The Dilettantes (2 page)

So when the eighteen-year-old bookworms, pre-emptively drunk on the knowledge they were about to soak up, arrived on the
hill for their first day, they realized with a slow-burning shock that they hadn’t exactly been told the full truth. The biggest betrayal was that they still—
still!
—weren’t even in the majority. Everywhere they looked they saw depressingly familiar-looking meatheads, whose marks were just good enough to squeak into general studies and who were still high-fiving anything that moved.

The smart kids, too, were different than advertised: a little less friendly, a little more standoffish. Everyone had a favourite book, but nobody would tell you what it was. So every year the new arrivals figured it was best to just lie low, learn the rules as fast as possible, and fall in line. If you brought up fashion now, it must have a footnote from Michel Foucault on the tag. All uses of the word
Darfur
must be followed by a minute of silence. All chocolate-chip cookie recipes must be postcolonial.
Nerd
was now the highest possible compliment, fetishized beyond belief. The smoothest move an undergrad could make was to sheepishly but loudly admit in tutorial that Heidegger was the only thing on his Amazon Wish List. Then chuckle, look down, and mutter, “I’m such a nerd.” Instant swoons.

Discovering even this narrow of a niche was a victory, Alex had to admit, but it still felt awfully hollow. And these kids were his peers—more than that, they were his readership. His target audience. Would they be interested in a two thousand–word feature on trees? Could he be bothered to even try to convince them?

Alex headed back to the office, ready to roll up his sleeves. The
Metro
was coming, and they needed to be prepared. He wouldn’t let
The Peak
get caught unaware—especially considering all the advance warning he’d already given everyone. It’d be downright embarrassing. As he walked past the lone remaining pay phone at the bottom of the stairwell, he saw the girl from the Mini-Mart holding the receiver to her ear. Right as he came into earshot, the girl’s voice jumped an octave.

“If I’m calling you long distance to explain why I changed our relationship status to ‘It’s Complicated,’ then
wouldn’t you say it’s complicated?”

Alex felt strange watching an argument about Facebook politics take place on a rusty old pay phone. Something about it didn’t add up. It was like choosing to defend your thesis via smoke signal.

Or writing an email, only to then print it out, stick it in a pigeon’s beak, and shoo the poor bird clear across town.

On the other side of campus, Tracy Shaw walked toward the Renaissance coffee shop, listening to a girl she’d just met tell her all about her directed studies course and her injury-prone brother and how she’d ended up here, in this suburb, at this school, to study English literature.

“So after the second accident,” the girl was saying, “the doctor said, ‘You must stay home and rest. Six weeks, minimum. The bones need time to re-attach.’” She winced along with Tracy. “Gross, I know. But my brother doesn’t listen. He gets bored and after three days pulls his skateboard out of the closet. I don’t know why this occurs to him. He hasn’t used the thing in years. Anyway, he jumps on in the driveway and
ten seconds later
is lying on the ground with a broken hip. The board shoots down the road, right into a big intersection.”

“Oh my god,” Tracy said.

“There’s more! Right as he falls, a police car is driving past our house. But they don’t stop to help. They just roll down their window, point at the skateboard that’s flying into traffic, and one says, very seriously, ‘Wear a helmet.’ He’s wagging his finger.” The girl’s laughter was as warm and strong as a hair dryer.

It was a crisp fall afternoon. Leaves scuttled along the paths on tiptoe, and the wind came in light on its spiralling route across the
Burrard Inlet. This was real mountain air, the stuff of legend and throat lozenge commercials. Packs of 1st-years sat cross-legged under trees and on benches, their noses held religiously high; a skinny guy with bloodshot eyes stuck his head out of a window in the nearby Academic Quadrangle, breathing greedily. Rumours had swirled for years about
SFU’S
supposedly out-of-control suicide rate, but a day like this downgraded those kinds of whispered statistics to a dark inside joke. It gave the students a subconscious reminder to breathe deep and enjoy themselves now, while time and youth and deferred student loans and temporary feelings of chest-beating immortality were in their favour. Besides, sparkling mountain water was already a finely tuned billion-dollar industry. You had to figure it was only a matter of time until they came with vacuums to bottle the air itself.

This, at least, was a modest version of the motto held up by a student activist group called The Air Up Here, whose bi-monthly demonstration Tracy and the girl walked past on their way to the coffee shop. It looked like a demonstration, anyway. It might have just been four hippy kids playing hackeysack. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

Soon the hill was alive with the sound of djembes.

“The police are maniacs,” Tracy said, once they were a safe distance away from the drums. She exhaled sharply and shook her head. “But you know what? I can do you one better. My little brother goes to school in Edmonton, and everyone in residence there plays these huge games of dodgeball. It’s just massive: fifty people on each side, industrial-strength boomboxes. So last year he’s in the middle of a game, and he winds up and whips the ball as hard as he can. He’s a bit of a showboat, so he probably jumped in the air and made a big thing of it. But he throws it so hard that he actually
breaks
his arm. A spiral fracture, all the way from his elbow to his
shoulder. Right as he threw it, he says he felt his whole upper arm just kind of sag.”

The girl threw her hands over her mouth, delighted. “No!” She was Scandinavian, with elfin features and an accent that, while clearly an insecurity for her, was also unstoppably cute, at least from where Tracy was standing. The girl had the kind of non-threatening exoticism that guys on campus went cartoon-eyed over.

Not that Tracy was competition—she’d been off the market for so long that her interest in what men liked was, at this point, strictly anthropological. “Yes!” she insisted, now warming to the familiar contours of her anecdote. “The best part is that the university hospital is just down the road, and when he went to check in, the doctor was totally unimpressed. My brother says, kind of sheepishly, ‘Yeah, it’s from a dodgeball.’ The doctor just nods, and goes, ‘How long have you lived in Lister Hall?’”

“Wow. Just, wow.”

Tracy had already let out another spurt of laughter. “He had to get pins, screws, and a whole pile of staples on the outside. His arm is basically an office supplies cupboard now. I keep asking him where they hid the hole punch. And he got all excited while he was in the hospital because they told him it’s the same fracture soldiers get from throwing hand grenades. There’s just nothing for all that force to go into, I guess, because the thing they’re chucking is so light.” A new tag to the story floated into her mind without her even searching for it. “He was basically just trying too hard.”

The Scandinavian stared into the middle distance, watching the hippies’ hackeysack jump and fall (mostly fall). “Then it’s decided,” she said, nodding with solemnity. “Our brothers must never meet. They’ll set both of our houses on fire.”

“So what happened to the skateboard?”

“What?”

Tracy felt the familiar tingle in her jaw for a post-class cigarette as they reached the café’s awning, but she fought it off. “Your brother’s skateboard. You said it went into traffic.”

“Oh! It got crushed under a truck, I think. We found a few pieces that night. He made us go out and look for it after sunset. It had his favourite sticker of a skull on the bottom.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tracy said as she held the door. Inside, the coffee shop was buzzing with activity. “I really feel like a moron—but I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Don’t worry about it! It’s Anna,” said Anna, playfully cocking her head to one side.

Just then Tracy remembered something Dave had once told her, years ago—one of his many cockeyed theories, though this one she was actually a little partial to. It sounded a lot like something her coworkers at
The Peak
might have cooked up, come to think of it.

The idea was that there were exactly three kinds of conversations you had to have with a classmate before you could become friends. First-level conversations were lightning quick, with no question or answer taking longer than five seconds. You usually had this kind of talk inside a classroom before the
TA
showed up, when the rest of the class looked quiet and distracted, and therefore 100 percent committed to eavesdropping. You spoke quickly because you sensed how many people were listening to your fluffball small talk, and because you didn’t want to commit to too much, in case the other person turned out to be a creep, or didn’t like novels with ambiguous endings, or all of whose favourite artists—by sheer coincidence—turned out to be fascists. At this point it was still possible to move to a new seat in a different row.

Next was when you could each talk for about fifteen seconds at a time without feeling overly pushy about it. These conversations took place in hallways, or the first time you saw a classmate in a public
place, free of the clingy aura of academics. It was common to stall at this level for years.

The third level, however, was critical, and critically short. It lasted for exactly one conversation. Here each response could last a maximum of forty-five seconds—really, as long as you could expect any non–blood relative to listen to you—which was enough time to detail what your term paper was about, or what was
really
wrong with the
CBC
, or what you and your boyfriend liked to do on long weekends. This conversation had to take place sitting down. By the end you felt nervous and sometimes light-headed at how much personal information you’d let out without thinking, and if both of you were still on board at this point, it was a done deal.

Just then, as they stood in line together, Tracy noticed how Anna’s teeth were sticking out in a goofy smile, and how unconcerned she looked about it. In other words, the girl was approaching level three and hitting her stride fast. Unless Tracy hit the brakes now, and hard, she’d have a bona fide new friend in a few short minutes.

But unlike most of the people she worked with at the newspaper, Tracy didn’t instinctively hate or fear other students. In fact, she often liked them. After a full year as copy editor—a position that required almost zero contact with contributors, either in person or digitally—she remained largely immune to their acerbic, passive-aggressive ways. In general she preferred talking to writing, which helped her social life, though not her proofreading rigour, and she was the only person on staff who could have entire conversations with other students without bringing up the fact that she was employed by
The Peak
. This was mostly because she couldn’t bear those long pauses while they struggled to think of something nice to say.

Tracy leaned over to Anna and said, “This is my favourite coffee shop on campus. I don’t know if you’ve been over here before. It took me almost two years before I even figured out there was an upper
bus loop, let alone all this stuff.” The complex they were standing in was one of the most recent appendages sewn onto the
SFU
campus proper, and also boasted a florist, a ghost town of a
DVD
rental store, sushi and Indian restaurants, an optometrist’s office, a pizzeria/donair shop, and the campus’s computer store. The whole area, coffee shop excepted, was so clean as to suggest under-use. “It’s meant to bring in the people who live in those apartment buildings around the corner. They aren’t students or faculty, most of them, but for some reason they live here anyway—even though there’s literally nothing to do up here if you don’t go to school. Weird, right? Anyway, as you can see, the plan didn’t work.” Tracy gestured to the overloaded tables of boys with flipped-up polo collars and girls wearing fuzzy boots whose pom-poms dangled perilously close to the floor. Two of the former perked up when they spotted Anna. “Nothing but rez kids everywhere you turn.”

“I wanted to ask you about that,” Anna whispered. She held a hand up to her mouth and her eyes darted around, as if she were about to disclose state secrets in the most indiscreet way possible. “Why do they all wear sweatpants? Someone told me that was how to spot the people from residence.”

“Oh, everyone does that,” Tracy replied. “Sweatpants, flip-flops, golf visors—I’ve seen yoga pants with a dress shirt. Tucked in. In Vancouver, casual is a right.”

Up at the registers, some kind of complication involving a gift card brought the lineup to a standstill. The girls chatted gamely on. They talked about how long the SkyTrain takes between stops. They talked about a popular
TV
show, wherein a group of attractive plane-crash survivors slowly discover that the island they’re stranded on is either science or magic. They talked about how both of their mothers never went anywhere without painted toenails. They talked about their tutorial, for an English class on Shakespeare’s later plays. When
their own drinks were finally ready, Anna spotted a pair of recently vacated stools and asked Tracy if she wanted to get a seat.

“Can’t today, I’m afraid,” Tracy said, flashing her own smile. “I’ve got a meeting. But this was fun. Save me a spot in class next week, okay?” No doubt about it: this girl was sit-down material. She was flattered Anna felt the same way.

Back outside, Tracy lit a cigarette. She wasn’t unattractive, and didn’t consider herself so, but whenever she talked to a girl like Anna, who actually turned heads, Tracy felt herself standing up straighter to compensate. It was a purely symbolic gesture; Tracy was five foot four, rounding up. And she only ever realized she was doing it afterward, when her lower back began to ache and she felt her spine settle back into its familiar slouch. Oh well.
Better than sticking my tits out
, she thought.

So she was short, with thick-chic glasses and an attractively prominent stomach that she hoped gave off a subtle, second-trimester femininity. Her jeans had double-folded cuffs. She used to wear a blazer with pins all along the lapels, until one day she didn’t.

One particular point of pride was that she didn’t try to compensate for her figure by making a barrage of hyper-filthy innuendo and constantly reminding everyone that this was a sexual creature. That sex
happened
here, whether you liked it or not.
Those kinds of girls
, she thought grimly, taking a deep puff of smoke,
are the absolute worst
. In photos they always made sure they were squeezing someone’s breast (not necessarily their own), and they only seemed to know two facial expressions: tongue sticking out; or chin angled down and mouth slightly open, looking doe-eyed into the camera. Both were meant to remind the viewer of blowjobs. You couldn’t reason with these girls.

Tracy was emphatically not one of them. For one thing, she hated wine coolers. She thought they tasted like potpourri.

Pinching the cigarette between her lips, she put on her headphones and cued up Hüsker Dü’s
New Day Rising
. The hackeysack circle had now doubled its numbers to eight. All guys. No surprise there. Their clothes were faded, frayed, and contained at least three times as many pockets as Tracy could imagine practical uses for. They never kept the hackeysack in flight for more than a few hits in a row, either, but guffawed and egged each other into trying more and more outlandish moves anyway. Three of them were yelling out quotes from a late-night animated series, all trying to approximate the main character’s squeaky, vaguely ethnic voice. If this was a meeting of any campus group, now it was Dreadlock Fans and Owners.

Even optimists like Tracy had little time for the hippies.
You’ll never get anything done
, she thought with an arch smile,
not with pants that complicated and slogans that simple
.

Just then one of the guys in the circle looked up and made eye contact with her. His eyes were Alaskan-husky blue, and he wore a long-sleeved waffle shirt with cargo pants that tied around the waist with a thin black cord. The directness of his look froze Tracy’s smug train of thought in its place. It also, she realized a second too late, froze her smug expression to her face.
Whoops
, she thought, slipping by.
You’re not supposed to let the hippies know you look down on them. Otherwise they’ll stop lending you their lighters
.