Whoops.
Boyfriends weren’t the only reason people freaked out at college. Overall, as it got colder and people got more and more into college life, it sort of seemed like there was a growing number of students going a bit nutso. It was as though everyone had been playing the same video game for too long, eyes all fringed with thin red lines.
Foreshadowing these meltdowns, around the end of November, posters showed up all over campus with the message, “ANXIOUS? We’re here to help!” The poster had information about a college-run website and a bunch of little tags with the address on them. Like those LOST DOG PLEASE CALL posters with the phone numbers. It wasn’t long before those little tabs started to get ripped off a lot. You’d see them peeking out of the tops of people’s textbooks and wallets. Like a little ANXIOUS flag.
The whole thing reached a noticeable decibel around the end of term when suddenly everyone had to hand in papers and study for exams, which, I have to say, just sort of suddenly HAPPENED. One day Shar and I were in Cultural Studies for the screening of a movie Carly had warned me wasn’t available anywhere else, and I noticed a date written on the front board.
“Holy shit, is that our EXAM?”
Several students nodded. Several more rolled their eyes.
“What is that, next week?”
“Two weeks,” Carly, who was sitting a row behind and two seats over, mumbled, looking at me the way a person looks at a stupid younger brother.
The next obvious question being what, other than the movie we were about to watch, would be on that exam.
“Ask Superstar for her notes,” Shar suggested, wadding up a ball of gum in her fingers and planting it under her seat. “Wait, why are we seeing this movie?”
Of course I was an arts student, a group that’s almost expected, from what I understood, to screw off on their exams. I heard this one story about a guy who didn’t study or go to class for any of his courses because he wanted to see if he could pass without doing any of those things. He failed, but, you know, at least it wasn’t a wasted effort. The other story I heard in the caf was about a guy who’d just Wikipedia’d the key words from the titles of all his courses the day before exams. But by the time I heard that rumour the dude was a second-year student, so, you know, he must have passed something.
The people who were truly, and rightly, tearing their hair out were the science students who had real exams that were, I heard, super difficult. Hope, the engineering student on my floor, abruptly stopped drinking alcohol at the end of November and started chugging energy-boost drinks. She hated her room and so more often than not she studied in the bathroom, throwing dirty looks at anyone who and walked out the doorspDo went in to use the space for … well, what you’d normally use a bathroom for. Eventually the whole floor got sick of fighting with her and we all started showering and peeing and everything else on the next floor up.
My plan for exams, once I realized they were happening, was really an adaptation of Shar’s, cooked up over late-late-night pizza and The Shining in the common room. Basically, I would read everything I could find, beg, borrow, or steal that related to the course. And in reading I would hope that SOMETHING would lodge itself in my brain. Hopefully something useful, like a date or the name of a dictator or a fact.
“Your brain is stickier than you think,” Shar reasoned, pressing her pizza-smudgy finger into my forehead. “All you really need to do is read everything once. It’s not like you’re becoming an expert or anything. You’re a FRESHman.”
Which is how it happened that, on the night of Rattles’s accident, Shar and I were in her room reading. Truthfully what I was doing would probably be better described as “looking,” staring at the pages of my textbook in sequence, while Shar watched videos on the internet of people drowning. We almost didn’t hear Rattles over the cries of the tidalwave victims floating across Shar’s screen.
Rattles, since her tragic breakup, had not quite embraced the single lifestyle. If anything she seemed to have given up the notion of any kind of lifestyle at all. She’d gone from preppy chic to a wardrobe of utter indifference, wearing the same giant college sweatshirt and baggy-kneed yoga pants. Her hair was always tied up in a loose ponytail that appeared to be, kind of tellingly, unravelling. At night she would wander the halls of the dorm, aimlessly peeking into various rooms to say hi to whoever was awake.
“Hi. Um. Hey. Um. What are you doing?”
If you were eating she’d pick at your food. If you were reading she’d interrupt your reading to ask you what you were reading. If you were watching TV she’d perch somewhere on the side, expel deep sighs, and ask questions like “So what’s going on? Is that guy dead? Is this a history movie? Are you guys finding this hard to follow?” All in the same squeaky, sad-sounding voice. Eventually she’d sigh and move on, like an animal in the zoo that’s tired of looking at you through the fence and so retreats to its cave.
At some point she’d duck out to a convenience store and return with massive bags of salt and vinegar chips and big bottles of Coke, which she was reluctant to share.
“Oh you want some? Um, yeah. I guess. But, um, this is kind of all I can eat now?”
Rattles was in the music program, and so at least half of her exams involved playing really long and really hard piano pieces. From her constant whimpering, just about everyone in the dorm knew she’d had a lot of trouble practising since her boyfriend broke up with her, which was causing her, to say the least, a lot of stress.
As soon as I noticed the sound of crying that night I knew it had to be Rattles. When I opened the door to see what was going on, she was on her hands and knees on the hallway carpet picking pills up off the floor. Her pale face looked even paler under the fluorescent hall lights.
“I spilled my pills,” she sobbed.
“Oh,” I said, hoping the pills were at least over-thecounter m handful of , cedication.
“Where is everyone?” Rattles looked up, her eyes pressed into her skull.
“I think they’re all at the library or something.”
“They’ve all gone to see a movie,” Shar hollered from behind me.
“Oh yeah. I guess you guys didn’t want to see a movie?” Rising from the carpet, not unlike some sort of creepy flickering Japanese horror film character, Rattles slowly shifted toward me. Her track pants were too long and the cuffs scraped against the carpet the way little kids’ pyjamas do.
“You guuuys,” she whined as she brushed past me, zombie-like, “I don’t know what I’m going to DOOO!”
Three steps into Shar’s room, she sunk down to the floor. “I have an exam tomorrow!? But I CAN’T take it, you know? I just CAN’T. It’s like … It’s like OH MY GOD, you know?” Tears dribbled down her cheeks. “I’m so stressed out.”
Shar snapped her laptop shut and moved to sit on the bed. I sort of thought she would ask Rattles to leave.
Looking at the pills in her palm, Rattles sighed. “It’s like, I wish maybe I had some sort of massive injury, you know? Like, can they make you take an exam if you have a broken leg or like a torn tibia?”
“Well,” I reasoned, “probably not an exam where you need your feet. Don’t pianos need feet? Or, like, involve you using your foot?”
Shar shifted. Looked at me. Looked at Rattles. She lit a cigarette and opened the window a crack. “Obviously. Obviously they won’t make you take an exam with a broken leg. You’d be in the hospital.” She took a long drag off her smoke. Exhaled. Then, checking on Rattles again, she said, “I think they have to let you out of an exam if you’re unfit to write—”
“Oh my GOD I’m TOTALLY unfit to do ANYTHING right now!” Rattles sobbed. “I, like, can’t sleep. I’m sad all the time. I’m like DEPRESSED, you know? It’s like, FUCK! I’m like EATING all the time—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Shar cut in. “Except they can’t just go letting people who are depressed get a free pass for feeling sad. No offence, but lots of people feel sad. What I’m saying is that you’d need to be
PHYSICALLY unfit to get out of an exam.”
“Oh,” Rattles moaned, threading her fingers into her hair and pulling. “UGH! Whatever. It’s HOPELESS. I’m going to fail!”
“Sure.” Shar nodded. Her voice had taken on a weird rhythm—like something almost robotic, but soothing, steady, and deliberate. “Or. Maybe. Maybe you COULD find some way out of it. It’s like you said, if you were INJURED you couldn’t play, right?”
“What?” Rattles’s voice seemed to be breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces with every word she spoke.
“If you were injured. You couldn’t play. So?”
Rattles bent her head and started to cry again, the kind of crying that seems more to do with exhaustion than anything really sad. A tear dripped of things I needed to be doingened me f her cheek and onto the floor. Watching it splash against the linoleum I felt a weird sort of twist in my stomach, a tiny nervous twinge.
Slowly untangling her fingers from her hair, Rattles sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her snotty nose.
Shar pressed her cigarette into the plate she’d perched on the windowsill, snapping it in two.
Finally, because I had no idea what else to do, I popped up from my place on the floor, declaring, “I’m going to get you a tissue.”
Outside, I took another long look down the hall, listened for the sound of other people, the sound of someone, anyone, with a vested interest in helping the crying girl in Shar’s room.
Nothing.
I walked as slowly as I could to the bathroom, weighing each step, thinking, or hoping, that by the time I got back Rattles would have obediently disappeared.
I was standing with one hand on Shar’s doorknob, a wadded-up handful of toilet paper in the other, when I heard a splintering noise, like the sound of a foot going through a brittle floorboard.
When I pushed open the door, Shar was sitting on her bed, hairbrush in one hand, sleeve pulled back to display a red welt on her forearm.
“See?” she said, rubbing her fingernail over her raised skin. “No big deal.”
Rattles seemed transfixed.
“Right, Allison?”
Before I knew it, Shar was up and had my arm in her grip, the brush raised. I could feel Rattles watching us, hear her raspy, post-crying breathing.
“Right, Allison?”
Truth or dare.
Which, like I said, I’d never played. Until Shar.
“Right?”
Her eyes still focused on me, Shar tightened her fingers around my wrist. She was pulling, a little, and smiling this familiar smile, like the smirk girls give each other when they’ve just said something mean about someone else, like the sly, no-tooth grin girls use when they’re playing a game, a trick. It’s the look of an accomplice. The look you give to your accomplice. Me.
“Right,” I breathed.
Right answer.
SMACK!
I jolted. Shar held her grip firm for a moment as the sting spread across the flesh of my forearm.
I pulled my arm away and looked down to see Rattles hiking her grubby sweatshirt sleeves up.
Seeing Rattles’s arms bared, Shar let out a sharp laugh, tossed the hairbrush on the bed.
“Or, yeah, you know? Or you could just study and take the exam I guess,” she chuckled.
Rattles had gone stone quiet. She opened her hand, flicked the pills still stuck there onto the floor. “I should go,” she said.
No one moved.
“Okay then,” Shar chirped. “Good luck with your studies!”
“How many times,” Rattles whispered thoughtfully, “do you think … Like, to actually miss an exam. How many times would you, like, do it?” things I needed to be doingened me
“Theoretically,” Shar added.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe twenty-five?” Shar’s voice was smooth and level. “What do you think, Allison? Theoretically?”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered. “Like ten?”
“Ten?” Shar coughed incredulously.
“Fifty?”
Shar raised an eyebrow, lit another smoke, and took a long inhale. After a few drags she rested her cig on the plate and walked toward Rattles, who was clearly lacking in momentum. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your room.”
They were gone for a while, especially considering that Rattles lived next door. It was long enough for me to open my textbook and take up a purely aesthetic pose, “studying” what from a glance seemed an impossibly long list of all the languages spoken by “Chinese” people.
At one point I thought I heard Shar tell Rattles to stop crying. It was hard to hear, though. And I kind of didn’t want to listen.
Shar slid back into the room just as I was tracing my finger over a line about the Mongols, which I had clearly at some point thought was interesting enough to highlight with neon pink. She walked up behind me and stabbed the tip of her toe into the small of my back.
“Fifty! What are you, some kind of monster? Man! She’s going to break her arm!”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re terrible, Allison.” She said it like she was describing a rock star, or something sweet and fattening. You’re TERRIBLE, Allison.
“She’s not going to DO it.”
“Oh no?”
Shar got down next to me, knee on my textbook, and took my arm in her hands. “Look at your poor little bruise,” she mocked. “Maybe you’ll have to miss YOUR exam, bully.”
“It’s not even a bruise.”
“You want me to kiss it better?”
That same smile.
“No!” I said, maybe a little too fast and too loud.
“As if,” she cooed, planting a loud smooch on the pink outline the brush had left behind.
The next day I slept in and had to make a mad dash to the auditorium for my East Asian History exam. The last question involved drawing a map of China. AN ENTIRE MAP. I drew a half-hearted rectangle with jagged edges and added in some rivers where I could remember there being rivers. Later on I found out that someone had taped a map to the back of the third toilet in the women’s bathroom. So apparently there are a few reasons to stay in touch with your classmates.
I saw Rattles in the hallway before I heard the news. She was walking stooped, bent almost to a ninetydegree angle. Paler than ever with black circles under her eyes. She had a tensor bandage wrapped around her right wrist, a flesh-coloured wrap wound so thick it looked like a turnip.
“What happened to Ra— Nat?” I asked Carly, who was sitting on the floor in her room,econds later">OH surrounded by a sea of Cultural Studies notes I was hoping to borrow.
“She hurt her wrist.” Carly shrugged, not looking up, twirling a highlighter in her fingers.
“Doing what?” I tried to perch myself on Carly’s bed without disturbing what seemed to be a delicate study system.
Carly’s walls were covered in black and white movie posters—all of them movies you’d have to rent at some obscure retro place to watch. I wondered if she had. Rented them.
She shrugged. “I don’t know actually. I mean, I guess it was from practising too much because she plays piano, right? Hmmmm. Did you download the videos for Cultural Studies, because you need those too.”
I got the whole story from Shar during her celebratory feast at Chicken! Chicken!
“Well she’s TELLING PEOPLE that she tripped and fell. That girl is such a liar.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think? She beat her fucking wrist! With a stapler!” Shar chuckled. “A STAPLER! Can you imagine? Guess someone didn’t have a BRUSH!”
“WHAT?”
Pausing over her plate, Shar tapped her fork on her wrist in demonstration. “You know, like BANG BANG BANG!”
“She actually did it.”
“Of course. Because she’s a spineless pushover and I—WE—gave her a genius way to get out of her exam. Although”—Shar picked up a bit of chicken finger and proceeded to drown it in ketchup—“I’ll say this
, Rattles outdid herself. She CHIPPED a bone.”
“NO!”
“Yep.”
Watching Shar suck the ketchup off her chicken finger, it occurred to me that she was kind of glowing, with a look on her face like a mom holding up her kid’s first-place ribbon. In front of her a feast of french fries lay smothered under a bloody blanket of ketchup. One of the fries was poking through like a bone splinter. Sort of.
The sickly sweet smell of tomato and the image of that little fry was making my stomach hurt.
“Wow. So. Huh.”
It was hard not to picture Rattles alone in her room, maybe sitting on the bed next to her stapler. Her face all sweaty from constant crying. No one around to buy her chips and tell her to chill out, that exams are no big deal.
“I feel bad,” I said, twirling the straw of my Coke.
“Why?”
“Because …”
“Allison. We did not do anything to that girl, okay? Not that she didn’t WANT us to, the lazy slug. Like we’re going to do her dirty work for her. Like we’re going to leave the door open for her to charge us with ASSAULT.”
“She WANTED you—she wanted US—to hit her?”
Shar shrugged. “Who knows WHAT that girl wanted? Look, whatever you do, do not feel bad for the Rattles of this world. Maybe this will teach her not to wander around the halls sobbing and looking for sympathy.">“What do you think?toDo”
On the way home, Shar demonstrated Rattles’s wristbanging technique on various surfaces. The railing on the steps outside the restaurant. A tree down the street from residence.
“Like this so BANG BANG BANG BANG!”
“Problem,” I finally said.
“HA!” Shar hollered. “Are you kidding? Oh poor little Rattles can’t handle exams! Oh poor Rattles! Let’s all FEEL SO SORRY for her. Poor Rattles and her DEADLY office supplies! Fuck. It might just be the funniest thing I’ve heard this year. Oh! Do you think she did it fifty times? Is fifty enough to chip bone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Allison”—grabbing me by both shoulders, Shar pressed her forehead against mine—“you must RELAX and enjoy this moment with me!”
(You) Set Me on Fire Page 8
