The Man of My Dreams (7 page)

“I kind of had a long day.”

“What, studying paintings?” He smiles, and she thinks that maybe he has not yet chosen Michelle over her.

“It’s more tiring than you’d think,” Hannah says.

“I don’t have Friday classes this semester,” Michelle says. “It’s so sweet.”

Hannah also doesn’t have Friday classes, which might be the reason for the cough medicine problem—by the time Friday afternoon rolls around, she’s already been untethered for over twenty-four hours.

“You liberal arts people,” Todd says. “You don’t know how good you have it.”

“I’m premed, man,” Michelle says. “I’m working my ass off.”

“Okay, but she”—he jabs his thumb at Hannah—“is studying art history. Any questions you have about the
Mona Lisa,
Hannah’s on it.” He’s making an effort, Hannah thinks. It might be small, but he’s making an effort. And he’s not bad-looking, and she suspects he’s drunk, which is good, because maybe if he’s drunk, he won’t be able to tell when he kisses her that she has no idea what she’s doing.

“Hannah and I don’t really know each other,” Michelle says. To Hannah, she says, “Before we picked you up, I thought you were going to be someone else. But I think that girl’s name is Anna.”

“Here I was thinking you’re all best friends,” Todd says. “I’m seeing images of you doing Hannah’s hair while she’s borrowing your pantyhose.”

“Sorry, but no one under the age of seventy wears pantyhose,” Michelle says.

“What’s she wearing?” Todd points at Kim, who is standing by the stereo with Jeff.

“Those are tights,” Michelle says. “Pantyhose are see-through. They’re, like, nude.”

“Nude, huh? I like the sound of that.”

No, Todd probably will not be the first guy Hannah kisses. She wishes she knew for sure, though, so she could stop trying. The dynamic between her and Michelle—Michelle with her tight pink V-neck shirt and department-store necklace of flat, thick gold—is ridiculous and unreal, something from a movie: bitchy girls fighting over a guy. Maybe at this point, Todd is hoping for both of them.

Now they are talking about the internship Todd will have this summer with Lockheed Martin. Hannah glances again toward the other couch. She could rest on the arms between them, she thinks, just lean over and shut her eyes. This would seem odd, but she can’t imagine that anyone would really care, and besides, they’d probably assume she’d passed out. She angles herself against the cushions and closes her eyes. Immediately, she is falling through darkness. The darkness is an overlay, as if there is all sorts of activity occurring on its other side, people bumping a black stage curtain from behind.

“Check that out,” she hears Todd say. “You think she’s okay?”

“It looks like she’s just sleeping,” Michelle says. “She didn’t seem like she was having a very good time.” Hannah waits for a more vehement expression of contempt—
And she’s a loser anyway!
—but instead Michelle says, “Are we going to this bar or not?”

“Let me ask around,” Todd says.

Go,
Hannah thinks.
Hook up. Give each other chlamydia.

More movement occurs around Hannah. From the other couch, a guy says, “Is that girl asleep?” She is afraid her face will twitch or, worse, she will smile and give herself away.

“Hannah.” Someone is tapping her arm, and she opens her eyes. Then, feigning disorientation, she shuts them, swallows, opens them again. Jenny is kneeling in front of her. “You fell asleep,” Jenny says. “Do you feel okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Everyone’s going to a bar, just for an hour or so. Do you want to stay here or do you want to come?”

“I think I’ll stay here.”

“Do you need water or anything?” There is a certain brightness to Jenny’s eyes, a sloppy emphaticness to her words, that makes Hannah pretty sure Jenny is quite drunk.

Hannah shakes her head.

“All right, then. Sweet dreams.” Jenny smiles at Hannah, and a wish flickers through Hannah for genuine friendship with her. She almost believes that if she revealed to Jenny what she is really like, Jenny would still accept her.

They shut off the television and the stereo and cut the lights, except in the kitchen. When they’ve all left, the quiet is astonishing. Hannah thinks that she might be able to fall asleep for real. She realizes she has no idea how or when anyone is planning to return to campus. Maybe they are staying here all night. The thought dismays her—having to look at these same guys in the unforgiving light of morning, waiting in line for the bathroom. She wishes she had brought a toothbrush.

Less than five minutes have passed when Hannah hears the front door open again. There are two people, a guy and a girl, both of them laughing and whispering. Soon they are not even whispering, just speaking in low voices. The girl, Hannah realizes, is Jenny, and she assumes the guy is Dave, the one from the kitchen.

“I left it inside the sleeve of my coat, so if it fell out, it should be on the closet floor,” Jenny says. “But don’t turn on the light. Hannah’s sleeping.”

They are quiet for a while, and when Dave speaks, his voice is different—it is thicker. “Do you even have a hat?” he says.

Jenny laughs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it’s supposed to mean?” This must be when he touches Jenny’s forehead or her neck. “It’s okay if you don’t,” he says. “I like being alone with you.”

“I swear it’s here somewhere,” Jenny says. Her voice is different, too, softer and slower. The apartment is silent—Hannah feels as if she’s holding her breath—and then there is the slight smack of their lips meeting, the rub of their clothes.

To Hannah’s horror, they move from near the closet onto the other couch. They don’t talk much, and soon they’re both breathing more quickly. Hannah can hear snaps being pulled apart. After several minutes, Jenny says, “No, it fastens in the front.” Their feet point toward Hannah’s head, separated from her by only a few inches of cushions and the armrests of the two couches. “You’re sure she’s asleep, right?” Dave says, and Jenny says, “She went out like a light.” Hannah wonders if Jenny really believes this.

There is more rubbing around. It seems to last for a long time, fifteen minutes maybe, though Hannah has not opened her eyes since Jenny and Dave entered the apartment and has no idea what time it is. A zipper comes undone, and after a few seconds, Dave says quietly, “You like this, don’t you?”

Actually, Jenny’s moans sound like weeping, except that clearly they aren’t. But there is something soft and mournful, something infantile, in the noises she makes.
Please just don’t have an orgasm,
Hannah thinks.
Please.
She finds that she herself is crying. One at a time, the tears fall from between her squeezed eyelids in long drops, tip off her chin, and settle around her collarbone.

Dave murmurs, “You’re so hot.”

Jenny says nothing, and even through her tears, Hannah is surprised by this. It seems like Jenny should acknowledge the compliment. Not by saying thank you, necessarily, but by saying something.

“Hold on a second,” Jenny says suddenly, and her voice is almost normal. They shift, and Jenny rises from the couch.

After a minute, the sound of vomiting is clearly audible from the bathroom. “Holy shit,” Dave says. He stands and walks toward the noise.

Hannah opens her eyes and exhales. She wishes she could move into one of the bedrooms, even the outside hall—she doesn’t care. But if she moves in their absence, they will know she was awake all along and maybe it will seem like she wanted to overhear them.

At the approach of footsteps, she snaps her eyes shut. She assumes the footsteps are Dave’s, but it is Jenny who hisses, “Hannah. Hannah!”

Hannah makes a grumbling noise.

“Wake up,” Jenny says. “I just got sick. And I’m hooking up with this guy. He’s in the bathroom cleaning it up. Oh God, I want to get out of here. Can we leave? Let’s leave.”

“And go where?”

“Back to school. I have Kim’s keys. And you can drive, right? You didn’t have that much to drink?”

“If we leave, how will Kim and everyone get back?”

“We can go by the bar and pick them up. And if they don’t want to come, which I’m sure they won’t, we can get them tomorrow.”

“But what about this guy?”

“Oh God. I don’t know what I’m doing with him. He just tried to kiss me in the bathroom,
after
I threw up. I was like, are you out of your mind? So let’s go. Can we go?”

Hannah props herself up on her elbows. “The car’s not stick, right? Because I can’t drive—”

Jenny pushes her down. “He’s coming. Go back to sleep.”

“Hey,” Hannah hears Jenny say. “Talk about a party foul.”

“Not a problem,” Dave says. “It happens to all of us.”

“You know what?” Jenny says. “I’m going to call it a night and head back.”

“Are you serious?”

“I just feel like it would be better.”

“Don’t worry about this,” he says. “You should stay.”

“I really think I want to go. Hannah, wake up.” How can Jenny refuse Dave? He will accept her, vomit and all, and she is refusing him. It doesn’t seem gross to Hannah that he tried to kiss Jenny after she threw up; it seems kind.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Dave is saying. “We could just sleep.” He’s saying it in a light way, as if acting casual will be more likely to convince Jenny.

“Another time,” Jenny says. “Hey, sleepyhead Hannah.”

For the third time tonight, Hannah pretends to awaken. Now that Jenny knows she is faking, Hannah wonders if Jenny realizes she is acting exactly the way she did the other times.

“We’re taking off,” Jenny says. “You get to sleep in your own bed.”

“Okay.” Hannah sits up and glances at Dave. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi.” He is watching Jenny as she pulls on her coat.

Jenny tosses the keys to Hannah. As Hannah retrieves her coat from the closet, Jenny hugs Dave. “Great to meet you,” she says.

“When you guys come back, you should stay for longer,” Dave says.

“Definitely.” Jenny nods. “That’d be fun.”

Then they are out in the hallway, the door to the apartment shut, Dave left inside. Jenny grips Hannah’s wrist and whispers, “That guy was
so
cheesy.”

“I thought he seemed pretty nice.”

“He was creepy. If we’d woken up together, he would have said he loved me.”

Hannah says nothing.

“You were smart to go to sleep,” Jenny says. “Good decision.”

Decision?
Hannah thinks incredulously.
I didn’t decide anything.
Then she thinks,
Did I?

They reach the car. It is freezing outside, the air icy. The bar is at the bottom of the hill, and Hannah keeps the motor running while Jenny hurries in to tell the other girls that they’re leaving. Hannah suspects the girls will be angry, but Kim appears in the window of the bar, smiling and waving. Hannah waves back.

“We’re supposed to call them tomorrow afternoon,” Jenny says as she climbs in again. “But probably we don’t need to come get them until Sunday morning. You’ll drive back with me, won’t you?”

The request surprises Hannah—it seems she has not behaved so oddly tonight that Jenny plans to drop her altogether. This fact should probably make Hannah grateful.

They take only one wrong turn before finding the highway. Few other cars are out—it is after three, Hannah sees when she looks at the digital clock on the dashboard—and shadowy clumps of trees line either side of the road. Michelle’s car drives smoothly, so smoothly that when Hannah looks at the speedometer, she sees that she is going almost twenty miles over the limit. She knows she should slow down, but there is something heartening in the movement of the car. She realizes that she was disappointed to leave. Underneath it all, she must have harbored some secret belief that the others would return from the bar, that Todd would have tired of Michelle, and that she, Hannah, would end up making out with him—that, by the end of the night, she would have kissed someone. But now she is glad to be gone. If she and Todd ran into each other tomorrow on the street, he probably wouldn’t recognize her.

As her disappointment fades, so does her resentment toward Jenny. It
would
be unnerving for a guy to say he loved you a few hours after meeting. Only in theory does it sound appealing. Either way, it is difficult for Hannah to imagine such an event in her own life. She wonders how long it will be before she kisses someone, before she has sex, before a guy tells her he loves her. She wonders if these delays are due to something she does that other girls don’t do, or something they do that she doesn’t. Maybe she will never kiss anyone. By the time she is old, she will be as rare as a coelacanth: a fish, according to her Evolutionary Biology textbook, that was thought to have gone extinct seventy million years ago until one was found off Madagascar in the 1930s, and then again in a marketplace in Indonesia. She will be lobe-finned and blue-scaled and soundless, gliding alone through dark water.

Half an hour elapses in silence. Just after they pass a sign advertising a truck stop at the next exit, Jenny says, “Want some coffee? My treat.”

“Do you want some?” Hannah says. She doesn’t drink coffee.

“If you don’t mind.”

Hannah puts on the turn signal and pulls off the highway. From the end of the exit, she can see a blazing hundred-foot sign featuring the name of the truck stop, and a mostly empty parking lot aglow with light. She waits for the stoplight to change.

“Weird,” Jenny says. “I’m having déjà vu.”

“About the truck stop?”

“About everything. This car, you driving.”

“Déjà vu is when your eyes absorb a situation faster than your brain,” Hannah says. “That’s what I read somewhere.” Jenny doesn’t respond, and then—Hannah can feel herself blurting this out, talking quickly and breathlessly—she says, “But that’s such a boring explanation. It’s so clinical. Sometimes I think about, like, ten years from now, I think, what if I get married and have kids and I live in a house and what if some night my husband and I are making dinner and I’m chopping vegetables or something and I have déjà vu? What if I’m like, oh, wait, this is all familiar? I just think that would be really weird, because it would be like I always knew that things were going to end up okay. I knew that I would turn out happy.” Hannah’s heart is pounding. “That probably sounds strange,” she says.