“What are you girls up to?” he called out.
Considering at that point the magazine was open to a page of tips on getting the most out of your sex toys, I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “Um, not much,” I said.
“You know, Ami, I spent some time in the Big Apple myself!”
“Oh, yeah?” she said, making a face at me.
“Have you ever seen those I Love New York shirts?” he asked. “But instead of the word ‘love,’ there’s a big red heart? I bought one of those in the airport the last time I went. ’Cause it’s so true!”
Is he serious? she mouthed at me. I shrugged.
“Uh…yeah,” she said. “I heart NY. I bought one of those from some vendor on the street for, like, five dollars.”
I choked on a laugh.
“Ooh, on the street! No wonder Leigh wanted you to come along,” Tim exclaimed. “You’re a woman of the world.”
A weird guttural voice was now coming softly from the radio and, obviously eager to change the subject, Ami capitalized on it. “Is that French?” she asked.
Tim turned up the music a little. “Ah, Ami, obviously you’ve still got a lot to learn. But don’t be embarrassed—a lot of people think that! It’s actually a mystical language created entirely for Cirque du Soleil. I can understand this song, but alas, I am not yet fluent in all of it!”
What a freak. He turned the music back up all the way, and Ami and I went back to giggling in the backseat, although this time it was over Tim and his music rather than the Cosmo in our laps.
“I Love New York?” Ami whispered. “Really?”
“Hey, a girl who can buy T-shirts in midtown is the kind I need by my side in the big, bad world of Rice-A-Roni.”
Ami giggled, turning the page from the sex toys article, but the next one wasn’t any better. My own smile faded a little as I saw it.
“The Secret to Being Good in Bed.” I didn’t even have to skim the article to figure out what it would say. For one thing, I’m sure a willingness to have sex at all was a prerequisite.
Although there were variations, all these articles basically boiled down to the same thing: self-confidence. Men don’t care as much about technique in bed as they do about self- confidence and enthusiasm. They want a woman who’s less concerned with sucking in her stomach and more interested in…well, you know.
It was the type of article that was meant to reassure those women who were already sex goddesses, while ignoring those who were nothing like that and had no clue how to be.
Just once I’d like to see an article called “Who Cares About Sex Anyway?” or “Caution: The Ultimate Aphrodisiac.”
After a swift glance at my face, Ami shut the magazine and slipped it into her duffel bag. I’m sure she’s dying of curiosity about what happened between Andrew and me, but I’m not ready to discuss it with her yet. In a weird way it was easier to discuss it with Rebekah, who didn’t know the situation. I knew Ami was a little hurt by my not talking about it, but I couldn’t help it.
Up in the front seat, Li was pointing at something outside the window, and Tim turned down the music again to figure out what was going on.
“Why that person standing outside with sign?” Li was asking, gesturing wildly toward a man on the curb. Ami and I both craned our necks to look out the window. It was one of those typical “grand opening” shindigs at some Mexican restaurant, complete with a man wearing a sombrero and a sandwich board that read eat at jorge’s!
“He’s advertising,” Tim said, and I could tell by the tone of his voice that he didn’t see what the big deal was, either.
This answer didn’t appease Li. “Why they don’t get real sign?” Li asked, flabbergasted.
“It’s just for attention,” I explained. “They hire a person to do it so people driving by will notice it more.”
“Oh.” For a moment Li was silent while he thought about this. “He get paid money?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “He gets paid money.”
Even though I was staring at the back of his head, I could practically see the dollar signs light up in Li’s eyes. One thing I’d learned in the half hour we’d been in the van was that Li was very concerned with money. It was, like, all he talked about.
“How much money?” he asked eagerly.
What was I, the census bureau? “I don’t know,” I said.
“Not much,” Tim added. “But more than minimum wage, I would hope!”
Li made a pooh-poohing sound. “Not worth it,” he proclaimed. “I only do for lots of money!”
During the trip Li asked how much money he could make operating a tollbooth, driving a delivery car, and selling rugs by the side of the road. He even made Tim tailgate a car that advertised how to “Be Your Own Boss” while he wrote down the phone number.
In my personal favorite query, he asked Tim how much the college would pay him to be a professor. Tim was taking him seriously until it became obvious that Li wanted the college to hire him now, before he’d even graduated. Tim had to explain to him that you can’t simultaneously be a student and a professor at the same school.
When we were only a few miles from the hotel, we had to make an emergency stop at a Kinko’s. Tim sprang it on us that we would have to do a reading of our work at the awards ceremony, which neither of us was prepared to do. I wasn’t in such bad shape. I’d brought a copy of my paper just to look over, and I was pretty good at improvising presentations. Since all I had to do was read an excerpt from it anyway, I’d be fine.
Li, on the other hand, started freaking out. He hadn’t brought a copy of his poem, and there was only a slight hope that it had been saved in his e-mail somewhere. So on the back of the paper with the “Be your own boss” phone number, Li started trying to recompose the poem. I had no idea how the original one had sounded, but the new one was pretty hilarious. I wondered if the contest officials would realize he was reading a different poem.
We pulled into the Kinko’s so that Li could check his e-mail and retrieve the original. Because of the delay, we weren’t going to have the chance to drop by our rooms first, and Ami and I went into the Kinko’s bathroom to change into our awards ceremony clothes. Of course in Ami’s case, that meant some kind of crazy getup complete with leggings, a polka-dot dress, and huge silver earrings shaped like saxophones.
Whenever I check out Ami’s dress style, I teeter for a few minutes between horror and admiration. This time I watched her pour some kind of heavy gold glitter eye makeup all over her eyelids before I finally settled on admiration. “I just don’t know how you do it,” I said, shaking my head.
Ami didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It’s not as easy as it looks,” she said. “Contrary to how it might appear, I don’t throw on whatever I feel like. This is actually a very well-planned ensemble.”
I was sure it was, although I had personally witnessed Ami tossing clothes out of her dresser drawers, flinging them over her shoulders like she was in some I Love Lucy episode, and then wearing whatever happened to land on top.
I’d borrowed Ami’s flats again, but other than that, I looked pretty much the same as I always did. Slightly nicer long-sleeved shirt, with slightly nicer black pants. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go for this thing.
Ami and I finally emerged from the bathroom to find Li asking the Kinko’s copy guy how much he made working there. The pimply-faced kid was clearly uncomfortable, but doing his best to hide it. I decided to rescue him.
“Come on, Li,” I said, gesturing to the paper in his hand. “Now that you have your poem, we should get going. We’d hate to be late to the awards ceremony.”
Li’s face brightened at the prospect. He was really hyped to read his stupid cherry blossoms poem. Not that I knew for a fact it was stupid—the reworking of it had been, but perhaps it was unfair to judge based on a cheap copy done in fifteen minutes while sitting in a Dodge Caravan. I’m sure Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” would have sounded equally inane in such cond
itions.
Or maybe I was giving Li too much credit.
It wasn’t long before we reached the hotel where the awards ceremony was being held, and we snuck in the back, hoping no one would notice that we were a little late. Luckily, the keynote speaker was just wrapping up his speech, which appeared to be something about the many different ways that we use writing. Like that hasn’t been done to death.
They had to go through several categories before they got to us, so Ami and I amused ourselves by whispering snide comments about each contestant. Tim shot us quelling looks—or at least, I think that’s what he was going for. It was hard to tell, since his face is so open and unlined, with eyes that always twinkle. It’s hard to take a forty-year-old Boy Scout seriously.
One thing I noticed as people got up to present their papers—only the first- and second-place winners actually read excerpts of their work. That meant that I would still have to read, but Li wouldn’t. I glanced over at him, expecting to see profound disappointment on his face. Hell, I was a little disappointed for the kid. He had just seemed so pleased to get the opportunity to read his stupid (or genius that sounded stupid when rewritten in a van) poem. But he just stared straight ahead, the smile on his face as wide and steady as though he were posing for a picture.
Finally it got to underclassman research. I sat up straighter in my chair, and Ami gave my arm a little squeeze.
The crane-looking woman behind the podium read out my name. “And in second place, we have Leigh Nolan with her essay entitled ‘Food for Thought.’ Congratulations, Leigh.”
I was already halfway out of the row, Tim giving me the thumbs-up as I passed, but I couldn’t muster a thumbs-up in return. “Food for Thought?” That’s it?
The title of my paper was supposed to be “Food for Thought: Cognitive Approaches to Treating Bulimia.” In that context, my title made sense—was clever, even. But without the subtitle, it didn’t sound clever. It sounded like one of those idiotic online zines—the ones that list supposedly existential questions like: Why does Hawaii have interstates? or Why do you drive on a parkway but park in a driveway?
Weakly, I shook crane woman’s hand and stepped behind the podium.
“The title—” I began—and then I had to stop to adjust the microphone. When I spoke again, it was weird to hear my voice boom out, ricocheting around the room, and I almost jumped back.
“The full title of my paper is actually ‘Food for Thought: Cognitive Approaches to Treating Bulimia,’” I said. “I’ll give everyone a second if you’d like to pencil that in your program.”
I waited, but I didn’t see anyone reaching for a writing implement of any kind. Finally I cleared my throat.
“All right, so I’m going to read for you the last section of my paper, which discusses various cognitive aspects of bulimia,” I said, and began reading. Despite the somewhat shaky beginning, I could feel the audience start to get into it—or at least, as into a research paper about eating disorders as you can get.
In my opinion, the study in the excerpt I chose to read was a particularly interesting one. Basically, it discussed bulimics’ performance on a Stroop task, which is a task where words are presented in different colors. The participant is supposed to say the color, not the word, but sometimes, if it’s a word that “interferes,” they hesitate on the color or read the word instead.
In bulimics, there have been several studies that showed that they tend to perform worse on Stroop items that deal with body image. But a subsequent study found that bulimics also performed poorly when presented with other threat words that did not reflect eating or weight, such as “pain” or “isolation,” thus suggesting some kind of emotional component to the disorder other than mere body-image distortions.
Because my paper was originally written for my high school psychology teacher and I had apparently not taken that into consideration when I adapted it for the contest, I had to ad-lib a little spiel about the Stroop task that had never been formally outlined in the paper. It’s just one of those things that anyone affiliated with psychology should know, like Milgram’s conformity studies or Freud’s obsession with sex and mothers.
All in all, it went pretty well. I sat down to a round of applause that, after I listened to the polite smattering the first-place winner got, made me feel as if maybe people had actually listened to my paper and liked it. For the first time, I started to think this contest had been a good idea even without the whole psych clique competitiveness thing.
Then they got to the underclassman creative writing awards. Crane woman called Li up, and Ami and I clapped as he rose from his seat. Then I noticed that he had something in his hand…his poem. Confused, I leaned over to whisper in Ami’s ear.
“Is he supposed to present that?” I said. “None of the other third-place winners did.”
She shrugged. “Maybe he just forgot to put it down.”
We watched him reach the podium, where crane woman was holding out her hand for him to shake it. But instead of shaking her hand, he brushed past her and stood in front of the microphone. Li was actually going to read his poem! This was going to be incredible.
“Everybody, relax,” he said into the microphone. He had no trouble speaking loudly into it, and immediately his heavy Chinese accent filled the room. “Close your eye, close your eye!”
I stifled a laugh. Everyone looked confused, especially crane woman, who still had her hand slightly stretched out as though expecting him to take it. Li repeated his demand for everyone to close their “eye,” and reluctantly, some people obeyed.
“My poem,” he said, stretching out the word to make it po-EM, “is called ‘Cherry Blossoms.’” He held the paper in front of him, snapping it dramatically as he began to read.
“Cherry blossom fall from the sky,” he began. “Wrapped up in the most see-through butterfly. Cherry blossom catch on the wind. Cherry blossom want to be our friend. Cherry blossom…”
It was just as bad as the van version. Maybe worse. Some of the lines were kind of pretty, and I have to give him credit for working in rhymes of “awesome” and “opossum,” but mostly it was just meaningless. If this poem was worthy of third place, I shuddered to think of the runners-up.
What really made this version of the poem worse was its length. Every time it seemed to be wrapping up, it went on for another eight stanzas, and then it did it all over again. I had fully gotten over my amusement and moved into nod-ding off before Li finally stepped away from the podium. This time he held out his hand, and crane woman absently shook it, looking as though she had just been abducted by aliens.
Li sat down, and the second- and first-place winners presented their pieces, but nothing could compare to the moment when I saw Li push crane woman aside and order everyone to relax. For the rest of the ceremony, there was just no beating that for sheer entertainment value.
Afterward we all sat at a little table with plates of hors d’oeuvres. Ami laughed over Li’s stunt and gave him serious props for his nerve, but he just blinked.
“What I do?” he asked. “I just want to read ‘Cherry Blossoms.’”
Somehow that made it better. Li really seemed oblivious to the huge scene he had caused and the looks on the contest directors’ faces.
“Well, it was a very nice poem,” I lied.
“Thank you.” He beamed. “But I want it to win first place. That why I enter contest—for the money.”
The first-place winner was awarded one hundred dollars, the second-place winner won fifty dollars, and the third-place winner took home a free Mark Twain anthology. I could tell by the way Li looked at his anthology—as though it were a dead rat found behind the stove—that he was not too thrilled with one of America’s finest writers. Or at least, not as thrilled as he would have been with one hundred bucks.
“Sell the book,” I suggested. “Then you’ll make money.”
I glanced around, looking at all the uptight people from other schools trying to mingle while surreptitiously
wiping sticky fingers on their pants or the dark green tablecloths. It struck me as funny that here we were, a table of three misfits from one of the smaller and lesser-known colleges, so insular and disgruntled that we hadn’t won first place that we couldn’t be bothered to interact with anyone else.
It occurred to me that throughout this entire day, I hadn’t worried about the situation with Andrew at all. I’d known it would be a good idea to take a little break from each other—I just hadn’t expected to be so successful at it.
Later that night, when Ami and I were sitting on the hotel beds in our pajamas, I considered talking to her a little about Andrew. But for some reason I still couldn’t. We talked about a ton of other stuff—Li’s stunt, school, even one of the surfer guys at Joanna’s party who had gotten Ami’s number but hadn’t called yet. It felt good to advise Ami on her love life, since it took attention away from mine.
Finally, when pauses between conversation started getting longer and longer, we turned off the lights and went to bed. I could tell by Ami’s soft snoring that she dropped off almost immediately, but I just lay there, staring at the shafts of light from the window blinds.
Then, all of a sudden, the wall started to shake a little. I turned to look at Ami, but she was dead to the world. Then I heard it. The people in the next room were having sex.
And not normal sex, either. The guy appeared to be making some weird growling noise, and the woman just kept repeating the same thing over and over: “OhGodthatfeelssogood, ohGodthatfeelssogood, ohGodthatfeelssogood.”
Perfect. I tried to put my pillow over my head, but I could still hear it. I felt like pounding on the wall and telling them to keep it down. And there was shorthand for ohGodthatfeelssogood—it was called a moan. It seemed to me that if she had the energy to repeat that whole sentence, maybe it wasn’t as good as she was claiming. Your woman’s faking it! I wanted to scream through the wall, just to shut them up if nothing else.
Eventually the sounds died down, and I drifted off to sleep, the pillow still over my head.
That night I dreamed I was walking along the beach, the sun peeking over the edge of the water. For some reason I knew it was sunrise rather than sunset, which made it more surreal, because we never see the sun rise over the water here. I was wearing a skirt as white and foamy as the waves, and my feet were bare.
Psych Major Syndrome Page 13
