pleeeeeeeease order with me and Dev tonight??? 3-for-2 calzone night the couples are ditching us.
I hadn’t realized Amie and Alec were dating.
The keyboard of my laptop clicked as I typed an answer. The minute hand on the clock moved from just before the seven to just after the eight before I hit send. We weren’t friends yet. Instantaneous replies might have looked desperate and I liked Cleo. Boarding school was a way to get out, to build my own identity and follow the myth of reinvention vaunted by brochures and bad TV shows. My bio teacher may have been droning on about evolution right now, but I didn’t have millennia. This was an opportunity, my shot, and I wasn’t about to blow it.
Devin and Cleo were already at the front gate at six to meet the delivery car from Italian Kitchen. I waved, holding a ten between my fingers. Her hair formed a half-halo with spiky tines behind her right ear: a Budweiser crown askew. She must have looped and flipped her hair into an elastic the same way I had, except that mine just hung awkwardly.
Devin and I hung back as she somehow slid to the front of the line of waiting students to get our food from the delivery guy. She leaned a little too far into his car to take the bag, her head slipping through the window. When she emerged, even I could recognize the satisfaction in her pursed lips, her lifted chin, the unordered can of Diet Coke in her hand.
We took our calzones to the library steps. Devin finished his and half of mine in the hour we spent there. I was glad to be in the middle. Their conversation still mostly happened over my head, but at least no one had their back to me. I didn’t mind smiling, nodding and laughing in the appropriate places.
Listening to the conversation was working for me. That is, until Cleo got bored gossiping about the rest of the campus and Devin’s summer at home in Los Angeles.
“Let’s play a game.” Cleo closed the container still holding half of her chicken Alfredo calzone, putting a last piece of cheese in her mouth. She glanced down at me. “Never Have I Ever.”
I had played “Never Have I Ever” all through middle school, asking about kisses and porn amidst the giggles of eighth graders too inexperienced to know they were inexperienced. Those games were usually won by the people who had kissed a boy, had a crush on a high school guy or walked in on their siblings hooking up. In other words, not me.
As I learned quickly, Cleo always brought a different set of rules, starting with her fingers behind her back.
Dev smirked at her. “Never have I ever done a Robo-trip.”
Someone had talked about it during Orientation: getting high off Robitussin.
Cleo rolled her eyes. “You’re an asshole. New rules.” Her voice rattled off black mark after black mark against my name, as my fingers stayed up and theirs dropped rapidly; never have I ever gone streaking, smoked pot, snuck into the guys’ dorms, hooked up in water, hooked up under the bushes on campus… Every time I thought there was no way, someone rolled their eyes and I knew a finger dropped. The only three I had done were pathetic in comparison: stolen from a parent, cut class, smoked a cigarette. And it had only been twenty bucks. In the end, Cleo was the first to signal defeat. I put down my remaining seven fingers and withdrew my hands. Dev had one finger up, which he displayed and thrust in Cleo’s face before putting it down.
Dev’s inappropriate finger gestures distracted me, so I didn’t realize Cleo had seen my fingers until she spoke and I spun around to face her.
“Someone’s still a virgin.” Her conclusion wasn’t cruel, just Cleo: blunt and snarky and not giving a damn what anyone else thought. The only good thing about that moment was that my back was to Dev. My cheeks felt sunburned from the inside out.
“Maybe.” The days of moral authority were long gone. Despite the kilts, the rules, the Sex Ed classes that warned about awkwardly timed babies and awkwardly placed warts, the scarlet letter of modern high school had become V. I had already been tried, convicted and branded.
Just great.
But as embarrassed as I was, it changed the flow of the conversation, and I stopped being the monkey in the middle, trying to catch the conversation flying over my head.
Dev just laughed, resting an arm over my shoulders. “We can’t all be like you, Cleo. Water? Really.”
She raised the crafted arch of one dark eyebrow. “And he was more a man than you’ll ever be, Kennedy.”
“So how far have you gone?” He turned to me, suddenly interested.
I figured this had to be one of those times they tell you is perfectly acceptable for lying. “I don’t kiss and tell.” I tried to sound flirtatious. I probably sounded about as sexy as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club.
But hey, if that was what you went for.
Dev leaned in, arm still around my shoulders. He was wearing that smile, the one that said that he had gone more than far enough. “I always make them tell.”
“Be nice.” Cleo stood up, grabbing the Styrofoam container that still held part of a calzone. “We should get out of here. Don’t want the RDs on my ass this early in the year.” I couldn’t decide whether I was thrilled to get out of there or disappointed to leave Dev at the door to our dorm. It really was too bad he was way out of my league. The pretty boys, the football jocks, the popular guys of the world seemed oblivious to girls like me who lacked double Ds, French manicures and perfectly hemmed kilts. Why we wanted those boys if they wanted that didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t going to change. Fortunately, there was nothing stopping me from enjoying this for as long as it lasted.
Instead of doing homework, Cleo and I watched a movie after Lights Out and I collapsed on the shag rug in her single around one in the morning. No one had singles except hall monitors, who apparently earned the boon of privacy with their contribution to dorm life, according to my counselor. How and why Cleo was in that position of authority was still a mystery to me.
My roommate ignored me the next morning as I stumbled in, grabbed my uniform, toothbrush and canned espresso shot, and stumbled out. Then again, Josie only ever showed a penchant for religious music and home-cooked lasagna in airtight Rubbermaid containers complemented by a total dislike of everything me. She was also preoccupied with not letting a centimeter of pale skin between neck and knee show as she changed into uniform. That didn’t seem to make much sense, since I saw her hot pink underwear before I left the room. It seemed more important that she always turned up the Jesus music, just for me.
Stiff and dry-eyed from leaving my contacts in overnight, I fit in well with the rest of the student body. Teachers began their endless task of shaking slumped-over students and I fell easily into the pattern of halfheartedly finishing my homework in class. Orientation replaced drama today, and Nicky and Scott were missing at lunch, thanks to a shared free period.
It hadn’t been a bad week. Still, my feet dragged coming up the stairs Thursday after classes. I was focusing very hard on the last five yards to my room as I turned the corner, past my counselor’s office into the home stretch.
“Elizabeth!” Crap. I turned around, fixing a smile on my face as I faced my counselor. For a woman who lived in a building with fifty high schoolers, she wasn’t half bad, and she was definitely several steps above and several decades younger than the RDs.
“Hey, Ms. Clemens.”
“Come on in.” She waved, barely visible behind the stacks of folders on her desk. I hated to think what kind of information about me was on that desk. My feet shuffled into her office and my arms dropped my bag on the floor with a relieved relaxation borne of carrying the forty pounds of it around all day.
“I’m trying to get to know all of the new girls.” She was still shuffling papers, looking up at me every few words with a big smile. “Talk to all of you individually. We’ve got a great group this year.”
“Yeah, for sure.” I don’t think it was too convincing. Our dorm had gotten the apparently standard collection of girls who were painfully shy and girls who weren’t quite shy enough, especially when it c
ame to senior boys.
“I’m particularly excited we have such a smart group.” My heart sank at her last two words. “Two Ritter scholars, you and that freshman, Maddie? I don’t know if you two know each other. She’s very sweet.”
Maddie had practically run into the dorm when she saw me, Cleo and Devin walking back to the dorm last night. I could sympathize with that reaction to Cleo and Dev, even if I saw myself more as scared than scary. She was in a lot of classes with people in my grade, though. Focused, intense and book-smart, she was more what you’d expect from someone on the full-ride Ritter scholarship. She was also kind of my worst nightmare.
“Yeah, she seems really nice. I haven’t talked to her much yet, though.”
Worst nightmare might have been an exaggeration. Still, I was terrified of being Maddie.
Clemens smiled, probably seeing our dorm GPA rising in her mind’s eye. “I see you’ve been spending a lot of time with Cleo?”
I shrugged.
“She’s been such an asset to this dorm. I don’t know what we’re going to do without her next year.”
It was hard not to laugh at that. Cleo would never strike me as an authority figure’s best friend.
“I just want you to know you can come to me with anything.”
I’d heard that one before. Clemens was youngish and didn’t seem that bad. She was even wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, instead of shapeless clothes that attempted to hide the twenty pounds perpetually in the process of being lost. Still. Trying to imagine sitting in her office and talking about my latest guy problem? Maybe ideal for Josie, but it didn’t exactly seem like a great idea.
Not that I had any. Guys, I mean. There was always a plethora of problems. Like Cleo had pointed out: in every sense of the word, I was about as virginal as it got. Thanks to my second and most recent boyfriend, I had been felt up, in that awkward fumbling middle school way. I hadn’t exactly had quality or quantity when it came to guys, and it wasn’t for lack of trying
Freshman year was supposed to be my year to come out of my shell, to have some fun, get in some trouble, laugh too hard and drink too much with my friends. They had gone through with it, going out and hooking up. It wasn’t until December that I realized I was always getting Sunday morning, rather than Friday night, calls, listening as they bitched about hangovers and moaned about accidental hookups. They stopped calling when they found distractions: a boyfriend, a clique. Pot.
So I didn’t think I would have to worry about Cleo’s warning that Clemens would call home if she thought I was having sex. Her aversion to drugs, alcohol or crash dieting, maybe, if I was lucky. But I didn’t think sex would be a problem.
During my brief stint as a space cadet, Clemens had been listing reasons that I could come talk to her. She had just reached the all-encompassing “…chat! I’m always here after classes.”
“Definitely.” I tried to make my smile warm. It was nothing personal. Really.
She smiled. “I think this is going to be a great year. One last question.” Of course. “We’re trying to compile a list of tutors within the dorm, in case people are having trouble with anything.”
That request always came eventually: help the intellectually destitute. I hated it. “Yeah, sure. Put me down for something.” Hopefully, something no one would need. I still can’t stand trying to teach people things they don’t think they need or want to know. It’s even worse when I agree with them.
“You’re in precalculus, right?”
I nodded and took the offered escape. “Yeah, and I have a ton of homework for tomorrow. You know Hamilton.”
She laughed. “Absolutely. Go ahead.”
I grabbed my bag and fled as quickly as my feet would allow. It wasn’t exactly a lie that I had a ton of homework. I just wasn’t going to do all that homework. Or any. I could usually get enough done in class or at lunch.
This was another one of those things that seemed like an acceptable lie.
The first time it happened freshman year was history class. The teacher had asked and I had forgotten to place a filter between synapse and sentence before I answered. Everyone else in the class had no interest in hearing how I couldn’t help that I remembered this stuff from middle school. They were especially uninterested when it happened again: talking about something our teacher hadn’t covered in just a little too much detail.
So maybe I was even a little bit interested. It’s hardly a crime. But lately it seemed to be, even to my teachers. Turns out, they often don’t like being put on the spot for information they don’t know, and often don’t want to admit they have no idea. In hindsight, I realize that’s not entirely unreasonable, but at the time all I could see was my supposedly certain allies standing back with their hands up, if not aligning themselves with the general feeling of dislike.
Walking into math on the first day of freshman year had made it clear that in the caste system of high school, I was Super-Untouchable. There were only three girls in the class, of which I was the youngest. Of the other two, one was in thick-rimmed glasses and the other had the evidence of too many bags of Cheetos staining her fingers and muffin-topping over the waistband of her jeans. Neither one of them looked like they’d brushed their hair that day.
I thought this was not an entirely insurmountable problem. Plus, sophomore and junior guys in my math class gave me the golden opportunity. That is, until I learned they didn’t have anything to say to me. That became even truer when I became the kid who screwed up the curve. It didn’t matter how little I studied, how much I dozed off in class. Somehow, my test grade was always the one making everyone else look bad and they didn’t really like it—or, by extension, me.
With the way to new friends clearly not happening, I turned to the handful of girls I had been hanging out with since the beginning of middle school. The bonds formed among clandestine huddles in the girls’ bathroom were unique and, I thought, at the very least, relatively hardy.
Wrong again.
It all snowballed as a habit of sarcasm became the deadly sin of pride. The same friends who had punctuated newly learned vocabulary with giggles started turning those same words back against me. And by high school, rubber and glue didn’t suffice as a comeback anymore. To them, too, the kid who shut down conversation in class should shut the hell up. The fact that I never studied sealed my fate. It wasn’t exactly a combination designed to endear me to the rest of the student body, and I was wrong to hope that they could look past it.
My parents weren’t really sympathetic to the lack of parties in my life. My mom kept suggesting that I make friends with the “nice girls” who were Untouchable like me. She failed to see the problem when I was in every Saturday: she kept telling me that it was an opportunity to get ahead on homework. Plus, as an added bonus, she had been home every Saturday night in high school too.
I think it was supposed to be comforting, but I was mostly just even more terrified.
Her only useful advice was to join a sports team. Swimming had always been my sport, and I came back from Christmas break with a tan and the hope that maybe now, the swim season would make it better.
Do I even need to say it? I was wrong again. I didn’t even get invited to the end-of-season swim team party. They said they just forgot about me, but I got the feeling they hoped that I had climbed to my spot on the curve and jumped.
Even before Icarian brochures arrived uninvited in our mailbox, some time in late November, I had to get out. It wasn’t even a question of going somewhere anymore, but just of leaving there.
I guess I had just figured that it couldn’t really get much worse.
3.
The first full week is always awful, and by the end of the week, I was running on Diet Mountain Dew and Starbucks in a can. Still, I hauled my reluctant self out of bed at eleven on Saturday. Abandoned by their girlfriends (Nicky was a coxswain at a crew regatta, Amie had a track meet), Cleo (mysterious plans) and Devin (sleep), Alec and Scott had convinced me to go to the m
ovies in town.
Town is really an exaggeration. The town ten minutes away has only Main Street, with the movie theatre, three restaurants, a coffee shop and a hardware store. Off Main Street, there is a Walgreens, a gas station and two B&Bs. An aerial view was a view into a snow globe, except that our winter snowstorms were the farthest thing from light and fluffy or pleasant. For civilization, also known as Walmart and possibly McDonald’s, you had to drive at least twenty minutes either way. A Marriott was half an hour down the interstate; for graduation, you had to make a reservation six months in advance. We were only allowed into town on weekends, but people snuck in all the time.
We walked along the road from campus. A couple kids were smoking in the trees not too far from the sidewalk, but they ignored us as we walked past the gray tendrils hanging over the trail.
Even though we were five minutes late, the movie theatre was practically empty. The only people were the three of us, three or four townies and two couples in the back row. We bought two fistfuls of Warheads and watched the only movie playing, the most recent comic-book-turned-movie. It was awful, and the fact that my lips were stuck in a permanent pucker for the second half of the movie didn’t really improve it. But Scott and Alec laughed through the whole thing, so I laughed too, the child at the table trying to hide her incomprehension of the adult conversation.
Walking outside hurt my eyes after the darkness of the theatre, so I almost didn’t see Cleo walking toward us. It was impossible not to smell her once she was within a few feet, though: Febreeze and mint gum. Alec laughed and shook his head as he hugged her. Scott frowned. She pouted when he kept his distance. When she sloppily wrapped her arms around my waist, I smelled thick, sweet, pungent smoke faintly clinging to her hair, buried under the overwhelming smell of “Meadows and Rain.”
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