What She Saw... (12 page)

They didn't say much else. Then, again, Spitty didn't exactly encourage Phoebe to mingle. He stood next to her the entire time chattering on about how “Mardi Gras beats spring break's ass.” Phoebe found the whole thing pretty boring. And she wasn't dressed warmly enough. And she was tired of standing, and wary of being mistaken for someone with school spirit. So right before the game started, she informed Spitty that she wanted to leave. “You wanna go home
now
?” he cried out in disbelief. “Right before the kickoff?”

“I hate sports,” she told him.

“You hate sports. You hate the sun. What
do
you like, Stein?”

“Sylvia Plath's okay.” (She was reading
The Bell Jar
for her new favorite class, Women Writers on the Edge 202.)

Spitty squinted through the morning mist. “Isn't she in Tri Pi?”

Phoebe rolled her eyes condescendingly. “She's a dead poet.”

“How'd she die?”

“Stuck her head in the oven.”

“That's no way to go. The last thing the woman probably saw was crumbs. That or grease.”

“Still better than blood.”

“Now, that's a matter of opinion,” contended Spitty. “If it was me, I'd probably just jump off the clock tower. Maybe it's a cliché, but that's a serious last view we're talking about.”

“It's also a long way down.”

“Exactly. If I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with a
bang.
” Spitty pushed his right fist into his left palm. It was an impressive performance. Neither one said anything for a few seconds.

It was Phoebe who broke the silence: “I just don't think I could ever get up the nerve to jump off that thing. If it was me, I'd probably just overdose on tranquilizers or something wimpy like that.”

“Oh yeah?” said Spitty, glancing sideways. He elbowed her in the rib cage. “Hey, Stein, you're not gonna do anything stupid now, are you?”

“I wouldn't rule out the possibility,” Phoebe was only too happy to tell him—to imagine him worrying that she would. Even though she knew she wouldn't—couldn't bear the thought of not being alive to find out which of her mortal enemies came to her funeral. “But probably not.”

“ 'Cause I'd miss you,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling like little stars, a goofy smile plastered across his puffy face. That's when it first occurred to Phoebe that Spitty Clark might have a crush on her.

She wasn't, at that point, interested.

For one thing, he wasn't her type. Since arriving at Hoover, Phoebe had decided that her ideal paramour was a foreign-born graduate student in architectural preservation who spoke several languages and wore his black canvas book bag slung sideways over his French-cuff shirts. For another, she preferred the idea of being admired from afar to the idea of being worshipped in the flesh. Freshman year she'd fooled around with a bunch of different guys. She always managed to get creeped out. If it wasn't the pimples on their backs, it was the wrinkled monstrosity between their legs. She'd take off all her clothes, then announce she “really had to go.” For her efforts, she was called a ball breaker, a tease. She didn't bother defending herself. She wasn't horny like other girls seemed to be. She wasn't hungry either.

Or maybe she'd simply convinced herself that she wasn't hungry or horny because to have appetites was to be disappointed if and when they weren't fulfilled, and she'd suffered enough disappointment in one year on account of her rejection by Tri Pi.

But she could also be a flirt. “Would you really miss me?” she asked Spitty.

“Yeah, I would,” he told her. “Come on, I'll drive you home.”

“You'll miss the kickoff!”

But he was already gone—three paces ahead of her, walking briskly in the direction of his car, a chocolate-brown Crown Victoria he'd purchased at a police auction for a couple of hundred bucks. He unlocked the passenger door. Then he glanced behind him—at his buddies, now safely out of earshot. “Between you and me,” he said. “I don't give a fuck about football.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” He climbed into the driver's seat. “I'm with you. Sports are a fuckin' bore.”

Phoebe couldn't believe what she was hearing. Spitty Clark was just as much of a phony as she imagined herself to be! The revelation made him infinitely more likable, and certainly more viable as a boyfriend—assuming she'd been interested in having one. “I'm gonna tell everyone,” she teased him.

“You better not,” he said, index finger outstretched. “Or I'll break your neck.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Saves me the trouble of breaking it myself.”

“You're really something, Stein.”

Now she was giggling. She hadn't giggled in months.

“So you wanna go out to dinner Friday night?” Spitty had a big smile on his face when he asked her that.

“I only eat breakfast and lunch,” Phoebe told him.

“Well, you can just sit there and watch me chow down.”

“Sounds fun.”

“You better believe it,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. “Myself, I've always been a big fan of food—eating it, cooking it, shopping for it, you name it.”

“You like to food-shop?”

“Are you kidding? I fuckin' love it! All those brightly lit aisles. Everything in its place. Songs you can sing to on the stereo. You should try it sometime. Hitch a ride down to the Stop & Shop at three in the morning one night. You'll see what I mean. It's not even about buying stuff. I mean, I like the cereal aisle the best, and I don't even eat cereal.” He shifted the car into reverse.

“What do you eat for breakfast?”

“Who, me?” he said, accelerating out of his space.

“Yeah, you.”

“Oh, I'm not really a breakfast person.”

“Me neither.”

“You're not really an
anything
person, Stein,” he said, chuck-ling as he straightened out the car.

Phoebe spent the rest of the weekend trying to convince herself that Spitty was only kidding around—and that she had interests and passions and predilections just like everyone else.

Except she couldn't think of that many.

FRIDAY NIGHT, JUST as planned, Spitty drove Phoebe to Billy Bob's Sirloin Saloon, a family-style restaurant across the street from the Amoco station. Oil paintings of the Wild West hung from stained-wood walls. Red-and-white checked cloths, laminated in clear plastic, covered all the tabletops. The place was filled with children—screaming, whining children cutting up their dinners into strange shapes. Phoebe and Spitty sat down at a table for two. She ordered a black coffee and a house salad with dressing on the side. He ordered a sixteen-ounce strip steak and a rum and Coke from the bar. Already significantly over twenty-one, he was only too happy to show some I.D. “So who you taking to your formal?” he wanted to know after the waiter disappeared.

“No one,” Phoebe answered with a shrug. In actuality, she hadn't given the matter of Delta Sig's fall formal much thought.

Spitty couldn't understand that. His eyebrows disappeared under his hat hair. “You're not going to your own formal?” he exclaimed. “How can you not go to your own formal?”

“Very easily,” she told him. “Formals are lame. And besides, it's not like I have a boyfriend.”

“I'm a boy and I'm your friend.”

“Are you trying to invite yourself to my formal?”

“I'm not ashamed to ask for what I want.”

“Why do you like parties so much?”

“Why do you think so much?”

“What's wrong with thinking?”

“There's nothing wrong with thinking,” Spitty began. “So long as you don't think too much. See, that's your problem, Stein. You dwell. It's not healthy. Sometimes you just gotta let things go, stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop trying to figure out the why and the how and the what does it mean. Because none of it means shit. You know why? Because we all die in the end anyway. Some people stick their heads in the oven. Other people just keel over in the middle of dinner. But no one gets out alive. And that's the sorry truth. And that's why you gotta enjoy yourself now. Because that's all you basically get in life— a few superior kegs, a few worthwhile hangovers, a few nights when the other crap fades into the background and it's just you and the moment and the moment is righteous.” He leaned forward. “Then, Stein, you can die in peace. And if not in peace then at least knowing that you spent a few minutes of your life not just sitting around being bummed out about how and why and when it was all gonna end.”

Their food arrived. Spitty's steak was so big it was hanging off the sides of his plate. Phoebe took a sip of her coffee and wondered if her date was right. Maybe thinking too much was the root of all her problems. Maybe she would start having fun the day she stopped trying to figure out why she never had any. “Okay, fine,” she sighed with mainly performed exasperation. “Do you want to go to my formal or what?”

“I'd be honored,” replied Spitty, not quite suppressing a cheeky grin.

PHOEBE MAY HAVE thought formals were fundamentally lame. But she was also vain enough to spend most of the week preceding hers shopping for the right outfit. There were three expeditions before she found the black velvet scoop neck cocktail dress she ended up purchasing at a store called Contemporary Model in the pedestrian mall downtown. There were two preliminary trips to Shoetique before she settled on a pair of black patent-leather high-heeled Mary Janes. So vanished the meager savings she'd accumulated from her work-study job shelving books in the Architecture and Urban Renewal Library. And on the day of the big event, concerned that she would fall victim to the six o'clock crunch—the haggling over electrical outlets, hot water, and mirror space that preceded even the slowest of Saturday nights at Delta Nu Sigma—she started beautifying in the middle of the afternoon.

Randi Rugoff must have had the same idea. Phoebe was working over her hair with a round brush, a blow-dryer, and a diffuser in the second floor bathroom when Delta Sig's resident aerobics queen minced in, a magenta towel wrapped around her squat, bronzed form. “Getting ready early?” she shouted to be heard over the electric storm.

“Yeah,” Phoebe shouted back.

“Remind me,” continued Randi, her eyes combing the length of Phoebe's malnourished body with undisguised aggression. “Who's your date again?”

Phoebe turned off the dryer. She didn't feel like yelling Spitty's name out loud. “I'm taking Spitty Clark.”

Randi smiled lewdly. “You're taking the rapist?”

“The rapist?”

“You didn't know Spitty Clark raped a Delta Sig?”

“What?”

“Why'd you think Kappa O got kicked off campus?”

“I don't know—I never thought about it.”

“Well, have fun,” said Randi with a gleeful smirk.

Then she disappeared around the corner, in the direction of the showers, leaving Phoebe alone with her pounding, incredulous heart.

OFFICIOUS THOUGH SHE tended to be, Delta Nu Sigma's president, Samantha Schwartz, seemed like a good person to talk to in a crisis. Two years could make a difference that way. She was the only senior living in the house; the rest of them were sophomores. Phoebe threw on a pair of sweatpants and proceeded downstairs to Samantha's presidential suite. Samantha came to the door with a chemistry textbook pressed flat against her ski-jump tits. It was pretty obvious Phoebe was interrupting her. “Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?” she asked her in a tiny voice.

“Come in,” clucked Samantha with a constipated smile.

It was the neatest room Phoebe had ever been in. There was a Post-it note hanging over Samantha's desk that read, “Buy odor eaters.” Samantha sat down on the edge of her bed. It had one of those frilly elasticized skirts fitted around the bottom of the mattress. Phoebe sank into a neon green beanbag chair and took a deep breath. “I'm supposed to be taking Spitty Clark to the formal tonight,” she began, “and someone just told me he's a rapist.”

Now Samantha sighed the sigh of a much older person than herself—a person who'd lived through enough personal highs and lows to have at her disposal the means to look beyond what others, younger and less experienced than herself, tended to obsess over. Then she reached for an emery board. She filed as she spoke. “It was before your time. There was a Delta Sig named Maggie Green who was going out with one of Spitty's brothers in Kappa O, a guy named Dummy Stevens who graduated last year. There was a party one Saturday night at the old Kappa O house down on Thurgood. It was four o'clock in the morning. Maggie had crashed for the night in Dummy's bed. Dummy was downstairs finishing the keg. According to Maggie, Spitty climbed into Dummy's bed and had sex with her, pretending to be Dummy, and she was too drunk to know the difference until it was too late. How late? She stayed for bacon and eggs the next morning. She didn't file a complaint until the afternoon. According to Maggie, she was still in shock. According to everyone else, she decided to call it rape only after Dummy found out she'd cheated on him. There was a hearing several months after the fact. Spitty said it was consensual. Maggie said it wasn't. There were no witnesses. Spitty walked away with ten hours of community service, but Kappa O was kicked off campus until the year 2010. For that, Spitty's brothers will probably never forgive him. As for Maggie, she ended up transferring out of Hoover—in protest, I guess. She was one of those people who always had to make a statement. To be perfectly frank about it, none of us here at Delta Sig were particularly sorry to see her go. On the other hand, the loss of Kappa O was a blow to the entire Greek community. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No, that's fine—I mean, I feel a lot better now,” Phoebe assured her.