Loner (3 page)

“That about wraps it up,” the proctor said, flop-sweaty minutes after his slip-up. “Oh, whoops—I forgot the icebreaker game. Duh.”

He asked us to go around in a circle and announce our first names prefaced by another word beginning with the same letter. I came up with a few options right away, to mitigate the anxiety of any turn-based speaking program, in which you count down with dread how many people are left until you, whereupon, as everyone looks your way, you must turn the key in the ignition of your vocal cords and hope they start without a hitch, always a risk with an inveterate mumbler in the final, shaky throes of puberty.

Adamant Adam, Terrestrial Tejas, Shy Sara,
the attention of the room revolving with the centrifugal force of a roulette ball that was inexplicably gaining momentum. After my physics-passionate roommate proudly declaimed “Subatomic Steven,” my mind went blank.

The room was still. Someone coughed.

As I tried to remember the words I had considered earlier, my
internal dictionary scrubbed clean from
czar
to
each
, I heard, from the floor to my left, “Genius Jake.” The others laughed in appreciation.

“We forgot David,” Steven yelled.

All eyes reverted to me—yours included, I imagine.

“David,” I squeaked. My brain harped on the word
vaginal
.

“Defiant,” I said.

I was the only one to state my name before its alphabetical ­pairing—a small act of defiance itself, it occurred to me. I'd begun faultily but had recovered with verve, the gymnast sticking his landing after a herky-jerky dismount. I wondered if anyone else had taken note of my subversive maneuver.

“Funky-fresh Phil,” said Jake's teammate as the room again buckled in laughter. The line approached you.

“Veronica,” you said in your voice with nothing to prove, so unlike my own timorous quaver. Then, with the minutest upturning of the left side of your lip, “
Veritas
.”

You were the only person who had followed my lead. Kindred spirits of swapped syntax. And, from that curling lip, there was some mischief to your appropriation of our college's motto of truth.

Other names and parts of speech skittered around as the game continued, but I heard only the two words you had spoken. Had you gone standard as everyone else had—
Vivacious Veronica
—it's possible that you would not have lassoed my imagination so completely, that I might have feasted on your superficial appeal over the course of that meeting and decided I was sated. Yet that Latin addition meant
you had more than beauty in your arsenal. You possessed creativity and wit and, as your dismissal of jockstrap Jake and ­feeble-minded Phil had suggested, valued intelligence and sensitivity.

Veritas
: someone like me had a shot. We were, after all, really at Harvard.

When the meeting concluded Steven drafted me into a six-­person troupe he had formed in the scrum of the common room. We trundled over for dinner to Annenberg Hall, that cathedral-like
space splashed across the brochures and websites, where glowing, ethnically diverse faces rounded out every photo. I'd seen it during my campus visit with my father a year earlier, but tonight I was no longer a mere spectator of its burnished walnut paneling, stained-glass windows, and chandeliers; I was standing in the brochure itself, ready for my close-up.

I brought my tray over to the table Steven had secured. As was my New Jersey set, they were a visual hodgepodge, a chimera of the shambling (Justin) and the husky (Kevin) and the ectomorphic (Steven), the overdressed (Carla looked like she was on her way to a college interview) and the flamboyantly unfashionable (Ivana and her shoe gloves), topped off by an aggressively nondescript seat filler (Sara, who had gravitated to us).

Sara patted the empty chair next to her. “Saved you a seat,” she said.

Though an upgrade over my Hobart High lunch club—three girls!—we were still clearly freshmen who had missed out on the normal high school experience and were now attempting to simulate it in college. Our dinner conversation revolved around the cuisine, the refuge of those with little in common. We lobbed insults at the sogginess of the tater tots. We mocked the desiccation of the halal grilled chicken. We speculated about breakfast. Everyone responded to each joke like soused nightclub patrons yukking it up as a legendary comedian trotted out his greatest hits.

I forced myself to smile along, but felt a spasm of apprehension seeing the next few months unfolding much like this, the ripe cranberry blush of autumn fading to bleached December. By cruel accident, these might well become my college friends. We would choose to live together as upperclassmen, visit one another on vacations, stay in touch after graduation, attend the other members' nuptials—maybe two of us would even get married. We would rate the hors d'oeuvres at the wedding reception and ponder what brunch would be.

My cowardly instinct was to cling to them. But not for too long: powerful clans are never this diverse and scattered. Only the outcast are.

I got up to scoop myself a bowl of sugary cereal amid the symphony of fork tines scraping white ceramic plates, wending past tables populated by students who appeared to have happily found their tribes: girls with chemically blond hair; an octet of preppy black students; football behemoths with phalanxes of neon sports drinks; chicly dressed Asians; outdoorsy types toting bumper-stickered Nalgene bottles; future Undergraduate Council presidents and their cabinet members; legacy WASPs with Roman numerals appended to their names and swoops of hair soldered to their foreheads.

When I sat back down, there you were at last, coming into the dining hall late.

You stood in the roped-off line near my table among the clutch of students you'd arrived with, engaged in a whispery tête-à-tête with another girl, already having things worth saying in confidence. The rest of your group possessed a similar ease, as though they'd hung out together for years. A uniformity of physical desirability differentiated by grace notes: that girl's raven tresses and alabaster skin against your coppery tones, that boy's cultivated stubble, the one black guy wearing a gauzy scarf in August. I watched them—you, really—in slow motion, cinematographer of the hackneyed movie sequence in which the cafeteria's din silences and a languorous song spills in as your moving lips swallow up the frame.

I could tell that you all had not only gone through high school as one should but had done so precociously in seventh and eighth grades; your secondary education had featured the unfettered experimentation typically associated with college; and now you were, compared with the rest of us, bona fide adults.

One other thing was obvious, from your clothes, your body language, the impervious confidence you projected, as if any affront
would bounce off you like a battleship deflecting a BB pellet: you came from money.

My parents made good salaries practicing law, but nothing close to the assets of your
families, where a crack about tuition and parking would never even come to mind, let alone be verbalized. Yet your crowd didn't reveal its class by stock emblems of ­affluence: navy blazers with brass buttons and chinos, pearl necklaces, the plumage of those crimson-and-blue-blooded WASPs who looked like they'd been born wearing a pair of boat shoes. Yours was ­subtler and pitted against that bloated, decaying archetype. You had ­traveled widely, dined at Michelin-starred restaurants without parental ­supervision, matriculated at schools with single-name ­national reputations, ingested designer drugs and maybe had a cushy stint in rehab.

It wasn't just your financial capital that set you apart; it was your worldliness, your taste, your social capital. What my respectable, professional parents had deprived me of by their conventional ambitions and absence of imagination.

I'd done everything I was supposed to my whole life, played by all the rules. It had gotten me into Harvard, but look where I was sitting: with Subatomic Steven and the rest of our lost-and-found bin.

As I hovered over my bowl of Lucky Charms with soy milk, your conversation with the girl concluded. You took an ­eyedropper out of your pocket, reclined your head, and squeezed a couple of times into both sides. Then you closed your eyes and massaged the corners, as if the public world were too pedestrian to bear witness to and necessitated a retreat into your private one. You blinked several times, your eyes glassy with artificial tears, and stared off into space. It seemed like we were the only two people in the ­cacophonous dining hall not speaking to anyone, the only two not fully present.

A moment later the ID checker asked for your card. You were
still in your stupor, and one of your friends nudged you. You snapped out of it with a halfhearted laugh. I then understood. Maybe you wouldn't admit to it, maybe you didn't even know it yet, but you were also faking it. Somewhat of a loner, too.

Justin and Kevin were hosting a gathering in their suite that night. When Steven was ready to go, I told him that, actually, I was pretty exhausted.

He insisted I come. “You don't want to miss out on the first night,” he said. “Someday we'll all reminisce about it.”

Precisely. But the immediate terror of staying in while everyone else on campus drank alcohol together and hooked up—my four years of high school compressed to one joyless evening—began to eclipse my fears of the long-term consequences.

“Maybe for a bit,” I said.

Crudely Scotch-taped to the walls of Kevin's bedroom was a gallery of posters for comedies and gangster movies starring all-male ensembles. A purple tapestry tacked to the ceiling cast everything in a dank submarine light.

Justin's height—a slouch-shouldered six foot five—and fake Idaho ID had enabled him to purchase thirty-six cans of beer and two plastic jugs of vodka from a liquor store in Central Square. I splashed orange juice into my cup of vodka and took a sip. An acrid corruption of my breakfast beverage of youth. I'd have to find something more palatable, a signature drink.

Everyone was more reserved in the cloistered intimacy of a dorm room. When the conversation remained stilted, Ivana suggested we play the drinking game Never Have I Ever.

“Never have I ever blacked out from drinking,” she said after a cursory review of the rules.

“I'm confused,” Steven piped up, unashamed to put his ignorance
on display. “You haven't blacked out yourself, but if someone else has, they drink?”

Justin and Kevin nodded and swigged from their cups with lupine grins of self-satisfaction, conquests masquerading as ­confessions.

On Carla's turn, she brought up marijuana use. Kevin, Justin, and Ivana all drank. I'd seen it just once in person, when a drum-playing skater had passed a green baggie to his friend under a desk before history class.

“Never have I ever been fingered by someone,” said Kevin.

The sudden swing into the crassly sexual startled us all, except Ivana, who tipped her cup, emboldening Carla to follow suit and rendering Sara the female holdout. She peered into the opening of her beer can while everyone else stayed silent.

My lower back prickled with perspiration. I hadn't even kissed a girl yet, an abyss of experience I'd hoped never to reveal at all in college, and certainly not on the first night.

My turn. To head off any further declarations of carnal milestones, I said, “Never have I ever been convicted of a felony,” knowing that none of us teachers' pets had ever run afoul of the law and hoping it would act as a reset button which, as an ancillary benefit, would shift the focus from Sara's contagious embarrassment. No one drank. From there things amplified into the absurd: orgies, snorting cocaine off strippers' breasts, unsolved homicides. The game petered out, followed by a card trick from Steven (he'd brought his own deck).

We split up into factions. Sara ended up next to me on the bony futon and we traded getting-to-know-you questions. She was planning to concentrate in Latin American history; she'd gone to a magnet school in Cleveland; she had an older brother and younger sister.

I didn't have much to say about my sisters when Sara asked. Miriam had been genuinely apathetic to me growing up and had recently decamped across the country for law school, cohabitating
with the boyfriend she'd had since college. Anna spent all her time socializing; when she and I overlapped in my senior year at Hobart High, I tacitly agreed never to speak to her in the hall lest I betray our relation. I'd always envied the brothers and sisters whose last names were legendary among the student body—those handsome Wilson boys, the wild Capalleri sisters. The entirety of Anna's farewell to me the morning I left for college, after my parents woke her, was an irritable “Bye” shouted from her bed. Those crazy three-to-four-years-apart Federman siblings.

“My older sister's in law school and my younger one's in high school,” I told Sara.

“How old are they, exactly?” Before I could answer, she laughed. “I'm the worst at small talk. You must be so bored. Hey, here's a fun fact: I spell my name without an
h
.”