The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (11 page)

Garment Alley was a big, attic-smelling warehouse with dim
lights and green floors. Wesley seemed to think it was heaven, but it skeeved
me out. I imagined everything as full of lice and stiff with pit-stains.

Wesley chose a few Seventies-era t-shirts, flopping them
over his thin forearm. Then we browsed the coats.

“This one’s very cool,” he said, pulling an olive Army
jacket off the rack. There were a few blue chevrons embroidered on one sleeve.
He checked to make sure all the green buttons were still there and then he held
it against himself. “Hold these?” He handed me his t-shirts and put the jacket
on.

“A little baggy,” I said. We walked to a mirror so he could
see for himself.

“Yeah,” he said, “in the shoulders. It might fit you,
though.”

“Should I?”

“Go ahead.”

Reluctantly I tried it on, mostly to make him happy. It was
warm from his body, and yes, it looked better on me; my muscles filled it
better (though these days they weren’t what they’d been; I still did pushups
and situps but I had stopped lifting weights).

“You should buy it,” Wes said. “It’s only—” He found
the tag. “—five dollars!”

“But do you think it’s
me?
”

“The only you is the you
you
choose to be.”

“Sure, Captain Fortune Cookie.”

He laughed. I bought it.

On the ride back to the dorm he was quiet the whole way. He
kept zipping and unzipping the jacket he’d bought, a puffy blue thing. He
looked anxious.

“Do you not like your coat?” I said.

“I like it, I’m just— I really shouldn’t have skipped
classes today. I’ve skipped too many. I’m getting behind.”

“Well now that you can stay warm you won’t have to skip any
more.”

I liked when Wesley skipped—we had fun when we
skipped—but there was always a price, for both of us, to our skipping.
For me it meant a little extra effort the next day, tracking down homework
assignments or whatever. For Wes it always caused regret and a new focus
(usually brief) on his classes and his education, which he pronounced as though
it had a capital
E
. He always swore
he would never skip again. On evenings of days we’d skipped he would hole up at
his desk with his books while I chilled in the lounge with Shelley and Harriet.
Shelley called these post-skipping nights Wes’s “hooky sulks.”

During one hooky sulk in mid-October when we were doing
homework, our phone rang. The phone jack was located behind my desk and so our
phone sat near my laptop, making me feel like the gatekeeper.

“Can you get it?” Wes said from his bed, where he was
surrounded by books. That day we’d skipped classes and gone to buy a new lens
for his camera. The lens cost him sixty dollars; the skipping cost him six
hours in a frenzy about French class.

I picked up the phone. It was Wes’s parents. I told him and
he sighed and came over.

While he talked to them he sat on the edge of my desk with
the phone cord wound up in his lap. I put my reading aside and played a game
called Snood on my laptop, glancing occasionally at the freckles on Wes’s thin
arm. I had come to hate his parents. They didn’t call often but their calls
always left him upset. Their conversations (or at least Wesley’s side of them)
would seem to be pleasantries at first, stuff about their dog and his sister.
But before long Wesley would be yelling—about his grades, his classes,
eventually his capital-
E
education.
That was how it went this time, too. My desk started to rattle beneath him.
Soon the back of his neck was flushed and he was wiping his eyes. “But Mom,” he
was saying, “I
am
fucking thinking
about the future!”

He was inches away from me but untouchable, and I didn’t
know what to do.

I closed my laptop and crept out of the room. Shelley was in
the lounge peeling an orange. The scent of it filled the air and was a
surprising change from the eucalyptus spritz.

“Wesley is having another weird convo with his parents,” I
said, sitting down beside her. “I had to get out of there.”

“The same shit?” She handed me a wedge of orange.

“I don’t really like oranges,” I said.

“Eat it, it’s good for you.” Shelley was very mom-
ish
. I put it in my mouth.

“Yeah, the same shit,” I said, chewing. “They put so much
pressure on him. This time he was
crying
.”

“Yikes.”

“I don’t like to see him cry,
Shel
.”

Later when I went back to the room the lights were off.
Wesley was already in bed. I didn’t know how he could be sleeping already, but
he was at least pretending. I didn’t say anything. It was the first night we
didn’t talk ourselves to sleep.

***

A day in late October was marked on my calendar with two
letters:
UP
.

“I’m almost too psyched to go to class,” I told Wes that
morning as I was tying my shoes.

He was still in bed, his head resting in the crook of his
elbow and his paisley quilt pulled tight to his chin. This seemed like a day he
probably wouldn’t go to class.

“This is their first album release of my R.E.M. fandom,” I
went on. “Their last album came out a few months before I got into them, so I
missed the spectacle of the launch.”

“This is a big deal for you then,” he said. He scratched his
nose with the quilt. “What time do we need to leave?”

“Well Strawberries reopens at midnight for the release, but
I don’t know— I want to be in line early, I don’t want the CDs to sell
out before I get mine. Eleven, I guess? We can take the bus.”

“Sounds good.”

I went to class, and when I got back that afternoon he was
still in bed, lying with his arms folded behind his head, looking at the
ceiling. It was probably a hooky sulk. I was afraid he wouldn’t want to come to
Strawberries, and after he declined to join Kaitlyn and me for dinner it sure
seemed to be going that way. But when I got home from dinner he was up and about.

It rained that night and we stood in the rain, with
raincoats and wet sneakers, in line with a bunch of other people, some of them
R.E.M. fans, some of them fans of other bands releasing albums that day,
waiting for the record store to open. It was a cold rain that foreshadowed
winter but I was too excited to feel it. Wesley was quiet, stood looking down
at his sneakers while water ran off his hood.

At midnight the pink neon Strawberries sign blinked on and a
tired employee opened the door. The dripping line worked itself inside, snaking
through the aisles, ending at the checkout counter, behind which the day’s new
releases were still packed like shrink-wrapped gems in their shipping boxes.

“Does it look like a lot of people are buying
Up
?” I said nervously to Wes, standing
on my toes trying to see. “What’s that guy buying?”

Wes tilted out of line. “Looks like Jets to Brazil. You’re
safe.”

As we got closer to the front of the line I said to Wes, “I’m
getting
ner
vous.”

But soon I was there, and one of the
Up
CDs, with its shiny checkerboard cover, was placed in my damp
hand. I handed over a twenty with the other. Casually I slipped the CD into my
raincoat pocket—it felt like a treasure some desperate person might try
to steal.

Outside we waited at a covered bus stop for a ride back to
the dorm. Water sluiced off the leaves-covered Plexiglas roof, making it feel
like we were behind a waterfall. I held my palm flat against the CD in my
pocket.

“When will this bus come?” I complained, bouncing on my
toes. “I need to listen!”

Wes pulled a Discman and a pair of headphones out of his coat
pocket, held them out to me and said, “Brought this for you. Go for it.”

It was the most thoughtful thing I think anyone had ever
done for me. Still, I wanted to wait to get back to the dorm so we could listen
together, so I could share my band with him the way he’d shared so much with
me. And that’s how we did it. We lay in our beds and listened to the new songs,
warm and dry, and they were amazing.

I wanted that night and all the nights like it to last
forever. Somehow I really thought they would, too.

***

After Wesley was gone I wondered often about when exactly
he made the decision to leave. I wanted to know which of our fun times he spent
knowing he was going. I wanted to know which one of them wasn’t quite fun
enough to change his mind.

Did he know, on the night of
Up
, that in a month he’d no longer be at UMass? Did he know when we
were trying on clothes at the thrift store?

I think he knew on the day he told me he was out of
eucalyptus oil. Picture him sitting at his desk, holding the little glass vial
up to his eye, looking through it like a jeweler through a lens.

“Oh,” I said, maybe sensing somewhere deep that this was a
sort of finale. “You can get more, right?”

He let the vial roll back and forth on his palm. “I don’t
know where I’d find some around here. I guess I could look.”

“You should look, I’ve gotten used to it! It’s the trademark
of our room!”

He held the little empty vial over our wastebasket, then
dropped it in. “So long, eucalyptus,” he said.

If he knew then that he was leaving, it was still a few
weeks before he told me. When he told me I was confused, as confused as I’d
ever been. But could it really have been a surprise? He had all but stopped
going to class, and I often saw him in the morning when I was getting ready,
sitting in the lounge by himself with open textbooks on the couch, looking out
the window, a million miles away already.

He had said something to me that sounded like, “I’m leaving
UMass.” I looked at him as seconds ticked by. Finally he said something else; this
time it sounded like, “I’m going back to California.”

I said, “Next year?”

He said, “Next Tuesday.”

“You’re—? Tuesday?” That was one week away. “But—
Wow
.”

I felt as if everything had slowed down but my mind, and I
could take the time to examine each little detail of the world as it was and as
I was afraid it would become with him gone. The sound of kids playing frisbee
on the Quad / the emptiness of the room after next Tuesday. The wood of the
desk against my arm / who would play music for me?

I could feel my eyes welling up. “The semester’s over in a
month,” I said. “You aren’t going to stick it out?”

“I don’t see the point,” he said, shrugging his thin
shoulders like an old man, his freckles suddenly looking like liver spots. “None
of my credits would probably transfer.”

“So this is something you’re thinking about, or—?”

“It’s done. I went to Student Affairs today.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Yeah. So....” He stood up and went over to the stereo, opened
the CD tray and then closed it without putting anything in. “I just need to not
be here, Ollie.” Again he opened the tray, and closed it. “I mean, you’ll
probably have your own room. That’s cool, right?”

After a minute of silence he left the room, and as soon as I
was alone I started to cry. I had a million thoughts running through my head.
Who would I talk to? Who would I tell everything to? Who would ask about my
classes? Who would I make fun of people with? Joke with? Laugh in the dark
with? Who would tell me stories about their adventures? Who would be my best
friend?

I pressed my fists against my eyes. I was remembering now
what it felt like to be afraid all those years. I was a little boy again with
no idea what my future looked like.

***

Wes didn’t want the hallmates to know he was leaving and
asked me not to tell. He said he wanted to slip away without any fanfare. So I
was alone with the knowledge while the hallmates remained in what seemed to me
a blissful ignorance. But it was hard to keep secrets in quarters that close.
On Thursday of that last week Shelley stopped by our room while Wesley was
packing a box.

“Getting ready for the end of the semester?” she said, but I
could tell she was suspicious.

“Actually,” Wes said, “I’m going home.” He smirked
uncomfortably.

“What do you mean?” she said.

My muscles tensed. I didn’t want to hear him say it again.

“I’m dropping out!” he yelled, as though she’d asked him
fifty times instead of just once.

“Explain this to me,” she said calmly. She crossed her arms
and leaned in our doorway. She didn’t tip-toe around things like I did.

“I don’t know. I need to not be here.”

“It’s the end of the semester. You’re going to throw away a
whole semester?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” she demanded.

Wes just shrugged and resumed his packing.

Shelley sighed. “Ollie, I’m going to dinner if you want to
come.”

I looked at Wesley. I looked at Shelley. “OK,” I said, and
grabbed my Army jacket.

Later that same day Harriet found out secondhand from our
RA, Travis, who had asked if she was bummed about Wes. She opened our door
without knocking.

“I heard a rumor today,” she said, her hand still squeezing
the knob, “and someone needs to tell me it’s not true.” But she was already
looking around at the missing belongings and packed boxes.

Wesley just looked at her. Harriet rolled her eyes and
stomped up the hall to her room. I got up and followed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said. “Wesley didn’t want
me to tell anyone.”

“It’s his responsibility, not yours. I just think it’s lame
I had to find out through Travis.” She sighed and turned on her TV. “Whatever.
So it goes.” She waved her hand and said, “
Pffft
.”