by Tom Perrotta
“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”
Hobie turned and watched as the elderly couple dismounted their stools, the old woman assisting the old man, who needed a few seconds to get his feet properly connected to the floor.
“You guys okay?” he asked.
The man waved dismissively, as if Hobie did nothing but bother him.
“We’re fine, dear,” the woman said, taking her unsteady partner by the arm. “See you tomorrow.”
After they’d shuffled out, Hobie explained that they lived right around the corner, which was a good thing, since they’d both had their driver’s licenses revoked, with good cause.
“This is their ritual,” he said. “They come here every night and drink whiskey sours. Barely say a word to each other, and then they walk home. Last year was their fiftieth.”
“That’s a long time,” Eve said. “I guess they’re all talked out.”
Hobie shrugged. “Least they have each other.”
Eve nodded, distracted by the realization that they were alone now. There was something undeniably porny about the situation—the handsome bartender, the lonely divorcée. She could see the video in her head, shot a little shakily from the man’s point of view, the MILF looking up, licking her lips in anticipation as she undid his belt. It was an image that would have been unthinkable at any other time in her life, but now seemed weirdly plausible. There was literally nothing stopping her. All she had to do was slip behind the bar and kneel down. Hobie gave her a searching look, almost as if he were reading her mind.
“One more?” he asked hopefully. “On the house.”
*
Later that night, after she’d watched her porn and gone to bed, Eve wondered why she hadn’t taken him up on his offer. It was just a drink, a half hour of her time. He was reasonably good-looking and easy to talk to, and it had been a long time since she’d had a fun flirtation, let alone a fling. If she’d been advising a friend, she would have said, Give it a shot, see where it leads, he doesn’t have to be perfect.
It wasn’t so much the sexual fantasy that had thrown her off—that had come and gone in a flash—as it was the nagging sense of familiarity that had snuck up on her over the course of the night, a feeling that Jim Hobie was more of the same, another helping of a meal she’d already had enough of. He wasn’t as obnoxious as Barry from class, or as charmed by himself as Ted had been, but he was in the same basic ballpark. She could go to bed with him, she could even fall in love, but where would it get her? Nowhere she hadn’t been before, that was for sure. She wanted something else—something different—though what that something was remained to be seen. All she really knew was that it was a big world out there, and she’d only been scratching the surface.
* * *
Amanda was a wreck the next morning, not because of her sexual exertions—Bobby only lasted a couple of minutes—but because it turned out to be one of those nights when sleep wouldn’t come, when there was nothing to do but lie awake in the darkness and watch the bad thoughts float by, an armada of bleak prospects and unhappy memories. It had been close to five by the time she drifted off, and then she was up at seven, nursing a headache that two ibuprofen and three cups of coffee hadn’t managed to eradicate.
“Are you okay?” Eve Fletcher asked when Amanda arrived at her office for their ten o’clock meeting. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” Amanda insisted, suppressing the usual urge to open up to Eve, to tell her about her rough night, and ask if she had any strategies for dealing with insomnia. “Just cramps.”
Eve gave a sympathetic nod. “I’m almost done with all that. I’m not gonna miss it.”
Amanda would have liked to pursue the subject, to hear Eve’s thoughts about menopause and growing older, but she decided that was out of bounds, too. Eve was her boss, not her friend, no matter how much Amanda wished it were otherwise.
“So you got my email about Garth Heely?”
“I did.” Eve looked upset, but only for a second. “Was it a heart attack?”
“His wife said stroke.”
“You know what? That’s how I want to go.” Eve snapped her fingers. “Quick and painless. In my own bed. That’s one thing you learn, working with old people. You really don’t want to die in a hospital.”
Amanda murmured agreement, trying not to think about her mother. Going fast wasn’t that great, either. She’d been dead for a couple of days before the neighbors even started wondering if she was okay.
“Any ideas for a replacement?” Eve asked. “We need to nail this down sooner rather than later.”
“I’ll email you the short list by the end of the day.”
“Perfect.” Eve nodded briskly. “That it?”
“I think so.”
Amanda rose uncertainly. She felt like she’d forgotten something important, like there was one more thing they needed to discuss, but the only possibilities that occurred to her were Trish’s perky nipples and the puppy-like whimpers Bobby made right before he came, neither of which were appropriate subjects for workplace conversation.
“By the way,” Eve said, “if you still want to get a drink sometime, I’d be totally up for that.”
Julian Fucking Spitzer
When you walk into the dining hall with someone else, you kinda melt into the scenery. Nobody even knows you’re there. Walking in by yourself is a totally different experience. It’s like you’re radioactive, like your skin is giving off this sick greenish glow. You can feel everybody staring.
I have friends, you want to tell them. They’re just busy right now.
Usually I ate my meals with Zack, but he’d slipped out after receiving a booty text at three in the morning and still hadn’t returned, the first time that had ever happened. He wouldn’t tell me who he was hooking up with, but he usually rushed out and came back an hour or two later, tired but happy, like a volunteer fireman who’d done his duty for the town and needed to rest up for a bit. I texted him—dude where r u—but he didn’t respond. I tried Will and Rico, too, but those guys were probably still asleep.
The Higg that morning was an ocean of strangers, so I headed past the crowded tables to the less-populated section in back. It was a reject convention back there. I guess I could have taken a book from my backpack and pretended to study—that’s what the other losers were doing—but it seemed like an asshole move, like, Hey look at me reading a textbook! At least my breakfast was pretty good, though it was common knowledge that the Higg omelettes weren’t made with real eggs—it was some kind of sludgy yellow liquid that came in a can.
One thing you realize when you’re on your own is how happy the people who aren’t alone look. There were a bunch of couples eating together, and most of them were pretty smiley, probably because they’d just woken up and fucked. Other people were laughing with their friends. A professor with crazy-clown hair was lecturing a bearded grad student who kept nodding like his head was on a spring.
There were two groups I couldn’t stop looking at. One of them was a bunch of girls who reminded me of Becca. Super-skinny, straight hair, lots of makeup. They were all wearing short skirts and sneakers, like they were still in middle school and thought it would be fun to coordinate their outfits. They kept erupting in laughter that sounded fake and a little too loud, like they wanted everyone to look at them and wonder what the hot girls thought was so funny.
Next to them was a table of football players, seriously big guys chowing down on plates piled high with ridiculous amounts of food. Unlike the girls, they were quiet and serious, maybe discussing the upcoming game, or wondering why coach had been so pissed off at yesterday’s practice. I had this weird urge to pick up my tray and join them, just so I could feel like I was part of the team again. I really missed that feeling.
There I was, people-watching and eating my omelette, and the next thing I knew my throat swelled up. And then my eyes started to water. I realized I was two seconds away from bursting into tears l
ike a little bitch, right there in the Higg. I actually had to squeeze my eyes shut and take a few deep breaths to get a hold of myself.
Little by little I could feel the pressure letting up, the rubber ball dissolving in my throat. It was a huge relief. But when I finally opened my eyes, that douchebag Sanjay was standing right in front of me, watching me like I was a science experiment. There was nothing on his tray but an apple and a tiny container of yogurt.
“Hey, Brendan,” he said. “You okay?”
I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks—he wasn’t hanging out with Dylan anymore—but it seemed to me that he was slightly less nerdy than before. New glasses maybe, or a different haircut. Cooler clothes. Something.
“Fine,” I said. “Just a little hungover.”
He nodded, but it was annoying the way he did it, like it served me right for getting drunk on a Monday night. Fuck him. I wiped my mouth and stood up, even though there were still a few bites left of my omelette.
“Gotta run,” I said. “Catch you later.”
I carried my tray over to the dish line and put it on the belt. I glanced back at Sanjay as I headed for the exit. He was sitting at my table, all by himself, reading a book and munching on his apple. He seemed totally fine, like he didn’t even know I’d ditched him.
*
Losing my shit in public like that was a wake-up call. I mean, I knew I was drinking too much and fucking up in my classes. I’d flunked a unit test in Math and gotten a D on my first writing assignment for Comp—What Does White Privilege Mean to Me?—a grade the instructor claimed was “an act of charity” on her part. I was having trouble in Econ, too, but that was mainly because I couldn’t understand the prof’s heavy Chinese accent. That afternoon, he was droning on about “sooply sigh” and “deeman sigh” when I started zoning out. But instead of checking Facebook or texting Wade, I decided to be constructive for once and make a to-do list, which my dad claimed was one of the Eleven Habits of Highly Successful People or whatever. It went like this:
• Homework!
• Pay Attention in Class!!
• No Drinking on Weekdays (if poss.)
• Call Mom
• Laundry!!!
• Way Less Super Smash (vid games in gen.)
• Bday Card for Becca!
• Return Dad’s Email
• Hang w ppl Besides Zack
• Break Up w Becca?
• Shave Chest & Balls
• Extra-Currics?
It had a calming effect to write it all down, to take my sense of impending doom and divide it into a dozen problems that could actually be solved, some more easily than others. I decided to start small, heading straight to the laundry room after class and washing every item of clothing I owned, plus the sheets and towels, which were pretty disgusting. It was a real morale booster, except that some of the white stuff came out pink.
*
That night I went to the library to do my homework, which I hardly ever did. I was trying to read this book about climate change, how it was almost too late for humanity to save itself, but maybe not quite, not if we all made a decision to change our wasteful lifestyles immediately. It was pretty interesting, but I had trouble keeping my focus. For one thing, I was sitting at a big table in the main reading room and the girl next to me was chewing her gum really loud. And this dude across from me kept sighing hopelessly as he erased the answers on his problem set, like he wanted the whole world to know he was struggling.
But all that was just background noise. What was really bugging me was the phone call I’d just had with my mom, which hadn’t gone the way I’d expected. I figured she’d be happy to hear from me, since we hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. But she kind of blew me off.
“I’m on my way out the door, honey. I have class tonight.”
“What?”
“I told you about my class. At ECC? Gender and Society, every Tuesday and Thursday night?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, though it was news to me. She’d been talking about going back to school for so long I pretty much just tuned out whenever the subject came up. “How’s that going?”
“Great. It’s really exciting to be back in the classroom.”
For a person who was on her way out the door, she had a lot of time to rave about her class. Apparently, the teacher was a really unique person, the students were super-diverse, and the reading was challenging and thought-provoking, exactly what she needed at this particular moment in her life.
“Cool,” I said, though it bugged me to hear her talking about college like it was the greatest thing in the world. I was the one who was really in college, and in my humble opinion, it was a mixed bag. Also, she was taking one fucking class. Try taking four, and then tell me how much fun you’re having.
“Oh, by the way,” she said. “One of the other students said he went to high school with you. Julian Spitzer? That ring a bell?”
I froze for a few seconds, trying to convince myself I’d misheard. But I knew I hadn’t.
“I remember the name,” I said, after a long pause. “But I didn’t know him that well.”
“He told me to say hello.”
I seriously doubted that Julian Spitzer had asked her to say hello. Unless he was fucking with me, in which case I couldn’t really blame him.
“Hey,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I got another email from Dad about Parents Weekend—”
“You know what, honey? I really have to go. I’ll call you back tomorrow, okay? Love you.”
*
Technically speaking, I wasn’t lying to my mom about Julian Spitzer. I really didn’t know him that well. He’d moved to Haddington in seventh grade, too late to make much of an impression on me and my buddies. In high school he was part of the skater posse. You’d see them cruising through town sometimes, zipping down the middle of the street in a big pack, like they didn’t give a fuck about oncoming traffic. I remember Julian standing up really straight on his board, hands on his hips, long hair streaming behind him like a girl’s.
I didn’t witness the incident at Kim Mangano’s house. I was upstairs with Becca—it was the first time we hooked up—in a bedroom that belonged to Kim’s little twin brothers. Meanwhile, Wade was in the kitchen, trying to talk to Fiona Rattigan, his on-and-off girlfriend who’d broken up with him a few days earlier. I guess she was ignoring him, and he got kind of upset. He grabbed her by the arm and wouldn’t let go. She said he was hurting her. A couple of people tried to intervene, but Wade told them to mind their own business.
He’s abusing me! Fiona said, in a really loud voice. I think she was pretty drunk herself. Somebody call 911!
Julian Spitzer happened to be in the kitchen, because that’s where the keg was. When he finished filling his cup with beer, he walked over to Wade and tossed it in his face.
Are you deaf? She asked you to leave her alone!
It took Wade a couple of seconds to wipe the beer out of his eyes and recover from the shock, and by then a couple of our lacrosse teammates had grabbed hold of him so he couldn’t do anything stupid. It was the middle of the season and our team was doing really well. The last thing we needed was for the party to get busted, and a bunch of our best players to get suspended for drinking and fighting. But Wade was furious.
For a week or two it was a big deal in school, like, Hey, did you hear about Wade and Spitzer? But then it just kinda died down. There were other parties, other incidents. Wade got back with Fiona, our team made it to the state quarterfinals, and then it was summer vacation. The whole beer-in-the-face thing seemed like ancient history, except that Wade couldn’t stop brooding about it. We ignored him, because everybody knew that Wade could be a nasty drunk. When he’s sober, he’s one of the sweetest, most laid-back guys you could know.
*
It was just bad luck that night in August. Wade and Fiona were on the outs again, Becca and I were fighting, and our buddy Troy hated his camp counselor job, which required him to s
pend his days with whiny five-year-olds. We tried to cheer ourselves up by drinking a bottle of Popov vodka in the woods by the golf course, but getting wasted didn’t improve our mood.
Afterward, we drove around in Troy’s Corolla for a while, circling past the same familiar landmarks over and over—the high school, the cemetery, the lake, the high school again—because nobody felt like going home, and at least we could be bored together, and complain about the songs on the radio.
And then, on maybe our eighth or ninth lap around the town, we just happened to see him—Julian Fucking Spitzer, all alone on a dark stretch of Green Street. He was riding his skateboard at a good clip, pushing off with one foot and then gliding for a while, not a care in the world.
“Look at that,” Troy said. “It’s your little buddy.”
He slowed down until we were right on Julian’s ass, and then gunned it, swerving around him and jackknifing the Corolla so it blocked the road. Julian had to jump off the skateboard to keep from plowing into us. He could have run, but for some reason he just stood there, paralyzed, as Wade stepped out of the passenger seat.
“Get in the fucking car,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”
“What if I say no?” asked Julian.
“Just get in the car, asshole.”
Julian didn’t argue. It was like he’d been expecting this for a long time, and figured he should just get it over with. He picked up his skateboard and climbed obediently into the backseat. Wade ducked in right behind him, so there were three of us back there, with Julian squashed in the middle. Troy started the engine and we headed off.
“How’s it going, dude?” Wade asked in a fake friendly voice. “Having a good summer?”
“Not really,” said Julian.
“Awesome,” said Wade. “Happy to hear it.”
He slipped his arm around Julian’s shoulders like they were boyfriend and girlfriend. I could smell someone’s sweat, sharp and sour, but I wasn’t sure whose it was. It was like we were one person back there, three bodies glued together.
