Cecily Von Ziegesar (7 page)

“Are your parents pretty strict?” Adam asked, only because his parents weren't.

“They're not, not really,” she mused. It was she who was strict, with herself. How could she screw up when her brother had screwed up enough for the both of them? She was about to tell Adam all about Patrick and the tense silences between her parents at dinnertime, when Professor Rosen's head loomed large in the open window.

“Shipley Gilbert, do the words ‘roaming restrictions' mean anything to you?” she demanded. There was no way for Shipley to know this, but roaming restrictions as a form of punishment had been put in place during her brother's tenure at Dexter.

Shipley sat up and glanced at Adam. His face was very red. “I'm sorry,” she stammered. “This isn't his fault. My car was stolen. I thought the week was pretty much over, and I needed some bug repellent for tonight.”

Professor Rosen frowned and turned her attention to Adam. “Maine plates” she observed. “You live around here?”

Shipley decided not to remind her that she'd already been inside Adam's house.

Adam wondered if he was in for it now too. “Just a few miles away. River Road, toward China.”

Professor Rosen's eyes lit up. “No kidding. We're on River too, the Homeward end.” She squinted at him for an awkward minute. Her hair was pretty, Shipley noticed for the first time, light brown with natural reddish blond highlights that reflected the sun. “I have to ask,” the professor continued. “You don't happen to have any acting experience, do you?”

Acting in front of an audience was not something Adam had ever considered. In fact, the idea terrified him. “No, not really. Sorry.”

“Well, I'm putting on a one-act play. I do one every year. This year's
The Zoo Story
by Edward Albee. Know it?”

Adam shook his head.

“There are only two parts, Peter and Jerry, and you're just right for Peter.”

“Okay.” Adam nodded politely, even though he had no intention of ever acting in the professor's play.

“What's your name, anyway?”

“Adam. Adam Gatz.”

“All right, Adam. Think about it.” Professor Rosen rapped her knuckles on the roof of the car, directly above Shipley's head. “Now, be a good kid and drive her back to campus where she belongs.”

D
exter was an earnest place. Eliza had been waiting all week for something ironic to happen—a deadly hailstorm of Hacky Sacks, or a Birkenstock-induced foot fungus requiring amputation—with no luck. And the student population was dead-set on being
into
things—the Woodsmen's Team, football, the election, beer—that she simply could not get excited about. If she wanted to enjoy the next four years she would have to amuse herself. Which was fine. She was used to that. And there was certainly plenty of fodder.

“It's nice to know you're not ashamed that your mothers still dress you,” she greeted Nick and Tom outside her dorm. The boys lived in Root, on the opposite side of the quad from Coke.

Tonight Tom wore a pair of navy blue shorts with little green dogs stitched all over them, a yellow Lacoste shirt, a kelly green cotton webbing belt, and Docksiders without socks. Eliza thought it took courage not to be influenced by all the crunchiness around him. Nick, on the other hand, wore a strategically shredded purple T-shirt with a picture of a yellow gummy bear on it,
a pair of ancient brown corduroys, and his trademark earflap hat. “How's married life?” she asked them.

The boys shrugged their shoulders uncomfortably. Obviously neither one was too pleased to be rooming with the other.

“Any luck in the employment office?” Nick asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah,” Eliza said. “You?”

“I did okay,” Nick responded carefully. He'd been waiting for Tom to tear into him for needing a campus job at all. The less said about it, the better.

Eliza and Nick's tenure at Dexter was contingent on financial aid, and their financial aid package was contingent on their keeping a campus job. The best-paying jobs were in Dining Services and Physical Plant, but the upperclassmen usually snagged those while the freshmen were at orientation. Other jobs included assisting professors with their photocopying and filing, mail room detail, helping students with their papers in the Writing Center, shelving books in the library, operating the audiovisual equipment for films or lectures or performances, or modeling for Studio Art: Portraiture classes.

At a big public university you could get away with a modeling job without the fear of being constantly recognized, but not at Dexter. It was a small school, and after a few months there were no new faces. A model for any of the studio art courses could count on the fact that by graduation half the campus would have seen her naked. This did not deter Eliza. It was way better than skinning and filleting raw chickens, a restaurant job she'd had in the past.

Nick had taken a job in the audiovisual department. He liked the idea of getting to watch movies from a little booth in the back of the theater, and he already knew how to use a slide projector. Back at home he often got out the carousel full of slides of his mom smoking pot on the beach while pregnant with him,
or of his dad digging sand castles. That was before his dad went to California for business and met a yoga instructor from Santa Cruz, home of the most captivating women in the world. They hadn't had much more than a postcard from him since.

“Where's Shipley?” Nick demanded.

Eliza made a face. “Who cares?” She'd gotten into the routine of hating Shipley. She even hated her underwear, which looked like it was dry-clean-only, and her jeans, which she hung up on hangers. Her jeans! “I think she already went to the barbecue. She said she'd meet us there.”

 

T
he sun hung low and hot. The Grannies, Dexter's Grateful Dead cover band, were tuning their guitars on a small makeshift stage beside the Pond, the impressive man-made lake on the edge of campus. It was an all-male band, but each of the Grannies wore the type of flowing Indian-print skirt bought from vendors in the parking lot at Dead concerts. Throngs of students milled around on the grass eating hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on smoking charcoal grills provided by Dexter Dining Services. A few students browsed the literature stacked on tables set up along the banks of the Pond, one table for each of Dexter's special interest groups: the Women's Group; the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Group; the Woodsmen's team; the Chess Club; Dexter Recycles; the Dexter Republicans; the Dexter Democrats; Dexter ROTC; the Dance Club; the Drama Club; the Ultimate Frisbee Club; Dexter Vegetarians; the Knitting Circle. Some of the upperclassmen sipped from plastic cups of Busch near a cordoned-off keg manned by a security officer holding a sign that said, “Please provide ID.” Professor Darren Rosen stood on the fringes of the crowd drinking beer with a group of sleep-deprived poetry majors wearing woolen cardigans despite the heat.

Nick spotted Shipley almost immediately. She was registering to vote at the Dexter Democrats table, aided by that redheaded guy from the farm.

“Democrat, Independent, or None?” Shipley wondered aloud. “My parents are both Republicans.” She wasn't sure about her brother. Probably he didn't vote.

“None,” Adam advised, wishing he could touch her hair. His parents had driven him to Augusta to register on April 10, the day he turned eighteen. They were both registered Democrats, but they'd told him not to register for a party unless he was sure who he wanted to vote for in the primaries, and how could he know that if he never bothered to read the paper or listen to NPR? They had both been gaga for Jerry Brown, and had helped him win the Maine caucuses, baking brownies for fund-raisers and cheering him on at rallies, but they didn't seem to mind that Bill Clinton had won the Democratic nomination. “Clinton gives a fabulous speech,” his mom would say. “Plus he dodged the draft. And,” she'd continue, raising her voice, “he has
gorgeous
hands!”

Tom surprised himself by not liking the sight of Shipley and Adam standing so close to each other, especially not near a table with Bill Clinton's smiling face pasted to it. His parents were both Democrats, which he thought was hypocritical as hell. His dad had gotten very rich during the Reagan years, and Bush had won the Gulf War, pretty much. Didn't he deserve some appreciation?

“Good to see you again, man.” Tom clapped Adam hard on the back. “All set to vote?”

Shipley wasn't sure how much longer she could continue to discuss the election. Her political knowledge began and ended with the Gulf War was bad news, George Bush was old and boring, Ross Perot was old and crazy, and Bill Clinton was relatively young and handsome and played the saxophone and
didn't seem to mind that both his wife and his daughter had terrible hair. She'd only followed Adam over to the Dexter Democrats table in the first place to distract herself from the note scrawled on the dry-erase board outside her room.
The keys are on the tire
, the note read. She'd run across the road to check, and sure enough, the car was there, right where she'd left it.

“I'm sorry.” The man seated behind the Democrats table offered her a sheet of white paper crammed with voting information. “You can't use a college post office box as an address to register. You're going to have to register in your home state and request an absentee ballot that you can fill out anytime before the election.”

“Thanks.” Shipley took the sheet of paper and stuffed it into her bag. “You'll never guess what happened to me today,” she gushed to Tom and the others. “First my car disappeared and then I got in trouble with Professor Rosen for going to the convenience store down the hill.”

“I gave her a ride,” Adam piped up importantly.

Nick tried to think of something interesting to report. “I got a job in AV.”

Tom hitched up his shorts. “What's that stand for anyway? Actually still a Virgin?”

Nick glared at him. “No. It's the audiovisual department. I set up the slide projectors and VCRs and show movies in the auditorium. I even get to do the lighting for plays.”

“What's wrong with being a virgin?” Shipley said, blushing.

The three boys stared at her with barely concealed excitement. Shipley was still a virgin?

“Hey, you know that blue light on top of the chapel tower?” Tom said. “Well, I heard there's this Dexter myth that if a virgin ever graduates, the light goes out.” He nudged Nick in the arm. “Dude, we got to get you laid.”

Shipley smiled. “Me too, I guess.”

“I'm sure that won't be a problem,” Tom said, grinning.

Adam pretended to be distracted by the music. Nick scowled down at his shoes.

Eliza's eyes were glazing over. Listening to Shipley flirt with every guy in sight was even more excruciating than watching her hang up her jeans. Eliza had done away with her virginity at the ripe old age of fourteen with Fabrizio, her neighbor. He was sixteen and skinny, and spoke no English, having just arrived from Genoa. Fabrizio went on to impregnate Candace, one of the cheese girls at his father's pesto business. They married, had twin girls, and were now obese.

As far as the election was concerned, no matter what the Dexter Democrats wanted Eliza to believe about Bill Clinton, Ross Perot already had her vote. He was a fucking renegade badass who was going to revolutionize the whole fucking process. Not everyone fit in the box. In fact, she'd had an interesting run-in this morning with someone who definitely didn't. She was in the room alone, studying cross-sections of a smiling chimpanzee's brain in her Psychology textbook, when the door to the room started to rattle and shake. She thought maybe it was a tremor—she'd read somewhere that even Maine had tremors—but nothing else was shaking. She decided it must be Sea Bass and Damascus, throwing their beer guts around next door as they polished off another keg. She got up and opened the door.

A guy stood in front of her, dry-erase pen poised. Despite the sweltering late summer heat, he wore a dirty black parka with a leaky tear in the chest, dirty maroon Dexter sweatpants, and dirty work boots. His long blond hair was matted and his beard was flecked with bits of grass and other miscellaneous crap.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Leaving Shipley a note,” he told her gruffly.

“Figures,” she said, and slammed the door.

“The band's starting,” Eliza observed now with a yawn. “Let's get some food.”

Adam followed the group to the food line. When he and Shipley had arranged to meet at the barbecue, he'd hoped the others would stay away. But wasn't this what he wanted? Friends? A life? His sister had practically drop-kicked him out the door. “Get the fuck out of here,” she'd said. “And don't come back till you've gotten some action.”

The Grannies were playing “Sugar Magnolia.” Clouds of charcoal smoke drifted through the warm air. A group of girls with bells tied around their ankles danced in a ring, flipping their long hair from side to side, their eyes unfocused and their wrists limp. Professor Rosen lay on the grass while someone read her palm. She appeared to be a favorite among the older students. A group of freshman girls who looked about thirteen kicked off their flip-flops and dangled their feet into the lake, arms around each other's shoulders as they swayed in time to the music. Beyond the lake and the smoky chaos surrounding it, Dexter's brick buildings stood poised and resolute.

Shipley tried to take everything in, but there was too much to process. With a total population of only nineteen hundred, Dexter was a small college in a small town, but it still felt overwhelming compared to high school.

She pressed her lips against her roommate's ear. “Sea Bass and Damascus are going to finagle us some beer.”

“Good for them.” Eliza sounded unimpressed. She resented it when boys waited on girls. She was trying to turn Shipley into a feminist.

“They're just being polite,” Shipley would argue. “They were taught to do that by their own mothers.”

“Yes, but don't you see?” Eliza would point out. “The more
they wait on us, the weaker we are. It's how they keep us
down
!”

Shipley didn't have an answer for that. She knew she could push a door open herself, but it sure was nice when a guy opened it for her.

They loaded their plates. Two cheeseburgers with everything on them, a corn dog, and a huge pile of potato chips for Tom. Nick filled up a bun with potato chips, tomatoes, cheese, lettuce, pickles, mustard, and ketchup—a vegetarian's delight. Eliza selected a foot-long hot dog, which Shipley was sure she was only eating because it was shaped like a penis. Shipley chose a bleu cheese burger with tomato. Adam got a hot dog with ketchup just to see if he could taste the rat testicles his mom insisted they were made with.

The singer's dirty blond hair hung over his shoulders in matted dreadlocks. His voice was raspy, his blue eyes wide and excited. Tom stood to Shipley's right, wolfing down his food. Shipley was glad she'd taken the time to brush her hair and change into her pretty white sundress from Martinique. She loved how soapy and clean Tom smelled most of the time, and how big he was. She felt safe with him. Since his arrival at the barbecue she'd paid no attention whatsoever to Adam, who stood to her left, quietly munching his hot dog.

Nick had run out of pot. He ate his condiment-filled bun with forlorn sobriety, pretending not to care that Shipley's attention was being monopolized. If Shipley were to choose either
one of the others, Nick preferred Adam, but he could tell by the way she kept looking up at Tom between her long blond eyelashes that she was smitten with him. How she could like a guy who could eat a whole sausage pizza between dinner and bedtime and burp the national anthem he simply could not understand.

“This music sucks,” Eliza noted to no one in particular. Mustard dripped down her chin, but she left it there on purpose.