Loner (5 page)

“Harvard isn't for everyone,” my guidance counselor had told me in my junior-year advising session, words I ignored as boilerplate dissuasion he dispensed to every Cambridge hopeful in hedging against the school's stingy acceptance rate. “It's true that it can open doors for you later, but you might well get a richer college experience elsewhere, in a place you can find yourself more easily. This is often the problem when you go somewhere primarily for its name.”

It's convenient, in hindsight, to blame Harvard. But it wasn't the guilty party.

Chapter 4

T
he eve of Harvard's weeklong shopping period, in which students sample classes before selecting them, I was on my bed, laptop scalding my thighs, meandering the Internet of you, looking at the photo and cycling through the same information. (“ ‘It's a wonderful opportunity for students to think about the world outside themselves,' said junior Veronica Wells, representing Hungary.”)

The September breeze carried boisterous shrieks and distant music up to my open window. The Matthews Marauders were in the Yard, attending the Ice Cream Bash. (As with the A Cappella Jam, a number of social happenings attached an overblown noun that leached them of any allure: the Foreign Students Fete, the Hillel Gala.) I didn't have it in me to go to yet another cornpone event, especially when you were unlikely to be present.

An e-mail pipped into my in-box among the deluge of university mass mailings. It was from Daniel Hallman, a charter member of my high school cafeteria table. He was reporting on his first week at the University of Wisconsin, where, he claimed, he'd gotten “wasted
or high” every night and had received “blow jobs from three girls, though not at the same time . . . yet.”

His tone was unrecognizable, nothing like the Daniel of the previous four years, who once in a while threw in a sly remark at lunch, who had never, to my knowledge, had a real conversation with a girl outside of class. Though he was evidently a new man now, flush with alcohol in his bloodstream and treatable venereal diseases, to engage with him, albeit electronically, would be to return to that cafeteria table, an even more desperate seat than my current one in Annenberg.

Yet
he
was the one having the quintessential college experience, drunkenly bed-hopping, while I had locked myself up in sober solitary confinement. I thought of my childhood bedroom, the years in which no one other than family members and cleaning ladies had set foot inside it. It occurred to me that, had I not been assigned a roommate, I could die on my twin mattress and it might take weeks until someone investigated.

My phone buzzed.

“So he
does
know how to use that expensive device we bought him,” my mother said after I picked up.

“Sorry for not calling back.” I could hear NPR in the background. “You're in the car?”

“We're going out for Chinese. I didn't feel like cooking.” She lowered the radio. “So? How are you? How's Harvard?”

“It's okay,” I said. “Classes haven't started yet.”

“And your roommate? What's he like?”

“He's fine. I don't think we're going to be best friends or anything.”

“No?” She sounded disappointed. To my father: “Green light.” Back to me: “Well, it takes time to get to know some people. I'm sure once classes begin you'll make a few friends.”

“I have friends already,” I said. “There's a bunch of us in the dorm that eat together every meal and hang out. The Matthews Marauders.”

“Really?” she asked. “That's great. What about that nice girl we met moving in?”

“Sara,” I said. “She's in the group, too. We talked awhile the other night.”

“Oh, good. I liked her.”

We both waited for the other to say something.

“But things are okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.” My voice cracked. I took a drink of water from a stolen Annenberg cup. “Really good, actually. I even have a nickname everyone calls me. David Defiant.”

“Anna, put your phone on silent,” she chided. “Sorry, what did you say? They call you David Definite? Why's that?”

“Defi—it's a long story.”

“You'll have to tell it to me sometime,” she said. “Listen, we just got to the restaurant, but I'm glad to hear you're enjoying yourself.”

“I should go, too.”

“Oh? What're you doing tonight?”

The bass from the Ice Cream Bash turned up. “I'm going to this ice cream party.”

“Sounds fun,” she said. “Remember to take your Lactaid.”

Hordes of students ate ice cream from paper cups, gabbing amiably as sanitized pop music played on speakers. While no one was looking, I swallowed one of the two lactose-intolerance pills I stored at all times in the small fifth pocket of my jeans, entered the fray, and got in line. It seemed like I was the only untethered attendee, as if everyone else knew the secret that ensured they were never alone at a party.

“Hello?” The Crimson Key member wielding the scooper was looking at me with hostile impatience under his perky mask. “What can I get you?”

I quickly asked for vanilla. “No, wait,” I said as he plunged his arm into the bucket. Vanilla was what I always picked, the gastrointestinally safe base that deferred flavor to its toppings.

“Chocolate,” I revised. “With rainbow sprinkles, please.”

I was tucking into my audacious dessert, wondering how long I could last without speaking to anyone, when Sara materialized in another well-timed intervention. She wore a capacious L.L.Bean backpack and was empty-handed.

“No ice cream?” I asked.

“I was hoping there'd be sorbet. I'm pretty lactose intolerant.” She added, with mock solemnity, “We all have our crosses to bear.”

The spare lactase-enzyme supplement bulged in my pocket. I reached in and fingered its single-serving packet. To offer it to her would be an admission that we together were fragile Jews in the crowd, unable to stomach a treat little kids gobbled unthinkingly.

“Here,” I said quietly, handing her the packet as if making a drug deal. She recognized what it was and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said, tearing it open and depositing the pill on her tongue. I felt a curious surge of warmth toward her.

We drifted back to the ice cream table. “So, a fellow digestively challenged Ashkenazi,” she said. “You
are
Jewish, right? Your last name sounds like you're a member of the tribe.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “You haven't been around in a while. Were you in hiding?”

“Ah, you've seen through my facade,” she said. “Underneath this pleasant exterior lies a deeply antisocial personality. I'm a closet sociopath. Or psychopath, I mean. I always confuse them.”

She chuckled. I spooned some ice cream into my mouth and nodded.

“Groups aren't my thing,” she went on, waving her hand at the masses around us. “I'm an extroverted introvert at best. But everyone says that, right? They want to claim the best parts of each—that they can be charming when they need to, but they really prefer
solitude. No one's ever, like, ‘I have the neediness of an extrovert and the poor social skills of the introvert.' Sorry I'm talking so much. I've been in the library all day prepping for my freshman seminar.”

“I'm not that good in groups, either,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Rice's letter of recommendation. “Or one-on-one.”

She laughed authentically.

“Like, when it's just Steven and me in the room, I'm not any more comfortable than I am here.” It was a clunky segue to my next question. “Who's your roommate?”

“Veronica Wells? The really pretty girl?”

Feigning ignorance, I shook my head. “I haven't been paying much attention to the people in our dorm. Is she nice?”

“I wouldn't know,” Sara said. “I've seen her maybe five times. I think the last conversation we had was when she turned on the light at four in the morning and said, ‘Sorry.' ”

“Oh, you're also in the front room,” I said. “That's annoying, huh?”

She shrugged.

“So do you have any sense of her?” I was leading the witness ham-fistedly, but I couldn't stop myself.

“Not really. She and her crowd seem a bit too-cool-for-school.”

“Does she have gatherings in your room?”

“No, thank God.”

A spastic “Hey, guys!” interrupted us. It was Steven, in the second physics-pun T-shirt he'd worn that week (
MAY THE M
•
A BE WITH YOU
).

With breathless excitement, he informed us that there was a proctor in Grays who wasn't cracking down on freshman parties, and they were having a big one tonight, the other Marauders were being lame, but did we want to come?

“I'd better stay in,” Sara said, taking a skittish step back.

You and your too-cool-for-school friends might be there, at an unsanctioned event. Sara and you clearly weren't friends, but she
could nevertheless provide a bridge, rickety though it was. And thus far hardly anyone else was even talking to me.

“C'mon,” I said. “I thought groups were your thing. What are you, a closet psychopath?”

The reference was just enough of a gesture toward intimacy to elicit a giggle. Parroting something a person had previously said in a different context, I was figuring out, was a winning tactic. The subject is flattered you paid such close attention in the first place and commends her own intelligence for catching the allusion.

“When in Rome,” she said, hands clenching the straps of her backpack like a soldier preparing to parachute into enemy ­territory.

Inside the rain forest fug of the dorm room, we leaked through a strainer of bodies toward a desk that had been transformed into a bar. I poured myself half a cup of gin and glazed it with tonic water; Sara reached into a cooler of beer cans bobbing in a slushy bath. A poster of Bob Marley exhaling miasmically presided over the festivities. Clubby music blared a beat resembling a spaceship's self-­destruct alarm.

I scanned the room. You weren't there. But it was early.

Steven ambled off to find some people he knew; he had already gotten himself elected mayor of Harvard's nerdy township, of which the Matthews Marauders was one of many districts.

Sara and I were left alone. In between baby sips of her beer, she confessed she'd hardly drunk alcohol before this week.

“I wasn't what you'd call Miss Popular in high school.” She wiggled the tab on her beer can like a loose tooth. “Unless ‘mispopular' became a word. Thank God for Becky and Ruma. Those were my two best friends.”

I had always envied the depth of female friendships—even the
abjectly ostracized seemed to have a soul mate on the margins with them. I'd have traded that for my tenuous coterie of fools.

“I was sort of the same,” I said. “I had two hundred classmates, and I bet half of them wouldn't even remember me.”

The tab on Sara's can snapped off and, with no garbage nearby, she slipped it into her pocket. “But the anonymity is kind of nice,” she reflected. “I always felt a little sorry for the kids at the top. Everyone's watching them. That can't be easy. If no one's paying attention to you, at least you can be yourself, do your own thing.”

I was about to counter that whatever things the anonymous accomplished, they were of little consequence, since nobody noticed. But she had a point. Unseen, you could take your time, slowly amass knowledge and skills. For years everyone could believe you were a faceless foot soldier; they hadn't investigated more closely, or they simply lacked the necessary powers of discernment. Then, in a single stroke, you could prove them all wrong.

Someone jostled my arm as he passed, spilling gin and tonic on my wrist.

“No one paying attention to you.” I licked my sticky skin like a cat. “I guess that's something I identify with.”

“Something
with which
you identify,” she said playfully. “Aren't you glad you're talking to that fun girl at the party who reminds you to never end a sentence on a preposition?”