Penelope (5 page)

While Penelope was changing, Lan emerged from her room, which now smelled like paint thinner. Lan was wearing a black T-shirt with iron-on letters that spelled
I HEART LIFE
.

“Hi,” said Penelope. “Why does your room smell like paint thinner?”

“I was painting in there,” said Lan.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to paint your room.”

“Shut up,” said Lan.

“What?” said Penelope. Lan had gone into the bathroom.

Emma came into their room while Penelope was trying to fix her bra straps under her sundress.

“That’s an interesting dress,” said Emma, throwing her bag, a green leather satchel redolent with unnecessary chains, on her bed.

“Do you like it?” asked Penelope.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“The ice cream social, I think. I mean, what else is there?”

Emma did not answer. She walked over to her bureau and took out her makeup bag. She started applying very dark eyeliner to her bottom lids. “Did you like the talk downstairs?”

“It was pretty awful.”

“Yeah,” said Emma.

“I kind of zoned out during it.”

“Me too. Does my eyeliner look OK?”

“Yeah, it looks great!” said Penelope.

“Good.” Emma pursed her lips and glanced at Madeleine Albright.

“Well, I’m off. I’m getting drinks at Noir with my friends before this thing. I think I’ll only go for like five minutes before I go to the Owl.”

“You’re getting drinks at a bar?” asked Penelope.

“Yeah.”

“How will you get in?”

“I have my friend’s fake. It always works, at least in New York. They probably won’t even check here.” Emma laughed wildly, this time a sort of braying sound.

“Well, have a good time,” said Penelope.

“Thanks,” said Emma. She picked up her bag, checked her cell phone, snorted, texted someone, and strode out of the room.

Penelope floated into the common room and planted herself on the futon. Lan was milling around in the bathroom, opening and shutting the medicine cabinet really loudly. Penelope didn’t feel hungry but decided she should go to dinner. This time she didn’t even bother asking Lan to go with her.

After a long, lonely dinner, in which Penelope enjoyed a heaping plate of canned corn with a side of what was supposed to be chicken masala, she decided to make her way over to the ice cream social. She walked very slowly. Penelope always felt uncomfortable when she arrived at things on time. She usually played Tetris on her cell phone until there was a good-sized crowd somewhere, but her mother (in one of their many precollege pep talks) told her she was not allowed to play Tetris in front of people anymore. Penelope’s mother did not believe that
people played Tetris at social events, despite what Penelope told her about the prom. Penelope told her mother that she was being closed-minded and then Penelope’s mother canceled Penelope’s subscription to Tetris. So now she didn’t have it anymore.

She shouldn’t have worried. The ice cream social was mobbed with people who had all packed themselves into Harvard Yard for the event. There was no more ice cream, unless you liked strawberry—and Penelope didn’t. Penelope walked around the perimeter of the gathering, wishing for Tetris and searching for people she knew. Emma and Lan were nowhere to be seen. She saw Adorno Eric playing with a hacky sack. She saw Glasses and Nikil trying to chat up a girl who was carrying a Razor scooter over her shoulder. Then she saw Ted and Jason glumly eating ice cream near a tree.

“Hi,” said Penelope, and sat down beside them.

“Oh, hello,” said Ted. “How has your evening been?” Jason continued to shovel ice cream into his mouth at a rapid rate.

“Oh, fine. I hate strawberry,” said Penelope.

“Terrible!” said Ted.

“You are a freak!” said Jason. It was at this point when Penelope realized both of them were very drunk. Jason was almost completely crimson and sweating profusely. Ted was drinking whiskey out of a flask.

“Where did you get that flask?” asked Penelope.

“At 7-Eleven,” said Ted. “Are you having a good time here?” He took a gigantic swig of whiskey and coughed slightly.

“Oh, not too bad. The strawberry situation is pretty depressing and my roommates aren’t here, so …”

“Do you want to go? It’s pretty awful,” said Ted. Jason had put his ice cream cup on his head and was lying against the tree, eyes closed.

“Where are you guys going? I just got here, so I don’t know. Are you going to the Owl?”

“What is the Owl?” said Ted.

“I don’t know,” said Penelope truthfully.

“No, we are not going there. We are going back to my room
to drink more whiskey out of this flask. It is much funner in my room. We have been drinking there for about four hours. All of them were blissful. Just look at Jason.” Penelope did look at Jason, who was snoring.

“OK, I guess I can leave,” said Penelope.

“Up, Jason,” said Ted. Jason got up groggily and gagged. His entire face was red except for a thin strip of skin above his upper lip, which was greenish. Penelope took him by one arm and Ted took him by the other.

As they staggered away from the Yard, Penelope passed Glasses and Nikil. The Razor scooter girl had abandoned them. Now they were talking to another girl with dirty pigtails, drooping eyes, and the body of a quail.

“So where did you go to high school?” asked Nikil.

“Milton,” said the girl.

“Oh, cool. Bronx Science,” said Nikil.

“Stuy,” said Glasses.

“Did you know Sharon Dwoskin?” asked Nikil. “I think I met her at an Academic Decathlon thing in Alaska.”

“That sounds familiar, but I don’t know. Westinghouse took up all my time,” said the girl.

“Cool,” said Glasses.

“OK, we have to get out of here,” said Ted. He hoisted Jason up and started walking. Penelope trotted after him.

Jason vomited three times on his way to Pennypacker: once behind a suspiciously phallic monument covered in tarp and twice in front of a Chinese restaurant. He was a joyless drunk. He repeatedly referred to Penelope as “the Whore of Babylon” and refused to drink any water. Penelope had never seen anyone this wasted in her whole life. At her high school, people smuggled vodka in water bottles to class in the mornings, but they were always very businesslike about it.

Finally, they arrived at the door to Pennypacker. Jason’s face
was covered in vomit and dirt. His hair looked oddly like a toupee.

“You look like you swallowed a fucking lemon,” said Jason to Penelope.

“Oh God. Penelope, can you open the door please?” said Ted, and hoisted Jason over his shoulder and carried him up to his room. Penelope flitted in the vicinity, occasionally patting Jason’s shoulder.

Ted threw Jason onto his futon. Jason found this very funny. Then he fell asleep.

“I want to put him in his room, but I don’t know where his key is, and I also don’t want him to choke on his own vomit. Maybe he should stay on this futon for a while. What do you think?” asked Ted, his hand on his hip.

“Uh, sure,” said Penelope. “But I don’t want to wake him up.”

“We can go in my room,” said Ted.

“Oh,” said Penelope. “OK.”

In all the novels that Penelope had read, puberty progressed in a certain, similar way. One got one’s period at twelve. One dabbled abortively in popularity at thirteen. One French-kissed at fourteen. None of this was so for Penelope. She did not get her period until she was fifteen, and even then it was a bit of a struggle. She was never really given the opportunity to abandon her true friends for more popular drug users and learn from the experience. And she had never, really, properly made out with someone before.

She wasn’t completely inexperienced. She had kissed people briefly. When she was a junior in high school she had a boyfriend named Greg for a week and a half. Greg had a lisp that only she could hear. Penelope’s mother wouldn’t let her have boys in her room, so she and Greg used to hang out in her living room and play Ping-Pong. Greg would talk about
Dune
. Penelope would pretend to play the piano, and eventually the entire experience began to resemble an absurdist play. Only chaste kissing occurred, like monks through some kind of grate.

Thus when Ted said to Penelope, “Why don’t we go into my room?” Penelope was mostly gripped with a cold fear. Yet she steeled herself to adversity and decided to follow him in there anyway. She had to grow up sometime.

Penelope entered Ted’s room and stood in the doorway pretending to examine her phone, which, once again, did not have Tetris on it. Ted’s room was entirely spartan except for a copy of
The Fountainhead
posed prominently on a plywood bookcase. Ted sat on his bed and took out his laptop.

“Do you want to listen to some music?” asked Ted.

“Sure!” said Penelope, still standing in the doorway. She scratched her head.

Ted stared at his computer screen for a moment, lost in concentration. Then he seemed to find something he liked, which was “Crash into Me” by Dave Matthews Band.

“Come, sit here,” said Ted, and patted a space on the bed next to him. Penelope moved over to his bed and sat there, taking off her shoes and crossing her ankles. Dave Matthews started singing really softly. Penelope thought of pretending to throw up and then thought the better of it, because she could never really throw up on command like some people and she had not had anything to drink, so she would have to say the vomit was the result of a stomach virus, which is far less excusable.

“I love this song,” said Ted.

“Hmm,” said Penelope.

“What kind of bands are you into?” asked Ted.

“Oh, all kinds of bands,” said Penelope.

“Like what?” Ted’s leg was really close to Penelope’s leg. He was wearing shorts, which was embarrassing.

“Ah, gee, I don’t know,” said Penelope, racking her brain on how to get this strand of conversation to stop. “Whitney Houston, maybe.”

“Totally,” said Ted, not listening. Ted was bobbing his head to the music and Penelope wondered if Ted was secretly terrible, yet able to hide it effectively in the waking hours. She didn’t
really know him. And a sense of humor can sometimes be a disarmingly superficial thing. Still, she had come into his room. She was contractually obligated to make out with him. College students make out. It is just what they do. Ted was probably expecting her to lunge at him at any moment.

“This song really reminds me of my senior year,” said Ted.

“Really? I think it came out when we were nine.”

“My girlfriend was really into it.”

“Was she? That’s cool,” Penelope said. This was a curveball.

“When I left for college, she made me a mix with this on it.”

“Wow,” said Penelope. “That is awesome. It is hard to make mix tapes. I always have trouble, you know, because what do you really put after Ace of Base?”

“I just miss her,” said Ted, as if he did not hear. “We broke up right before I came here. She’s out in California, you know? That’s far away.”

“I know,” said Penelope.

“And like, I don’t know what she’s doing. What did we do tonight? Go to an ice cream social?”

“Um … yes,” said Penelope.

“She is probably at a frat party or something. Do they even have those here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think they would.” Ted stared at
The Fountainhead
glumly.

They sat in silence for a moment. Penelope twiddled her thumbs.

“You are really great to talk to,” said Ted.

“Thanks,” said Penelope.

“You are like the only normal person here,” Ted said, inching closer to Penelope on the bed, brushing his ridiculous shorts on the side of her arm.

“I have never ever been told that before,” said Penelope.

“This school is pretty weird, don’t you think?”

“I am not sure we can make that determination yet.”

“What does that mean?” said Ted.

“I mean, we have only been here for like a second. We don’t really know if it is or not,” said Penelope.

“Yeah, I guess. Wow, I bet Sarah is fucking some guy at a frat party,” said Ted, who then kind of started to cry.

There was probably no person in the world worse equipped by nature and cumulative experience to handle drunk crying than Penelope. Her discomfort with all forms of maudlin emotion combined with her inability to distinguish drunken crying from real crying made her especially terrible in a situation such as this.