by Roan Parrish
Somehow, though, all it took was watching calm, practical, totally together Gretchen lean over the counter to kiss Layne, who mumbled and flushed and pushed her glasses up her nose in delight, to make me as melty inside as one of the molten chocolate lava cakes that we served with cinnamon-cardamon marshmallows to dip in their liquid center.
After I’d made us both the most decadent drinks I could concoct (a combination of the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino and the Gimme S’Mores) and poured them into enormous to-go cups, Gretchen and I walked back toward the dorms, cutting through Washington Square Park because we always cut through Washington Square Park.
We sat on the edge of the fountain half sipping our drinks and half scooping them into our mouths with straws because I’d added so many brownie chunks and marshmallows that they were practically solid.
“So, you and Layne are really a thing, huh?”
“Yeah.” Gretchen stabbed at brownie chunks with her straw, eating them like shish kebab. “She’s pretty great.”
“She, um, came around, then? On the you-being-too-young issue?”
“Well, it wasn’t that she thought I was too young per se, just that we were in different places in our lives. Which is true. Kind of. But, yeah, she pulled her head out of her ass and realized that if we liked each other, then it was stupid to manufacture reasons not to be together. I mean, it’s not necessarily going to be serious or anything. But we… yeah, it’s good.”
“I’m happy for you.” And I really, really was.
Gretchen’s grin—complete with brownie in her teeth and whipped cream in the corner of her mouth—lit up her whole face.
Back at the dorms, things were underway for what I was informed would be the most epic sugar eating competition I’d ever seen. I informed the boy who told me this (a strange, jockish guy with red hair and eyebrows so blond they were nearly invisible against his ruddy skin) that since I’d never seen any eating competition, it wouldn’t take much to impress me.
As it happened, though, even if I’d seen a lot of them, I still would’ve been amazed and borderline horrified as I watched my peers consume volumes of sugar so great that I actually feared for their lives. Gretchen, uninterested, went to change because she was going over to Layne’s later, but I found Milton, Thomas, and Charles standing with some other people from my hall, all of them watching the action with varying levels of bemusement and anticipation. There were six categories of competition, each bizarre and ridiculous in its own way.
“So, like, I heard this premed guy actually went into a sugar coma a couple of years ago,” Thomas was saying.
“Should’ve known better, shouldn’t he?” Milton joked. “Never gonna get into medical school with an oversight like that on his record.”
“A sugar coma is not a real thing,” Charles offered in clarification, and Thomas and Milton rolled their eyes affectionately behind his back.
The first contest was to see who could eat the most marshmallow Peeps in one minute. There were three competitors, all of whom were friends and apparently proposed the contest because they legitimately liked Peeps and wanted to redeem the much-maligned food. The second was a couples’ challenge involving truffles and clothing removal that got so messy and scandalous that one of the couples quit. The third challenge almost turned my stomach. It involved the consumption of marshmallow fluff using sex toys as vehicles of delivery in a truly upsetting manner.
The fourth was a team challenge that required each team to construct a house of cards out of chocolate bars and then eat it piece by piece without knocking the rest of the house over, removing the bars of chocolate, Jenga-style. Piles of wrappers mounded underfoot as the constructions grew, nearly tripping one girl and sending her sliding toward the table where she would’ve knocked over all the houses of chocolate if someone hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her shirt at the last minute.
The fifth challenge was really a drinking game, since that hot chocolate was definitely spiked with something stronger than Mug Shots’ Hearts Afire cayenne-cinnamon syrup. I knew because they invited audience participation, and Milton pressed a full cup (clearly smuggled out of the dining hall) into my hand with a wink.
But the final challenge was my favorite. Teams of two unrolled yards and yards of licorice around the room in a madcap game of follow-the-leader where they took turns placing and consuming the licorice while crawling under tables, jumping up to tap doorframes, and, once, following the path of licorice that snaked up the leg of a blushing boy’s jeans.
By the time Charles and I were heading back to our room, I felt almost cheery, and distinctly more amenable to Valentine’s Day. It didn’t hurt that I was tipsy from the hot chocolate and that since the event coordinators had given out all the unused candy to the audience at the end of the competition, I was now in possession of enough snacks for a week.
Charles gazed thoughtfully at the pile of candy I put on the dresser, hands in his pockets and a pink lollipop making a comical bulge in his jaw.
“Do you think the Student Activities Board is in cahoots with the parent candy company that owns the brands they just consumed downstairs?” he asked seriously.
The morning of my twentieth birthday, I woke up before my alarm for once, shutting it off before the train whistle could blast through my tender early morning brain. I called my mom to thank her for the birthday card she’d sent with a gift card to Olive Garden in it. “I figured you could take your friends out to a nice dinner after all that dining hall food,” she said. It was such a fundamental misunderstanding of my life on every level, but so very like my mom that I was overwhelmed by a sudden and unexpected rush of affection for her.
She told me about how Eric had gotten very into some reality TV show about people who want to be professional wrestlers or something and had started going to the YMCA religiously to lift weights every day.
I talked a little about my classes and satisfied her yen for celebrity sightings by telling her about the time I’d seen Michael Fassbender in Washington Square Park and how I’d served coffee to Michelle Rodriguez. She’d never heard of either one of them but after I’d listed some of their IMDb credits she was excited. She was disappointed to hear that I hadn’t been to a Broadway show yet, though, so I told her about going to Into the Woods, only I fudged the truth a little and said it was off Broadway. My mom was the only living human who couldn’t tell when I was lying, so she just oohed and ahhed over the mention of a play she’d heard of.
That night I really did take everyone to dinner at the Olive Garden in Times Square. It was mobbed with tourists, and we’d had to fight our way through the crowds. One does not simply walk into Times Square. But I relished the chaos for once. The bright lights and neon signs and huge television screens and billboards snapping my attention from scene to scene like a music video. People bumping into me and each other in confusion or enthusiasm or distraction, like meteorites colliding in space, or atoms crashing together, trying to get closer or to transform each other.
Inside, Milton, Charles, Thomas, Gretchen, and I laughed at how kitschy the Olive Garden seemed in contrast to the rest of the city. But I think they took as much unexpected comfort in its familiarity as I did, the menu and the décor and the smells the same here in this glittering wonderland as they were anywhere else.
We shared plates of fettuccine Alfredo and gooey cheese ravioli, towering piles of spaghetti with meatballs, and salad and breadsticks that really did seem endless. We drank raspberry lemonades spiked with vodka, courtesy of Milton, and finished with tiramisu, cheesecake, and something called a chocolate caramel lasagna, the flavors somehow so simple and pure that we kept eating them long after we were full, straining, maybe, to keep things recognizable.
I even ate some of the tiramisu, despite its newly negative associations, determined not to let my feelings for Will cast a pall over the evening.
After, we sat in the square for a while, people watching. Milton waltzed with one of the Disney characters, and Gretchen and I
planked on the steps outside the TKTS booth. Thomas drew comics with me as the birthday hero, a cape with my initials on it floating out behind me as I rescued a tourist stranded on a billboard. Charles didn’t say much—for him the meal had been breakfast—but he took pictures of all the clocks with his phone, muttering notes for his project under his breath until we headed for home.
When we got back to the dorms, giggly and full, Milton invited us all to his room for some birthday Felicity, and I went to change into pajamas first.
Outside my door was a gift with my name on it, wrapped in fancy matte paper, gold and purple lines interlocking in a sprawling geometric design. The perfect balance of beauty and organization. My heart stuttered as I scooped it up and went inside, closing the door after me as if the box might contain something clandestine or volatile.
Leo, the card read. You don’t need to change. Not for anyone. But maybe the slightest upgrade won’t be unwelcome? Happy birthday.
Will hadn’t signed it. He didn’t have to.
Inside the box was a pair of brand-new Vans, identical to the old ones that Will had so scorned.
12
Chapter 12
March
Somehow this semester I had midterms in every class, and they were eating me alive. I barely had time to shower and shove one of the bagels I’d begun stockpiling from the dining hall in the morning into my face while working. I’d even had to switch from Everything to Plain because I couldn’t stop typing long enough to eat and the seeds kept getting stuck in my keyboard.
I was a total mess.
Charles’ mania had increased as the semester continued. He’d begun setting his alarm to wake him up every ninety minutes because he’d read that based on neurological research, the human brain entered a heightened state of something or other ninety minutes into the sleep cycle and he wanted to harness these periods and maximize his brain activity.
He’d also begun playing these gamma and theta brain wave inducing audio clips on his computer to maximize his creative problem-solving abilities. Of course his alarm startled me awake, too, if I actually managed to get any sleep, and I’d sit straight up in bed in a panic, convinced that I’d missed a deadline or a test. It was no use trying to get him to alter his methods, as I’d learned last semester. Once he’d decided something was advantageous, he stuck to it a hundred percent.
All I could do was console myself with promises of all the fun and relaxation I’d get to have during spring break. I had already planned out the things I’d do in the city that I’d been too busy—or too content spending time at Will’s—to do since moving here. I wanted to go to the Cloisters and the Tenement Museum. I wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Hell, I even wanted to go see the Statue of Liberty. Maybe one day I’d get one of those hop-on-hop-off bus passes and pretend I was a tourist all day. After all, I still kind of was. For all that I’d been in the city for months, I’d hardly seen any of it.
I also had a full Netflix queue that I’d been adding to all semester. So, it was a plan: I would get my fill of the city during the day, then smuggle dining hall food back to my room and curl up in bed with my computer for as long as I wanted, not speaking to anyone if I didn’t want to.
I’d been doubly busy the last few weeks, having volunteered to help a grad student in the lab with some research for her dissertation. Part of her data had gotten mysteriously erased from the university server before she could back it up, and she had to try to re-create six months of work in a week in order to meet a deadline for her dissertation committee and submit her paperwork to the university in time.
It was horrible, and she was, understandably, a wreck, but she also treated me like I was her personal assistant. When I told Gretchen and Milton about it after running into the dining hall, totally frazzled, to explain why I couldn’t make it to movie night and why I was currently shoving food into my face faster than I could chew so that I could get back to the lab, they’d advised me to blow her off, saying that it was nice of me to help but it was her problem. I couldn’t do it, though. Her panic was too real, and I could all too easily see something like that happening to me.
As I ran back to the lab, cramming the piece of pizza I’d carried out with me into my mouth and trying not to indulge in elaborate stories where I tripped at exactly the wrong moment and a ball of chewed bread and cheese lodged in my throat, marking me down in the annals of history as having the most humiliating death on campus, my terrible manners reminded me of Will and I imagined what he would say if he could see me now.
He’d told me more than once that if I always ran to the rescue when someone asked I’d end up living my life in the margins of other people’s. That I was a pushover and it wasn’t my responsibility to kill myself in order to solve other people’s problems. This last had seemed like rather a dramatic pronouncement when he’d initially made it, but now, trying to walk-run and not choke on my pizza, I thought maybe he had a point.
One night I was working late in the lab when a guy I hadn’t seen before ambled in looking harassed and confused. There weren’t many people around so he came to me right away.
“Hey, have you seen a rock polisher around here anywhere?”
“Um, I don’t think so? But to be honest I have no clue what a rock polisher is, so I probably wouldn’t’ve known if I’d seen it.”
His name was Russell and he had a halo of frizzy blondish-reddish hair, a brownish-reddish beard, a full mouth, bright white teeth, and the sparkliest blue eyes I’d ever seen. He looked like a handsome, geeky lion and dressed like he was about to go on a hike. He was a geology and physics double major, and he usually worked in the geology lab next door, which was why I hadn’t seen him before.
We started talking sometimes when there weren’t many people in the lab. He was sweet and smart and funny, and I could tell he liked me. One night, he took me to the commissary for coffee and pie in the middle of the night and used his coffee cup and the pencil that was perpetually stuck behind his ear to explain how, at the molecular level, the pencil could pass through the pottery of the diner mug.
He asked me about my family and told me about his. His older sister was getting married the next month, and he hated the guy she was marrying. I told him about how Janie had a vlog on YouTube where she did makeup and hair tutorials and how funny she was in them. About how my mom had once read a series of mystery novels that featured a duo of New York City detectives, so every time I talked to her on the phone she asked me if I’d been to places that were featured in that series, only it was always things like “the Dunkin’ Donuts near the train station” or “the bus stop close to the Brooklyn Bridge” so I was never really sure what she meant.
In the geology lab a few nights later, Russell showed me some of the rock samples he was working with. The lights were dim everywhere else, leaving us in an island of light, like we were the only two people who existed.
“This is a quartz matrix that has rubellite tourmaline crystal in it, and then is scattered with some gold mica. There are even some fluorite crystals.” He was totally focused on the rocks. “This one is the prettiest, I think.”
He held it out to me, but it didn’t honestly look like much. I opened my mouth to say something complimentary anyway.
“Hang on, you can’t see the flecks in it unless it’s wet,” he said absently. He raised the rock to his lips and licked the flat edge of it slowly, tongue coming out as his blue eyes sparkled at me. It was undeniably one of the hottest things I’d ever seen.
When he held the rock out, I could see a riot of colors, from a dark brownish-violet all the way to a pinky-red, some crystals of peach and blue packed together and the whole back of it studded with the gold bits of mica.
Russell’s eyes darted down to my mouth and he stepped closer.
I flushed with arousal and the sharp promise of possibility. I liked Russell. He was handsome and nice and smart and maybe… maybe….
“I, um, I just want to say that I….”
> I can’t kiss you because I’m in love with someone else. I’m a total wreck over someone else, and it isn’t fair. But Russell was leaving in a few months, off to grad school in Chicago. He wasn’t proposing marriage.
I closed the distance between us, and I kissed him.
His lips were as soft as they looked, and he cupped my elbows firmly as we kissed. He tasted earthy, mineral. It wasn’t awkward or strange. It was nice. Comfortable. Sweet. So I kept kissing him. And at some point, I dropped Russell’s favorite rock, spit-damp, onto the floor.
I’d somehow managed to forget about midterms when I’d given Layne my schedule at Mug Shots, and I knew it would make her life harder if I asked her to switch my shifts, so I just kept showing up to work totally harried, downing four shots of espresso and vibrating through my shifts. Then, knowing I’d have to work when I got back to my room, I’d down a few more at the end of my shift, leaving totally strung out with my heart pounding, work intently for a few hours, and then crash hard and have nutso dreams, which made being interrupted by Charles’ alarm even more unsettling.
I was tearing my hair out trying to write a paper for my English class—the last thing I had due for midterms, thank god—when my phone rang and Will’s name popped up. I’d texted him the day after my birthday to thank him for the shoes, but I had made it clear that we weren’t going to start hanging out again.
