Love Show (2 page)

I looked up at the starless night.
I multiplied numbers in my head until the tears dissipated and then I took a
long swig from the Gatorade bottle and flashed David a falsely bright smile.

David slipped his hands into his
pockets and watched me warily. “What did they say?” he asked after a second.

“I didn't get the job.”

“What?” he looked shocked. I took
another sip from the Gatorade bottle, thinking of the hundreds of nights I
stayed up too late and woke up too early and said no to too many friends.

I had believed, foolishly, that
because I gave up on fun, I was entitled to a job at the
Times.
I didn’t
like that I had allowed myself to think that way.

He reached for me. “I'm sorry.”

“No, it's fine. Really,” I said. I
stepped away, not particularly wanting to be comforted.

It doesn't matter
, I told
myself.
There are other newspapers
.

I swallowed thickly.

"Hadley, slow down. Come
on," David said. He jogged to keep up with me.

There are so many other
newspapers. So many other places to apply. She said they would keep you in
mind, anyways.
And it's fine. It doesn't matter. No big deal
.

It's funny how quickly you begin to
talk yourself out of your own dreams. I took another long sip of the lemonade
and vodka.

David caught up to me. He grabbed
my wrist. “Hey, talk to me.”

“It's fine.”

"It's not." He shook his
head. "It's their loss, but it still sucks."

"Right." I bit my lip,
wondering if I'd picked the wrong pieces to showcase or if I had seemed too shy
for the Eastern Africa bureau or
something
. “I'm sure they'll really
suffer without me. It's a miracle they've kept afloat since 1851 without my
services.”

He wrapped an arm around my
shoulders and I let him hug me briefly. He didn't say much else. There wasn't
much else to say.

When we got home, I took a shower.
I washed the shampoo out of my hair and slapped my hand against the shower wall
twice. "Fuck," I muttered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

When I got out of the shower, I
looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes showed most of the week's damage;
red-rimmed and dark-circled, the left one was slightly larger than the right.
That happened whenever I went too long without a normal amount of sleep. I toweled
my hair into some kind of nasty Mohawk and got another good look at myself in
the mirror.

"You look like a troll doll,"
I told my reflection. "A fucking demented troll doll."

I cleared my throat.                               

"And you're talking to
yourself. So, you've lost your mind." I exhaled and huffed. "Clearly.
No wonder they didn’t hire you. You’re fucking crazy.” I closed my eyes,
unwilling to look at myself for another second.

"
You've Got Mail
is
on!" David shouted.

I toweled off my hair and put on a
bathrobe.

"Say something so I know you
didn't drown yourself!"

"Be right out!" I called
back.

I shuffled out of the bathroom and
over to David. I sat down next to him on the couch just as Meg Ryan was being
stood up by Tom Hanks at the café.

"
You've Got Mail
could
only be the name of a romantic comedy in the 90s," I said. "The only
thing I like about my inbox is the delete button."

David took a handful of popcorn.
"You. Need. To. Get. Laid."

"I need to get a job." I
said. "And a haircut. And new eyes. Have you seen this? My eyes are
different sizes."

He looked at my eyes. "It's ‘cause
you're tired. So, close them. And stop talking. And go to sleep."

I yawned, thinking of something
else to say about the inanity of romantic comedies, but as soon as my eyes were
shut, I dropped off into slumber.

David had been counting on doing a lot more wheedling to get
me to go to tailgate.

When I walked out of my room at 11
AM, he was already drinking with Nigel. He lifted a plastic cup in my direction
and grinned wickedly. Nigel was squinting at a beer, jabbering on his cell
phone to someone he was calling 'Snookums.'

"So, I've been thinking that
it's a requirement for you to attend tailgate,” David said.

"Sure.”

"Seriously?"

I shrugged. "Why not? I don't
have anything better to do."

He opened his mouth and then closed
it. "Wonderful. Put on something waterproof. They're calling for a
monsoon."

“Perfect,” I said dryly.

Nobody should drink alcohol at
eleven in the morning. It's a recipe for disaster. Nigel was slurring his words
by noon and David was trying to cut my hair and I was singing Ke$ha at the top
of my lungs.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I
demanded when he came at me with scissors.

“You need a haircut.”

“No.”

“Trust me.”

“No.”                                  

He pouted. “But,
Hadley
, I’m
dying to cut somebody’s hair.”

“Cut your own damn hair.”

David checked his reflection in the
mirror and tossed his head from side to side so his golden locks bounced. He
pouted. “That would be criminal,” he said. “Your hair, however, is problematic.
And Nigel has a limited quantity of hair."

I looked at Nigel's buzz cut.

"Go away," I said to
David as he snipped in the air. "That is
dangerous
."

"Please, Hadley, please,
Hadley, please, please—”                         

I looked in the mirror. “There is
nothing wrong with my hair.”

“You have so many split ends, it’s
giving me a panic attack.”

“Oh my G
od
,” I said.

He smiled maniacally. “Yes.”

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” he huffed,
dropping the scissors on the counter. He sipped his lethally strong vodka
lemonade from a hot pink Hello Kitty cup he had bought on one of our epic trips
to Target.

 “You’re making out with a stranger
today," David announced. He filled my glass with another generous portion of
lethal lemonade.

"I can't drink this."

"You can. And you will. And
then you will find a stranger, make out with him, and have the college
experience."

"That's it?"                                     

"No, that’s the
beginning," David said. "Baby steps.
Nigel
!"

Nigel opened his eyes. “What?”

"Are you falling asleep?"

"No," Nigel said.

I slurped my drink through a straw.
David turned the music up louder. By the time, I’d had my third vodka lemonade,
I probably would have let David cut my hair and then perform open heart surgery
if he wanted to.

"We need to go," Nigel
said to David.

"Hadley, we're leaving,"
David said to me.

“I love you so much. I think maybe
we should get married,” I said to David.

“I did not go through hell in high
school so that I could marry someone with a vagina.” He gave me a withering
look.

“We would be a great couple though.
And we wouldn’t ever have to have sex.”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“I love you.”

He dragged me by the wrist toward
the refrigerator. “You need to drink more. You have the alcohol tolerance of a
four year old.”

“Well, maybe we could have sex once
if we wanted to have kids.”

“Please stop talking.” He handed me
a Red Bull and I made a face. “Don’t even start. You are drinking that. I am
not going to carry you home. I’m just not. If you pass out in the parking lot,
then you can stay there. In the Monsoon. Where you will
drown
.”

“That’s mean.”

“That’s why I’m giving you a Red
Bull,” he said.

“You would totally carry me home.”
He made a face. He
would
totally carry me home. He just wouldn’t be
happy about it. So, I drank the Red Bull.

We stumbled down the tree-lined
block to the parking lot where the student tailgate was held. I wore jeans and
boots with a heel, and a tight purple tank top to show a modicum of school
spirit.

“I should have worn a coat.”

“You’re too drunk to be cold.”

“You don’t know everything.”

“I know most things,” David replied
wearily.        

“
What
is the point of even
going to this thing? They
aren’t
going to beat Nebraska,” I said.

“Nobody cares about the game. It’s
for the social scene,” he said. And, that was true. Most of the students would
stumble back to their dorms and apartments long before halftime.

“Hadley!” Andrew Brenner shouted as
soon as we walked into the parking lot, which was jam-packed with people I knew
and people I’d never seen. Everyone looked drunk.

I hugged Andrew warmly. Mostly
because, in spite of David’s insistence that I wouldn’t feel cold, I was
freezing.

“It’s supposed to rain,” Andrew
warned me, with an eye to the sky. “There’s a low pressure system moving
northeast out of Kansas.”

“Oh, okay,” I looked up at the foreboding
clouds and nodded. “Low pressure.”

Andrew really liked the weather,
which was endearing, but…you know, tedious. He knew all sorts of facts about
dew points and densities and southerly breezes.

So long as you didn’t let him get
started on meteorology, he was the sweetest kid in the world. But he’d started
in on the weather. And no matter how sweet he was, I couldn’t take much of it.

Usually, David would have taken
this opportunity to interrupt and drag me somewhere more interesting, but he
gave me a thumbs up and an encouraging smile.

“I’m just going to say hi to
someone,” he said.

"David," I hissed at his
rapidly retreating back.

"Hey, did you hear back from
the
Times
yet?" Andrew asked.

I cocked my head at him.
"Nope. No, I didn't. Not a word. I did hear that there was a hurricane off
the coast of West Africa, though. Sounds wild.”

Andrew looked at me incredulously.
"No way."

"I'm pretty sure," I
lied.           

"Where?" He pulled out
his iPhone. "Do you know if the system has a name? That would be virtually
unprecedented. It's almost
December
! And it’s the Southern hemisphere…”

"I've got to run," I
said. I lunged after David, but quickly found myself jumbled in a vaguely
familiar sea of purple. The music was thumping. The pavement vibrated. I’d felt
houses vibrate from aggressively loud speakers, but I’d never felt the actual
ground move.

And I thought I was drunk, but I
definitely wasn’t. I mean, not compared to the people here. I wasn’t throwing
up in a garbage can like the skinny girl in jean shorts a few yards to my
right. And I hadn’t yet taken off my shirt, like the screaming, incoherent boy
to my left.

“This is trippy,” I muttered to
myself. Appropriately, I took that moment to trip. Not badly. I caught myself.
Still, I tripped.

Someone wrapped a warm hand around
my arm and helped me up.

I brushed my hands off on my jeans,
cringing.

“You okay?”            

I looked up into a pair of
thick-lashed brown eyes. They were soft. Bedroom eyes. Deep and big. Something
you wanted to fall into.

Okay, so I was definitely drunk.

He was handsome, too, in a blue
plaid shirt, with a playful smile—halfway between teasing and happy to see
you—and tall, at least six two. We were standing close enough that I had to
lift my chin to look into his eyes.

He waved a hand in front of my
eyes. "Hey.” He laughed gently. “Are you okay? Did you hit your
head?"

“Oh. Sorry. No,” I said awkwardly.
“I’m-I’m good…I’m fine.” I smiled. “I’m great. Just clumsy.”

Someone shouted in our direction
and the handsome stranger turned his head. “One second, okay?” He took a few
steps towards a pickup truck parked at the edge of the lot.

“
There
you are,” David said,
grabbing my wrist and yanking me forward. “Where the hell did you go?” he
asked.

“Where did
I
go?”

“You were supposed to make out with
Andrew.”

“
What?
” I turned my head. I
was just drunk enough to want to make out with the handsome guy in plaid. I
tried to locate the back of his head in the crowd, but David kept pulling my
wrist.

“I am
not
making out with
Andrew.”

“Andrew likes you.”

“Says who?”

“Everybody who has eyes.”

“That’s ridiculous. And I've made
out with Andrew. It was not memorable."

"Right, you were drunk."

"Not that drunk."

“Mm…” he took a deep breath. “You
need to make out with someone. Break the totally depressing vow of celibacy
you’ve taken—”

“I haven’t taken a
vow
.”                 

“Nobody goes through three years of
college without so much as drunkenly hooking up with a stranger without taking
vows. Or being, you know, Mormon, or something,” he indicated vaguely with one
hand. He looked at me suspiciously. "And I
know
you're not a
Mormon. One, you’re drunk and two, you’re a caffeine fiend."

I took in a deep breath of the cold
air and ran my hand through my hair. Something about being cold and drunk and
wobbly from having tripped made me want to do something moderately crazy. 
“Well, there was someone over there,” I said vaguely.

“Excuse me?”                         

“There was someone…you know, cute.
Over there.” I indicated over to where the stranger in plaid had been.

“You think someone’s cute?” he
repeated slowly. "I've literally never heard you say that before.
Where?"

“Over there," I gestured.
"But, I don't think—”

“Where? Who? Why didn’t you say
something sooner?”

“Okay, you’ve got to stop yanking
my arm,” I said, as he pulled me back towards where I had been when I fell. “I
mean, I think you’re going to dislocate my shoulder.”

The rain started with a few fat and
icy drops and quickly picked up. Some people screamed dramatically and began to
flee. Others cheered and turned up the music.

“FUCK!” David shouted, throwing his
head back. “Where is he?”

“In a plaid shirt.”

“Of course, you would want to make
out with someone in the middle of a
stampede
,” he shouted at me.

“I don’t want to make out with
anybody!"

He rolled his eyes as someone’s
shoulder banged roughly into mine and he pulled me closer to him. The rain
turned from soft drops to a steady stream. I shuddered as it ran down my hair
and my back. The wind whistled across the parking lot and empty plastic cups skittered
across the ground around my feet.

“There!” I said. “He’s right
there.”  

And he was right there, with a
handful of boys who seemed totally undisturbed by the rain. He was leaning
against a red pickup truck with that easy smile on his face. He glanced up at
the rain, like he was happy to see it.

David pulled me closer. “Him?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Go talk to him.”

“What?
No
.”

“Yes.” He gave me a little push.

“Wait, what am I going to say to
him?” I asked David.

“Just talk. You’re smart.”

“No, no, no, no,” I said, digging
in my heels, literally. “This is a bad idea. This is like…”

Then, he saw us. He stood up and
smiled at me. And David disappeared.

“Hey!”

I looked behind me to see whom the
Plaid Stranger was talking to. Nobody.

Or rather to me.

And I was David-less and I had
nothing to say. My throat closed up.

“I was wondering where you went,”
he said.

I nodded. “Uh-huh?”

Jesus, Hadley. All you can come
up with is syllables?

Tree branches swayed and rustled
overhead. Dead leaves whipped around in circles in the parking lot. He reached
me in three easy steps. I looked at his hands. That was easier than looking at
him. They were stained with blue and red ink and I thought maybe I could ask
him about that, but that also seemed really weird.

Where the hell had David gone? I
turned my head once more behind me. He was nowhere. I looked at the handsome
doe-eyed stranger and smiled, uncomfortably.

"Do you want a beer?"

"It's raining," I pointed
out.

He smiled. "We’ve got the
waterproof kind of can.”

I nodded. "Okay. Yeah,
sure."

He stepped back towards the pickup
and tossed me a beer, which I caught, barely.

“Sorry,” he smiled.

“No worries, I got it.”

“We’re going to wait it out,” he
said, nodding up at the sky.

"Yeah," I said. I looked
up at the sky, too. That was even easier than looking at his hands was.
Flirt
,
I reminded myself.
You think he’s cute. So flirt.

"It seems like a lot of shit
like this has been happening all week,” he mused.

"Rain? Or people raining on
your parade?"

"My tailgate," he
amended, grinning. The rain picked up.

“Yeah.” I needed a drink. Or a funny
story to tell. I tried to open my beer, and found that my hands were scraped
and shaky. He took it, wordlessly, cracked it open and handed it back to me.

"Thanks." I said. "I
know what you mean. About the rain."

"Yeah? Who’s ruined your
week?"

I smiled. I looked up at him. His
eyes were just as soft now. And I hadn't hit my head. That was a real thing
that his eyes were actually soft. "I don't know. Nobody. Myself. The Cairo
bureau. In Egypt. Sorry, you're not stupid. I'm sure you know Cairo is in
Egypt. Anyways, this woman named Suzanne works there and she...well, it's kind
of her fault. Actually, I don't think it’s her fault. It’s totally my fault.
She was really nice about it. But, yeah, rain." I looked at him again,
unable to shut up, maybe because he didn't appear to be totally horrified. He
just looked like he was listening. Although, I was horrified. "Sorry, I'm
drunk. I mean, all that's true, but I'm also drunk, and my life is kind of a mess.
Or, it feels like a mess. I guess it's not actually a mess. I just thought I
knew exactly what to do to get exactly what I wanted, and I never really
considered that maybe it wouldn't work out. And then, like, the second it
didn't work out, I just immediately talked myself out of believing I ever even
wanted it. And I feel like I was so sure of everything that it would be
embarrassing to admit that things didn’t work out like I planned. You know? I
was always the sensible one. And if it turns out I wasn’t sensible—and that I
just deluded myself into thinking I was—I would feel like such a fraud.”