Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (3 page)

I was facing a huge assignment due on Monday and knew I had to work on it all weekend. On Saturday afternoon, though, Amber decided to do her laundry—the first time I’d actually seen her do any at all. Jerry came by, and they started stripping down her side of the room—sheets, towels, shirts—stuffing everything in a pillowcase to take to the washing machines in the basement. I headed for the library with a stack of books.

I worked right through dinner, stopping only long enough to get a tuna wrap and a bag of chips, but by nine that night, I’d had it. My eyes could scarcely focus and my head throbbed. I knew I had a full day of writing ahead of me on Sunday and wanted only to go to bed and sleep.

When I got back to our room, Amber was sitting at her desk, painting her toenails, one foot propped on our wastebasket. We talked a little about exams and grade points, and then I undressed in the bathroom, pulled on my pajamas, and got into bed.

My pillow had a dirty-hair smell that wasn’t mine, and I could almost bet that Amber had borrowed my pillow. I was too tired to start an argument, though, so I turned it over and stretched out.

My foot touched something between the sheets, however, and suddenly I sat up, threw off the covers, and saw a rolled-up condom at the foot of my bed, along with Amber’s underwear.

I leaped out of bed.

“Look!” I shouted, pointing.

Amber turned. “Oh! Sorry!” she said. She stuck another wad of cotton between her toes and padded over to retrieve the condom.

“This is
my bed
!” I yelled. “What were you
thinking
?”

“Well,
my
sheets were in the wash, and Jerry doesn’t like to do it on a bare mattress,” she said. She shrugged. “You were gone, so . . .”

“It’s
my bed
!” I screamed again.

I think I went a little insane. I pulled off my sheets and flung them on the floor. Then I grabbed Amber’s underwear and tossed it out the window. I picked up her shoes, which were on my side of the room, and threw them against the wall. I scooped
up everything of Amber’s that had migrated over to my section and dumped them on her bed.

Amber left and didn’t come back that night, or the next or the next. Gwen heard she’d moved into Jerry’s room. I wondered what
his
roommate thought of that! Every so often, she’d come back to get some more clothes or drop something off, but we didn’t talk much. And that was fine with me.

With Amber gone, Gwen started coming to my dorm more often, and then we simply used Amber’s bed as a couch. It was a good place to hang out, and I found I was making friends more easily than I’d expected. Sometimes someone would ask if a visiting friend could crash there for a weekend, so it became a guest bed when needed, and I liked meeting friends of friends.

I’d always heard that high school students were more independent thinkers than middle school kids and that there was even less of a herd mentality in college. That’s one of the things I hoped would happen when I got to Maryland—that I’d be released forever from worrying about whether I had the “right look” or wore the right brand-name jeans, or if I was hanging out at the most popular places.

But it wasn’t quite that simple, because sometimes I felt there was a competition to see who had the most individualistic look, and the professors were no exception.

Fun, though. There was the professor who dressed like he belonged in a law office, and one who looked as though he slept in his clothes. And then there was my Sociology 101 teacher, who walked into the lecture hall on the first day of classes in knee-high boots and a leather skirt.

As the weeks went on, though, and she appeared in an ultrafeminine dress with a ruffled collar one day and a denim skirt the next, we began to realize that she was making a statement about society’s attitude toward women based on superficial appearances. Valerie Robbins and I tried to guess how her outfit punctuated her point at the end of each lecture. Male and female equality? Woman as dominatrix? Sex in the workplace?

“I think she’s trying to establish a position of authority,” Valerie had said that first day. “All she needs is a whip.”

Valerie was a tall, thin girl who fascinated me because she ate twice as much as any other girl I knew but complained that she couldn’t gain an ounce. I’d pay almost anything for her metabolism. She was also the kind of friend who didn’t just welcome you with open arms, she
enveloped
you in whatever project excited her at the moment, and Valerie was always into projects.

“You’ve got to help me,” she said the third week of October. She’d been going with this guy Colin for a year and a half—they’d met in high school—and he was a sophomore here at
Maryland. His birthday was coming up on Monday, and he had bragged that no one, ever, had been able to surprise him—he was that good at detecting signs and signals. Valerie wanted to prove him wrong.

She brought two friends—Abby and Claire—to my dorm room around noon on Sunday and told us her plan. The four of us were going to her uncle’s house in Adelphi that afternoon to bake cupcakes, Colin’s favorite. That night she and another couple were taking him to dinner to celebrate because it was the weekend. But at three o’clock in the morning on Monday, the four of us would sneak into his dorm, stand outside his room, and belt out “Happy Birthday.” When he admitted defeat, he’d get the cupcakes. What did she have to lose but a good night’s sleep? And the rest of the cupcakes would be ours.

Val had the car, Abby had the two cake mixes, and after a trip to the local Giant for the rest of the ingredients, we drove to her uncle’s, where we promised to leave some cupcakes in return for the use of the kitchen.

We divided each cake mix in half. To half the chocolate, we added coffee instead of water; to half the vanilla, we added maraschino cherry juice.

Abby was a little powerhouse—small for nineteen, but hardly fragile. The oven mitts gave her the look of a boxer, and she was definitely the director of this operation.

“Fill each cup just two-thirds full,” she instructed. “You don’t want the batter to spread out over the top as it bakes.”

“I hope Colin’s worth all the trouble,” said Claire, a tea towel
tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Her widely spaced eyes surveyed the cupcake pans still waiting to be filled.

“No trouble for me. I love baking,” Abby said. “Someday I’m going to enter a bake-off and win ten thousand dollars. All I need is a recipe no one has ever thought of yet.”

“If I won ten thousand dollars, I’d start a rare-book collection,” Val said.

“I’d use it to open a consignment shop,” said Claire. And we all agreed that would be perfect for her. Claire’s wardrobe was indefinable, because she could throw together the most unlikely combinations and look great. She wore her long brown hair pulled straight back, away from her face, so that all the attention was directed to her body and the flow of her clothes.

Everyone looked at me.

“If I had ten thousand dollars, I’d fly to Barcelona to see my boyfriend five times,” I said, and told them about Patrick.

Sitting around that kitchen table, watching the cupcakes rise through the glass window in the oven, I was feeling pretty good about college so far. Eight weeks into the semester and I’d already made some friends, got rid of a roommate, and knew my way around the whole campus. Not as hard as I’d imagined, and if I didn’t feel really close yet to these girls, I was feeling comfortable.

Valerie, Claire, and Abby spent the night in my dorm room. Valerie came back from her dinner with Colin around eleven, and we decided it was easier to all bed down in one room than set an alarm in four different rooms on campus. Valerie and I
slept on the floor in sleeping bags, and I let Claire and Abby have the beds.

When the alarm went off at three, it felt like we’d only been asleep for fifteen minutes. Ugh. How could we possibly pull on our clothes and sleepwalk all the way over to Colin’s dorm? But somehow we all managed to get our teeth brushed so we wouldn’t asphyxiate Colin when we surprised him, and ten minutes later we were wider awake than I’d imagined, sneaking across campus under an October moon. When we saw a security car making a turn, we ducked behind a hedge and it rolled slowly by. We felt like prisoners on the verge of escape, waiting out the beam of a searchlight.

Finally there we were at the side door. It was a known fact that our key cards opened the side doors of at least two of the buildings on campus, and one of those buildings was Colin’s dorm.

We went up a flight of stairs, our feet making light echoing thuds on the metal steps, and opened the fire door. We were all so used to noise in the halls—at all hours of the day or night—that the absolute quiet was a bit unnerving. But down the hall we went to room number 231 and found the door . . . ajar.

We stared uncertainly at each other. There was no way Colin could have found out what we were up to, because the four of us had been together all day Sunday and none of us had called anyone. Whichever of Colin’s roomies had come in last simply hadn’t bothered to close the door behind him, we decided, so we stepped inside.

No lights were on in the small living area. On either side, there was a door to a two-man bedroom. Valerie pointed to Colin’s door.

“Ready?” she whispered, and we faced in that direction. “One . . . two . . .”

A large figure suddenly loomed in the doorway beside us, blocking the light from the hall, and we screamed—all four of us together.

“What the hell?” A shadowy hand swiped at the wall for the light switch, and there was Colin in his boxers, his rumpled hair hanging in front of his eyes, just returning from a trip to the bathroom.

There were rustlings in both bedrooms, voices in the hall, and somebody appeared brandishing a lacrosse stick.

“Wait!” Valerie yelled.

“Val?” Colin said, staring at her, then at us.

“He’s surprised,” I said.

“Happy birthday!” Val and Abby and Claire cried in unison.

“I don’t believe this!” Colin said, finally beginning to smile, and I thrust the box of cupcakes in his hands.

“We broke your record, admit it,” said Val.

“Hey! People are sleeping here! Trying to, anyway,” said one of the roomies.

“We’re going,” Val told him. “Happy birthday.” She kissed Colin’s bemused face and pointed toward the cupcakes. “Share.”

*  *  *

I was almost as excited about Thanksgiving this year as I was for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Pamela or Elizabeth since September, and most of my other friends would be home too.

Liz texted regularly, but we had to go on Facebook to find out anything about Pamela. She called once, though. She said the theater arts college works you to death, and I said, what else is new? We agreed to get together the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Usually I can get someone to drive me to the Metro in College Park, and then I get off at Silver Spring, where Dad or Sylvia picks me up. But I had a lot of things to carry this time, including laundry, so Dad drove over to College Park and waited for me outside my dorm. We’d talked about getting me a used car, but the Metro was so handy, and student parking so iffy, that I’d decided to wait.

I threw my stuff in the backseat and slid in up front, leaning over to give Dad a kiss. I love the way his face lights up when he sees me.

“Four whole days!” I said. “And I got most of my assignments done, so I can just hang out. Is Les home yet?”

Dad edged the car into traffic on Route 1. “Coming in this evening. And a friend of his is driving in from West Virginia tomorrow.”

“Male or female?” I asked.

“A young lady, actually.”

The older my dad gets, the more he sounds as if he were born in the 1800s. Any female under forty is always a “young lady.”

“Have you met her?” I asked.

“No. Les just said it’s someone he wants us to meet. Her name is Stacy.”

I looked at Dad. “Where’s she going to sleep?”

He broke into laughter. “Now, where have I heard
that
before? You haven’t changed a bit.”

I laughed too. I used to ask that about Sylvia all the time when she and Dad went anywhere overnight before they were married, but this time I was simply protecting my room. “I just want to know if I’m supposed to give up my bed or if she’ll be shacking up with Les.”

Dad grimaced. He hates that term. “I haven’t the faintest idea, and I’m not about to ask. Lester will have to work that out himself,” he said.

I was impatient with the way traffic was creeping along, so I turned on the radio but kept it low. “How are things at the Melody Inn?” I asked.

“It’s been a busy fall, and business is picking up, I’m glad to say.”

I asked about various employees and music instructors, and then the big green exit sign for Silver Spring loomed up ahead, and once we were off the beltway, it wasn’t long before we were home. Dad pulled into the drive, and we each carried some bags inside.

Sylvia hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek.

“I smell something baking already,” I told her. “The whole house smells wonderful.”

“I’m so glad both you and Les could come for Thanksgiving,” she said, and accented the last word with an extra squeeze before she let me go. I figured that, much as she and Dad liked having the house to themselves, they also enjoyed sharing it again, especially around the holidays.

*  *  *

I loved being back in my room. A whole double bed to myself, recently painted walls, old treasures. . . . Sylvia had faithfully watered my huge rubber plant, which now reached the top of the windows. I lay down on my bed and smiled happily up at the ceiling. So many dramas and traumas had passed through this room. The night Sylvia slept with me, for example, before she and Dad married, when a blizzard kept her here at Christmas; the time I hid Pamela here when she ran away from home; the way I cried after Patrick and I broke up back in ninth grade. . . . Right now it was great remembering all of that, because—happy or sad—each experience was a part of this room.

My cell phone started ringing almost immediately. Everyone was checking on everyone else to see who would be around this weekend. We had the decency not to plan to get together till after Thanksgiving—to spend Wednesday night and Thursday with our families—but we all looked forward to the next day.