An Off Year (9 page)

“So you didn't have a book or anything?” asked Angie.

“No,” said Josh.

“You were that determined not to see art?”

He shrugged. “What can I say? I thought it was lame.”

“How long ago was this?” Angie asked.

“It was last week,” I said. She laughed again. After they left, I had the sinking feeling that it was going to be really hard to hate Angie, so I went and bugged Germaine to get off the computer and let me check my e-mail, even though I knew I didn't have any.

“I'm using it,” she said.

“Dad, Germaine won't let me use the computer,” I called to his office, in a voice I had perfectly pitched so that I knew he couldn't hear it but she'd think he could.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Have it. God.”

That felt much more natural.

 

 

Angie ate dinner with us, although Germaine had escaped by going to Conrad's place. He shared a dumpy apartment in the city with five other guys, and Germaine only went there in the direst of circumstances, like when she had to be pleasant to houseguests. Dad was fascinated by Angie and wanted to know what she thought about the Art Institute, since she had just finished an art history class at school and he'd minored in that when he was in college.

Angie seemed all right. But something about the way she was so friendly yet polite was almost
professional
. Or too adult. Or too happy. I felt like she was an actor pretending to be somebody who was twenty instead of an actual twenty-year-old. She just seemed so damned nice and polite, and I kept waiting for her to turn into Germaine, or Kate, or any of the other girls I knew who had gone to college. Secretly she had to be fake, or boring, or a bitch. Even though it wasn't fair of me to assume this, I kept expecting the transformation to happen. I was just nervous being around someone, too, whom I had to behave around.

“We rented some movies tonight if you want to watch them with us,” said Josh. “
Ghostbusters
and
What About Bob?.
Some Bill Murray stuff in honor of Angie's first time in Chicago.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. Sitting around watching movies with them sounded awkward.

“I'm going to hang out and watch them, too, Cecily,” said Dad. “You should join us.” I tried to think of any reason I could not watch the movies with them that didn't involve me sitting awkwardly and quietly in my room, not doing anything. But I had no plans, nobody to call.

“I got some ice cream,” added Dad.

“Okay,” I finally consented. What can I say, I like ice cream. Who doesn't?

Upstairs with our ice cream, as
What About Bob?
began, I kept sneaking glances at Angie. It was weird being in close proximity to another girl, one who wasn't my sister, our cleaning lady, or my mother. She ate her ice cream without looking at it, just sticking her spoon into the blue ceramic bowl and lifting it to her mouth. She wasn't messy or anything, but she didn't take care to parcel out tiny portions of ice cream into her spoon the way Germaine did, didn't wipe her mouth constantly the way Mom did. Her hair was really blond, unlike Germaine's, which was sort of dirty blond. It was pulled back in a ponytail with little pieces falling perfectly around her face. She had a little turned-up nose and big brown eyes. In order to have an excuse to stare at her, I started talking.

“So how did you and Josh meet?”

“He stalked me,” she said. “For a year.”

“I had a Dante class with her that I couldn't stand, but she told me she was signing up for a Chaucer class, and I did it, just so I could hang out with her,” Josh said.

“Finally, at the end of the term, he told me that he was only doing it so he could study with me. So I told him to go screw himself.”

“And she kicked me in the groin!”

“Wow,” I said. “That's cute.”

I shut up, and we went back to the movie. I liked that Angie laughed at the movie, loudly and without waiting to see if we were laughing, too. I had always thought the movie was okay, but I never enjoyed it as much as I did watching it with Angie.

 

 

I had another appointment with Jane coming up, so I decided to go the extra mile and try calling Kate again. We had been speaking less and less often, or actually, she was. I had been leaving voice mails and e-mails—not any more than I usually would have, but I felt like a pathetic stalker. Without her, I'd have no friends to talk to and I knew that wouldn't be good. We had meant to get together while she was home for Christmas, but the one time that we made an actual plan, she had canceled, citing “family plans,” which I thought was total bullshit. I had never heard of her canceling fun to do something with her family, especially if her parents were on the verge of killing each other. My hands shook when I dialed. Stupid Kate.

“What's up?” she asked when she picked up the phone. They had caller I.D. in her room, which had been making me paranoid.

“How's school?” I came up with lamely, after running out of preliminary conversation.

“School is cool,” she said. “It's cool to be in school. And follow the rules. And drool. While wearing mules.”

“Shut up.” I didn't even have a clever comeback.

“Seriously, things are going good.” She started telling me about some guy named Greg that she had been e-mailing me about. He was really cute. He was in her Spanish class.

“So, we kind of hooked up on Thursday night at happy hour.”

“Now, is he the one who lives on your floor? The football guy?”

“No, the football guy and I were just friends. That's Quinn. The other guy on my floor is Randy, and we don't speak anymore. That was just a one-time thing. He has a girlfriend anyway.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Actually, they're having some kind of Round-the-World party thing outside in my hall right now, so I have to go. See you!”

“What's a Round-the-World party?” I asked, but Kate had already hung up. A Round-the-World party, as I later found out, is an excuse to get drunk. Everything in college that is not class is an excuse to get drunk, it seems. St. Patrick's Day is an excuse to get drunk. The fifth of May is an excuse to get drunk. A warm day is an excuse to get drunk. A Round-the-World party is just another one, only in this case people wear togas and yarmulkes and sombreros.

Kate and I tried to get drunk once or twice in high school, not because we were going anywhere special, but almost as an experiment. We wanted to see what it was like, if it was really that great. One time, she slept over at my house, and we took a bottle of kiwi-strawberry Snapple, crept downstairs to Dad's sparse liquor shelf in the kitchen, and put about a drop of vodka in the bottle. We shared sips, watching
Saturday Night Live
and giggling together about what we'd act like once we got drunk (start beating each other up? cry and call ex-lovers?), but not surprisingly, we didn't get drunk. We tried it again another night at her house, with the same flavor of Snapple, only we added her mother's rum. A lot of it. Probably too much, because after a few sips we agreed it tasted bad and poured it down the toilet.

I really never got drinking. I guess my parents had unwittingly sabotaged that whole thing, since I had been around alcohol my whole life. Not that either one of them was a big boozer, but they just didn't treat it like it was anything too special. Dad would have a drink of wine every now and then and Mom, when she lived with us, liked her Manhattans, and I thought both tasted like crap. I much preferred to sneak sips from Dad's creamy, sugary coffee.

I tried to get drunk; I just never got there. I'd get tired before I got to the giggly, laughing point that my friends did. I remember one particular Christmas dance. Meg had smuggled a bottle of white wine from her parents' house over to Kate's, and Meg swigged from it as we got ready for the night. I remember that it was the sophomore-year dance, because I let Kate do my makeup and was surprised that she actually did a good job—she did something with some eyeliner that made my eyes look fascinatingly gray and not that drab-gray that was too indecisive to be blue or green. I also let her do my hair, some twisty thing she had accomplished so that I had little tendrils along the sides. Who knew that Kate had such skills? I had expected her to make me look like a cartoon character. I guess we got too into it because Meg sat on the toilet (seat down) the whole time and drank from her bottle, and by the time we left she had drunk almost the whole thing, which we didn't realize until we got back.

At the dance, we acted stupid as usual, shaking our butts on the dance floor in inexpensive formal wear, and Meg began throwing herself around harder and harder.

“Do you think Jaash likes me?” she yelled in my ear. My brother had graduated from our high school the year before.

“No,” I said. I was positive that Josh didn't even know who she was.

“Shut up!” she squealed, and slapped me across the arm, hard. “I think he's sooooo haaht,” she said, and this time I could smell her hot breath, and it smelled like ass.

“Hey, is she okay?” yelled Kate.

Meg rested her hand heavily on my shoulder to tell me something else that I'm sure was very important, but she fell down, bringing me to the floor with her. She screamed with laughter, and I tried to pretend to laugh along with her, but soon she dissolved into tears.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked, even though I knew what was wrong with her.

“Nobody luh-huh-hoves me,” she blubbered. Kate and some of our other friends came over and were trying to pick her up, but Meg was playing the wet noodle game with her bones and felt like she weighed three hundred pounds.

“We gotta get her out of here before she barfs all over the place,” Kate said. “Or before she gets in trouble.”

“Or before people start sliding around in her barf,” I said. We started giggling and then laughing. For some reason, the deejay made the music even louder at that point, so we couldn't hear anything, not our laughing, not Meg's groaning, just Sir Mix-a-Lot's approval of big butts.

We eventually hustled Meg to the gym exit and found a cab. Kate and I had to do rock-paper-scissors for who was going to sit with her in the backseat, and I won, for the first time in my entire life (scissors). Kate propped up Meg against the window behind the cabbie so he couldn't see her, sticking her mouth and nose out like a dog so that her little bursts of clear puke would slide down the outside of the window. The driver didn't notice, or at least he pretended not to.

Maybe getting drunk in college was different from getting drunk in high school. Everyone in college seemed to do it, it seemed. Everyone expected that you'd do it, so maybe it was more . . . what? I didn't know. It was more relaxing? You weren't as worried about getting caught? You didn't have to do it in such a hurry? It made you charming and delightful, as opposed to barfy?

After the night of the Round-the-World party, I tried calling Kate a few more times. She was so busy with classes and a fun new boy named Adam that as our talks grew fewer and farther between, it was harder to catch up. Our conversations would have to be an hour long for me to hear everything she was up to. When I called, I usually got either her roommate or their voice mail, which consisted of them singsonging that they weren't home. Even though I didn't know her at all, I grew to hate the roommate, with her loud voice and New York accent that, I'm sorry, sounded fake. Otherwise, Kate was just using that caller I.D. and wasn't picking up because she didn't want to talk to her stupid former friend who was too much of a baby to leave home.

 

 

For New Year's, Josh and Angie ended up going down to Navy Pier to watch the fireworks. Germaine was out with Conrad. I realized that this was a good reason for me to be talking to my friends, the way Jane had recommended. I had no plans, and while I didn't mind sitting at home with Dad on any other night, tonight just seemed extra pathetic. I told Dad that Kate and I were going to a party, even though I knew she was going out in the city with some friends from college. He seemed so happy that he offered to give me cab money. I promised him I wouldn't touch any alcohol and borrowed the car. I spent the night slowly driving up and down the lakeshore, through the towns that got richer and smaller the farther north I went. I listened to music and sang to myself and would feel pretty hollow when certain songs would come on, and I felt like if life were a music video, I'd be crying beautifully at that moment, but it wasn't and I didn't, not at all. I brought myself home around one o'clock, when I knew Dad would be asleep already. The next morning, I told him that Kate and I didn't go out; we just stayed in and watched movies. He didn't question me further.

I was aware
of how pitiful my New Year's Eve was, so I made one resolution for myself: get out of the house more. Surely good things lay for me outside our door! New friends! Inspiration! Perhaps a model scout who would say, “You are clearly too short for this job, but you have a certain I-don't-know-what. Are you in school? No? Good, come with me!”

Yes, getting out would solve everything.

The problem with that was, once I had promised myself to do so, it felt like a huge imposition. Dad had gotten me a membership at the university gym after I complained that the groceries I carried in from the car were too heavy, and for the first few days of the new year, I dutifully put on my workout clothes and then sat around waiting for an excuse not to go out: snow, a really good rerun on TV, the need for a nap. After a few days, Dad pointed out that it was pretty crappy of me not to use the membership that he had paid for, so the first Friday of the new year, I promised myself I was really, really going to go. As soon as this episode of
What's Happening!!
was over. Then the phone rang.