The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (29 page)

“You could always endow a department and create your own major,” I suggested.

“I've always liked history,” she said. “Think they'll let me dig up famous figures and clone them so I can ask questions?”

“I don't see why not. Who would you pick?”

“Maybe Hannibal of Carthage. I mean, anybody who can lead a battalion of elephants over the Alps to fight the Romans seems like a guy who would have some interesting ideas.”

“I love that Hannibal's your number one.”

“I'm sure a lot of people would just want to clone Einstein or something, but I'd rather hear about the elephants than theories about gravity. I'm done with facts about space.”

Outside the truck, elm trees and brick buildings rolled past. My tires kicked up flame-colored leaves. I could smell the earthy eastern air. Sophie leaned over and embraced me—surprisingly firmly, I might add. I guess she was still kickboxing.

If there is a way for a person to be happier than I was in that moment, I don't know what it is.

My new roommate's name was Li. He was from Hong Kong, and he played the cello in the university orchestra.

“Do you…have any interest in dance-rock?” I asked during our first conversation. He said he did, so I asked if anybody else in the orchestra felt the same way. He said he would check with the other members, and that's how I ended up with a band consisting of a drummer, a French horn player, a pianist, two cellists, and me on guitar. I called the group the School Dance.

Because of the time necessary for the construction of a
building, it was a couple of years before I finally got the chance to play the venue that my money had built, so I spent my time honing my skills at local clubs and dances, and—more than anything—being a college student.

Though I'd had to buy my way in, once I arrived at Princeton I focused on proving that the admission office had made a mistake by rejecting me in the first place, and studied like a madman. I declared a major in astrophysics, which might not have been the most practical course of study, since I didn't know what I was going to do with my degree, and math was always a horrible weakness of mine. But due to the fact that I didn't have to worry about money, I figured I would do something that interested me, and if I failed a class, I could just take it again. No rush. Whenever my classmates insisted that long-distance space travel was impossible, I kept smugly silent, because I alone knew the truth. I still didn't understand the mechanics of
how
it was possible, but I guess that's what you get when you have a bassist from New Jersey try to explain the folding of space-time instead of somebody more qualified.

Perhaps the strangest thing about my college experience was that Sophie and I naturally fell into the roles of good friends, and that was all. We dated for a few months when I first got to Princeton, but then she wanted to look around and see other people, and when I was honest with myself, I knew that I wanted the same thing.

Allow me to explain.

In Gordo, I had been attracted to Sophie because she had
seemed so unbelievably
interesting
compared to the other students, but at Princeton,
everybody
seemed interesting. During those few months when Sophie was at college and I was rotting away in New Mexico, she had gotten used to dating stimulating people from around the world, and while we cared for each other immeasurably, the reason we had both wanted to go to Princeton was to
get away
from our hometown and become more well rounded. It seemed counterintuitive to only see each other. I think we both secretly thought we might get together again down the line, but after working so hard to win our freedom from New Mexico, we wanted to run with it.

In my first two years of school alone, I dated a Lebanese anthropologist, a Croatian flautist named Lika, and the Argentinean national equestrian champion. As Cad had promised, the dregs of the Spine Wine I had consumed lingered in my body for a couple of years, which meant that I was able to understand everything foreign students said in their native languages, even if I couldn't speak their languages myself. It was a good parlor trick—more than once, I found myself in a bar while, say, a girl from India named objects in the room in her native tongue and I instantly pointed them out. But eventually my abilities started to fade, which was probably for the best. No need to have more strange chemicals in one's tissues than is absolutely necessary.

Sophie dated guys who were equally intriguing—a member of the Danish royal family, one of Picasso's great-grandnephews, a baseball player who had been drafted by the Cubs—though I tried not to pay too much attention to her conquests because I occasionally got the urge to kill them, open-minded as I was.

But Sophie was my best friend at school, and when I finally got up onstage with the School Dance at the newly completed Perfectly Reasonable Center for the Performing Arts as a junior, she was standing in front of the stage, just as she had been for all our gigs. I even wore a yellow jumpsuit with a lightning bolt for the occasion, because it just seemed
right.

The Perfectly Reasonable would have been proud of the auditorium. The walls were swathed in purple satin, and there was an enormous wet bar at the back. In honor of Skark, I'd asked the administration to track down the highest-quality disco ball they could find for the room's centerpiece. The one they found was less a
ball
than an antique Venetian chandelier shaped like a sphere that was taken from an opera house and had a sophisticated pedigree that would have no doubt delighted Skark.

The building was full for my band's performance, a ninety-minute sweating, shouting, dancing mess in which I rattled off twenty new songs. Ever since I had gotten to college and met musicians who were able to help me bring my concepts to life, I had been writing songs at a tremendous rate, at times finishing two or three a night, so I was always able to give the crowd something new. And the band had actual
fans
—not just kids who happened to be at parties we were playing, but people who would show up at our gigs whether they were students or not.

For the encore of every show I would ask the audience to shout out anything they wanted to hear, and we would do our best to accommodate them. There were songs that people asked for all the time—“Night Fever” by the Bee Gees, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper, “Burning Down the
House” by Talking Heads—but this time there was a request from the back of the room that I'd never heard.

“Play ‘Sophie and Me Up in Those Trees.' ”

Which was a song I hadn't played since the Dondoozle Festival.

“Now
that
is a deep cut,” I said.

“I don't think I know that one,” said Li, turning to me.

“No reason you would. I'll do it solo,” I said, taking off my electric guitar and putting on an acoustic. Nobody there would have any reason to shout it out aside from Sophie, who I saw had her neck craned and was standing on her tiptoes as she scanned the back of the room, thinking the same thing I was.

As I played the song—
You're swinging up there and I'm looking up at you, can't wait to come home to a tree house made for two
—I stared at the back of the crowd to see if I could locate the source of the request, but the lights were too bright and the auditorium too large.

And Skark was up in the vines

Singing about old times….

I added the line because I knew the audience was probably too buzzed to care about the lyrics, and I wanted to see if anything would happen if I threw his name out. I didn't get a response, but—though there was no way to be sure about this—I thought I saw a tall figure pause by the emergency exit
and look back at the stage just before ducking his head and walking through the door.

I peeked at Sophie, who shrugged. Wouldn't put it past him to show up.

Sophie and I escorted each other home that night—we lived in the same upperclassman dorm, which meant we were always walking together. Outside, there was the kind of chill in the air I had known I'd love even before arriving on campus—naked trees, mitten-wearing couples holding hands, clouds drifting in front of a huge yellow moon—and when Sophie gave me a look, I gave her my scarf, which is what often seemed to happen.

“I know you have the money to buy your own scarf,” I said.

“But if I bought my own, it wouldn't be one of yours.”

“That's my point. Even though you're no longer my girlfriend, you seem to think you still have full scarf privileges.”

“If an ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend are on good terms, the ex-girlfriend gets lifetime scarf privileges. It's just the rule.”

“I'd like to read that rule book.”

“The library has an ancient copy in its archives. I'd show it to you, but any man who touches it is doomed to years of datelessness. It's cursed.”

“I must have accidentally read it in high school.”

A sharp breeze blew across campus, and I zipped up my jacket to cover my neck. A food wrapper bounced along the
ground in front of me, pushed by the wind, and I bent over to pick it up, because litter had no place in my version of college.

I was about to drop the wrapper in a trash can when something printed on it caught my eye—it was the In-N-Out logo. I held it up to Sophie.

“What's strange about this?” I said.

“There's no In-N-Out on the East Coast.”

“No, there is not.”

We looked up at the sky to see if we could spot the Interstellar Libertine, but all we saw was the normal stars blinking warmly.

“Do you ever wish we still had the bus?” she said.

“There's nowhere I'd rather be than here.”

I listened to the quiet campus.

“I think you're supposed to end that sentence by saying
here with you.
”

“I thought transitioning to friendship meant I didn't have to finish sentences anymore,” I said.

“At least do it jokingly, for old times' sake. You can't just cut me out of a good moment.”

“I will put you back in the moment if we can also make out, for old times' sake.”

“HA…hehhhhhh. Snort.”

“You've added a
snort
to your laugh?” I said.

“I don't know where it came from,” she said.

“In the wake of this new snorting development, I'm withdrawing my make-out offer.”

“
Good, because it was never under consideration,” she said. “Particularly because of that goober on your face.”

“You're lying.”

“I'm not. It's like a little intruder below your nose. Don't get defensive. It's cold outside—no need to be ashamed.”

“Where?”

“Right there. Below your left…nostril.”

I wiped my face. Definitely a goober.

“Told you,” she said. “On your nostril.”

“Nostril,”
I said. “Another terrible word.”

“Not as bad as
oyster.
”

“Good one. Which reminds me, I've been hating
pamphlet
recently.”

“Squat.”

“Emission.”

“Great one. Why is that so awful?”

“I think it's because of the
sss
and then the
un.
There's something about them together that doesn't work. And the context is kind of unappealing.
Emiss-ing.
”

For a moment, she looked lost in thought.

“I've got one,” she said.

“Try me.”

“Polyp,”
she said.

“That is
horrible
,” I said. “What is it?”

“It's a bump that grows in your colon.”

“Tough to match, but I've got the best one ever,” I said.

“Give it.”

“I don't think you're going to be able to take it.”

“I can handle anything.”

“Here it comes.”

“Bring it.”

If Skark had visited campus to pay his respects to the temple his band's success had built, I was glad he'd left quietly, because I was done with visiting space. At the moment, the only stars I wanted to see were the points of light haloing from sidewalk lamps, the only nebulae I cared about were the clouds Sophie and I were exhaling in the cold night, and even if the Earth was zipping around the sun at a speed I hadn't
quite
been able to figure out from my astrophysics classes, it was nice to feel completely still.

“You're killing me,” said Sophie. “Come
on.
”

“…Girdle.”

“HA…hehhhhhhhhh…”

Best thing in the universe.