Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (7 page)

Was I overreacting to hide the possibility that the letter might have been going the other way?

Tears again.

There’s so much ahead for each of us,
Patrick wrote.
I just didn’t want to keep anything from you and wanted to make sure you weren’t expecting more from me. You’re the last person on earth I’d ever want to hurt, Alice. . . .

But I
was
hurting! How could he think I wouldn’t? We had a history together. We’d watched each other grow up. How could he ever feel that close to anyone else? How could I? And yet . . .

Dave was incredibly thoughtful, Jag was crazy smart, Travis
had a wicked sense of humor, and what about the other guys I hung out with when a bunch of us got together on weekends? Who knew how I’d feel about them when I got to know them better?

But I wasn’t looking around for someone else; why was Patrick?

A couple was coming toward me and I made no room on the sidewalk. I wasn’t even thinking about them until I noticed them parting to make way for me.

Patrick was right, of course, about expecting too much of each other. I knew that. I’d always known that. But how should I answer? Telling him that there were other guys I was attracted to sounded like trying to get even. Telling him I was about to write the same kind of letter wasn’t entirely true and read like revenge. Telling him I was crushed and bleeding was both true and a lie.

I realized I was heading away from my dorm, so I turned and started back. This time I allowed myself—forced myself—to face what I was really feeling. Was it possible that just as I clung more to home than other girls seemed to, I used Patrick as my buffer against the world? My shield against having to explore more on my own, get to know other guys, allow myself to love and lose? Did every girl who lost a mother when she was small carry that around forever? When was I going to approach life minus a security blanket, trusting that whatever happened, I’d be strong enough to handle? I came to a bench, so I sat down and unfolded the letter again:

Would it be easier if we didn’t call or text each other for a while, just to see how it goes? It might be a good time to try it because I’ve been assigned to Madagascar and have been told that my village is two hours by bicycle from the nearest town. No electricity, no cell phone coverage. I’ve started a blog and will be posting notes whenever I’m in the capital, but I don’t know how often that will be. I just want you to have the same chance that I do to explore and meet new people, and I hope you believe me when I say that you still, and will always, mean a great deal to me.

Patrick

Why couldn’t I just live with that? Why not let that last line sustain me and throw myself into new friendships, a new relationship maybe, and see what would happen?

And finally, back in my dorm when I’d sat at my computer motionless for twenty minutes or so, my feelings going back and forth like a pendulum, I put my fingers on the keys:

Dear Patrick
, I wrote.
Understood. Really. Always, Alice.

Abby was my roommate my sophomore year. After the “outbreak of Amber,” as I called it, Abby was a refreshing change. She respected my space, kept her own reasonably neat, and I certainly never found her underwear in my bed.

Now that the second bed belonged to Abby, the whole gang hung out here sometimes, with as many guys as we could
comfortably squeeze in. Besides Dave and Travis and Jag, there was Cole, the basketball player, and James, who was inheriting his family’s farm, and Pete and Andrew and other guys I went out with occasionally for a sandwich or to a club, and that’s how the big shave-off took place in our room.

I’m not sure how “No Shave November” got started. I think it was originally a charity event to raise money for men’s health awareness or something. But guys all over campus had been growing competitive mustaches or beards—whatever—and then, on the first of December, we had a big shave-off. At some schools, I’d heard, women take part and don’t shave their legs for a month, and sometimes, for the big shave-off, they removed hair from . . . uh . . . other parts of the body as well.

We were content to watch the guys try to outdo each other, and in they came with handlebar mustaches, goatees, shoulder-length hair, dreadlocks, and we girls supposedly had the pleasure of shaving them or watching them shave each other.

“I hope somebody’s going to vacuum this up,” Abby said as we watched Cole’s reddish locks fall, hit or miss, into the barber’s apron that we fashioned from a sheet. Colin had the arms of a vinyl raincoat tied around his neck, and soon his hair was sliding down the front and, some of it, anyway, into a trash basket.

“Isn’t there some way to recycle hair?” Val said, waiting with a mustache trimmer. “Fill mesh bags with it to surround an oil spill or something?”

We shrieked as Travis posed for a picture with only half
of his handlebar mustache shaved off, and we made him pose for another with Dave, who had run a razor up both arms from wrist to elbow.

But James won first place when he stripped off his shirt and presented his hairy back to the girls.

“Wow!” I said, running my hand over the silky mat of black hair. “I had a cat once that felt like this.”

James pretended to purr. “Live it up. I’m all yours.”

I contemplated that vast expanse of shiny blackness. It was like a virgin forest, and I felt like an axman about to destroy it forever.

“Uh-oh,” said Claire, “she’s got that look in her eye.”

I put down the scissors I’d been holding and borrowed the narrow mustache trimmer instead. Then, bracing my left hand on James’s shoulder to steady myself, I turned the gadget on and carefully shaved out the letters A-L-I-C-E, to much laughter.

When we got a hand mirror and showed James his back, he spun me around and sat me on his lap. Then everyone got their cell phones and took pictures of us. Valerie sent one to my laptop, and hers was the best. There I sat, straddling James, who was looking over his shoulder and grinning, his face pressed up against mine, with A-L-I-C-E etched on his back in crooked but definitely readable letters.

I e-mailed the shot to Liz and Pamela and Gwen and also to Lester. For a brief moment I fantasized about forwarding the photo to Patrick, but then I wisely closed my laptop.

*  *  *

Abby and I were in Valerie and Claire’s dorm room one rainy night, having just shared a gigantic white pizza, delivered right to us. The driver had looked so wet and miserable, we asked if he wanted a slice. Instead, he gratefully accepted the extra tip we gave him before he took off. We hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door to discourage anyone else from dropping by and raiding our dinner. You can’t believe the power of pizza. One whiff, and there’s a mob knocking. Claire had gone to a game, so when we were done, we’d put our leftover slices in their little fridge for her.

“Ah,” Valerie said, sprawling out on her bed.

“Ah,” I echoed, lying beside her, head to foot. Abby lay on the other bed, lazily hitting a balloon up in the air and watching it drift down again for another swat. Occasionally the balloon would come over our way, and I’d maybe give it a kick with one foot. There was something about our contentment that reminded me of the way Pamela and Liz and I, and sometimes Gwen, used to hang out in Elizabeth’s bedroom with the twin eyelet bedspreads, the matching curtains, everything that made that bedroom so “Elizabeth.”

For just a moment I felt a sudden rush of homesickness sweep over me, and then it was gone, but in those few brief seconds I realized how much those friends were like sisters to me, and I wondered if Abby and Valerie could ever mean as much to me as they did. Wondered whether you have to have a history with someone to feel the same closeness.

We’d been to each other’s homes once or twice over holidays, and I’d met their families—Claire’s in Baltimore, Valerie’s in Frederick, and Abby’s clear over on the Eastern Shore. But it wasn’t the same as driving over to Gwen’s, or walking to Pamela’s, or looking across the street to see if Liz’s light was on. Still, there was something about living together all these months the way we were that had a sisterly feeling, and I was glad the three of us had stayed in that night instead of going to the movies in the rain. It was another tragic Italian classic and, masterpiece or not, I wasn’t in a Fellini mood.

“What made you decide to major in history?” I asked Valerie, barely raising my head as I bounced the balloon with my knee. This time when it drifted toward the closet, no one went after it.

“I don’t know. Sort of like following a continued story, I guess.”

“You plan to teach it?”

“God, no. What I’d
really
like is to work in a museum. Acquisitions or something. I’m totally addicted to
Antiques Roadshow
. Why did you choose counseling?”

“I haven’t exactly made it official,” I said. “I just like listening to people.”

“Eavesdropping, she means,” Abby joked.

“Well, that, too,” I laughed. “I mean, do you ever wonder why someone would become an exterminator?”

“Oh, please!” said Valerie. “Just the thought!”

“Or a proctologist,” said Abby. “I mean, of all the parts of the human body, someone chooses—”

“Uh, we just ate,” said Valerie. “What about you, Abby? You decide on a major yet?”

“No,” Abby told us, and turned over on her side, propping her head on one hand. “I’ll probably go through four whole years and still not know. ‘Getting away from high school,’ that was my major.”

“You and me both,” said Val. “I used to think, ‘If these are the best years of my life, shoot me now!’ It wasn’t so bad after I met Colin, though. We hung out together a lot, and the MSG—”

“Monosodium glutamate?”

“  ‘Most Snotty Girls’—then they left me alone.”

“Why did they pick on you?” I asked.

“There had to be a reason? One of them told me I was too tall and wore the wrong clothes for my height. They wanted to do a makeover on me—even cut my hair—and I declined.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Would you trust someone brandishing a pair of scissors who would just as soon chop off your legs? So they posted a photo of a tall, skinny, naked girl—a behind shot—on YouTube and put my name under it. One of their parents eventually put a stop to it, but walking out of that school with my diploma was the best thing that had happened to me up to that point, and that’s pathetic.”

“Sounds awful!” said Abby. “I never had to deal with anything like that. Mostly, I just wanted to get out in the
real
world and
do
something. Except I didn’t, and still don’t, know what that something is.”

We lay still, thinking that over.

“Maybe that’s what college is all about,” I said finally. “Helping us discover who we are.”

“A short, dumpy girl sick of studying, but she’s hopeful,” said Abby.

“A tall, skinny girl with heart,” said Val.

I laughed. “An in-between girl who’s thinking Claire doesn’t like white pizza nearly as much as I do, and I can even enjoy mine cold.”

“Okay,” said Abby. “Let’s eat the rest and destroy the box.”

*  *  *

I met Jared, a music major who was apparently an amazing saxophone player, in line at the cafeteria, making small talk. For some reason, I mentioned the Melody Inn and that led to his telling me that he plays in a band for weddings and stuff. We had lunch together a few times, went to a jazz concert, and in April he invited me to a friend’s afternoon wedding just so I could hear him play. It was quiet at the U because there were no big finals scheduled, and a lot of kids had gone off campus for the weekend.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, since he assured me that the reception was a buffet—they didn’t have to set an extra place for me—and he was doing a special number on the sax.

He and the clarinet player—a guy named Blake—were picking me up for the reception, which was being held in Langley Park. I put on a navy-blue sheath that I save for special occasions and my sling-back heels, and as I stood in front of the
mirror putting on my makeup, I suddenly realized that I had a pretty good figure—not perfect, by any means, but there was a nice curve to my breasts, a slim waist, hips maybe a little more narrow than they ought to be, but . . . well, I looked great, actually.

“Hey,
babe
!” I said to myself in the mirror. Then I went outside to wait for the guys.

Jared did play well. He had long fingers and a narrow face and shoulders. His hair was short and dark and curly, and he was handsome in a nervous sort of way.

I sat at a table with some friends of the groom, and I could tell that several of the women had their eyes on Jared and commented on his playing. They’d crowd around him after a set, or they’d gather around him at the bar, and I’d stand off to one side counting the number of girls who hit on him. But after a while I started counting the number of drinks he’d had.

I was glad Blake was driving after the gig was over, because he’d had only a beer or two.

“This was a lot of fun,” I said to both of them when we reached my dorm. “It was great hearing you play, Jared. Thanks for inviting me.”

I was surprised when he got out of the car too, because he lived off campus with some grad students.

“I’ll walk,” he told Blake. “The air will do me good. Jush keep my sax at your place, will you?”

“Jush?” I said, laughing. “Jared, are you drunk?”

“I’m fine!” he said, a bit too loudly.

“C’mon, I’ll drive you,” Blake called, leaning toward the passenger window.

“I’ll
walk
!” Jared said. “Air will do m’good.”

“O-kaay,” Blake said, and drove off.

I hadn’t really planned to spend the evening with Jared. I’d wanted to catch up with Pamela and Liz, answer their last texts and e-mails. But I remembered the orange juice and cheese in my little fridge, and I figured the least I could do was offer him some juice. Maybe I’d change into jeans and we could walk around campus a little—sober him up. It
was
a gorgeous spring evening.