Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  The majestic

  houses

  with Greek Letters

  branded

  on the piazzas

  encircle the campus

  like a noose.

  Frankie published it in the college paper he was now working on, and many a frat folk gave me a cruel stare as I made my way to classes each day. But other than the activist/newspaper types whom Frankie took up with and the Harmony Society, the Greeks were the only place to build a social life, so I still hung out there from time to time.

  Every other weekend there were bars on the frat house lawns with men from the hill country serving cocktails and crawfish. There was always live music spilling out their open windows, and occasionally the brothers wore coats and ties instead of blue jeans in an attempt to appear civilized.

  During the Winter Formal, Ned Crater set me up with an overweight fraternity brother nicknamed “Behemoth,” and I reluctantly danced with his fat arm around me the whole night, his sweat dripping on my black sequined dress—the one Mae Mae had bought for me at Saks Fifth Avenue during a precollege shopping trip she took to Charleston. I looked longingly at Ned and Jif, who gazed into each other’s eyes. They danced closely as Ned professed his love every few minutes, causing someone somewhere to yell, “Get a room, Crater!” And I wondered if anyone would ever gaze longingly into my eyes.

  “Two hundred and fifty bucks for a sweat rag!” I chuckled to Ruthie as I hung up my dress at the end of the evening.

  “That’s probably not what your grandmother envisioned,” Ruthie said before taking a bag of popcorn out of the microwave and setting it before me.

  “Behemoth is nice,” I said, munching on the buttery treat, “but I sure hope he doesn’t call me.”

  When Peter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter one Thursday in April, I threw my Chaucer book at the wall and dissolved into tears. Sensing my despair, Ruthie postponed her trip to Chapel Hill for the weekend, and Jif told Ned that she’d better stick around the dorm, too, and the three of us spent the weekend together.

  They drove me to the Pooshee Pass, where we picnicked by the river, sunning on blankets and swinging on a rope swing that whisked us out into the black water, where there was no choice but to let go.

  “I know you’re down, Adelaide,” Ruthie said as we sat on our blankets, sipping Co-Colas and waiting for the sun to bake us dry. “This whole Peter Carpenter thing is definitely freaky. But I just have to believe that life here is going to get better for you and for all of us.” (Ruthie’s parents had refused her request to transfer to the University of North Carolina, and she was deciding to make the best of things at NBU.)

  “Freshman year is supposed to be the hardest of all, right?” Jif said, flicking a horsefly off Ruthie’s shoulder. “I know some of it has bothered you, Ad, but next year we’ll be sophomores, and we’ll know what to expect. And I can surely guess that this whole arrest thing will make the administration take a look at some of the backwardness of the Greek world here. Ned told me that President Schaeffer is investigating all of the frat houses personally and giving them strict instructions about what not to do during initiation.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, my eyes on the moving water as it rushed over the rocks, making them slick and slippery. “But you know, this is just not what I expected college to be like.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruthie asked.

  “I mean, I worked so hard to get here—even got that little scholarship and some help from my grandparents that really sealed the deal. I was counting on this place to transform me into a brighter, better person. But instead, I’m nothing but a country bumpkin. And a reviled one at that.”

  Jif tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear, and Ruthie patted my back.

  “Don’t you think it’s like this at most colleges?” Ruthie asked. “I mean, at Chapel Hill, some pretty backward stuff goes on.”

  “Well, yeah, bad stuff goes on in pockets of every college, but we’re so small and secluded here.”

  They both nodded in an attempt to hear me out.

  “But it’s more than that for me,” I said. “For one thing, you both have people who care about you in the midst of it all.” Jif shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun, and Ruthie dug her toes into the black river mud.

  “You’ve got Tag and a place to escape to,” I said to Ruthie. And to Jif, “You’ve got Ned pining all over you—inviting you to every social event that comes down the pike and walking you safely back to the dorm each night.”

  Jif looked down to her pink toenails and nodded.

  “The only person who has so much as looked my way this year is Behemoth!”

  Then we all laughed and put our hands over our mouths to hide our full-blown grins. Even me. My ears reddened with embarrassment.

  Behemoth had called me every other week for a few months to ask me out, and I always made some half-baked excuse about a paper to write or a friend coming from out of town. Finally, he stopped calling, and I was relieved.

  “I’m alone,” I said, feeling the familiar sting in my eye.

  “You’re not alone,” Jif said, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ve got us, for one thing.”

  “And you’ve got your poetry,” said Ruthie. “Dirkas just asked you to join that upperclassman workshop next semester. You aced that religion class, and the professor called to tell you that he wanted you to submit your last essay to a religion magazine!”

  When I was honest with myself, I had to admit that I’d had some positive experiences at NBU: I had joined the community service program and served food at a soup kitchen twice a month on Saturdays. My creative writing teacher, Professor Dirkas, had been hired as a permanent professor. He liked my work and invited me to join the graduate class next fall. The social justice class was taught by Dr. Shaw, that wise and gentle minister who helped me find McSweeney’s office last fall, and he had us all over to his home, where his wife cooked us spaghetti and let their three children sit in our laps while we discussed writings of Niebuhr and Ryan. As I held Molly, Dr. Shaw’s joyful and precocious three-year-old, I wondered what the Shaw family did to take cover when the kegs started rolling in the streets.

  And I had to admit that there were students in Dr. Shaw’s class who didn’t seem like barbarians, and I was thankful to know that they existed. One of them even invited me to a Bible study, and I winced at the sound of it but peeked in the chapel once on my way to the library; they were having an intense discussion about the The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. The discussion had something to do with Lewis’s assertion that earth was actually a region of hell, and that piqued my interest for a moment. Certain portions of my freshman year at NBU could pass for a region of hell!

  “I’m fat and alone,” I said now, unwilling to depart from the pity party I was hosting with my friends. “My mom is going to die when she sees me. I mean, she’s been buying me party dresses for the deb season I won’t be able to fit into! At this point, I can’t even get my big toe into them!”

  “Okay, stop right there!” Jif said with a determined look in her eyes.

  She squeezed both of our wrists and continued, “I think a diet is what will make us all feel better. We’ve got six weeks until we go home for the summer, and I think we should each try to drop ten pounds before then.”

  “How?” Ruthie asked.

  “I’m practically an expert on this,” Jif assured us. “Laird and Jenna do it all the time.” (Laird and Jenna were Jif ’s two newest friends, and they were both from quaint Connecticut towns outside Manhattan.

  They were pencil thin and usually dressed to kill.)

  So Jif and Ruthie and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Pooshee Pass concocting a college-budget crash diet that included Slim-Fast, ramen noodles, chewing gum, and diet pills. Ugh.

  When Devon Hunt asked me out at the Wednesday coffeehouse social, I thought things were finally looking up. Devon was a first-year law student at the University of Virginia, and his father wa
s the provost at NBU. He was an alum and came down frequently to see his folks and old friends at the Phi Kap house.

  On the night that we met, I was tapping my foot at our table with

  Jif, Ruthie, and my new friend Vera, an exchange student from Vienna, Austria.

  Taking Jif ’s lead, I’d toned down my makeup, depermed my hair at the local salon, and begun the painful process of dieting so that my debutante dress would fasten when I went home for the summer. I felt lighter, having shed the first few pounds of pizza and ice cream that had attached themselves to my rear end over the last eight months. I even stood up to dance when the guitarist played my favorite song, “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and moved with a new kind of exuberance and hope, before Devon made his way over to extend his hand in an introduction.

  It was my first real date since Luigi Agnolucci (if you didn’t count my asking Lazarus to the senior dance and being set up with Behemoth), and my friends were as excited as I was. They brought in all their new spring dresses and sandals for me to try on.

  He wanted to take me out to dinner instead of a frat party. And he had said something about a movie or a drive up to Buxton Hill to look through his telescope at the stars.

  “I’m so excited for you!” Jif said, and she pulled out a pale pink sundress from her closet that still had the store tags dangling from it.

  “That’s your Kentucky Derby dress,” I said, waving it away. (Ned had relatives in Louisville with box seats, and he had invited her to attend the event with his family. She had ordered it from some fancy New York boutique that Jenna had told her about, and had searched all over Roanoke for the perfect hat and shoes to accompany it.)

  “I’m not going to wear that before you,” I said. “And besides, there is no way I could fit into it.”

  “This is your color, Adelaide, and I know it would look great on you,” Jif persuaded. She waved the dress forward and backward so that it billowed out as though a breeze were bringing it to life. Then she threw it to me, and I had no choice but to catch it.

  “Now, if you spend the next two days before the date on a liquid diet . . . ,” Jif said.

  “I can’t,” I protested. “I’ve got that McSweeney paper to write before finals, and I don’t have the stamina that you do. I need food to write papers!”

  Jif had already proved she had the will to diet. Over the last two weeks she had followed our Tully Dormitory Diet to a tee and had lost six pounds. She had even climbed Kiki Mountain with Laird and Ned in the middle of it all, and she had made a B+ on her American History paper.

  I held up the lovely pink dress my friend had thrust in my arms before looking back to Jif, who was raising her eyebrows in a familiar expression of determination. We stood this way for one whole minute until I agreed to a liquid breakfast and lunch.

  “But I have to eat dinner,” I said as she took the liberty of grabbing the dress and hanging it up in the center of my closet.

  I didn’t drink at my dinner with Devon Hunt—I wasn’t old enough, and it was my little test to see if he would be interested in a girl who didn’t partake. Not to mention the fact that all my stomach had seen during the last twenty-four hours was coffee, water, and orange juice so that I could squeeze into Jif ’s dress. It fit me perfectly, and I was glad to have made the extra effort to wear it, though my fingers were trembling with hunger by the time the waitress brought my pasta primavera.

  I had even consented to a Correctol laxative that Jif sent in an envelope to my room the night before.

  “This will do the trick,” she had written. “I’ve tried it before, and Laird does it all the time.”

  I took it reluctantly before falling into bed and spent much of my afternoon on the library toilet instead of in my study room.

  Devon Hunt had one beer and a steak sandwich and told me stories about law school at the University of Virginia and the good times he’d had at NBU.

  “So what do you think you’ll major in?” he asked.

  “English with a creative writing focus,” I said.

  “I was an English major. What do you want to do with it?”

  “I want to be a poet, as impractical as that sounds.” I swirled the pasta around my spoon as I waited for his response.

  “Hey”—he shrugged—“somebody’s got to fill the bookshelves with new stuff. Why can’t it be you?”

  “Yeah.” I grinned at his optimism. I looked him in the eye and wondered if someone true was beneath the surface.

  Just then one of his friends stopped by the table to say hello.

  “And who’s the lucky girl this evening?” the boy said, stretching his hand out in an introduction.

  “Adelaide . . . um . . . ,” Devon said, and I could tell he couldn’t remember my last name, though Jif, Ruthie, and I had said his full name over and over all week long. We had even looked up his senior photograph in an old yearbook. He was sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch of the Phi Kap house, reading Tender Is the Night by Fitzgerald.

  “Piper,” I said as Devon searched my face.

  “Right,” he said, wiping his brow. Then he reached over to squeeze my hand. “This is my lovely date for the evening, Miss Adelaide Piper.”

  I had seen Devon’s friend before. He was a seasoned senior and was often seen sitting on the lawn, drinking a beer or throwing a Frisbee. I’d taken note of him once on a Saturday night in an argument with a girl I did not know. When the girl scurried away from him, he threw his beer bottle against the column and it shattered into tiny pieces of sharp brown glass that caught the light of the moon as I walked by. It gave me a funny feeling. I would have loved to have had a man break glass over my departure. Heck, I would have settled for an “Oh, stay a few more minutes.”

  “It’s called being whipped,” Frankie had said to me when I related the incident. It was something that happened on a rare occasion at NBU. A boy, even a cool frat boy, would fall hopelessly in love (usually with one of the prep-school blondes), and he would become nice and sweet and do anything she said. A senior had become whipped over Laird, Jif ’s friend, and he brought her roses and took her home to meet his parents over Christmas break. He even decided to attend the NBU law school instead of the higher-ranking Yale where he had been accepted so that he could be closer to her.

  Maybe Devon would fall like that. I hoped someone would break glass over me one of these days.

  “Don’t let him fool you, Miss Piper,” the boy said. “He looks quite the part of the intellectual with his books and telescope, but behind the smoke and mirrors he’s a typical Phi Kap.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said (wondering what the take-home message was), and the boy patted Devon on the back and took his seat with a group of seniors toward the back of the restaurant.

  Devon rolled his eyes at his friend’s departure.

  “So, an English major?” he said. “I remember the days. Have you taken McSweeney’s American Poetry class?”

  I had a paper due to him day after next, and I was delighted that my date was familiar with the course.

  Devon had concentrated on American literature, and we remarked about McSweeney’s bizarre obsession with Robert Frost, whom he had known during his days at Dartmouth. McSweeney had shared a few lunches with Frost during his college years and recounted their conversations about twentieth-century poetry over and over to his classes. He was an obvious chauvinist, Devon agreed, and he reenacted several cruel remarks he had made toward female classmates who attempted to dissect the poetry he adored.

  I admitted that I was writing a paper about William Carlos Williams, another one of his favorite poets, in order to maintain my B average, though I really wanted to write about Marianne Moore, whose nature poems seemed the most compelling of anyone I had studied.

  During a quick bathroom break, I ran into Miranda Thompson, an upperclassman from my social justice class. Miranda was from Columbia, South Carolina, and we had shared a few friendly conversations about our misfit state and the Governor’s School,
which Miranda had attended for science and math.

  “Hi, Piper,” she said as I applied the subtle rose-colored lipstick Jif had selected for me. “You look terrific,” she said. “What’s different?”

  “I’ve lost a few pounds.”

  “Good for you. That freshman weight can be a bear.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said. “I’ve gotta lose a few more before I head home so my parents won’t think I’m some evil dorm mate who ate their daughter.”

  Miranda chuckled as she readjusted her blouse in the mirror. “So what do you have going on tonight?”

  “I’m out with a graduate—Devon Hunt. I met him at the coffeehouse the other night.”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly. “Isn’t that the provost’s son?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Know him?”

  “I know of him. I knew a girl who used to go out with him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, he seems like a nice guy.”

  “Yeah,” Miranda said; then she turned around to face me. “Just take it slow. I wish someone had told me that my freshman year.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “My pace is comparable to a snail’s.”

  We both laughed, and Miranda wished me luck on my finals.

  “I won’t see you until next spring,” she remarked.

  “Why?”

  “I’m taking the London abroad semester in the fall.”

  “How great,” I said, and I imagined myself flying to London in a few years to study British literature (though that would definitely take another private trip to Papa Great and Mae Mae’s house).

  I said good-bye and headed back into the dining room, where Devon was waiting with a smile.

  Devon remarked about the clear spring sky as we walked out of the restaurant. Then he handed me a peppermint and tried to persuade me to let him drive us up to the Buxton family cemetery hill on the outskirts of campus where he could set up his telescope and give me a good look at the constellations.

  I had told him over dinner that I had signed up for Tuttle’s astronomy class in the fall, which was one of the more popular science courses on campus, and he said that he had loved it so much that his parents bought him a telescope for graduation.