find you on Facebook, you know. But I didn’t have your last name.”
She wonders if he rehearses his lines, the way a theater actor would. She
wonders what his success rate is, how many girls he’s said it to versus how
many positive responses he’s gotten so far. When he gives back her schedule, his
hand lingers on hers for much longer than it should. She knows he did it on
purpose. She knows he knows what effect he has on her; cute guys often do. She
knows he knows it takes very little to make her say yes.

“Okay,”
she says, snapping her clear case shut. “Let’s go.”

He
puts an arm around her shoulder—a few girls passing by actually pause and
stare—and says, “Great. I’m starving.” As they walk towards the parking
lot (Scott insists on taking his car, probably to impress her with his fancy
dashboard and leather seats and the fact that when he turns on the stereo, it
is his own syrupy voice that comes blasting out of the speakers), Summer can
feel all those expectations inching towards her, ready to pounce. For as long
as she could remember, this has been her problem: A guy does something as
inconsequential as
smiling
at
her, and visions of diamond engagement rings and wedding receptions and
adorable little kids and a big house with a pool and three Golden
Retrievers start swimming around feverishly in her head. She wonders if this is
normal, how she has taken the concept of every guy she has ever exchanged a few
sentences with and tried to see how he would fit into her life, into the
grander scheme of things—will Ellie and Ken and her baby nephew Nick like
him? If her parents were alive, what would they think of him? When they
graduate, will they work in the same company, or will they be better off
pursuing separate careers? There were also her shallow concerns, trivial
thoughts that kept popping up at random moments: Will he be absolutely
disgusted when he hears the way she snores, or sees the scar on her upper right
thigh from that time she fell out of a tree when she was six? Does she have to
shave her legs every day and brush her teeth before she kisses him in the
morning, and is she not supposed to wear her ratty clothes anymore, even when
they’re just watching TV at home? Summer wishes she could switch off the part
of her brain that gets overly,
prematurely excited at the slightest prodding and the tiniest flicker of
attraction, the part of her brain that morphs every single guy she meets into a
prospect, a candidate for First Boyfriend and True Love.

Summer
reminds herself, for the second time today, that if she expects nothing, then
nothing ever has to hurt. She reminds herself to keep her hopes at
bay—tell them to take a seat and settle down the way a teacher would to a
classroom full of students clamoring for attention. But when Scott’s arm stays
around her shoulder until they reach his car, she can feel her resolve melting.
He opens the car door for her, and she thinks, aware that it sounds a bit
silly,
Ken doesn’t even do this for Ellie,
and he’s already a pretty decent guy
. Scott takes her hand
as he pulls out of the parking lot, and Summer can’t help believing that maybe
it’s okay to let him. Maybe it’s okay to be hopeful, just this once. Maybe it’s
okay to expect something after all.

Chapter
5

A week later,
Scott shows up at her doorstep, surprising her with a
take-out bowl of pumpkin soup and a large plastic bottle of grapefruit juice.
“You said you weren’t feeling well,” he says, stepping into her room and
glancing at Meg’s and Roxanne’s empty beds.

“How
did you get in here?” Summer hisses. She is thrilled that he is inside her dorm,
inside her room, where he shouldn’t be. She is glad she has decided to change
out of her pajamas, brush her teeth, and wash her face this morning, even with
her head pounding from a bad cold and her throat prickly and sore.

“I
have my ways,” he says, obviously pleased with himself.

Summer
scrambles to clear some space on the small couch in between her corner and
Roxanne’s—the clothes and bags and folders and text books are all dumped
onto the floor to make room for him. When Scott sits down and looks around like
he is evaluating the world she lives in, she is suddenly
self-conscious, and she wishes she had done more than change out of her
pajamas, brush her teeth, and wash her face. She wants to cover up her tacky
bed spread, the damp, faded towel hanging over her desk chair, the muddy
sneakers beside her closet, the fingerprint-stained full-length mirror she has
yet to clean. The paper she wrote for her Psychology class rests on the coffee
table in front of the couch, and Scott picks it up and leafs through it.
 

“This
isn’t due for another two weeks, right?” he asks.

“I
wanted to finish it early,” Summer says. “It’s lame, I know.”

“It’s
not lame,” Scott says. “Do you mind if I read through it and get some ideas? I
can’t figure out how to write mine.”

“I don’t
mind at all,” she says. “I can even help you write it, since I’m done with
mine.” She panics for a moment, afraid he’d think she was implying he was
stupid. “But only if you want me to,” she adds cautiously.

“I’d
love that,” Scott replies, smiling up at her. “Let’s work on an outline now?”

“Sure,”
she says, grabbing a pencil and a notepad and taking a seat beside him. They
sit on the small couch squished together, their legs crossed and their bare
knees touching. She catches a whiff of cigarette smoke on his hair and his
shirt, but she tries to concentrate on her fingers gripping the pencil moving
across the notepad; she hopes he doesn’t notice her sweaty palms and shaky
handwriting.

Twenty
minutes—or maybe thirty, or maybe forty-five—pass before Scott
jumps up and says, “Will you be mad at me if I can’t stay? I just remembered I
have to do something for our gig on Saturday. Will you be all right here on
your own?”

Summer nods, handing him the almost-completed outline.
Scott stuffs the piece of paper into his pocket and leans in to give her a
quick kiss on the lips. Summer is glad she is sitting down because she feels
faint and dizzy and deliriously happy. She hears a high-pitched giggle and
realizes it came from her own mouth. “You just caught my germs,” she tells him.

“I
don’t care,” Scott says, leaning in again for a longer, slower, gentler kiss
that leaves her out of breath and at the same time makes her want to run around
the campus dancing and shouting. “Now I really have to go,” he says, and when he
is gone, she studies her reflection in the fingerprint-stained mirror and can
barely recognize the sparkly-eyed, giddy girl staring right back at her, a
bright, bubbly grin stretching perfectly from ear to ear.

Over
the next three years, Scott would make her feel that way plenty of times, and
Summer would learn to take those times and magnify them so they could drown out
the other times—the times when she’d sit in her dorm room on the verge of
tears waiting for him to call or text or show up, the times when self-doubt and
disappointment would rain down on her after another heated argument about
labels and trust. Over the next three years, Summer would learn to understand
that with guys like Scott—guys whose songs you heard on national radio,
guys who rubbed elbows with socialites and supermodels on a weekly basis, guys
who were considered local celebrities and featured in magazines and
newspapers—you took what you could get, and you didn’t complain. Over the
next three years, she would learn to understand just how little a girl like her
was allowed to expect from a guy like him.

Often,
Zachary would tell her, in a nerdy nasal voice that makes his every statement
sound like a legitimate scientific fact, that she is wasting her time and youth
on him. They had grown close after being seatmates in Gen Psych, and every time
Scott broke her heart, it would be Zac on the other end of the phone line,
comforting her and asking her if she needed anything. Summer was stubborn and
defensive when it came to Scott, and this was an endless source of frustration
for Zac, who had to listen to her gushing, glowing stories one day and
miserable, lovesick ones the next. Once, over red wine and strawberries, Scott
looked into her eyes and told her she was different, special. She was over the
moon with joy, and called Zac to share the good news (and maybe rub it in his
face a little) the minute she got back to her room. “It doesn’t mean anything,”
Zac told her. “Guys use that line all the time. It’s just another way of saying
that he wants to flatter you but doesn’t know you well enough to give you
anything personal and specific. Which means, quite ironically, that to his
eyes, you’re just like everyone else.”

Summer
knew Zac had a point. She knew she should train herself to demand more from
Scott, to push him until he gave her what she deserved: answers and
explanations and definitions, security and commitment and peace of mind. She
knew he was seeing other girls, going on dates and trading flirty text messages
and drunkenly hooking up with them after gigs; he was upfront about all of
this, laying out all his cards on the table because he “valued honesty” and
“wanted to make sure they were on the same page.” She knew the loaded,
judgmental looks these girls gave her when she came to his shows, knew they
talked about her and called her a loser and a groupie behind her back. She
knew, even before Zac had told her, that she wasn’t different or special at
all. Yet, she also knew one wrong move would completely, irrevocably drive
Scott away, and she wasn’t sure she could live with that. Deep inside her, in a
secret place she had tucked away beneath layers of denial and assurances that
she had everything under control, she believed she could change him; that one
day, he’d wake up and realize he loved her all along. She believed—with a
faith much stronger and more persistent than she would ever admit to
anyone—that she and Scott were destined to be together.