Psych Major Syndrome

by Alicia Thompson

  Linda’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head. “Okay, well maybe we can talk about that another time,” she said. “But we have other things to do, so let’s just—”

  But there was an earnestness about Rebekah’s face that told me the question wasn’t just her way of heckling me. I wasn’t going to back down from this one. “Because you’re a minor, it would be your parents’ decision, too. I know it sucks, but that’s the way it works.”

  Trying to redirect the issue of abortion back toward teenage pregnancy, I addressed the entire group. “Abortion is a choice legally available to you, but remember that it is not the same as taking precautions to prevent a pregnancy. For example, if you’re seriously considering having sex, you should go to a clinic and—”

  Rebekah cut me off. “Would you get an abortion?”

  Shit. “I…don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  Linda shot in front of me, gathering the index cards from Molly and Kathy/mother-of-Kathy and shooing the girls back to their seats. “All right,” she said, her voice high-pitched. “I think that’s about all we have time for today. We wouldn’t want you girls missing your buses. See you next week!”

  The session erupted in a shuffling of backpacks and a jostling to get to the door, and I turned to Linda in confusion. “They still had five minutes,” I said. “And it seemed like they were actually really listening.”

  “You were encouraging them to have sex,” she hissed, “with all your talk of abortions and clinics and pills.”

  I blinked. “I was trying to give them honest information,” I said. “If it’s already occurred to them to have sex, they’re going to whether we talk about it or not. At least if they had some information they might be better able to protect themselves.”

  Linda snapped her teeth together. “Well, it’s not something we talk about here.”

  She stalked off, leaving me standing there with my index cards, completely flummoxed. I guess the hypothetical babies that we’re always talking about just popped up out of the flower patch or something. So far this mentoring program made absolutely no sense.

  “Nice going,” Ellen said, passing by with a smug smile.

  Ellen would definitely be the other woman in a romance novel. She’d be the one who tried to sabotage the heroine at her job but was eventually caught cheating and taking all the credit for accounts that the heroine had actually put together. She’d get fired, and meanwhile the hero and his beautiful, honest employee would make passionate love on his mahogany desk.

  My lips curved upward into my own superior little smile, but it quickly faded as I remembered the truth of the situation. The truth was that I wasn’t beautiful or honest, and I felt a little silly instructing a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls how not to get pregnant when I couldn’t even figure out how to have sex in the first place.

  I guess it’s weird that I’m the only college-age girl in the UNIVERSE who can date someone for a year and not have sex, but let me explain. Even though I know it’s a completely cheesy, teen-flick kind of thing to do, Andrew and I had planned our first time together to be on prom night. But what those movies never show is the part where your friend ends up crashing your hotel room because he had an older brother pick up three cases of hard lemonade and now he’s crying over a girl who dumped him TWO years ago, at summer camp. They also neglect to tell you that, if your boyfriend ends up visiting his grandparents for a month after graduation and you spend a lot of time scrubbing bathrooms at a B&B, it becomes incredibly awkward to broach the topic of sex again, once that night of teen abandon has passed you by.

  It seemed like going to college would make the whole thing way easier, but it just introduced a new set of complications. I know tons of people who get “sexiled” on a regular basis, and roommates who’ve set up elaborate systems of beads around the doorknob or a special magnet stuck to the metal doors to indicate that they’re taking full advantage of their newfound freedom. But Ami and I had talked about it on one of our first nights, and we both agreed that it was rude to kick someone out of her own room, and it was totally weird to have any overnights when the other one was there.

  Andrew had his own room, but it didn’t solve the problem of the beds. All the beds were twin extralongs, which are basically regular twin beds that have had a sliver cut off the width and added to their length. Or at least, that’s how it seems. I slept over at Andrew’s room just once, in the first week of school, and I ended up sleeping on the floor just because I kept rolling off the edge. Since then, he hadn’t brought it up again, and I always invented some reason why I’d rather go back to my own room, anyway.

  In college, some people created insane opportunities to have sex whenever and wherever they pleased. (I’d even read some anonymous student’s blog about doing it up against the washers in the laundry room, which just gives me more reason to be irritated when people take my clothes out before they’re done and stack them on top.)

  Meanwhile, Andrew and I? We spent all our energy figuring out how to explain why we weren’t having sex.

  How pathetic.

  NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT: A personality trait that is high in people who tend to be concerned with achievement and have pride in their accomplishments. These people avoid high risks (because there is a chance of failure) and low risks (because they won’t generate any sense of achievement).

  SYDNEY called to let me know that the Intro Psych study group would meet at her condo, which was located at the edge of a lush golf course about twenty minutes from school. I heard somewhere that Sydney’s father is this big-time market analyst who makes, like, a thousand dollars a minute consulting for corporations. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sydney’s condo was as nice as it was, but it still blew my mind that someone only three years older than I was could live like she does.

  Sydney opened the door almost before I knocked, as though she’d been waiting. “Leigh! You’re not late! Come on in.”

  I’m not a nut for being punctual or anything, but I’m not one of those people who buys into the whole concept of “Stiles Time,” either, which is supposedly how this college warps your sense of time until you’re chronically ten minutes late for everything. So I put Sydney’s comment down to random bitchiness and stepped through the door. “Nice place,” I commented.

  Sydney dismissed her thousand-dollar furniture and state-of-the-art entertainment system with a flick of her wrist. “I recently redecorated the study,” she said. “Here, let me show you what I’ve done with the place.”

  Reluctantly, I started to follow her, and caught myself when I stumbled over a huge lump on the floor.

  It was a cat. And not just any cat. This was the biggest, meanest cat I’d ever seen. It looked like it could crush an armadillo in its jaws, and it had the beady eyes of a crocodile. It was more than a cat. It was a Linda Blair movie.

  “Oh, that’s Sir Wug,” Sydney said. “Careful. She’s in perpetual heat.”

  Like mistress, like cat. “She?”

  Feeling another pair of beady eyes watching me, I noticed Ellen perched on the couch, the straight line of her back barely grazing the cushions as she regarded me with displeasure. I guess she was still upset about the whole mentoring thing.

  “Hey,” I said, to test it out.

  “Hello,” she replied icily. Yeah, she wouldn’t be giving me a BFF locket anytime soon. Although I still didn’t understand why she was taking my role in the mentoring group so personally.

  “Um…” I said to Sydney. “Did she already take the tour?” As vile as Ellen was, I did not want to be alone with Sydney.

  “Sydney showed me around earlier,” Ellen said, and I thought I saw her shudder.

  It didn’t take me long to realize why. Let’s just say that the only thing Sydney has in common with Martha Stewart is her penchant for cheating. Mostly her decor consisted of naked pictures of herself that were supposed to seem “artistic,” but instead just looked like she really, really wan
ted to show off her body. Which isn’t that great, and I’m not just being bitchy. Her boobs looked really weird.

  For the pièce de résistance, Sydney ushered me into her study. “As you can see, I got a new Mac,” she said, gesturing to the small laptop on her desk. “I had had my old one for over a year, so it was getting a little slow.”

  Probably from all those naked pictures she was loading onto it. Right next to the laptop, where I’m sure she wanted me to see it, was a glossy 5x7 of her butt in profile, right where it starts to curve into the top of the leg. I averted my gaze.

  “Is that a new desk chair?” I asked, as though I cared. It was leather, and looked much nicer than the barely padded chairs they gave us in the dorms. Our chairs didn’t have wheels on them, either, so if you lived on the first floor you could totally hear the person above you scraping their chair back and forth on the linoleum.

  “No, I’ve had that. And the desk and bookshelf were here before.”

  Okay, someone would have to explain to Sydney that “redecorating” did not mean having Daddy buy you a new laptop and putting a picture of your naked body on your desk. I just wasn’t going to volunteer to be the one to do it.

  “They’re nice,” I said lamely. “Maybe we should go back to the living room and see if Joanna and Jenny are here yet.”

  Luckily, Sydney just shrugged and we left her study, which had been starting to give me the creeps. After only ten minutes in her condo, I had this weird crawling sensation on my skin, as if a stray piece of hair had come undone from my ponytail and was brushing against my back. Maybe it’s the fact that everything feels vaguely ’80s, even despite the brand-new Mac and wide-screen HDTV. It wasn’t in that cool Napoleon Dynamite sort of way, either. More in an uncomfortable, greasy time warp way, kind of like that Strokes video for “Last Night.” Some things just shouldn’t look that authentic.

  Joanna and Jenny had just arrived, and so we spent a few minutes in the living room making awkward small talk that mostly revolved around A) Sydney’s thesis (on whether bumblebees will give preference to light or sound, or something equally lame), B) our classes, and C) our opinions of professors. Joanna and I spent a few moments commiserating over how difficult it was to make an appointment with Dr. Harland before Sydney cut in.

  “All right,” she said. “We should really get to work. So does everyone have their stuff?”

  I pulled out my Intro Psych notebook. Ellen had brought a small accordion-style file with papers neatly organized by the different areas of psychology. Ellen and Joanna also both had their textbooks. I knew Ellen would be a card-carrying member of the “suckers who buy textbooks” club, but I hadn’t expected Joanna to buy into the hype.

  Only Jenny’s hands were empty, her eyes wide and stricken. “I forgot,” she said, her voice the merest thread of a whisper.

  I’ve heard Ellen refer to Jenny as GAD Girl, referring to the acronym for Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I wouldn’t go that far, but sometimes I do wonder how Jenny dresses herself in the morning. We haven’t even gotten through one whole semester yet, and already she seems like she’s one midterm away from madness, one deadline from a nervous breakdown.

  Supposedly the Intro Psych TAs have a bet going on about whether she’ll finish out the year, which I think is kind of mean. Also bad money sense for those rooting for Jenny, because she has a better chance of having a piano fall on her head than of making it through the finals.

  Sydney rolled her eyes. “Just sit there and listen,” she said. “That’s probably what you would have done anyway.”

  Jenny nodded meekly, her face redder than her hair as she slumped back on the couch. I tried to give her a slightly encouraging smile, but her head was down and it didn’t look like she was going to make eye contact for the rest of the night.

  “So, first off,” Sydney said, addressing the rest of us, “let’s just start by getting to know each other. Why don’t you guys tell me about where else you applied, and why you chose to come to Stiles.”

  Ellen leaped to answer, ticking off a list of schools that made my jaw drop. Pretty much every school in the United States that contained the word university in its name was on her list, including all the Ivy Leagues.

  “I got into Yale, actually, but I chose Stiles for its uniquely independent approach to education.”

  “The fact that Yale costs, like, fifty thousand dollars per semester probably had something to do with it,” I muttered.

  Ellen’s eyes challenged me. “Sorry?” she said, but she didn’t sound very sorry.

  As if I were going to give her exactly what she wanted—a rational reason to hate me, instead of the numerous irrational ones she seemed to harbor now. “That’s just a lot of schools,” I said. Her parents probably couldn’t afford Yale after they declared bankruptcy from the thousands of dollars in application fees, SAT prep classes, and transcripts for the application process alone.

  Maybe there were diminishing dollar signs in my eyes, because Ellen got my drift perfectly. “My parents pay for anything school-related,” she said with a toss of her head. “They believe that my education is the most important thing in the world.”

  How nice. I wondered if they considered her fiancé “school-related,” since as far as I knew he was living in Ellen’s dorm rent-free and she paid his car insurance.

  “What about you, Leigh?” Joanna asked. “Where did you apply?”

  “Just Stiles,” I said.

  “Just Stiles?” Ellen repeated. “That’s stupid. What if you hadn’t gotten in? You wouldn’t have gone anywhere.”

  Sydney’s eyes sharpened. “Was Andrew already going to go to Stiles? Was that why you applied?”

  This was a no-win question. If I said no, then it looked like Andrew and I didn’t care about staying together. If I said yes, then I looked like a typically sappy girl who planned her life around her high school boyfriend.

  “He’d looked into it.” I hedged, hoping she would drop it. Truthfully, Andrew had mapped out his college plans by the tenth grade (as you can see, not a lot had changed). By the time we started dating, he was already set on Stiles. I didn’t really care, and the school had pretty convincing brochures (if they don’t offer a class, you can start it yourself!) so I decided I’d apply there, too.

  “So what about grad school?” Sydney asked. “Are you guys planning on going to the same school?”

  “I’m not ruling anything out,” I said. “We’ll just have to see how it goes.”

  I noticed that no one was asking Ellen what her fiancé planned to do while she studied in Pennsylvania or Hawaii or Wisconsin or whichever of the fifty states she would apply to grad school in. I didn’t know a lot about him, except that he worked at the three-cent copy place and that he and Ellen were constantly bickering.

  Which, unfortunately, I can kind of relate to. And to think, I used to be so smug about my relationship with Andrew.

  “I think that’s radical,” Joanna put in, nodding her approval and effectively silencing Sydney. “There’s no need to make any hasty decisions at this point.”

  From the first day of Intro Psych, I marked Joanna as someone I wanted to meet. She’s just…interesting. For one thing, she’s one of the biggest girls I’ve ever seen. And I don’t mean in that euphemistic “she’s not fat, she’s big-boned” sort of way. I mean that she’s really just a big girl. Her legs are these sturdy, tanned columns beneath her boardshorts, gleaming with health and energy. Seriously—I don’t know if she oils them or what, but they totally gleam. She’s almost six feet tall, and she has this incredible white blond hair, which I’m pretty sure is real, since her blue eyes are framed by strikingly white eyelashes. I’ve always had this weird sensation that in another life, Joanna was a tree.

  My New Agey parents would be proud.

  “So, what about Nathan? What’s his deal?” Sydney asked, her eyes getting that weird glint again.

  “Who’s Nathan?” Ellen glanced from me to Sydney, not liking being excluded.
Jenny briefly lifted her head, as though she were interested, but her scraggly red hair quickly fell back to cover her face.

  “Are you kidding me? He’s only, like, the hottest freshman.” Sydney sighed dramatically, and I rolled my eyes. Couldn’t she find a guy her own age?

  “He’s Andrew’s roommate,” I explained, since I didn’t think the description “hottest guy” would produce a police sketch artist’s likeness anytime soon. “He’s planning to be a math major.”

  Joanna wrinkled her nose. “So hot but a little boring, huh?”

  I could think of a lot of things to call Nathan, but oddly, “boring” wasn’t one of them. “More like self-righteous,” I said, and immediately felt a twinge of guilt. Not that I had any reason to feel guilty—I’m sure he’d said worse about me. And just because he helped me out when I was in a tight spot with my paper didn’t mean it was a betrayal to talk behind his back. Right?

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly be asking him to give a guest lecture,” Sydney said with a lascivious smirk. “I’m sure we could find more interesting things to do.”

  Gross.

  “Okay, Mrs. Robinson,” I said. “Let’s get back on task.” Never thought I’d be saying that.

  “Actually, I don’t really need any help in Intro Psych,” Ellen said. “I took AP psychology in high school.”

  I had taken that class, too, and AP statistics. But I was here because I’d been coerced into it by Sydney’s conversational wizardry (and also, because Stiles didn’t believe in letting you “test out” of anything, a fact which I was totally cursing right now. Invent your own classes, my ass).

  “So why did you bother to come?” I asked. Which, given the fact that I was here for pretty dubious reasons myself, was a little snarky. Like I cared.

  “I don’t like to be left out,” Ellen said. Well, I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step toward getting help. “And I have some questions for Sydney. You’re applying to grad schools now, right? Do you have any tips that will help me when I apply in three years?”