Loner (2 page)

Steven waited a moment before laughing.

Later that afternoon, the two of us headed downstairs for an orientation meeting. Steven swatted the casings of all the doorframes we passed through and leapt the last three steps of each flight of stairs while holding the railing.

A few dozen freshmen mingled in the basement common room, key cards dangling over chests from crimson lanyards. Taxonomies hadn't been determined yet, hierarchies hadn't formed. We were loose change about to be dropped into a sorter that would roll us up by denomination.

“Lot of cute girls here,” Steven said to me. He plopped himself on a couch and began chatting up a girl who wore a pink pair of those rubber shoes that individuate one's toes like gloves.

I took the seat on his other side. A number of “cute” girls did indeed dot the couches and folding chairs, even one or two who could compete with Hobart High's Heidi McMasters. (Our sole exchange, in eighth-grade earth science:

HEIDI: “Do you have a pen?”

DAVID: [
immediately hands her his best pen, never sees it again
])

A boy with chiseled forearms fuzzed with blond hair sat on the floor to my left. He was also not speaking to anyone, but seemed indifferent. I could tell he'd be popular.

“David,” I said, extending my hand.

He shook it and looked around the room. “Jake.”

“Are you from New York?” I asked, gesturing to his Yankees hat.

“Connecticut.” His face lit up as he raised his hand. Another freshman swaggered up to him and slapped it. I introduced myself to the new guy.

“Phil,” he said. They began talking about several people to whom they referred only by last names.

“You guys know each other from high school?” I asked.

“Same athletic conference,” Phil said.

“Oh, what sport?”

“Baseball,” he answered without looking at me.

Llabaseb,
I thought—no,
llabesab.
I hadn't reversed a word in a month or two; I was getting rusty, far from the fluency of my younger years. At twelve, without many interlocutors to speak of (or to), I began a dialogue with language itself, mentally reversing nearly every word I encountered in speech, signs, objects I saw:
tucitcennoc
(Connecticut),
citelhta
(athletic),
draynal
(lanyard). Doing so came naturally—I'd visualize the word, reading it from right to left, syllable by syllable—and it surprised me when it impressed others. My verbal ability was discovered that year at summer camp, where for three days all the kids besieged me with requests to apply it to their names; Edward Park's was a crowd-pleaser. For those seventy-two hours I reveled in a social power I'd never had before, awaiting all the
gnolefil spihsdneirf
that would sprout from a few disordered words. Then the boy who could flip his eyelids inside out stole my thunder and, upon returning to the solitude of my parents' house, I graduated to a new lexical pastime: memorizing vocabulary lists in my older sister's SAT books. Words turned around in my mind only intermittently thereafter.

When the Harvard application solicited me to write about a meaningful “background, identity, interest, or talent,” though, I was reminded of that summer I felt genuinely special. “To continuously reflect the world in a linguistic mirror,” I postulated in the essay, “is to question the ontological arbitrariness of everything and everyone. Why is an
apple
not an
elppa
, nor, for that matter, an
orange
? Why am I
me
and not
you
?” I titled it “Backwords” and typed the whole thing in a reverse font and word order (by line), preparing to mail in a hard copy so that the reader needed to hold it up in front of a mirror. My parents, however, feared the admissions committee would think it was gibberish. Bowing to prudence, I compromised by writing the body of the essay normally and changing just the title to
.

My “unique” essay had “rather intrigued” the Harvard admissions committee, my guidance counselor later informed me.

I waited for a lull in conversation between the baseball players. “Ekaj and lihp,” I said.

“What?” Jake asked. “A lip?”

“Your names backward.” They stared at me blankly. “Jake is ‘ekaj,' Phil is ‘lihp.' ”

The two of them contemplated their reversed monikers and shared a look.

“Guess we're really at Harvard,” Phil said under his breath.

I sank back into the couch's quicksand cushion, praying for the meeting to begin so that my silence wouldn't be conspicuous—or, failing that, for a monumentally distracting event: burst sewage pipe, freak hurricane, the president's been shot.

Uoy t'nac
og gnorw gnieb flesruoy,
I thought.

Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned around. “How was your move-in?” asked a girl standing behind the couch.

“I saw you coming into the dorm with your parents,” she said after I failed to react. “I'm Sara.”

“Oh, hi. David.”

“Nice to remeet you.”

“You, too,” I said, and I was groping for something else to add when, from the entrance behind her, in the fashion of a queen granting a balcony appearance to the rabble below, you traipsed in, the nonchalant laggard. Suddenly there was no one else in the room; for the briefest of moments, as you entered my life, I paid myself no mind either, a rare, narcotic, unself-conscious bliss.

“You're late,” Jake hollered in your direction. “You missed the meeting.”

You glanced up from your phone. “Isn't it at four?” you replied.

He drew out the suspense for a beat. “Just messing with you.”

You returned to your phone without any expression.

“It's about to start, though,” he said. “Sit with us.”

“Thanks,” you said in a low, unmodulated voice. “I prefer to stand.” You crossed to the other side of the room.

I'd received nothing from those fifteen seconds, but it felt like I had; Jake and Phil's loss was my gain. You had no truck with entitled athletes who chased openmouthed after fly balls like Labrador retrievers and assumed any girl would jump at the heliocentric opportunity to orbit their sun. Their assets from high school were liabilities here.
Guess we're really at Harvard,
I wanted to scoff in their faces.

Jake, looking unscathed by rejection, whispered something to Phil, who laughed.

“Well, I should probably find a place to sit,” Sara said, and wandered off.

You sequestered yourself against a wall, arms crossed over your chest, the only student without a lanyard. You were here because it was compulsory, not to make friends. You had no interest in present company, didn't need to manufacture an affable smile and hope some generous soul took pity on you. No, you weren't one of us at all. You were in a tribe of your own.

How differently our lives would have unraveled over these years if the computer program generating the room assignments had started up a millisecond later, spat out another random number, and the two of us had never had a chance to meet.

Chapter 2

I
f one were creating the Platonic ideal of a woman from scratch—which I could do here, manipulating the facts to serve my narrative agenda, though I'll cleave scrupulously to the truth—she would not necessarily resemble the being who had just swept through the common room, whose features I later had time to assess in magnified detail.

To begin with, your “flaws,” a word I sandwich between petrified scare quotes. On the upper third of your forehead, as if connecting your two cerebral hemispheres, a blanched hyphen of a scar; a nose the tiniest bit crooked and long; two central incisors that outmuscled their next-tooth neighbors.

But the faces that are most compelling rarely belong to models, avatars of unblemished conventionality. They don't possess the imperfections that highlight the nearby superlatives—the distant twin mountains of an upper lip under an elegantly concave philtrum, the cheekbones sloping like the handle of a jug. And, most salient to an eye across a room, the hair in a carelessly knotted bun, a few
rogue tendrils grazing the sides of your face, chestnut flecked with mid-October hues, a newly minted penny unsullied by commerce. That would be your hair-dye lyrical subcategory: “Mid-October.” (My mother's color of choice is the law office sensible “Medium Ash Brown.”)

My seat on the couch allowed me to study you with impunity while keeping the dorm proctor, a redheaded grad student in German philosophy, nearly in my sight line as he introduced himself. The heel of one of your leather-sandaled feet was planted against the wall. Gazelle legs encased in dark jeans; I estimated your height at a half inch shorter than mine, depending on our footwear. The spaghetti strap of a tank top climbed over lissome shoulders (a fuller bosom than your lemon-size breasts would have been incongruous—­gauche, even—against your svelte torso). Adjacent to each strap was a pearly sliver of skin less touched by the sun; the rest was the tone of a patiently toasted marshmallow.

“One of the great things about college,” the proctor said as my eyes remained on you, “is how seemingly unrelated stuff starts unifying in your mind. A theory you learn in a science lecture will connect to a line of poetry in your English seminar and link to a story a friend tells at lunch. Your world is expanding and diffusing while simultaneously contracting and growing denser. Everything, in a sense, becomes one thing.”

After the abstract musings, he shifted to the practical matter of dorm rules, the details of which I would have been diligently committing to memory in my previous incarnation—the one that ended when you arrived. My concentration was broken only when the proctor, reading aloud the college's policy on sexual misconduct, suddenly lost his vocal footing.

“. . . includes not only unwilling or forced vagin—vag—vag—”

His face turned a shade darker than his hair. I winced, but a few students snickered, Jake and Phil included, as he continued to trip on the word.

“—vag—vag—vag—” he stuttered, excruciatingly incapable of advancing, an oratorical Sisyphus. The poor guy, who'd likely spent years in speech therapy working to remedy a lifelong affliction, had finally decided he was ready to be in a position that required public speaking, and it was all undone with a single anatomical adjective before a room of puerile teenagers.

The more he persisted, though, the more my sympathy waned, replaced with resentment for his subjecting us all to such vicarious discomfort. Eventually he gave up, skipping the section altogether and moving on to the rules for alcohol and drugs.

I kept ogling brazenly without fear of detection until your head swiveled a few degrees from the proctor, casting, from your face to mine, an invisible string stretched taut.

It's difficult to say for sure, since I was less bold about looking at you after that, but I believe I was the only person you made eye contact with, however fleeting.