Morris’s party had been nice, but unnerving. Binky disappeared for a long time with Christopher Primrose. With Binky missing, and Foss getting into a grouchy mood over something Erika wasn’t quite sure of, Erika spent most of her time with Morris and a couple of other kids she knew from the Rube Goldberg club. They had fun talking about the time they went to Boston and Erika and Morris won the Rube Goldberg competition, even though Erika had to take a barrette out of her hair to get the paper-stapling machine to actually work. You weren’t supposed to add any elements to your design during the competition, but Erika had stealthily hidden the barrette under a complex web of rubber bands. No one knew, not even Evan, the science teacher—if he had, he would have had to tell the organizers, and they’d have been disqualified. That quick thinking with the barrette had been Erika’s claim to fame in seventh grade.
Fortunately, after another twenty minutes or so, Binky appeared, slightly disheveled, and she and Erika left Morris’s to be sure they’d be back at Erika’s by eleven. Binky was quiet during the walk home, and Erika noticed her lips had a slightly crushed look to them. She wondered what it was like kissing Christopher Primrose, but she couldn’t begin to imagine. He had a very dry-looking face. She didn’t think she’d like touching him.
After the night of Morris’s party, Binky kept coming up with more nighttime plans. Often, the parties involved Christopher Primrose, but when Erika asked Binky if they were going out, she was bitchy. “You have to stop telling people about me and Chris,” she had demanded. The fact was, though, at Rose Dyer High School there were no secrets, and other people had already begun to talk about Binky.
One boy, Jacob Weinrib, had said Binky was a “superfreak” and encouraged his friend Timmy Saltz to invite her to his party, a fact Erika learned in chess strategy from Tim’s lab partner, Mark. Erika had been called a freak by those boys before, but superfreak was a new one. She knew it had to do with sex, but wasn’t sure what type of act it referred to. She thought she might ask Melanie, but then she had forgotten about the whole thing. Whatever it did mean, the result was that Erika went to more parties, which was okay with her now that she had gotten used to it. There were usually kids to hang with who she knew, and she especially liked dressing up in pretty clothes. She liked the way her mom paid attention to her on those nights, and did her hair for her, like she did Melanie’s when Melanie went out.
Often, when she wanted to talk about important stuff to her mom, like science fair, or chess club, her mom seemed distracted. But her mother always smiled when it was time to dress for a party, smiled in a way that reached up to her eyes, which got squinty and sparkly, like happy-face eyes in a little kid’s drawing, or a picture in a magazine. Only Erika knew now that those really smiley people in the magazines had to hold those smiles for unnaturally long periods of time. She knew those real-looking smiles could be worn, without any feeling at all, almost indefinitely. She wondered how all the happy-looking people really felt at all the parties they went to, and she tried not to be afraid of them.
3
When Jan Russell’s roommate, Eliza Smith, arrived in the late afternoon of Jan’s first day on campus, Jan thought there had been a mistake. She had taken Brown’s roommate-survey seriously. She had already met Andy Berg at freshman orientation. Andy was from the New York City suburbs, and when they chatted Jan had been immediately hopeful that she had just met her first real college friend. Eliza Smith, on the other hand, was not what she had expected in a roommate. Eliza Smith was unlike anyone Jan had ever met before, much less lived with.
“Monster fucking traffic,” Eliza exclaimed as she burst into the dorm room. She carried a large green duffel bag on her shoulder. Her head was shaved to the scalp on one side, and her hair was dyed a dark, purplish red. She had light freckles, blue eyes, a round, girlish face, and was tall, with an ample figure. But any feminine attributes were overshadowed by her eyebrow piercing, knee-high combat boots, fishnet stockings, black short-shorts, and a T-shirt that read The Patriarchy Won’t Fuck Itself.
Jan found herself reading and rereading the T-shirt slogan several times. She knew she was being overly literal, but she couldn’t decide whether the declaration was supposed to be a positive or negative statement. She made a mental note to ask her boyfriend, Adam, what he thought, when they spoke at the end of the week. Jan and Adam hadn’t broken up before leaving for college, but they had decided to sever electronic ties. They’d talk once a week on Saturday mornings, but they wouldn’t text or use social media to keep in touch. Above all, they wouldn’t talk, text, or chat as a substitute for having actual, in-person college experiences.
The electronic separation had been Adam’s suggestion, but Jan had readily agreed. She didn’t want to be one of those girls who was basically in a relationship with her phone. She didn’t want to “introduce” Adam to her new friends by having them text each other. There was something cliché and high-school-seeming about the whole idea of everyone you knew knowing each other online and through chats. Still, it was hard to resist the temptation to snap a picture of Eliza. It would take weeks to describe to Adam what a single image could reveal about Jan’s new roommate.
Eliza’s possessions had arrived in the room earlier in the day, in creased, used-looking boxes, sent by a shipping company from Montana. Jan had glanced at them and wondered what sort of girl would follow the sloppily duct-taped, beat-up boxes. Most of the other kids in the dorm had parents with them for move-in day, and new-looking luggage—suitcases on wheels, trunks with shiny latches. Eliza, however, arrived without a parent in tow, and she carried a bag that Jan thought smelled a bit like horses.
The only fortunate thing was that by the time Eliza Smith arrived, Jan’s father, David, had finally left. He’d insisted on helping Jan set up her computer and printer, a task she could have done easier without him there, swearing under his breath with every step of the process. He’d been high-maintenance all day. He’d asked Jan a dozen times whether she was annoyed with him for leaving for Hong Kong so soon after she arrived at Brown, but he had avoided the more significant topic of his separation from Mom. Dad was a great one for talking about everything that didn’t matter.
“Hi! Need help with that?” Jan offered, trying to be friendly. “Did you take a cab all the way from the airport?”
“A what?” Eliza said. “No, no, no. Greyhound.”
“That must have been long,” Jan said, taken aback, thinking Eliza meant she had taken a bus all the way from Montana. But then Eliza clarified.
“Let’s see. I began my odyssey east on Tuesday. Airbus out of Kalispell heading west, naturally, to Seattle. All eastern travel in this country seems to begin by heading west. Layover. Two hours of fighting off this unusually persistent pervert. First the guy wanted to buy me a cupcake. Then Starbucks. Then pizza. He thought I was some teen runaway he was going to sell into white slavery or some shit. Finally told him, ‘How about get me an extra-hot latte so I can pour it on your balls?’ I am a basic perv magnet. Then in Houston some army dude sits down next to me, takes out his laptop, gets on this site that’s like International Warehouse of Bondage Toys. I like toys, I mean who doesn’t, but this is the airport, guy. There’s grandmothers here.
“When I finally land at Logan it’s like eight planes are all getting bags at the same carousel. It’s an absolute crush of people slinging giant bags everywhere, and who gets felt up? A handful of my ass fat is totally palmed, but I can’t tell who it is. Everyone around me is looking entirely focused on their bags, and I am like, right, my ass looked exactly like your wife’s Louis Vuitton. Jesus.
“Then I stayed with my aunt in Boston. My mom’s sister, who I met once when I was five. She has eleven cats. She works in an adolescent psych ward, and she is a psycho-bitch cat lady. She had no food at all in her house but cat food and Lucky Charms, which if you think about it look like cat kibbles.
“Then on the Greyhound I sit next to a dude who must’ve weighed four hundred pounds. No shit. He ke
pt taking these sandwiches out from God knows where. Turkey club. Italian combo. Tuna. Egg salad. Fluffernutter. A total sandwich-obsessed freak. I was like, man, I know actual hogs that maintain weight at fewer calories. But at least he was just a sandwich perv.”
Jan tried not to appear shocked, but she could feel her mouth go slack and she knew she was staring. “Wow,” she finally responded. “That’s a lot more eventful than my car ride with my dad. Only thing that happened to us was the GPS directions in the rental car were all in German. My dad speaks German and about five other languages really badly.”
Jan couldn’t help but feel that she could have done more to make this story amusing, that there was some vivid detail she could have added to capture how funny it had been with her father speaking German back to the GPS voice, something that would make Eliza think she was remotely interesting, but she felt tongue-tied and overwhelmed. As Eliza turned her attention to unpacking, an uncomfortable silence descended on the room. Jan knew she was overreacting, that this was only first-day-of-school jitters, but she knew herself well enough to know she needed to take a walk and regain perspective.
It was frightening how natural it seemed to want to talk to Adam. They had seen each other almost every day for the past year. But there was no way Jan was going to be the first to break the electronics ban. She forced herself to act busy organizing her clothes and desk, and then as soon as it seemed polite, she excused herself to see whether Andy Berg, the girl from the New York City area, was around.
To Jan’s relief, Andy was standing in front of her room, struggling to get her key out of the lock. “This is the tenth stupid thing I’ve done since I saw you,” Andy said. “Worst so far was slamming the window on my finger.” Andy held out her sloppily bandaged pinky. “My roommate, Sarah, attempted to help me out, but she is apparently a germ- and bodily-fluids-phobe, so this was not a great first moment together.”
“Ha,” Jan laughed, and nudged Andy aside, then gently wiggled Andy’s key free from the lock. “My special talent,” Jan said. “Comes from being the oldest in a dysfunctional, apartment-dwelling family. Someone needs skills.”
“Really?” Andy said. “You’re that one? I have two older brothers and have basically been carried on people’s shoulders my entire life. My parents and my older brother, Craig, literally unpacked all my shit. It was totally embarrassing. Sarah was there all by herself arranging her deodorizers and antiseptic sprays, and my whole family was micromanaging my dresser. My mother is a folding guru. She teaches classes on how to fold stuff. Apparently it’s the key to happiness. My brother and my dad are both architects, so that’s more of the same. I, on the other hand, am a brat in recovery. They sent me to a therapist because they were so concerned that I was a senior in high school and I left my smelly gym clothes in the car. In my OCD family, mess is a psychological condition.”
Jan smiled. “Sounds like you’re the Melanie of your family. That’s my baby sister. She’s a sophomore in high school. But I’m sure you’re better adjusted than Melanie. She’s growing out of it, but she’s sort of a mean girl. I think she might tell people where to sit at lunch.”
“Oh, that’s not me,” Andy said. “I’m harmless. I just have zero life skills. No sense of direction. Failed my driver’s test three times. That sort of thing.” They left the dorm together and headed across the small green toward the main part of campus. The sun felt good on Jan’s face, and she breathed deeply and tried to relax. So what if she had to live with someone she had nothing in common with? She was having an actual conversation, at least, with a real person, someone she related to. Andy stopped for a moment and twisted her long, curly dark hair into a bun, took a yellow pencil from her jeans pocket, and stuck it through her hair. To Jan’s amazement, the heavy bun stayed perfectly in place.
“Well, at least you’re good with hair,” Jan said. She felt her own thin blond hair flat against the back of her neck. She’d wanted to get it cut before she left New York, but things were so chaotic at home with both her and her father moving out, she didn’t get a chance.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “I did inherit the perfection gene in this one area. I can cut hair, too. I cut my own all the time. One summer a couple years ago I learned how from watching about a thousand YouTube videos.”
“Really?” Jan said. “I was just thinking how I wanted to buy a pair of scissors and just start cutting.” Jan had always wanted to be one of those girls who cut their own hair, or had a friend dye it some unnatural color. That was Eliza, though, not her. Pathetically, she’d always gone to her mother’s stylist in Tribeca.
“Oh, shit, yeah,” Andy said, looking at Jan. “I would love to give you one of those layered bobs. Would you do it? Your hair would be great for that, maybe with long bangs? Your hair has to be perfectly straight. Otherwise bangs don’t work. Most people have some little wave in front they don’t even notice until it’s too late.”
They had been walking around the quad too absorbed in their conversation to pay much attention to where they were going. Jan looked up for the first time and took in their surroundings. There were groups of students sitting on the steps in front of the student center, and other kids hanging out on the quad listening to music on giant headphones. There was one girl playing the ukulele, sitting with a pink-haired girl wearing motorcycle boots and a pompom hat—styles Jan envied and disdained at the same time. Posers, she thought. They were everywhere, and Jan again fought the impulse to snap a picture. It was scary how much she wanted to show Adam everything at Brown—not everything, really, just the annoying parts. She wasn’t sure what that said about her, or their relationship, but she doubted it was good. She took a deep breath. There was a part of her that knew she was being ridiculous. This wasn’t high school. It didn’t matter as much anymore what people wore. In college, you could be whoever you wanted.
It was a warm, sunny day and campus was crowded, although only freshman were supposed to be moving in. Jan figured a lot of upperclassman had arrived back just for this moment—to hang out before the grind of school officially began. On the upper quad, some shirtless guys were kicking a soccer ball. One of them had long, straight hair that fell into his eyes, and abs he kept touching in that way guys with really good bodies have of drawing attention to themselves without seeming to realize it. Why, Jan wondered, was she one of those people who, no matter what she did, seemed to be making too much of an effort?
Everywhere Jan looked everyone seemed hip and stylish. Brown girls seemed to all be skinny, or at least comfortable in their skin. Lots of kids were barefoot, or wearing Birkenstocks or Docs with cutoffs and droopy, off-the-shoulder cropped tops. It seemed like everyone had a piercing or a tattoo. It wasn’t how Jan remembered campus from her tour. There had been preppy kids, science nerds, and just normal-seeming people.
The more she looked around, the more the idea of letting Andy cut her hair seemed like a good one. She was here, finally—away from home. She needed to start to take more risks. She needed to stop thinking about Adam, and what he’d think of her every move. She needed to stop thinking so hard about things that hardly mattered, things that were supposed to be fun—meeting people and making friends. She glanced back at the soccer-playing boys. A short, dark-haired boy had scored a goal and was racing around the quad jumping on his teammate’s backs. A light-skinned black guy dodged him and both boys went tumbling to the ground. A boy in a gray tank sat down on the grass and watched the other guys rolling around in the dirt, shaking his head in mild amusement. Maybe that was how the world was really divided, Jan thought, between people who knew how to have a good time, and the people who watched.
Jan stared into Andy’s mirror. Hair was strewn all over the white porcelain sink, which was identical to the sink in Jan’s room. The snips of dirty-blond hair were darker, mousier than Jan had expected. Maybe she should color her hair as well? But that would have to wait for another night. They were already too buzzed to be doing what they were doing.
They’d eac
h had a couple beers before Andy had begun cutting. Classes had started a few days before, but it was a short week and this was how Jan and Andy were celebrating their first Friday evening in college. They had met after class on the quad, gone to CVS to get hair shears, and then walked down to Sheldon Street to buy beer with Andy’s fake ID.
Jan’s hair wasn’t salon-perfect, but that was the point. It came out a little uneven—shorter in the back than the front, and Andy kept trying to even it all out, which meant she cut it shorter than she’d planned—nearly up to Jan’s chin—but the bangs came out better than Jan had imagined, long and fringe-like, so her eyes took on a much deeper green. The bangs made Jan look sexier, less fresh-faced, almost, Jan thought, a little French.
When Jan went back to her room to grab a sweater, Eliza, who’d just gotten up from a late-afternoon nap, had been impressed. “Holla,” she’d said. “There’s a hottie on the hall.” Jan laughed and ran back to Andy’s room feeling carefree and sure of herself for the first time since she’d arrived at Brown.
Now, Andy had produced a joint. Jan took it and inhaled, as though she smoked every day. The fact was, Jan had only smoked pot a few times before. Adam hated the pothead kids at RD, hated the way kids came to class stoned, as though their parents had spent all that money on private school to have their kids go to school wasted out of their brains.
Jan tossed her head and felt the bare back of her neck. “My God, I can’t believe how short it is,” she said, laughing.
The Word for Yes Page 3
