Dedication (23 page)

Walking out from the air-conditioned chill into the afternoon sunshine, I drop my backpack at my feet to pull off my cardigan on the steps of Cabell Hall.

“See you Tuesday!”

I look up from tucking the pointelle cotton into my bag. “Yeah!” I smile back to Cute Lacrosse Shirt Guy. “Enjoy the movie.”

“Right.” He slaps his palm against his forehead. “See you at the library, then.” He walks backward, waving, before turning around and merging into the buoyant traffic of sun-kissed faces.

I lift my pack onto my bare shoulder and grin up into the cumulus-cloud-dotted sky. I fucking love Charlottesville, Virginia. Fucking love that it’s given me a To-Do list that doesn’t include Go to Crap Summer Job and Sob into Ben & Jerry’s Apron. Love that it’s filled with people who don’t know a goddamn thing about said previous sobbing. Love that everywhere I go, every hour of the day, there is, at minimum, one jogger chugging past in pursuit of health and clarity, flying the flag, forward focused. I just stick-me-in-the-sweatshirt, put-me-in-the-postcard, bumper-sticker-my-notebooks, L-O-V-E, love it.

I slip my sunglasses on and bounce down the brick steps into the J. Crew flow. Checking out hot guy with soccer ball. Checking out hot guy with other hot guys. Smiling at hot guy walking past. And somewhere in all this relentless navy and orange possibility awaits flip-flop-wearing Jay. Who I shall find and fall in love with, if I have to date every hot guy here to do it.

“I
hate
her,” my roommate Beth spins around to announce, her eyes wide with surprise at her own vitriol as we inch along in the miserably hungover Sunday morning O’Hill cafeteria line.

“Who?” I look around for the enemy.

“Her,” Beth mouths, jerking her head at the Patagonia-clad blonde in front of us.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers with alarm, her face twisted in confusion. “I’ve never met her. But her perfume, her voice…I feel like I could whop her over the head with this tray.” Her petite hands grip the peach plastic.

I look past Beth to her heedless torturer, giggling with friends as she picks through damp Tater Tots, unaware of the potential untimely end posed by the sleep-deprived, dehydrated, five-foot redheaded first-year behind her.

“When did you stop the pill?” I ask, reaching for a fistful of steaming wet silver.

“Um…like three weeks ago, right after I broke up with Mike, why?”

“PMS,” I pronounce. “Real PMS. The natural high.”

“Really?” Beth’s horrified.

“Welcome back!” I clang my fork to hers.

“I thought maybe it was the rain.” She shakes her head and grabs a limp waffle, biting into it. “Or someone wearing that much Calyx assaulted me in my formative years and I’d repressed it.”

“Rain isn’t helping,” I sigh, looking out the steamed windows. Gross guy in muddy sweatpants passes. Grosser guy chugs milk with his grosser friends, spitting it up all over himself while they laugh gross laughs. Grossest guy walks past, burping hello to the entire line. All in all a sea of pasty, oily, bloodshot, beer-reeking gross.

Six months at UVA and no Jay. No hot guys. It’s like the cold froze their cuteness and now it’s chipped off to reveal their bloated inner selves.

“I fucking hate Charlottesville, Virginia.”

“Where!” Beth’s eyes light up.

“What?”

“Oh,” she deflates. “I thought you saw it on a T-shirt. One in each color, please.”

I stick a mug under the coffee spout and watch the soapy water rise, indulging for only a moment in the imagined feeling of Jake’s flannel shirt against my collarbone.

“This is so not how I pictured this,” Beth says over the plastic cup of beer almost as large as her face.

“You were expecting crystal?” I ask as I watch Laura chatting with a bunch of the Phi Mu girls, seeing her break into her first genuinely relaxed smile since she got off the bus this afternoon.

“When your friend was describing how fun it would be I purposely tried to picture it as not-cliché, but how is it possible that there is
literally
a guy over there in a toga chugging from a funnel?”

“Let’s just take a moment to celebrate the ‘over-there’ part,” I point out as Beth leans in to clink plastic, foamy amber liquid spilling down my wrist and soaking the sleeve of my borrowed bodysuit. I watch Laura circle the keg with the Phi Mus and expertly take the dripping tap in her mouth. As her legs are lifted in the air Beth and I instead opt to keep slurping out of our relatively sanitary cups, eagerly awaiting, with the rest of the crowded room, the draft’s alleged goggle effect, which will hopefully scrub about a decade’s worth of nasty off these walls.

“Listen!” I put my hand on Beth’s leopard-print forearm as I make out the opening bars of George Michael’s “Freedom ’90.” Her eyes widen. She grabs my arm in turn and we quickly plow our way into the other bodies thrashing on the sawdust-covered floor between the Ping-Pong table and couch. Suddenly Laura is caroming the lyrics in my face, taking my hand. We throw our arms up and sing along, because no matter the Jake-size hole in my heart, I do have this. I could do whatever with whomever. I close my eyes and shake my hips, smiling as I look back out to see the cadre of girls around me, the circle momentarily completed by Laura, all blissfully doing the same.

Unable to fall asleep as the habitual 4
A.M.
eddy in my rib cage builds in strength, I study the stucco ceiling. Laura chokingly inhales. “Laura,” I whisper. More snuffles. “Laura,” I try again, peering down at her sprawled across the stretch of carpet between Beth’s and my beds, her right arm still akimbo around the plastic wastepaper basket. I sit up and reach my foot out to nudge her prone figure. “Laura!”

Her eyes squint open before focusing on me. “Huh?”

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Her lids flutter closed and her breathing slows, resuming its sharp increase in sonorousness. I pull my knees up under my T-shirt and stare out at the sliver of world visible between the shade and sill. The pain in my chest spreading through my limbs, making me cold, I lift the comforter around my shoulders. “Where is he?”

“Huh.” She tucks her left hand under the pillow.

“Where
is
he? Where
is
he, Laura?” I curve over the edge of the bed. “Where did he go?”

“No,” she says, her voice low and scratchy from yelling lyrics, smoking, and puking. “Go—to sleep.” She rolls away from me.

“I can’t.”

She mutters, feeling around her for the second pillow, pulling it over her head. “Sam that fucking postcard—”

“What?!” I drop to the carpet, the comforter slipping off as I grab the pillow from her.
“What postcard?”

“Didn’t tell you ’cause it’s—”

“What? It’s what?”

She lifts onto her elbows, taking a deep breath, her gaze regaining clarity. “Big nothing. ‘Hey, what’s up? Hope school’s good. Miss you, man.’ Big. Nothing,” she finishes, disgusted.

“From?”

“L.A., but led nowhere.” She collapses back. “Not that Sam didn’t dust it for prints.”

“Does he still have it? Can I see it?”

“Oh my God! I did not sit on a bus for thirteen hours to talk about Jake Sharpe when I could be doing that in my own bed!” Suddenly she jerks to her knees over the plastic wastebasket, dry heaving, and I reach out to curtain the hair off her face. As the wave passes she rests her damp forehead against her arm on the plastic rim. “Eight months later—eight
years
later, he’s still a total fuck.” Her voice amplifies inside the wastebasket. “That’s the news from Vermont, so can we please just go to sleep?” Nodding I pass her a glass of water as she wipes her mouth.
Hey, what’s up—hope school’s good—miss you, man.
Doesn’t miss me.

“I think I’m gonna head back,” I say to Beth as we pass the brick path to Delta Zeta.

“I don’t know,” she prevaricates. “Two years of this and I’m getting kind of drawn to it.” Rows of acapella–singing Laura Ashley-clad sisters conduct wooing choruses to the first-year girls walking Chancellor Street. “I’m not saying it isn’t a touch Stepford.”

“A touch.” I nod. “Although the prospect of all that free ice cream is pretty enticing. But, hey, go for it. They’re playing
Jaws
on the big screen and Lindsay’s making a ‘Candygram’sign.”

We exchange a quick hug and I cut behind the trilling houses onto Rugby Road, where the fraternities seem to be staging a wildly subtler recruitment: Dave Matthews drifts over lawns dotted with couches lounging near lazily smoking barbecues. The sun shifts further, dipping behind the rooflines of the once-grand homes as I continue along the sidewalk.

A Frisbee clatters to rest at my feet.

“Hey, pink skirt girl!” I look up the lawn and point to myself. A tall blonde grins. “Toss it back?” I swipe up the orange disk and skillfully fling it back, restraining myself from blowing my knuckles and rubbing them on my camisole. “Not bad.” He wipes the gleam of sweat off his chest with the T-shirt hanging from the belt of his cargo shorts. I shrug and continue walking,
praying to God
—“Hey!”
Yes?

I turn to see him watching me, tapping the Frisbee against the heel of his hand. “Yeah?”

“Hot dog?” he calls, flicking it back into play. “I mean, we’re barbecuing. You want a hot dog?”

“Sure.” I shrug.

“Cool.” He jogs backward up the grass and waves for me to follow, leading me to a tiny grill with a not very tiny guy sweating over it. “Load her up, Cord,” he directs. While draining his beer can Cord grabs one of the hot dogs squeezed across a tower of white coals and drops it into a bun. He squirts it with toppings and extends it to me.

“Thanks, Cord.” I take the paper plate and Cord nods, wiping his brow with the back of his chubby hand. I take a bite, wincing.

“Oh, dude! It’s hot. Hold on.” He bolts to a dented trash can at the base of the front steps and whips out a beer while I huff around the steaming meat to cool my tongue. He snaps the top and I take a soothing sip through the foaming opening, profoundly relieved at not having to resort to spitting it out.

“Thanks.”

“You got it, pink skirt.”

“Katie.” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Drew.” He crosses his muscled arms over his lovely chest while, beside us, smoke continues to billow from Cord’s makeshift hibachi.

“This is great.” I attempt another chew.

He grins. “Liar.”

“No, really!” Cord tosses a hot dog up and tries to catch it behind his back with the bun. I eye the growing pile of blackened misfires at his feet.

“Couldn’t figure out another way to get you up here,” Drew says, sending the heat from my mouth into my cheeks. “Had to think on my feet.”

I glance down at his Tevas. And they are nice feet. “Well, hot dogs are always a sure thing.”

“Yeah, Rush is all about seduction. We start with the roasted meat product and move on to the Jell-O shot.”

“An art form.” This is banter. We are bantering. I swig my beer, smiling at the couple sprawled on the couch beside us singing along with Dave.

“So, Katie?” He swivels his torso abruptly to the left to dodge the incoming Frisbee. “You a first-year?”

Sipping my beer, I shake my head.

“Second?” he asks, pulling the T-shirt from his waist again and holding it behind his neck like a towel.

“Guilty.” I take another sip. “You?”

“As charged.” We smile at each other. Where the fuck you been, Drew?! “Streaked yet?” he asks.

Oh. “Can’t say as I have.”

“A couple of the guys here are making their run tonight.” He boldly takes my upper arms to step me out of the path of the hot dog fumes as the smoke shifts. “We should check it out.”

“Are you—”

“No! No.” A flush spreads up from his jawline. He is nervous. I am making this boy nervous. “So, want to meet at the Corner around ten, pick a spot for some drinks, then head over?”

“Yeah, I could do that.” He takes the can from me, our fingers brushing. He holds out his other hand for my napkin.

“Full service,” I say appreciatively as I pass it off.

He smiles again. “So, ten, at the Corner?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll be waiting, Katie.”

But he isn’t. I am. Again. Always. Eternally. Tombstone imprint: Katie Hollis, She Waited. I inhale the last of a bummed cigarette and stub it out on the brick wall. Fuck this. Fuck him, never again, not for all the tan lanky in the world. I’ll just grab an ice cream with fudge and meet up with the girls. I kick off my borrowed beaded sandals and turn toward the bar.

“Pink skirt! Yo, Katie, wait up!” I spin around to see him doubled over, gripping his knees. He looks up and attempts a grin as he pants. “I ran all the way over. The shower backed up and I wanted to rinse off and change and my room was a mess.” My pulse ramps from the implication, from the trickle of moisture moving down his jawbone into the neck of his Polo where the fold marks are still evident.

“Okay,” I say, not moving.

He stands and runs his hand across his forehead. “Shit. You’re pissed.”

“I just don’t do waiting really well.”