Cum Laude

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Nick continued to smoke his joint, unsure of what to say. Eliza’s story was sad and he was pretty depressed already. He tried to remember what the guy in the Dumpster had said about cells just wanting to survive. Then he tried to think of an uplifting zen meditation to lighten the mood. But his mind was a blank.

  Eliza continued her depressing monologue. “I almost offed myself once, when I was around eleven. Or no, I guess I was thirteen. I think I was just lonely, and I’d been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath. I drank a whole bunch of aspirin and Scope and sat in the kitchen with the oven on. My mom came over from the garage to get a sweater and wound up taking me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. I probably wouldn’t have died anyway. I would’ve just shat bluey green for about a month. Anyway I was okay once I discovered sex—not that I’ve had any lately.” She shot him a meaningful glance. “But at least I’ve got my lucky rabbit’s foot.”

  Nick wondered if he should hug her. She sounded like she needed a hug. “Shit happens and then you die,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He sneezed. “Hey, did you hear about that huge meteorite?” Yesterday a giant meteorite had fallen out of the sky in Peekskill, New York, and smashed a Chevy Malibu.

  “You can kiss me now.” Eliza propped herself up on one elbow, waiting.

  “Huh?”

  “Or we could have sex,” she said hopefully.

  Nick took another hit off his joint, holding the smoke in until his face turned pink and his lungs were about to burst. He really liked Eliza. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He just didn’t feel like kissing her or anyone else right now, unless maybe Shipley walked in and threw him down on the ground and ripped off her clothes and insisted that he kiss her.

  “I’m kind of saving myself for someone,” he told her as he exhaled.

  Eliza stared at him through the cloud of smoke. Her eyes were tearing up and she couldn’t see for shit. She tossed the headlamp at him and stood up to go. “Aren’t we all?”

  8

  At college you are free to do as you please, almost. You can—if you so choose—eat Doritos for breakfast, not comb your hair, wear the same jeans for a month without washing them, sleep all day, cut your classes, and stay up all night. You can not floss. You can take up a dangerous hobby that would terrify your mother, such as hang gliding or collecting wild mushrooms. But absolute freedom is a scary concept. Without some sort of sympathetic authority, chaos reigns. You need to know that someone is paying attention and that you will be chastised, if not punished, for slacking off. That’s where the advisor comes in.

  Every professor embraces the role of advisor in a different manner. Some invite their advisees over to dinner with their families. Some treat their advisees to ice cream and mini golf on Friday nights. Some take them to a folk music festival to drop acid. Professor Rosen preferred to meet with her advisees the old-fashioned way—in her office.

  Shipley’s advisor meeting was right after Eliza’s. Shipley sat on the wooden bench outside Professor Rosen’s office, listening to the shrieks of laughter that emanated from within. The hallway was narrow, windowless, and plain, embellished only by the flyers, sign-up sheets, and other miscellany with which the English staff had decorated their office doors. A portrait of Shakespeare. A flyer advertising a screening of the film Halloween in the Student Union. A sign-up sheet for pumpkin carving at a professor’s home—BYO pumpkin. Knives provided.

  The three girls from Shipley’s orientation trip emerged from the office next door to Professor Rosen’s, wearing matching pink hooded Dexter sweatshirts. Elli, Nina, and Bree. Or was it Briana, Kelly, and Lee? They shared a triple in Sloane, the only allwomen’s dorm on campus, and had recently formed the Dexter Spirit Club to replace the now-defunct Dexter Cheerleading Squad, which had lost its funding in the late seventies.

  The girls paused in front of Shipley, smiling giddily, their arms linked.

  “Poor you,” one of them said. “Lucas is our advisor.” She lowered her voice. “He’s so amazing.”

  Professor Lucas Weaver was one of those handsome young English professors who toys with the hearts of his female students by wearing his hair just long enough to hang in his eyes, asking them to call him by his first name, reading aloud from Molly Bloom’s sexy monologue at the end of Ulysses, and placing just so on his desk a picture of himself hugging his terminally ill wife. So sensitive and charming and trapped in a loveless marriage to an invalid! Lucas—as he was known—was even more crushworthy than the average handsome young professor because of his adorable Tennessee accent and his tendency to moonwalk into class.

  “Oh my God is he cute,” one of the other pink-sweatshirted girls agreed. “He’s like Bill Clinton, but younger and thinner and with better hair.”

  “He’s reading ghost stories aloud in the chapel on Friday night for Halloween,” the third girl chimed in. “We’re going to dress up.”

  “The guys in our class are going to be Ghostbusters,” the first girl explained. “And we’re going as sexy ghosts.”

  “Wow.” Shipley was only half listening, distracted by something thumbtacked to Professor Rosen’s door. It was the sign-up sheet for The Zoo Story, Edward Albee’s one-act play. Professor Rosen was directing. First Year Students Only! the sheet read. Extra Credit! A single signature was scrawled across the sheet in green ink—Adam Gatz, it read.

  “Aren’t you dressing up?” one of the girls was asking. “There’s going to be a party in the Student Union with a haunted house and everything.”

  Shipley blinked. She was aware of the fact that by holing up with Tom in his room she was missing out on most of Dexter’s social offerings. Did Adam go to these things? She hadn’t spoken to him since the welcome barbecue. Would she have seen him dancing at Oktoberfest or pounding hard cider during Apple Cider Week had she not been with Tom? Maybe he even had a girlfriend by now—the Apple Cider Queen.

  Eliza stepped out of Professor Rosen’s office. “The professor will see you now,” she announced, sounding absurdly formal. “Hey, are you guys, like, planning a pajama party?” she joked. “Thanks a lot for not inviting me.”

  The three girls rolled their eyes. “See you later,” one of them told Shipley before stalking off down the hall with her two friends in tow.

  Eliza rolled her eyes in return. She hated those girls and their pink sweatshirts so much she hadn’t even bothered to learn their names. She was pretty sure they hated her too. It occurred to her that if the Office of Student Housing and Campus Life had placed Shipley in that same triple in Sloane, she’d be mincing around in a pink sweatshirt right now, shouting out dumb cheers and doing the splits during rugby games. Even if Shipley and Eliza weren’t friends, the mere fact that they were roommates had opened up a whole new world to Shipley, one where light pink was evil and irony ruled.

  Shipley stood up and waited for Eliza to let her pass.

  “She’s in a foul mood,” Eliza warned, which was a lie. Professor Rosen only had one mood: bitchily condescending.

  Shipley frowned. “But you guys sounded like you were having fun.”

  Eliza rolled her eyes again. Shipley was so gullible. “What a maniac,” she said, and stepped aside.

  Shipley pushed open the door and entered the tiny, crowded office, still unsure of whether Eliza was calling her a maniac or their teacher. Professor Rosen sat at her desk, thumbing through a ragged, pen-worn address book.

  “Ah, Shipley,” she said, looking up. She indicated the small wooden chair beside the desk. An orange fondue pot squatted beneath the chair, long forks poking out in all directions. A red Radio Flyer tricycle was pushed into one corner of the office and a cardboard model of a moose head was tacked to the wall. On the desk was a picture of Professor Rosen kissing someone dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh. “Sorry for the clutter. Have a seat.”

  Shipley crossed her legs and clasped her hands together. This was her chance to win Professor Rosen over. She waited patiently while the professor shuffled a pile of manila fold
ers around until she found Shipley’s. She removed a piece of paper from the folder and read it, her lips moving silently.

  It was the poem Shipley had written in class last week. The assignment—write a short poem about a member of your family—had annoyed her at first. Did it have to be so personal? Why couldn’t they write about the changing seasons or migrating geese or their favorite pair of boots?

  “I didn’t make the last name connection until I read this,” Professor Rosen said. “I remember your brother. He only showed up for one class.”

  Shipley nodded. The last thing she wanted to discuss was Patrick. But then she shouldn’t have written a poem about him.

  “How’s he doing anyway?” The professor sounded genuinely concerned.

  Shipley wasn’t sure what to say. She hadn’t seen Patrick since 1988. “He’s great,” she enthused.

  Professor Rosen frowned. “Really?”

  Shipley shrugged her shoulders. “We don’t really stay in touch.” She shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair. The meeting wasn’t going the way she’d planned.

  Professor Rosen studied the poem again. “It’s very good,” she remarked. “It shows your curiosity about him. I like the dichotomy that someone we grew up with and should know so well can be a complete stranger to us.”

  Shipley nodded eagerly. She hadn’t thought about any of that when she wrote the poem, but what Professor Rosen was saying made her sound insightful and wise.

  Professor Rosen removed a red pen from the chipped mug on her desk and scribbled a giant capital A below the last line of the poem. Then she tucked the piece of paper back into the manila folder. “You might want to think about East Anglia for your junior year. They’ve got a great poetry program.”

  Shipley gazed blankly back at her.

  “It’s in England. We have an exchange program.”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” Shipley said. “My junior year.” She tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “No, of course not.” Professor Rosen drummed her fingertips on the cover of her old address book, looking distracted. A collection of crystal prisms hung from the windowpane. The sun came out from behind a cloud, casting trippy rainbows all over the puny room. Was the meeting over? Shipley wondered. Were they finished?

  Professor Rosen pursed her lips. “I didn’t like that trick you pulled at orientation, but you seem like you’ve got your head screwed on right after all. You come to class. You do the reading. You write very nicely.”

  Shipley waited for the catch—surely there was one.

  “While I’ve got you here, I may as well ask. Do you happen to babysit? Our regular sitter just got sent home with mono and we have tickets to see a play in Augusta Sunday night. I wanted to eat out afterwards.”

  The professor leaned forward in her chair, the waistband of her olive wide-wale corduroys stretching tight across her flat, wide hips. “I asked Eliza and she said, and I quote, ‘I’m not into being nice to mutant gremlins.’” She shook her head. “What a character. But at least she was honest.” She smiled at Shipley. Her teeth were long and crooked. “Don’t tell me you don’t like kids either. Our guy’s only six months old. He’s a peach.”

  Shipley smiled back, an image forming in her mind of Professor Rosen’s charmless brick house, her nerdy clean-cut husband from the Computer Department, and their bucktoothed, spikyhaired baby, a mini version of Professor Rosen. A lot of the girls at Greenwich Academy had babysat; she’d just never been asked. The baby would probably sleep the whole time anyway. She could eat donuts and watch Pretty Woman on HBO.

  “I could if you wanted me to,” she offered.

  Professor Rosen slapped her palm on the desk. “Good. We’re in the directory. Just swing by around six. There’s a good chance I won’t be there because I’m supposed to be rehearsing my one-act. That is, if I can find someone to play the other lead. It’s a pretty demanding role. Pretty far out. I don’t know what it is about the boys this year, but I can’t find anyone to do it.”

  She cocked her head, her murky hazel eyes widening.

  “Hey, what about that hunky boyfriend of yours? What’s his name? Timothy? He’s big enough to scare the living daylights out of people.” She faltered. “When he gets fired up, I mean.”

  “Tom?”

  Obviously the play had something to do with the zoo. Shipley tried to imagine Tom and Adam flitting around onstage together wearing black unitards, their faces painted like mimes as they pretended to be tigers or gorillas or boa constrictors. She’d slink onstage wearing a black cat suit and lick her paws seductively while they fought over her, waiting to be claimed by the last beast standing.

  Tom didn’t seem like the theater type, but Professor Rosen was just starting to warm to her and Shipley wanted to give her everything she could give. Besides, Tom’s grades were terrible. He could use the extra credit.

  “Sure, why not? He’d love it.”

  “Tell him I want to start rehearsing as early as tomorrow if we can.” The professor pulled on her earlobes and looked at her watch. “The show’s at the end of term, which is a lot closer than you’d think.”

  Shipley stood up to leave, but Professor Rosen held up her hand. “Not so fast. We’re supposed to talk about whether you like your classes or not and what you want to major in. Do you miss home, are you happy, that sort of thing.”

  Shipley shrugged her shoulders. “So far I love it.”

  Professor Rosen smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how rarely I hear that.”

  Success!

  Shipley wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but she and Professor Rosen were practically best friends now. Outside the office, she scribbled Tom’s name on the sign-up sheet for the play, ignoring the rush that coursed through her when her fingertips accidentally grazed the green A of Adam’s name.

  9

  November was a curious month. Some days it was warm as summer. Some days it rained. And some days the wind ripped the leaves off the trees and scattered them mercilessly all over campus. Buildings and Grounds worked round the clock to keep the quad green and leaf-free. Weekends the leaves were burned, filling the air with pungent gray smoke. The heat had come on in the dorms and hot chocolate was served in the dining halls. There was a briskness to the student body, too. Midterms weren’t far off, and after that, vacation. Of course Thanksgiving was first, but anyone who lived farther away than New York stayed on campus for the turkey buffet in the dining hall.

  Now was the time when students became aware of how well they were doing in school. Tom was nearly failing Portraiture. Economics was impossible. English sucked. Geology required way too much memorization. And there was a good chance he would be replaced in Professor Rosen’s one-act play, meaning that he would fail to obtain the extra credit. Today he’d decided to try something new.

  “It’s like this,” Wills explained. He tied his long platinum dreadlocks in a knot on top of his head to keep them out of the way of the hot pink ecstasy tablets he was counting out on Root’s kitchen table. “You do E every two days. On the off days you smoke pot and cook huge meals and eat like a king. On E days you chew gum—lots of it—and run around outside. Or, if you can’t get any E, you steal ether from the chemistry lab. It doesn’t last and it stinks, but man—you got to try it at least once. Between the drugs and the running around and the healthy food, your body stays in shape, and basically you’re golden.”

  Each tiny pink pill had the almond-shaped outline of an eye stamped on it. Tom watched as Wills sorted the tablets into neat piles, four for each of the Grannies, and four for him. He’d agreed to purchase the E on the condition that the Grannies do it with him, in case he freaked out.

  Back in Bedford, Tom had stayed away from drugs. Mostly because of sports, but also because he wasn’t sure how he’d behave. Drinking was okay. His parents drank. Everybody drank. His dad was even cool with picking him up at rugby team parties at 3 A.M. when he was stark raving shit-faced with puke on his shirt. Still, he’d al
ways been curious about drugs, and now that he was away at college, why not? Mainly he was looking for a way to loosen up.

  “Dig deeper. Go nuts. Let yourself come unhinged!” Professor Rosen had screamed at him during his first rehearsal. Then she and that quiet kid, Adam, had stood there gawking at him and waiting for him to go nuts, but all he could do was talk louder and wipe his nose a lot and apologize for being such a shitty actor and forgetting his lines.

  “You will never create something that is truly yours until you let go of your inhibitions,” his painting teacher, Mr. Zanes, would murmur. Mr. Zanes was a whispering graybeard who padded around the studio in bare feet and was forever sucking on lollipops. “For my laryngitis,” he said. Apparently his work was all the rage in Prague in the early eighties, but the only evidence of his artistry was a teetering mound of lollipop wrappers in the corner of the studio.

  Of course it was nearly impossible for Tom to let go of his inhibitions when the subject of every class was Eliza in all her naked glory. Eliza sitting with her angry chin on her fists. Eliza in profile. Eliza lying on a sofa with her dark hairy crotch in plain sight. Every time Tom looked up, she would mouth “suck my tits” or “olive juice” or “blow me” while subtly giving him the finger. In retaliation Tom would turn her face into a giant oozing sore and omit her pale but rather nice tits. Now he was getting a D+ in Portraiture, which was supposed to be his easy A. And the play was a fucking disaster. Drugs were his last and only hope.

  “You know this stuff is all-natural? Comes from the oil of sassafras root,” Wills said. “Used to find sassafras oil in soap and root beer and all sorts of shit till the FDA got involved in the sixties and banned it. I was gonna order a big ole sassafras plant through the mail so I could make my own E, but then I was like, do I really want the FBI parked outside my dorm? Do I really want my phone tapped? Do I really want the pigs up inside my sphincter? I think not.”