Penelope (22 page)

Ted tried to look slightly more lively when he saw Penelope. It was a futile effort.

“Hey!” said Ted.

“Oh, hi,” said Penelope.

“Do you want a shot?” Glasses asked Penelope.

“No thanks,” said Penelope.

“Why? I have had six shots this morning,” said Glasses.

“That’s nuts,” said Ted groggily.

“Not to mention the peppermint schnapps,” said Glasses. “That means I’ve had seven shots.”

Penelope hovered silently near the coffee table while everyone else had a mumbly conversation about football and alcohol. She looked around her. The room was messy. It had beer cans lying discarded next to the trash can, for example; but it was messy in a more normal, less existential way than Penelope’s room, it seemed to her. This room had posters on the walls and books stacked on shelves. Penelope’s suite had cigarette butts all over the floor and cat hair in the bathroom. Penelope would try to clean it occasionally, but her efforts were like sad jokes.

“I’m sort of glad I’m not going to the game,” said Nikil.

“You aren’t?” asked Penelope.

“No,” said Nikil. “We both have something for EC 10 on Monday and need to study this morning. We figured we could drink, but we couldn’t go to the game. That’s a lot of time. I need to keep my A average up. I bet none of the bastards at the Crimson Business Board had an A in EC 10. A straight A! That was such a political piece of bullshit—”

“Well, I think we should go to the pregame,” blurted out Ted.

“Aren’t we at the pregame?” asked Penelope.

“I mean, I think we should go to the game,” said Ted. He stood up. Catherine stood up too.

“Do you guys want a shot before you go?” said Glasses in a leering tone that Penelope did not think was appropriate.

“No thanks,” said Penelope.

“I’ll have one,” said Ted.

“Me too!” said Catherine. “Although whiskey is so gross!”

Ted and Catherine took shots quickly.

“Ouch, that burned,” said Ted. He zipped his coat and walked toward the door. Catherine and Penelope followed him.

“Bye, guys,” said Penelope. She looked at her phone. Gustav had not texted yet.

“I could not stand another second of that,” said Ted, a bit too loudly, as they walked down the stairs. “I’ve been listening to Nikil whine about that Crimson thing for the last eight weeks. When will he get over it?”

“Maybe never,” said Penelope. “He is probably like Joe Kennedy.”

“It’s really sad,” said Catherine. “It’s just really sad.”

It was a brilliantly sunny, frigid day. Ted, Penelope, and Catherine walked down Massachusetts Avenue and over a stone bridge that ran across the Charles River. On the other side of the river was the Harvard football stadium, a late Victorian replica of the Coliseum that was both imposing and wholly devoid of irony. When they finally arrived at the entrance to the field, there were cops stationed there checking to see whether the students had alcohol in their possession. Ted was forced to throw out the beers he had stowed in his coat almost immediately.

Inside, the field was overrun with people, none of whom Penelope had seen before, even though they were ostensibly her classmates. There were several U-Hauls parked on the grass. It was hard to decide what the U-Hauls were doing or why they were there. Many of them had grills set up but were not serving food. Some of them had empty bottles of alcohol strewn near them, but no actual alcohol was being served. One or two were playing music and people were dancing in front of them, but Penelope had a morbid hatred of dancing when it was light out. If Penelope had a daytime wedding, for example,
she would eliminate dancing from the order of the event. It had no place.

“What time do you think people got here?” asked Penelope.

“No idea,” said Ted.

“This looks so fun!” said Catherine, dancing in place.

“Do you think there is any food here?” said Penelope.

“I don’t see any,” said Ted.

“I want to dance!” said Catherine. She started grinding up against Ted aggressively. Ted started dancing too. Penelope understood why he had never really danced in front of her previously.

“I think I might just go into the game,” said Penelope.

“Are you sure?” asked Ted.

“We’ll meet you in there!” said Catherine. She took Ted by the sweatshirt and led him to the dancing U-Haul.

Penelope was suffused with relief. If Gustav called her now, she would be unencumbered.

By the time Penelope took her seat, so far away from the field that she was alone in her own section, the crowd was already enjoying the halftime show. It was World War I themed, said the announcer into a loudspeaker. At the climax, a red papier-mâché plane representing Harvard flew into a blue papier-mâché Yale bulldog.

The game resumed. Penelope did not know anything about football, so she people-watched. The crowd was generally old and clad in fur coats. There were current students at the game too, but they seemed to be a constantly fluctuating, less vocal maroon number, like a small, sad, consumptive sister to the robust alumni of yore. At one point, a male Harvard cheerleader launched himself into the crowd to attack a male Yale cheerleader. This was the point when Ted and Catherine found Penelope. Penelope saw them striding up the steps to her section and felt that she now knew the exact feeling associated with the expression “living on borrowed time.” Gustav still hadn’t texted.

“There you are,” said Ted. “It took forever to find you! Why did you sit all the way up here?”

“Did you see that guy just attack the Yale cheerleader?” said Catherine, wide-eyed.

“Yeah,” asked Penelope. “I didn’t really understand that. Do you know who is winning?”

“It was crazy,” said Catherine.

Ted and Catherine sat down next to Penelope. It seemed that despite the police crackdown, they had been drinking since daytime dancing at the U-Haul. Catherine immediately fell asleep with her head on Ted’s lap. Ted’s bangs were down, and he had a dried patch of ketchup next to his lip that he seemed unaware of.

“So this is fun,” said Ted. Catherine started to snore loudly.

“I guess,” said Penelope. She checked her phone. No word from Gustav.

“Why do you keep checking your phone? Are you waiting for that European guy to call you?”

“No,” said Penelope. “He said he would text me.”

“And he hasn’t yet?” said Ted.

“No,” said Penelope.

“If he really wanted to hang out with you,” said Ted in a malicious tone that Penelope did not appreciate, “he would text you to watch the game with him. With us! So we can all go on the double date. I think he is blowing you off.”

“Maybe you are right,” said Penelope. Penelope had thought of many scenarios associated with Gustav, but the one she hadn’t anticipated was that he wouldn’t call or text her at all. Once confronted with the truth, she felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. The whole situation with Ted, however, seemed far more intolerable if this was to be an accepted fact.

It seemed as if the game was in its final minutes forever. It was very close because each side kept fumbling the ball and throwing incomplete passes at each other.

“The weird thing about bad football is the heightened suspense,” said Penelope during the third overtime. Ted and Catherine were both sleeping and didn’t respond.

After the game was over, Penelope roused Ted and Catherine
and all three of them walked back toward Pennypacker. It was starting to get dark.

“Well, what do you want to do now?” asked Ted.

“I think everybody is studying tonight,” said Catherine in a slurred voice.

“You wouldn’t think that would be the case,” said Penelope, “considering this is supposedly the most celebratory school-sponsored event of the year.”

“We could go to my room, I guess, and watch a movie,” said Ted.

“That’s fine,” said Penelope. Just then, Penelope got a text. It was from Gustav. It read as follows:

“Terribly sorry to have missed you today. Wasn’t able to stay for the festivities myself. Skiing in Japan for foreseeable future and Mum sent the jet early. Drinks when we get back? xx”

Penelope laughed with happiness.

“Why are you laughing?” asked Ted.

“Oh, no reason,” said Penelope.

“Did you get a text from that guy?” asked Ted.

“No,” said Penelope. Ted grabbed the phone from her and read the text.

“He’s probably at the S— right now and that’s a lie.”

“I think he’s in Japan,” said Penelope.

“You don’t have any reason for thinking that,” said Ted.

“I don’t know,” said Penelope. “But I think you should just put Catherine to bed. She can’t watch a movie. She is drooling on your sweatshirt.”

Two days after Harvard-Yale, Penelope took the bus home to celebrate Thanksgiving. She was happy to leave school. Recently, Raymond had started leaping into the shower while Penelope was washing her hair and watching her steadily until she was finished. Formerly, Penelope had thought cats were afraid of the water.

Penelope returned to school on Sunday and dutifully waited for Gustav to call her. He didn’t. Two weeks after Thanksgiving break, Penelope had still not heard from him. Penelope never mentioned it to anyone, but this made her feel very bad. Every time her mother called her to talk, she was momentarily excited because she thought it was Gustav. Every time Ted and Catherine texted her to go to dinner, she always briefly thought Gustav was calling her to go clubbing. Ted asked her about Gustav all the time. He seemed to take great triumph in being right about him, like the narrator in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
.

Penelope thought about asking Emma or Lan about Gustav, but it seemed like a bad idea. Lan probably didn’t know Gustav and would definitely hate him if she ever met him. Penelope didn’t think Emma would be very congenial to the idea that she and Gustav had a date and, instinctively, never mentioned he had texted her at all.

The only comfort Penelope had was that Gustav might not be back yet from Thanksgiving, although the longer she was back at school, the more unlikely this seemed, considering they were about to go on vacation again for Christmas in a couple of weeks. She had two Counting People sections after break and Gustav did not show up to either of them; he was not the most assiduous student. It was unfortunate he did not attend the section, considering that they had a very important final project for the class coming up, the country report, and Jared gave a lot of notes about it that Penelope did not write down.

The country report was the centerpiece of Counting People and the main portion of the course grade. Its mere mention made Jared voluble. It involved graphs and Excel spreadsheets as well as written content that analyzed the census data of the particular country on which one was doing one’s report. Penelope had the sense that people had been working on their reports for weeks. She had not started hers yet, but she had picked her country. She had selected Luxembourg, as the capital of Luxembourg is also Luxembourg.

The problem with Luxembourg was that it had very little
census data. Penelope figured this out about Luxembourg the day before the country report was due. She relayed this fact to everyone at dinner.

“I looked in all the databases,” said Penelope, drinking some chocolate milk for emphasis. “I really think the census in Luxembourg is not very thorough. I should complain to their chamber of commerce.”

“You should have never picked Luxembourg. You should have picked a country more important to the world than Luxembourg,” said Nikil.

“I would have picked Brazil,” said Catherine. “That country is so interesting.”

“Or do a country that needs more attention. Luxembourg is a pretty shallow, Western-centric thing to pick. Why don’t you pick a country with real problems and issues?” said Glasses.

“I don’t think these country reports help countries. Isn’t it cool that Luxembourg’s capital is Luxembourg?” said Penelope.

“Do you have Excel on your computer?” asked Ted.

“No,” said Penelope.

“You have to go to the computer lab then, to do the graphs there. Do you know where the computer lab is?”

“No,” said Penelope.

“It’s in the basement of the Science Center,” said Nikil, disgusted.

“OK,” said Penelope. “I have a lot of trouble with imagining graphs visually in my mind. This may be kind of hard for me.”

“Oh, don’t be silly!” said Ted. “Graphing things in Excel is one of the easiest things you will ever do. It’s way easier than writing an Images of Shakespeare paper, and you can write those in like two hours.”

“Oh, shut,” said Penelope. “Do you think that Luxembourg has so little census data because it is hard to keep track of the population amidst all the forest that is there?”

No one said anything in reply and Penelope drank the rest of her chocolate milk.

After dinner, Penelope walked over to the computer lab.
After an hour of reading Wikipedia entries about Luxembourg, Penelope opened up Excel to start her project in earnest.
This isn’t so bad
, she thought as she entered the data for the graph she was creating about Luxembourg’s changing birth rate.
It is just putting a number into a box
. She pressed the button to graph the data sheet and a pie chart appeared.
That’s odd
, thought Penelope.
I wanted a line graph
. When she went back to her spreadsheet all her data was erased.
Guess I have to do that again
, she said to herself and shrugged.