An Off Year (3 page)

“Cecily, it's so weird here. I feel like I'm living on Planet College. Like, it's funny, it's just like what you'd think, but WEIRDER.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, do they have you singing the school song all the time?”

“No,” I said. I mean, it was true.

“What is up with that? Do they think this is 1927 or something and everyone's going to the games in their raccoon coats?” Kate briefly had an obsession with the Roaring Twenties a few years ago.

“Ha,” I said.

“Anyway,” she said, “I gotta go. My roommate and I are going to go get dinner while it's early so we won't have to deal with the crowded cafeteria. See you around, clown.”

Okay, so I didn't get to tell her right away, but I knew I would have to. I did not want to be part of some wacky movie where I had to pretend I was in college while I wasn't. That seemed exhausting.

Kate was off on the West Coast at a school for people who are smart enough to get into an Ivy League college but are too cool to actually go. She was an only child and a genius. Her parents, both lawyers, were also incredibly rich. Kate herself had two cars: a little white sports car for the warmer weather and a gigantic SUV for wintertime (which she enjoyed driving through empty parking lots late at night after a heavy snowfall to make fresh tracks).

I sat next to Kate in freshman English, and on the very first day of class I decided that she was the most wonderful person I had ever met. I'm not sure what specifically it was that had indicated this to me. Maybe it was that she was wearing army green Converse All Stars that she'd decorated with Wite-Out while all the other girls were wearing new, sparkly flip-flops. Or that when the cutest guy in class said hi to her, she gave him a look like he was a fresh gob of spit on the sidewalk. Or maybe it was when Kaci Kamp whined because we had to read the first chapter of
To Kill a Mockingbird
for class the next day (one of my favorite books) and Kate passed me a note that said, simply, “She sux,” before we'd even spoken to each other. I was on her like a lamprey on a shark.

Kate spent her weekends TP-ing houses of the many boys who adored her, walking around town adopting fake accents and talking to strangers, and organizing trips to go bowling or play miniature golf or trek out to the one remaining drive-in movie theater in the county, all while cracking jokes, inventing nonsense sayings, and performing odd dances. She was tall and pale, with a muscular build from years of swimming and sailing the little Sunfish she'd received for her thirteenth birthday. She had long, wavy auburn hair and was totally unself-conscious about her body, throwing herself around and gesticulating wildly as if nobody else in the world were watching. She even created her own dictionary, and at times I forgot if the actual word for the stuff you eat was
food
or
shebooley
. I wished I were as confident (and pretty and rich and smart) as she was.

With no brothers or sisters, Kate enjoyed coming over and “studying” my family, pretending to interview Germaine (to her annoyance) and following Dad around the house. He adored her, and they had a running gag that he was paying her to be my friend. That didn't seem like such a bad idea, now.

The day after our phone conversation, I called Kate back and told her the truth. “Okay, so I had something else to tell you that I didn't get to. I'm not at Kenyon. I got to school and turned around and went home, and I've been here ever since. I didn't want to tell you.”

“I wish I had done that,” she said, after a second. “That is so awesome.”

I smiled. “It doesn't feel very awesome,” I said. “Yet.”

“Well, you'll make it awesome,” she said. “Why'd you do it, anyway?”

“That's the thing. I don't know,” I said. “It's not
like
me, my dad said.”

“Well, this is the new you,” she said. I liked the idea of a “new” me, but I thought that always entailed a new, empowering attitude, not to mention a new hairstyle. I had neither.

 

 

“I made an appointment for you next week with Dr. Stern. She sounds nice,” said Dad as he folded one of the navy towels, fresh from the dryer, from Josh's and my bathroom. I suppose that I could have done it myself, since the towels wouldn't even be in use if I weren't at home, but I didn't want to interrupt him.

“Cecily, are you listening to me?”

“Of course, dear Dad,” I said in a robot's voice, but really as I stood with my chin in my hands, feeling the vibrations of the washing machine through my elbows, I was staring at the intense orange of the Tide with Bleach box, which somehow reminded me of the Chip 'n' Dale cartoon I had watched earlier that morning. I knew that it involved throwing apple cores at Donald Duck, but what was the
theme
?

My father draped a sheet of lint over my head. I gagged and staggered around the laundry room.

“Pay attention.”

“Oh yeah, well, it's all fun and games until somebody chokes on sweater fuzz.”

“You know I love you. Almost as much as I love Josh and Germaine. But you have to get out of the house and at least address what happened. Please? It's been almost a month, Cecily, and it doesn't seem like you've done much more than rot your brain in front of the TV. That can't be very helpful. Plus, it was hard to get an appointment with this woman.”

I went back to the Tide box.
Man, that's orange.

He continued. “I think Health and Human Services will come and take you away if we don't at least try to figure out what went wrong. You just need to meet with her once, I promise. Nothing too intense. They're not going to give you a lobotomy. I'll just take care of that myself. I just need to find an ice pick.”

“How about I just lie on the couch and talk to you? That'll be much cheaper.”

Dad sighed. I took that as my cue to make a grand exit and tore up the stairs from the basement to the kitchen.

Germaine stood crying in front of the toaster.

“Hey, Germy, why are you crying? What did the toaster ever do to you?”

She turned around, tweezers in her hand. “The natural light's better in here than in my bathroom.” She dabbed at her eyes with a paper towel and experimentally raised and lowered her newly defined arches. I had to admit, she did a good job—if she was aiming to look like an evil villain. She looked critically at my brows. “You know, you could use a tweezing. You've got good definition, you just need a cleanup.”

My hands flew protectively to my brows. “Don't you come near me with those things! The last time you tried to make me over, you sent me to the emergency room!”

“It wasn't my fault you poked yourself in the eye when you were goofing around with my eyeliner.” I couldn't really dispute this. I was ten and wanted to look like Cleopatra but instead came home from the hospital with an eye patch, looking like a pirate.

I pulled two slices of cinnamon raisin bread from the bag on the counter. My sister watched me as I painstakingly picked out the raisins and flicked them into the sink.

“Why do you have Dad buy that bread if you don't like raisins?”

“I don't like the raisins themselves, but their essence is important in the toast.”

“Well, don't make a mess, please. Conrad is coming over soon.”

Conrad. The name filled me with intense feelings of bland-ness. I always hated Germaine's boyfriends, and the funny thing is, I don't think that she was too fond of them herself. She was looking for a knight in a power suit, but this one, like the others, was a rickety sideburned hipster in stale-smelling vintage shirts. He called himself a writer, which meant nothing in particular but an annoying tendency to try to be deep. However, in mannerisms and conversation, he was so unsure of himself that I felt like I could push him over at any time with my finger. And Conrad was a terrible writer. The odes he wrote about their lukewarm relationship tended to be bizarrely pornographic. Germaine kept them stashed in her makeup bag in her bathroom.

“All right,” I said, but realized that without thinking I was already squashing the raisins in the sink with my thumb, fat and flat like dead black flies. Superhero was crammed between my knees and the sink, his head down, intently watching the floor for falling treats.

“Cecily, can you take Superhero for a walk? Conrad's a little . . . uh . . .”

“Impotent? Gay? Smelly?”

Germaine glared. “He doesn't like dogs.”

“Then why is he going out with you?” I said. Before she could snap back at me, I dodged out the door with Superhero, onto the driveway, and down the street toward the beach.

It had just rained, so the effect of the sunshine on the lake mixed with the dark clouds moving east painted the water a silvery iridescent color. The leaves glowed gold, and the slick blacktop on the street shined.

One time a few years ago when I was walking Superhero on a foggy spring day, the lake was a milky jade green, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was maybe forty degrees out, but I still wanted to jump in. The sad thing about Lake Michigan photo-op moments is that the water always looks so inviting, but when you walk up to it, it's still the same grayish brown it always is. You expect the lake to look as magical as it did from afar, but it is always a letdown.

Dad grew up in San Francisco and was used to looking at water, so when he and my mom moved to Chicago's North Shore after they got married, they bought a house across the street from Lake Michigan. In the summer, sandy, bawling rug rats in diapers and idiotic flat-voiced girls working on their tans dominate the beach, but in the colder seasons, it's a nice place to wander around without being scrutinized by the high school lifeguards. Unfortunately, no matter the season, the beauty of the lake still guaranteed a healthy risk of running into people I knew from the neighborhood.

I escaped Germaine and her tweezers only to run straight on into Mrs. Garfield, my middle school algebra teacher, who happened to live down the street. She was also the mother of my former friend Meg. Meg and I used to be inseparable, and then suddenly we weren't for various reasons including her being a massive bitch. We hadn't really talked since junior year, which was going to make seeing her mom nice and awkward. The thought of Meg knowing that I wasn't at school was mortifying.

“Hello, Cecily,” Mrs. Garfield said, looking startled to see me.

“Hi, Mrs. Garfield.” Just steps from the sand, Superhero tried his hardest to yank my arm out of its socket.

She looked at me closely, like I was a math problem she was writing on the projection screen. “How are you doing? How is school going?”

“School is fine!” I said. “It's great.” I was sure that it was, somewhere, for somebody.

“You're home on a break?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping she would keep asking me questions that were so easy to lie about, which was much simpler than having to explain what I was really up to. I imagined her going home and talking about me matter-of-factly with her family over their dinner.
Cecily didn't go to school. I wonder what happened. You know, I'm really not surprised. Pass the pork tenderloin, please.
I really hoped she wouldn't tell Meg that she saw me.

Mrs. Garfield nodded. We stood still, looking at each other. This was like the verbal equivalent of the staring game: I wasn't going to say anything. She remained silent.

“Yes, well,” she finally said, making me the winner. “You take care of yourself, now. Tell your father I said hello.”

“Will do.” I speed-walked to the beach to get the awkwardness of the conversation behind me.

When we hit the beach, I let Supes off the leash, and all seventy-five hairy pounds of him were off, running through the shallow waves and sticking his black nose in the sand. I picked my way along the waterfront, pocketing stones and shouting to Superhero. Only two other people were out there, a father and his toddler. We passed each other, and I gave the father an adult-serious nod-smile but stuck my tongue out at the kid. He hid behind his dad's knees.

I thought I was pretty good at high school. You go to this class, you go to that class, you do this activity and that one, you make nice with your friends and your teachers, and you do some homework. Although I did hate shuffling around doing the same thing every day with the same people. By the time graduation came around, I was done with most of them, ready to get away from them—I would keep in touch with my good friends, I figured, but I wasn't going to go around on my last day of school making sure everybody signed my yearbook, as if I were always going to be BFF with Vanessa from that one English class or Darnell from sophomore-year second-semester gym.

I wasn't the prom queen, but I wasn't the girl from
Carrie
, either. Basically, I had been under the impression that I was pretty functional—I had my good times and some good friends and was sick enough of it to be ready to move to the next phase. After doing pretty well on standardized tests (I liked the order of the tests, except for the essay questions, which tended to be 100 percent bullshit when I wrote them), filling out all those applications, and smiling sincerely in the interviews, I thought I was ready for college.

Maybe talking to somebody about all this wasn't a bad idea. I just felt self-conscious—I didn't feel
crazy
, but I was worried that this so-called doctor would inform me that I had a mental defect or worse—that I was just a big baby who couldn't deal with reality. I still had a feeling that something was brewing with Dad, some big talk or punishment. Unless he was just going to let me get away with it without saying something, like the time he didn't say a word after the mailman slipped and sprained his ankle on the ice that I was supposed to have salted in front of the house. Fortunately, the mailman didn't threaten to sue. I wasn't sure if Kenyon was still asking for its tuition money. Dad hadn't mentioned it again so far. I tried not to think about it. I started feeling guilty. I wondered if Dad was worried that he and Mom had accidentally broken me during their divorce and that the damage was just starting to show now. A little therapy could get me all fixed up.