Sophomoric (3 page)

I’d heard that one before. Clemens was youngish and didn’t seem that bad. She was even wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, instead of shapeless clothes that attempted to hide the twenty pounds perpetually in the process of being lost. Still. Trying to imagine sitting in her office and talking about my latest guy problem? Maybe ideal for Josie, but it didn’t exactly seem like a great idea.

Not that I had any. Guys, I mean. There was always a plethora of problems. Like Cleo had pointed out: in every sense of the word, I was about as virginal as it got. Thanks to my second and most recent boyfriend, I had been felt up, in that awkward fumbling middle school way. I hadn’t exactly had quality or quantity when it came to guys, and it wasn’t for lack of trying

Freshman year was supposed to be my year to come out of my shell, to have some fun, get in some trouble, laugh too hard and drink too much with my friends. They had gone through with it, going out and hooking up. It wasn’t until December that I realized I was always getting Sunday morning, rather than Friday night, calls, listening as they bitched about hangovers and moaned about accidental hookups. They stopped calling when they found distractions: a boyfriend, a clique. Pot.

So I didn’t think I would have to worry about Cleo’s warning that Clemens would call home if she thought I was having sex. Her aversion to drugs, alcohol or crash dieting, maybe, if I was lucky. But I didn’t think sex would be a problem.

During my brief stint as a space cadet, Clemens had been listing reasons that I could come talk to her. She had just reached the all-encompassing “…chat! I’m always here after classes.”

“Definitely.” I tried to make my smile warm. It was nothing personal. Really.

She smiled. “I think this is going to be a great year. One last question.” Of course. “We’re trying to compile a list of tutors within the dorm, in case people are having trouble with anything.”

That request always came eventually: help the intellectually destitute. I hated it. “Yeah, sure. Put me down for something.” Hopefully, something no one would need. I still can’t stand trying to teach people things they don’t think they need or want to know. It’s even worse when I agree with them.

“You’re in precalculus, right?”

I nodded and took the offered escape. “Yeah, and I have a ton of homework for tomorrow. You know Hamilton.”

She laughed. “Absolutely. Go ahead.”

I grabbed my bag and fled as quickly as my feet would allow. It wasn’t exactly a lie that I had a ton of homework. I just wasn’t going to do all that homework. Or any. I could usually get enough done in class or at lunch.

This was another one of those things that seemed like an acceptable lie.

The first time it happened freshman year was history class. The teacher had asked and I had forgotten to place a filter between synapse and sentence before I answered. Everyone else in the class had no interest in hearing how I couldn’t help that I remembered this stuff from middle school. They were especially uninterested when it happened again: talking about something our teacher hadn’t covered in just a little too much detail.

So maybe I was even a little bit interested. It’s hardly a crime. But lately it seemed to be, even to my teachers. Turns out, they often don’t like being put on the spot for information they don’t know, and often don’t want to admit they have no idea. In hindsight, I realize that’s not entirely unreasonable, but at the time all I could see was my supposedly certain allies standing back with their hands up, if not aligning themselves with the general feeling of dislike.

Walking into math on the first day of freshman year had made it clear that in the caste system of high school, I was Super-Untouchable. There were only three girls in the class, of which I was the youngest. Of the other two, one was in thick-rimmed glasses and the other had the evidence of too many bags of Cheetos staining her fingers and muffin-topping over the waistband of her jeans. Neither one of them looked like they’d brushed their hair that day.

I thought this was not an entirely insurmountable problem. Plus, sophomore and junior guys in my math class gave me the golden opportunity. That is, until I learned they didn’t have anything to say to me. That became even truer when I became the kid who screwed up the curve. It didn’t matter how little I studied, how much I dozed off in class. Somehow, my test grade was always the one making everyone else look bad and they didn’t really like it—or, by extension, me.

With the way to new friends clearly not happening, I turned to the handful of girls I had been hanging out with since the beginning of middle school. The bonds formed among clandestine huddles in the girls’ bathroom were unique and, I thought, at the very least, relatively hardy.

Wrong again.

It all snowballed as a habit of sarcasm became the deadly sin of pride. The same friends who had punctuated newly learned vocabulary with giggles started turning those same words back against me. And by high school, rubber and glue didn’t suffice as a comeback anymore. To them, too, the kid who shut down conversation in class should shut the hell up. The fact that I never studied sealed my fate. It wasn’t exactly a combination designed to endear me to the rest of the student body, and I was wrong to hope that they could look past it.

My parents weren’t really sympathetic to the lack of parties in my life. My mom kept suggesting that I make friends with the “nice girls” who were Untouchable like me. She failed to see the problem when I was in every Saturday: she kept telling me that it was an opportunity to get ahead on homework. Plus, as an added bonus, she had been home every Saturday night in high school too.

I think it was supposed to be comforting, but I was mostly just even more terrified.

Her only useful advice was to join a sports team. Swimming had always been my sport, and I came back from Christmas break with a tan and the hope that maybe now, the swim season would make it better.

Do I even need to say it? I was wrong again. I didn’t even get invited to the end-of-season swim team party. They said they just forgot about me, but I got the feeling they hoped that I had climbed to my spot on the curve and jumped.

Even before Icarian brochures arrived uninvited in our mailbox, some time in late November, I had to get out. It wasn’t even a question of going somewhere anymore, but just of leaving there.

I guess I had just figured that it couldn’t really get much worse.

The first full week is always awful, and by the end of the week, I was running on Diet Mountain Dew and Starbucks in a can. Still, I hauled my reluctant self out of bed at eleven on Saturday. Abandoned by their girlfriends (Nicky was a coxswain at a crew regatta, Amie had a track meet), Cleo (mysterious plans) and Devin (sleep), Alec and Scott had convinced me to go to the movies in town.

Town is really an exaggeration. The town ten minutes away has only Main Street, with the movie theatre, three restaurants, a coffee shop and a hardware store. Off Main Street, there is a Walgreens, a gas station and two B&Bs. An aerial view was a view into a snow globe, except that our winter snowstorms were the farthest thing from light and fluffy or pleasant. For civilization, also known as Walmart and possibly McDonald’s, you had to drive at least twenty minutes either way. A Marriott was half an hour down the interstate; for graduation, you had to make a reservation six months in advance. We were only allowed into town on weekends, but people snuck in all the time.

We walked along the road from campus. A couple kids were smoking in the trees not too far from the sidewalk, but they ignored us as we walked past the gray tendrils hanging over the trail.

Even though we were five minutes late, the movie theatre was practically empty. The only people were the three of us, three or four townies and two couples in the back row. We bought two fistfuls of Warheads and watched the only movie playing, the most recent comic-book-turned-movie. It was awful, and the fact that my lips were stuck in a permanent pucker for the second half of the movie didn’t really improve it. But Scott and Alec laughed through the whole thing, so I laughed too, the child at the table trying to hide her incomprehension of the adult conversation.

Walking outside hurt my eyes after the darkness of the theatre, so I almost didn’t see Cleo walking toward us. It was impossible not to smell her once she was within a few feet, though: Febreeze and mint gum. Alec laughed and shook his head as he hugged her. Scott frowned. She pouted when he kept his distance. When she sloppily wrapped her arms around my waist, I smelled thick, sweet, pungent smoke faintly clinging to her hair, buried under the overwhelming smell of “Meadows and Rain.”

“How was the movie?” she asked. The smell disappeared as she stepped away from me.

“Awesome.” Alec grinned. “How’s David?”

“He’s great.” Cleo refused to be embarrassed, though it may have simply been impossible at this point. I wondered who David was.

Scott was standing stiffly next to me. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat. “I’m going to head back.”

Alec shrugged. Cleo waved. I smiled, unsure, at his retreating back.

“Don’t worry,” Alec murmured in my ear. “He always does this. Some shit with his brother. Explains why he’s so…” He searched for a word that fit the apologetic smile on his face.

“Stupid.” Trust Cleo to put the words in his mouth. “Not like Amie didn’t find out all about his and Nicky’s late-night conversations.” She lifted one eyebrow meaningfully.

I laughed. It was hard to picture Nicky doing anything as unromantic and undignified as phone sex. Then again, it wasn’t exactly something I’d ever been too tempted to think about.

“Hey, desperate times,” Alec said. “A guy’s gotta do…”

“Just stop there,” Cleo told him. He and I looped our arms around her waist as we headed for the drive-in hamburger place on the way back to school and Cleo continued. “You guys will take it however you can get it.”

“Now who’s judging?” Alec teased.

Cleo scooted into me and squealed as he squeezed her side. “You’re buying me fries,” she informed him. “I’m starving.”

I watched them and picked at my fries as Cleo devoured fries and a milkshake and half of Alec’s chicken nuggets. They joked about things I hadn’t been there for and people I had never met. Still, I didn’t tell them that the jealousy forcing its way up my throat was the reason I mostly just drew patterns in the ketchup.

The walk back to school was quiet. Alec left once we were on campus to go find Amie, who had said her event would be over by now, and Cleo and I wandered back to our dorm. Cleo paused at the door to my room. “’M gonna sleep. You wanna get dressed with me later?”

I smiled back. “Sounds good.”

She planted a sloppy kiss on my cheek. I would have been surprised except that it became clear very quickly that being surprised by Cleo was a waste of my time.

I hid a yawn as I opened my door with a push.

* * *

Cleo woke me up, standing in my room with wet hair and her plastic bucket of Herbal Essences shampoo and pineapple body wash.

“Five minutes?” I grabbed a hairbrush and a toothbrush. Two hours of sleep had left me drowsier than before and my mouth tasted fuzzy. After a second, I grabbed a towel and my basket too. Might as well shower now before everyone filled them up.

My ninety-nine-cent flip-flops slapped against the floor. Things grew on the floors and in the corners of our showers, things I did not want on my feet. Steam already hovered over the six stalls when I walked in. Someone was playing really bad pop music and singing along, which almost made up for the shower shoes and growing things.

Cleo handed me a diet energy drink as I walked into her room ten minutes later. It tasted like carbonated melted Popsicle, but by the time we were presentable, it had kicked in. Heavy lethargy had faded and the buzz of caffeine and adrenaline was making me bounce on the balls of my feet. The muscles of my calves flexed in the mirror as I moved up and down onto my toes. Cleo bent over her laptop, IMing half the campus. I twisted back and forth in front of her mirror, fixing my hair and dress with minute adjustments.

“Stop obsessing, you look fine.” Cleo fixed invisible smudges under her eyes. “We’re meeting Dev in front in ten. Boy takes longer to get ready than most girls.” She laughed. “Wonder who he’s trying to impress now.”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Her dark green shirt draped effortlessly the way I somehow could never make my shirts hang, creating shadows in all of the places you needed MapQuest to find on my body.

“Sure it’s not you?” I asked. “You guys seem pretty close.” Besides, I couldn’t see any reason for any guy not to want her.

She shook her head, raising one eyebrow as she looked at me. “We wouldn’t last five minutes. Trust me. I have commitment issues. He’d just get his feelings hurt.” She laughed and reached out for her mascara again. “You’re the one who should be looking out for him.”

I was surprised. Cleo didn’t seem like the type who would lie to make me feel better about myself. “Me? Why me?”

“You guys would be cute.” She fixed her corner lashes with a precision I had never mastered. “But I should warn you, he has history.”

“Yeah, I figured.” The hot ones always did. Besides, I’d heard some excerpts.

“Seriously…” She broke off as something hit the window. We heard someone calling hoarsely from three stories below: Devin. “Guess he was serious when he said five.” She walked over to the window and pushed it up. “Hang on! We’re coming!”

“Together?” a guy I had seen at some of the sophomore assemblies shouted up from the quad. “Can I watch?”

Cleo flipped him off. I blushed. The window closed with a smack. “Boys.” She rolled her eyes, sliding a twenty-dollar bill into her bra. “Ready?”

I made one last unnecessary correction. “Always.”

Tonight, Cleo had assured me, was an exception. Normally, there was nothing going on around this campus other than movies in the dorms (where the guys couldn’t go) or playing pool in the student lounge, if you could somehow get a table. Then there was always hooking up in the bushes, if you didn’t mind the dirt and the occasional stray stick. Fortunately, this weekend was the back to school dance. Lame and chaperoned. Still potentially fun.