I looked into his eyes, trying to determine if he was talking to me or to Jess, and I felt Jess next to me, trying to determine the same thing. Jinx, I thought, the way kids did when they said the same word at the same time.
We were sideways from a floor-to-ceiling window, and when I checked my reflection, I stood straighter. Jess flicked her hair. I guessed she was thinking about the lipstick in her purse. Me too. So I flicked my hair because she had, and she promptly straightened up.
He folded the glasses and hooked one stem into a jeans pocket. “What’s so funny?” he asked, saying it like he knew already. His back was to the wall, so I couldn’t see his butt, but it had to be good. He wouldn’t wear those jeans if it wasn’t.
Jess said, “Just girl talk.” Her voice overflowed with implication: that there was more, that maybe she’d tell him but maybe not, that time was endless and her flirty games could last into infinity, that a laugh now was as good as easing a tennis ball back at her with a single, graceful stroke. Three words equaled all that.
But he didn’t laugh. That meant something. The silence grew awkward as he glanced my way, his unwavering gaze turning my face hot, though I tried not to show it. There were things I could have said, but I outwaited him. “Maybe you’ll tell me,” he said. “What’s so funny?”
I said, “We’re ranking guys’ asses. And they don’t even know.”
Jess shrieked “Aaaugh” delicately and clutched at her chest with both hands, practically feeling herself up. “No, we’re not,” she said.
The guy locked on to my eyes. His were pale hazel. He didn’t blink, and neither did I, and he said, “What about mine?” and he stepped to the water fountain and pushed the button, letting a stream of water arc as he twisted his head to watch us watching him, scooping back his blond hair with his free hand.
Jess tugged my sleeve like a child. “Let’s go,” she said, puffing out an impatient sigh.
I said, “A-minus.” It was an A butt, which I’m sure he knew, but why give him the pleasure?
He twitched his butt in a goofy little wiggle. “Any extra credit?” he asked.
“Gross,” Jess pronounced. Someone else would walk away. Not her. No way would she leave me alone with him now, convinced she was protecting me.
“Tough crowd,” he said, twisting his head to drink from the fountain. Behind his back, Jess’s raised eyebrows asked me: Are you serious? But he straightened and faced us before I could answer. Anyway, I didn’t know the answer. What I liked about him was that he didn’t like Jess best or maybe at all. I think I thought that was enough. I think I thought that was the point.
He slipped on his glasses, then pushed them way down to the tip of his nose and peered over the black rims. “This is a mother of a headache,” he said. “Either of you got any drugs?”
“No,” Jess said. Her mother’s straitlaced voice.
He stretched wide both arms, hands posed like a Jesus statue, like we should place something precious into them. One palm had numbers written on it in red ink. “It’s a headache,” he said. “I meant aspirin or Tylenol.”
I gasped. “You can’t take Tylenol,” I said. “It’s been poisoned. Didn’t you hear? It’s on all the news.”
“TV’s for suckers,” he said with a crushing but ridiculous sneer.
Jess unzipped her purse, which hung at her hip, and pulled out a white plastic bottle. “Here,” she said, tossing it to him. The pills clattered lightly as he caught it.
“Don’t take that if it’s Tylenol,” I said. “Really.”
He examined the bottle through the lenses of his glasses. “It is,” he said. “Extra strength.” He knew, tacking that on on purpose.
Jess said, “It’s been in my purse forever. It’s fine.”
He unscrewed the top and spilled two capsules into his palm, on top of the inky red numbers. Someone’s phone number. A locker combination. A due date for a paper.
Why did I care? Trying to save the world. Take the pills, I thought, you idiot.
“Afraid?” Jess asked. I shook my head before realizing the question wasn’t for me.
“You only live once,” he said, and he cupped his hand to his mouth, then turned back to the fountain. Water arced. I wasn’t looking at his ass. I was looking at Jess, but now she was looking at his ass. He could fall down dead in five minutes. It happened that fast. Why did no one else care? I almost hoped he would die to prove I was right. What show-offs. I remembered how Jess liked to say “Half of being brave is being stupid.” “What’s the other half?” I’d asked once. “Believing in luck,” she’d said, smirking so I’d understand she thought of herself as lucky.
I unclenched my fists. I closed my eyes and quickly said, “I got to get back to my chapter.” I walked fast, opening my eyes to watch my feet thud the floor, one after the other.
Behind me, Jess laughed and said to him, “You know what they say. Once is enough if you do it right.” Her voice sounded like a pretty shower of confetti. He must have thought so, too, because he laughed right along with her. In the end, it was always Jess. I knew that.
Being quiet wasn’t in Jess’s DNA. But this was four A.M., when anyone else might tiptoe, or not slam shut the door, or not screech, “Shit,” when something crashed, or might shush the guy who called, “Fuck, I’m standing in broken glass.” The laugh was his, the guy from the library. Jess said, “Hang on.” Crunching, footsteps turning to taps on the tile kitchen floor. “I have no idea where the broom is,” she said, and laughed. He laughed. The rough ping-pong of drunk laughing jabbed my gut, making me think I might barf in the trash can, and I breathed quick, shallow breaths, then dragged the pillow over my head, cramming it down hard with my arm. Probably that vase her mother had put on the ledge between the dining and living areas, the one destined to break. Or a lamp. Or who cares. I wanted to shout, “Yes, I hear you! Now go to your room for God’s sake, and I’ll sweep it up tomorrow,” but they’d spiral into laughter if I did or throw out some more curse words. I clamped the pillow tight against my mouth to shut myself up, the trick that worked, the pillow holding me a silent captive—through the toilet flushing, the sink running, footsteps; the fridge popping open, closed, open; and, finally, the soft click of Jess’s door, and I knew they were quiet because they kept urging, “Quiet,” and giggling and grunting and moaning. My sheets became a sweaty mess, not a cool spot anywhere. Each beat of my heart clawed at my chest. Jackrabbit breaths. I knew I wouldn’t sleep, not as long as he was here, even as my mind spilled itself into emptiness.
At six or so, I snuck out to the other room and picked up shards of the glass vase with my fingers and carefully wrapped them in newspaper that I tucked into the trash. The apartment was quiet, draped in the morning gray of a day that hadn’t decided which way it would go. Half this, half that. I didn’t care about that guy. It wasn’t that. Anyway, Jess never saw him again after that night. She couldn’t even remember his name. He called a few times, but I didn’t give her the messages or bother writing the number. His name was Erik. He was very careful when he left those messages, saying, “Erik with a k.”
It was kind of a powerful feeling to do that, to wipe him from existence.
THE THIRD RAIL
(spring, freshman year)
When Jess was bored, she liked to pull together a quick collection of new people. She’d weave herself a whole new domain populated by people she accumulated from random encounters: chatting in line to check out a library book or borrowing a pen in a lecture class or anywhere. She craved surprise, and it was no big deal, creating a sudden influx of new people just for fun. She wanted excitement, variety, new stuff to talk about. I didn’t take any of this personally. She got bored with these new people quickly. The minute she did, it was like taking a broom to an old cobweb up in the corner and knocking it down. No thought that those dusty strands might be home to a spider. That these people might have believed they were real friends.
I was the real friend. We knew that.
; I knew Jess so well that I could spot the onset of this particular boredom, the way you’d spot sniffling at the start of a cold. She’d pace the dorm hallway, lingering at each door’s wipe-off memo board, reading scribbled messages as if hoping to find the answer to a question locked in her head. Or she’d gaze deeply at her face in her makeup mirror—not poking zits or practicing arching one eyebrow—but staring at her eyes, taking out her blue contact lenses and slipping on the glasses she refused to wear out, special-ordered Ray-Bans with clear lenses. She would sit still for ages, staring into super-magnification, dialing the mirror’s glow to the greenish office filter, the harshest light. “It’s all bullshit,” she would pronounce, “right?” and I’d glance up from my book and agree, and there would be more, ranting about the exact vast thing that was the bullshit right this minute—politics, the world, men, capitalism, science, God—and I’d close my finger in my book to mark my page and listen. “Something’s gotta change,” she’d say eventually, “you know?” I’d agree, and the next day she’d be going on about some girl in her psych class with fascinating stories about volunteer coaching a high school softball team last summer on an Indian reservation in South Dakota; then that girl with the cool lace-up boots in the dorm elevator would become “Cammy, you know, on the fourth floor, the expert on the London punk scene”; then it would be “Oh, I forgot I said I’d go to a movie with some people tonight,” meaning, So I’m not going with you like I said I would.
“Okay,” I always said, whether it was Jess not joining me at the library, Osco, Saturday movie night at Tech, the frat party with the Eddy Clearwater Band. One fast word: “okay.”
I couldn’t tell if she wanted me to be jealous. I couldn’t tell if I was.
In my head, I called them the test friends, like Jess was testing to see if they were better than me.
I could have created my own test friends. I knew how it worked. Everyone traveled in a pack in high school. Back there I was fringe, the quiet girl on the edge, no one’s best friend but also not the one gossiped about. The closest I had to a best friend was Janey, whom they loved flinging the gossip on. No one claimed her, so Janey assigned herself to me. She was the friend I had so no one noticed I had no friends.
There were filler girls I knew here, props: Catholic girls on Sunday mornings hovering over free doughnuts after Mass at the student center, all of us forcing awkward chitchat with the priest; girls in lecture classes who swapped notes color coded with highlighter pens and set up study groups for the final; girls who didn’t mind cheering through all four quarters on a sunny football Saturday, who understood rushing versus passing; girls along the dorm hall who made me laugh when we stood in our nightgowns, brushing our teeth at the bathroom sinks; girls who’d walk with me to Burger King for cheap Sunday lunch when the dorm cafeterias were closed. It was easy to feel surrounded by people. And I didn’t mind the pleasant simplicity of surrounding others, which felt different from, and perhaps superior to, Jess’s manic desire to rev herself up with a crazy kaleidoscope of new friends. I drifted and floated, whereas she crashed, usually about two weeks in, howling, “Well, tonight was a total suck,” finding me to postmortem Cammy and her tacky boots and the pathetic (and gross) affectation of safety pins jabbed through earlobes.
So it was nothing when she told me she was going to brunch at the Third Rail with the latest batch, Teresa and Deedee. I gave the usual “okay.” Then she said, “Come with. I want you to meet them.”
I made her repeat the invitation because I didn’t trust that I heard right. She laughed. “Are you afraid or something?” she asked, so right away I said I’d go. It was Sunday and no cafeteria and I had to eat and she knew it. I tried to imagine this would be fun, that I’d like these girls, that it was okay that Jess liked them.
The Third Rail—named for the electrical rail that powered the el trains—was famous for Sunday brunch. It seemed to be a spread of the usual stuff—waffles, bagels, the rest—but really, it was like all-you-can-eat dessert. So bowls of whipped cream for those waffles and tiny pitchers of hot fudge to take to your table. Chocolate chips in the cream cheese for the bagels. Chocolate chips in the pancakes. Chocolate chips to sprinkle in your oatmeal. Everything was turned into dessert or, if not, it was totally fattened up. Quiche was “quiche casserole” with a hash brown crust, three inches high, topped with a layer of sour cream. A man in a tall chef’s hat carved roast beef, and if you didn’t grab his arm to stop him, he globbed your meat with a coating of creamy horseradish sauce. Then there was the real dessert table, towers of densely frosted cupcakes and eight different types of cheesecake. Freshman girls kept the place in business, herding in, dragging visiting parents there, insisting guys spring for morning-after dates.
Jess wasn’t a brunch fan, calling it an excuse to eat like a pig and then sleep like a dog all day, but she went when her parents drove up with Linda, who for some reason loved the Third Rail—“Just to make me insane,” Jess said. “All she actually eats is chocolate chip cream cheese. She licks it right off the knife blade. So embarrassing.” I’d been a couple of times, with a cluster of penny-pinchers who lived down the dorm hall and had to be first in line when it opened at eight A.M., because anyone through the door before nine got two dollars off. There was always a fight about whether to tip on the real per person price or the discount, which spiraled into “Why tip on brunch when all they’re doing is carting off dirty plates?” Last time I shocked myself by advocating generosity, kicking in a couple dollars to jack up the tip, maybe because it mortified me hearing how my own thoughts sounded spoken. The penny-pinchers hadn’t invited me since that betrayal.
I drove over with Jess on Sunday, at a more normal brunch time of 11:30, and because we were late, they’d found a booth. Sitting across from each other, you might think they were sisters because they both had red hair, almost as if Jess had decided, Time for redhead friends. They jumped up and tumbled into Jess’s arms, all of them hugging gaudily, with relief. And because they were introduced to me so fast and because they both had a mass of curly red hair, but mostly because I expected them to be gone soon enough, I didn’t keep track of which was which. They hadn’t known each other until Jess came along. One was from Jess’s psych class, and Jess found the other in line at the bursar’s office, waiting to cash a check. A history major and a theater major. From Connecticut, from Phoenix. Chi O vs. Pi Phi, dogs vs. cats, vegetarian vs. meat, and so on—enough to make anyone think that these two girls with red hair wouldn’t be friends without Jess as the link between them. They had been slumped in the booth, arms crossed, stuck in a slow-moving conversation that appeared composed of single-word answers, but the second they saw Jess, their faces bubbled into smiles. Compliments gushed to Jess on her oversized cardigan sweater, which I had complimented earlier, and there was talk about someone’s new suede boots and someone else worried about rain on the way, all of this talk spilling at once, none of it special or beyond my own conversational skills, and then off to load up our plates. Jess returned with lettuce, raw spinach, alfalfa sprouts, and sliced mushrooms, no dressing—“rabbit food,” one of the girls called it with a giggle, but Jess nudged aside the greenery to reveal the skinniest sliver of pumpkin-walnut cheesecake, and we all fake-gasped. With the penny-pinchers, the routine was five trips to the buffet, focusing on food they wouldn’t feed us at the dorm, like expensive salmon, even if we preferred waffles slathered in whipped cream. I was too edgy to heap up with these redheads watching, so I had the least food—sauceless roast beef, three-cheese pasta salad, roll and butter balls, and two slices of cheesecake: almond amaretto and caramel turtle. Deedee and Teresa were fans of the quiche casserole, which came in three flavors (spinach-mushroom, bacon-Swiss, cheddar-onion), and they had slabs of each, even the vegetarian. That and red hair were knitting them together. And Jess.
Jess poured coffee and passed around the cream. It seemed impossible to imagine conversation for two hours. I could fake a headache. But they’d talk about me if I left.
“So,” one of the girls said. She looked at me, tilting her head as if I were a confusing piece of sculpture. “You know Jess how?”
“We met our first day,” Jess said. “We’re going to be roommates next year. After that we’ll share a cute little apartment off-campus, then be maid of honor in each other’s weddings, and finally live happily ever after a block apart in Chicago till we’re little old ladies.”
“So then you’re best friends?” the other girl asked. Coiled around her neck was a fuchsia-and-orange jacquard scarf that maybe would have looked good on a Frenchwoman or a Theta. If I had to guess, she was the theater major.
“Yes,” I said, exactly as Jess said, “I don’t believe in best friends.”
There was an awkward silence. I smeared a glob of butter onto my roll, rubbed my knife across its slickness over and over, creating a perfectly smooth surface. At home, we sprinkled salt on buttered bread, but I had forced myself out of the habit here.
“Oh, um,” said the girl with the scarf.
“Me neither,” the other girl said. “Ranking people is juvenile. And demeaning.”
“That’s not why,” Jess said, and the girl turned deeply silent, as if slapped on the hand for grabbing candy. I had said “yes” because I thought I was supposed to, but now I concentrated on running my fork tines along the rim of my plate, unwilling to get caught with food cramming my mouth at the wrong time. No one asked, What do you mean then, Jess? though I felt we all wanted to. They were sliding me sideways glances. Jess told me they wanted to meet me, but I bet she had told them the exact same thing, that I wanted to meet them. I would have expected that I would be the one screwing up; I would be the one saying, “I don’t believe in best friends.” Maybe Jess wasn’t screwing up. Maybe this is what she wanted me to know.
Jess said, “‘Best friend’ sounds so possessive, so reductive.”
The red-haired girls looked at each other. Suddenly they looked like they had known each other for a hundred years, like they could tell what the other was thinking.
Silver Girl Page 6
