An Off Year (15 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Don't worry about it. I'll go.” I couldn't really explain to him that I was terrified about going and sitting in a classroom with a bunch of other kids for some reason. Walking by them on campus, even sitting by them in the cafeteria, was a strange but usually tolerable experience. But sitting with them in a lecture hall for an hour, I'd be trapped. They'd immediately pick me out as a poseur the second I opened my mouth.

I didn't know what to expect, really. I had liked the art history classes I had taken in high school, but I didn't know what to expect from a college course. I wasn't sure my brain would be up for any challenge.

 

 

The first day of class, I woke up with that first-day-of-school feeling, which made me feel immediately embarrassed, and then I felt embarrassed for feeling embarrassed in my own bedroom. Since I'd started working, I had to dress a little more presentably—not anything very formal, but sweaters instead of sweatshirts. I actually even broke out the ancient, crusty tube of mascara in my bathroom and put on a little bit of makeup. I wasn't sure why; I was pretty certain that the majority of class would be spent in the dark, looking at slides.

“You look nice,” Germaine said that morning over our cereal bowls.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked. I rarely drank coffee, but I was already on my second cup. I felt jittery.

“It secretly means you look awful,” she said. “What do you think it means?”

 

 

As I crossed the quad later that day to get to the building where the class was held, I remembered what Mike had said about how I could be mysterious if I wanted to. While I didn't necessarily feel like trying to be an exotic nonstudent, I realized that nobody on campus knew who I was. Nobody here could look at me and tell I wasn't a student—that I had taken the year off, that I barely had any friends anymore, that I lived at home. For all they knew, I was the daughter of a famous person (Germaine had gone to school with one of Donald Trump's kids). Maybe it was a cool thing, and not a terrifying thing, that I was going into the situation with a totally clean slate, and no one around to say, “Oh yeah, that's Cecily: she fights with her sister, her hair looks like a Brillo pad when she wakes up in the morning, and she's had to see two professionals just to get here.”

I was going to be whoever I wanted to be. I was determined to be optimistic about this.

I hiked up to the third floor of the building and found the classroom. It was hard to feel independent and confident when I was wheezing and my sweater was sticking to my back, but I purposefully chose a seat in the middle of a half-occupied row. The room was shaped like a small auditorium, and I looked straight ahead as I walked down the steps to my desk, instead of burying my chin in my chest.

I sat down, put my winter coat on the back of my chair, pulled a brand-new steno pad out of my messenger bag and a pen I'd stolen from Dad's office, and lined everything up on my desk. I looked around, trying not to crane my neck too much. There were about twenty other students in the classroom, all silent. Some text-messaged, some riffled through their backpacks, some stared off into space. There was nothing on the projector screen in front of us, no teacher at the podium. It would be difficult to be the brand-new Cecily Powell if I wasn't even in the right place.

“Excuse me,” I said to a striking black girl with short hair sitting to my right, who was entertaining herself by staring at her furry boots. “Is this Intro to Art History?”

She looked at me and nodded. Not friendly or unfriendly. Just answering my question. I nodded back. The New Cecily asked questions and got answers.

“Hi, everyone, sorry I'm a little late,” said the blond, mustachioed man who walked in and hurried down the stairs. “I'm Professor Gunderson. This is Intro to Art History. Let me just check on the slides and we'll get started.”

The lights were shut off, I was bathed in a beautiful, colorful glow from what I think was a Picasso, and Professor Gunderson started talking. No attendance-taking or announcement-making, just talking about how he actually hated Picasso, but it was okay because he had reasons why, and here they were, and we shouldn't be afraid to dislike something, even if it's famous, as long as we could say why. I wasn't sure if I should take notes or what, but it felt nice to sit there in the dark and just listen.

Work was boring,
but I enjoyed watching the first hints of spring appear through the windows of Dad's office every day. Buds started to bloom on the trees, and the wildlife (squirrels, that is) started making more of an appearance on campus. One fluke day it hit sixty degrees, and half of the student body was out in shorts.

And I enjoyed going to class. I wished that I could just take one at a time for the rest of my life, although I knew if I did, I would graduate about the same time I was supposed to retire. I never ended up getting to know any of the kids in the class; it was hard when so much of it involved sitting in the dark being talked at, but it didn't stop Dad. He was on a roll. He was convinced if he could simulate the college experience for me enough, it wouldn't be that hard to actually get me going.

“I'm thinking you should go visit your brother at Madison,” he said one day on the way home from work.

“Why is that?” I asked. “I'm here, spending time on campus.”

“Josh can show you around, show you what it's actually like to be a student,” Dad said. “And I think living on a campus for a few days might help . . . unless you'd rather go visit some other schools.” Dad had done this with Germaine back when she was looking at colleges: they packed up the car and looked at twelve schools in ten days. I don't know what went on during that trip, but I know that when they got back, they didn't speak to each other for two weeks, and Germaine ended up going to a school they never visited.

So it was decided. After checking schedules, I would go visit Josh in the first weekend of May, before he had to start studying for finals. “Don't worry, we're going to have a lot of fun, I promise,” said Josh on the phone, as we solidified the plans.

“Cool,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I like fun.” But truthfully I was nervous. I didn't mind spending a few hours on campus a few days a week, but that seemed like day camp compared to sleepaway camp. I was worried I was going to hate it and Josh and I would fight and I would come home and be less, not more, ready to move on.

“We're definitely going to have a party, so just make sure you look good,” Josh said.

“I already look good,” I said, looking at myself in the toaster. I was wearing a red hoodie, and I had the hood up around my face like Elliott from
E.T.
, although I could barely fit all my hair under it.

“Right,” he said. And hung up.

A new challenge had been presented. Since I hadn't ventured out in public much since coming home over the summer, I'd paid very little attention to my looks other than my recent adventures in mascara. Back in high school, I wasn't, like, a fashion plate or anything. But I cared enough to know that I looked cute in little pretend-retro T-shirts, and while I hadn't inherited Mom's height, I had gotten her decent legs, so I tried to wear a skirt every now and then. I was putting a little more effort into what I wore lately just because I was on campus, but I hadn't purposefully tried to look cute since high school. There was no point in putting on makeup or picking out special outfits just to impress Germaine and Dad. Sometimes Germaine tried to shame me into taking care of myself a little bit more.

“I haven't seen that sweatshirt in a while,” she'd say at breakfast. “I can barely remember the last time you wore it. Was it yesterday?”

“Leave her alone,” Dad would say. She was probably just mad because she had to wear suits for work now. I was mostly relieved that somehow my sporadic attempts at exercise were keeping me from getting fat. I could still fit into my pants, so that was good.

But just because I didn't care what Dad and Germaine thought of my clothes didn't mean that I didn't care what a bunch of college kids would think. I was already going to feel out of place just by being there—I didn't want to look wrong on top of it.

There were three bathrooms on the second floor of the house. Dad had one attached to his bedroom and Josh and I shared another, since neither of us really cared about that sort of thing. But Germaine's bathroom was her sanctuary. I didn't even really know what it looked like, since I swear she had set up bear traps and laser-beam triggers in there to keep us out. The last time I had set foot in it was when I was about ten: Meg had dared me to shave my legs, and I sneaked in to grab a razor. I must have replaced the razor about a millimeter off the mark, because Germaine smacked me in the back of the head when she found it out of place.

This, however, was an emergency. I was going to have to look hot. My own stupid brother had told me so. Josh's and my bathroom was disturbingly low on hot-making devices. I think motel bathrooms offered more amenities than ours, where the sole aim was simply not to stink. I owned a few bits of makeup—blush, some mascara—but I was always ashamed that they didn't seem to multiply in boxes and drawers the way they seemed to so naturally for other girls. I put my hands on my hips and glared at the ancient lipstick in our medicine cabinet, willing it to reproduce and provide me with liner and lip gloss on its own, but it just sat there, aging and drying out.

Kate had sent me photos of her and her friends “going out.” That was the phrase she used: “going out,” as if being outside didn't really count unless you were at a bar and wearing a pair of black pants. I thought that in college, you rolled out of bed in your pajamas and slunk around campus like that. Not these girls, anyway. They were all wearing the same pair of tight black pants, it seemed, the same skimpy little tank top in different bright shades, towering platform shoes, and lip gloss so shiny the flash bounced off their mouths. Their hair looked like it was parted with a knife and hung down around their faces. Two girls had curly hair that seemed like it was still wet, and three others, including Kate, had hair so stick-straight and dry that it looked like it could catch on fire at any moment. Their eyes were all wide, their smiles even and white and brilliant. I examined Kate to see if she was secretly rolling one eye or flaring her nostrils or something, but as far as I could tell she blended in with the others. Not that I blamed her for it. I wouldn't have minded having fun group photos to stick up around my room, to prove I did indeed have friends that I could be adorable with. Most of my cute photos were from high school graduation, and I had taken those down a couple months ago, although I had been fond of a picture of Mike and me picking each other's noses with our mortarboards.

Germaine had gone out with Conrad, so I cracked open the door to her bathroom. Sunlight poured in through the window as if it were some sort of holy shrine. Near the shower, a rainbow of bath gels and lotions and scrubs lined the shelf. I crept in, looking back behind me to make sure she wasn't actually at home, ready to spring on me. I examined the different varieties. Enchanted Apple. Sultry Musk. Sweet Pear. Ravishing Roseberry. I had no idea that fruit could be so slutty. And what the hell was a roseberry anyway?

I lifted the top off a lotion called Stem. It smelled sort of like cut flowers, very green and clean. I made a mental note to steal that when I left, but not until then or else Germaine would hunt me down and scalp me.

I stood at the sink and flicked on her cosmetics mirror, which lit up with about two thousand watts. You could practically see pimples that wouldn't even be arriving for another month. I opened Germaine's medicine cabinet and was impressed by the sheer organization of it all. A bouquet of Q-tips sprang from a tiny glass jar, so perfect and small I couldn't even imagine what its original purpose must have been. I couldn't figure out why one would need five identical hairbrushes, but they leaned out of a container I normally would have used to hold pencils. Lipsticks stood neatly on end in a long box. Eyeshadow boxes lay perfectly stacked on top of each other. I grabbed a few items that looked like they wouldn't be missed.

This seemed like the perfect time to pilfer Germaine's supplies, since she was distracted: she was officially moving out. She had found a place in the city with a girlfriend (she claimed it was her friend Melissa, but I had a feeling “Melissa” looked a lot like Conrad), and she'd be moving out by the end of the month.

I was a little surprised by how melancholy Dad seemed about Germaine leaving.

“I can't believe you won't be here every night anymore,” said Dad at dinner one night.

“Oh stop, Dad,” said Germaine. “I'll be fifteen minutes away by car.”

“I know,” he said, and chuckled thickly, a sound that meant he was choking back tears. I never thought that Germaine and Dad had a special bond the way he and I did. They didn't fight all the time, but they seemed to irritate each other on a regular basis. Plus, Germaine was the only one of us who was close to Mom, so I figured that by default Dad would not miss her that much when she left. So the moving out had seemed like a good idea, especially since I could get more time just hanging out with Dad and not feel like I was in Germaine's way.

He started sniffling again the next night at dinner.

“I'm going to be an empty nester,” he said, gazing at Germaine. “I'm going to be a lonely old man.”

“Yep,” said Germaine. “It's going to be tough.”

“I feel like I should carry you into your new apartment the way your mom and I carried you into this house.”