30 Guys in 30 Days (5 page)

An interesting thing about the word “fun”: Two people with otherwise reasonably overlapping interests can have vastly different ideas about what, exactly, it means.

Case in point: My roommate, one Charlie Norton, a former Miss Georgia Peach Queen and otherwise lovely individual, seems to actively enjoy engaging in the sadistic and torturous ritual known as “the frat party.”

For you see, sister of mine, classes begin this Wednesday, and as such, the upperclass-men have begun to return to campus. And with them, so, too, have returned the subspecies known as
classmaticus greekus—
aka: Homo-Fratien.

Now, Charlie’s mother was a third-generation Tri-Delt (this has nothing to do with geometry. I already asked), and due to Charlie’s dubious “connections,” she was invited last night to a bash at Sigma Nu. Determined as she was to drag me out of my little post-puke-age pity party, she recruited me to go with her. To Charlie, the party would be an opportunity to “get my flirt on,” as in, to learn to communicate with the opposite sex. Never mind that I’m not totally convinced that I even
have
a “flirt” anymore.

The evening kicked off innocently enough.

“Have I told you how much I
love
that shirt?” Charlie asked. She had, actually. Several times. Not that I didn’t appreciate the vote of confidence. It was my favorite shirt: black and stretchy, skimpy but just shy of slutty. Charlie was wearing a sparkly pink halter that tied in about six different
places, and of course she looked her typical breathtaking self.

We were standing on the steps of the Sigma Nu house, a redbrick endeavor in the Colonial style so favored by Woodman University. The house was located on fraternity row, or Picard Street, as it was formally known.

“Thanks,” I said, glancing down at it and picking off a nearly invisible fleck of lint.

“Don’t fuss,” she said. “You look great. I love your hair straight. Anyway, I’m sure this’ll be fun. They say the trick is to drink heavily.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could say anything, a plastic cup sailed out from the window above us, splat-ting onto the pavement with a wet
smack,
and dousing the bottom of my leg with something liquid (probably beer).

I crouched down to assess the damage. My jeans were soaked.

A thick, beefy head poked its way out of the window. “HEADS UP!” he shouted, then retreated back inside.

Thanks, buddy.

“Oh, no,” Charlie said. “Did it get you?”

I extended my right leg by way of demonstration and shook it tentatively back and forth, an impromptu hokeypokey.

“You can’t even tell,” she proclaimed.

“But … what?” Of course you could tell. The entire bottom half of my jeans leg was
soaking wet.
You would have to be … well, you would have to be not looking to not be able to tell. Or maybe blind.

“Come on,” she said, with finality. “We’re going in.”

Inside, the house throbbed with energy. The walls pulsed with canned dance music, and the lights were either out completely or were dimmed way down. The house seemed to be illuminated solely by the psychedelic glow of a long chain of Christmas lights.

At least no one would be able to see the stain on my jeans.

“Oh, look, there’s Raegan,” Charlie said with a squeal. She gestured in the general direction of a tall redhead in the distance. “She wants us to come over!”

I could see no evidence of the fact that Raegan actually did want us to come over
(I could barely see Raegen, for that matter) and, more to the point, I couldn’t see any easy way over there. “Ill just wait for you here,” I said.

Charlie didn’t like this plan one bit. She knit her brows together, thinking. “Okay,” she said finally. “You can stay here.”

“Mother, may I?” I asked, half-joking.

“Yes,” she said, either missing my sarcasm completely or deliberately choosing to ignore it. “On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That you talk to someone. Anyone.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“It’s simple, Claud. I’m going over there to talk to Raegan. Now, ‘over there’ is far away and it’s kind of crowded, and given that you aren’t really interested in rushing—this semester—I’m going to grant you that maybe there’s no real reason for you to come with me. But if you’re going to stay here, you’re going to practice being social.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “Do you think I am, um, socially
challenged?”
I asked carefully.

She shook her head emphatically.
“I
don’t, sweetie. But
you
do. At least, tonight
you do. So maybe you need a little … what’s that they call it—ah, cognate behavior therapy!” She raised a finger triumphantly.

Her father was a celebrity shrink, I knew. But that didn’t mean his training had rubbed off on Charlie.

“You know, when you deliberately behave in a certain way and then, soon enough, your brain follows.” She smiled.

“I’m not sure that’s the exact scientific definition of the term, Charlie,” I replied. The last thing I wanted was to be her social case study.

She shrugged. “There must be
someone
here you’re willing to chat with.”

I scanned the immediate vicinity. “There,” I said, nodding my head toward a perky brunette standing a few feet away. “She’s in our dorm. I think her name is Shelley. We were on line together at the yogurt shop the other day.”

Charlie wagged a finger at me impatiently. “Dear, y’all are missing the point. You’re not gonna talk to some girl from our dorm. You can do that any old day. Tonight, you’re going to work on your flirt. Which means that you have to go up
to some guy—
any
guy—and strike up a conversation.”

That sounded suspiciously easy. “Just walk up to any old guy, and say anything?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded in the affirmative. “Anything you want. It doesn’t even matter if he runs screaming in the opposite direction—”

“Thanks, Charlie—”

“Which he
won’t”
she continued loudly, cutting me off. “But it doesn’t matter, anyway. ’Cause what we’re going for here is practice. You need to get out of the Drew zone.”

“It’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had,” I conceded.

“Awesome!” she said brightly, scampering off.

Alone, I suddenly felt a lot less sure of myself than I had only moments before.
Focus, Claudia. All you have to say is “hi”
I reminded myself. I took a deep breath and turned to the boy on my left. He held my gaze for a moment. I frantically brain-stormed a few openers:
Have you got a light?: What’s your sign?: Do you know where the bathroom is?
and rejected each on its own
lack of singular merit
(I don’t smoke; way too cheesy; slightly gross).
By the time I had come up with one, he was gone.

I shoved my way into the common room to find a few stocky boys in
South Park
T-shirts playing a game that involved cups of beer and ping-pong balls. They had obviously been at it for a while, and they seemed like they could be good candidates for my mission. I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, feeling like a groupie.

After one more round of what looked like people trying to slam ping-pong balls into half-filled cups of beer with paddles (soggy, drunken variation on a carnival game?), a tall, lanky boy with dark hair was proclaimed the winner. “VICTORY SHOT!” he shouted, raising his arms above his head exuberantly and ushering his teammates through the doorway toward what I presumed was the kitchen.

I ran to the bathroom to regroup for a moment. I waited in line briefly. When I was up I locked the door and collapsed against it from the inside. What was wrong with me?
This was a party, for pete’s sake, not a job interview. There was no reason to freak out. Okay, so, maybe it had been a while since I’d been in a party-type environment without Drew surgically attached to my arm. Back in high school we had a system worked out where we separated at parties so that we could mingle with our friends, but we always checked in every half hour or so. Who would I check in with tonight?

Then again, that was a large part of why we had decided to break up. We needed to take some time to figure out who we were.

Apparently, I was a socially inept barf machine with stained jeans.

I stood and splashed some cold water on my face. My hair was behaving and, despite the tropical climate inside of the Sigma Nu house, my makeup was pretty much intact. I wasn’t the Elephant Man or a refugee from the “before” part of
Extreme Makeover.
I was a pretty cute girl who, unfortunately, had drank a little too much a few nights before. Duh. Isn’t that par for the course for college?

Well, I had managed to give myself a decent mental pep talk when I realized that,
for all of my faux-confidence, I was still you know, hiding in the bathroom. So I popped a Tic Tac and made my way back to the party.

I found the kitchen, which wasn’t too difficult (I just followed the sticky beer trail), where Victory and his friends were vigorously attacking a keg. Improvising, I grabbed at a plastic cup and sidled closer to the keg. “Hey,” I said, smiling at Victory and holding out my cup. “Can you hook me up?” I had no plans to actually
drink
the beer, of course, but I needed a prop.

“Be glad to,” he said, grinning right back at me. He was, at least, pretty cute. He had bright green eyes and thick, sandy brown hair, and even underneath an oversize T-shirt I could see that he was in spectacular shape. I remembered that Sigma Nu was known as “the football frat.”

I’d never dated an athlete before—Drew was a total do-gooder/school nerd/student council darling—but reminded myself that the point of this endeavor was just to get the rust out of my system.
All I really had to do was talk to him—which, hey! Mission accomplished. Everything from this point on was just gravy.

Once my cup was full, we headed back to the common room. “You wanna sit?” my new boyfriend asked.

I settled myself on the couch, and Victory sat down next to me. Actually, he was essentially sitting
on
me. I laughed nervously and scooted a few inches back.

“So, you’re a freshman?” he asked, leaning into my personal space. I did another small shimmy backward.

“Um, yeah! Well, freshperson.” I giggled. How was it that he was back in my lap again? I slid backward. We were playing some weird game of reverse Twister.

“What’s your name?” I asked, stalling for time.

He put his hand on my knee. “Kris,” he said. He wrapped his free arm around me. We were seriously starting to cross some boundaries here.

“I’m Claudia,” I said, holding out my hand to shake.

He looked at my hand, laughed, and pressed it down onto his leg. “Sure,” he
said, sounding distracted. He leaned his face forward.

Now, Ellen, I may have lost my flirt, but it was plain to see that he was entering the kiss zone, which was
totally
out of the question.

“Oh, look!” I said brightly, pointing off into the distance at an imaginary acquaintance. I jumped up from the couch. “There’s my friend Shelley! I’m coming, Shelley,” I shouted, waving into thin air.

Kris shrugged and turned to the girl who was sitting on his opposite side, asking to bum a smoke. I guess I’m pretty easy to get over.

I needed to find Charlie and let her know that I was leaving, mission accomplished. I had nothing left to prove and, to be honest, I was tired.

“Easy come, easy go, huh?”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I spun around quickly. “Huh?”

All of my frustration melted away. It was Gabe. He was the last person I expected to find at a frat party. “I saw the
way you handled that guy. Classic.”

I ran my fingers through my hair, tense. “I swear, my sex appeal must be totally on the fritz,” I grumbled.

“Oh, uh …” Gabe frowned and stammered at me. He looked left, then right, then down at the ground, as if he couldn’t decide where to settle.

Oh, god,
I thought.
Awkward-moment alert. Abort! Abort!

Color flooded into my cheeks. “Never mind.” I exhaled sharply. “God, I am such a dork. That whole scene was a complete cliché.”

Gabe burst into nervous laughter. After a moment, he regained his composure. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“My roommate wants to rush. So one of her sisters—well, would-be sisters—invited her. You know, to check out the scene.” I shuddered involuntarily. “It’s fun,” I said, a shade too enthusiastically, feeling a wave of loyalty to Charlie. “I mean, I didn’t have any cool concerts to review tonight, anyway,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “You should come down to the paper tomorrow. I’ve got
a bunch of new stuff in. That is, if you want to write again.”

“I definitely do. I mean, I will. I mean—” I stopped myself. “What about you, anyway?” I asked. “What are
you
doing here? I thought you hated the Greek scene.”

I gave him a quick once-over. He did look vaguely out of place in this setting. His hair was hat-free and carefully mussed (there was definitely some “product” action going on, I decided), and he wore a tight ringer T-shirt that said,
VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS.
His cords were frayed, and his Pumas were two-toned.

He was the anti-Drew, and I loved it.

“‘Hate’ is a strong word, Claudia,” he said, breaking me out of my reverie. He pointed at his shirt. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Mmmm, I hope so,
I thought. I straightened, trying to banish all inappropriate thought from my mind. “Uh-huh!” I said brightly.

He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s Kyra’s scene. You know, she was, like, a legacy. So she’s Greek. And I’m the moral support.”

The words hit me like a punch in the stomach. He was here for Kyra. He was her moral support. He wasn’t mine. He wasn’t even on the market.

“There she is!” Gabe said, busting into my big, deep thoughts.

He doesn’t have to sound so freakin’ pleased about it,
I thought sullenly.

But yes, there she was. She wore a sleeveless printed top that on anyone else would have looked like Grandma’s curtains. Her jeans were soft, faded, and stain-free. Her hair was twisted up on top of her head in a style that would have taken me hours to perfect, but for Kyra, I’m sure, was effortless. She probably slept with her hair that way. She was talking to another girl, someone equally casual and good-looking and, from my vantage point, it felt as though I were watching the scene unfold on-screen. It was a movie, and Kyra was the star. But of course, it wasn’t
really
a movie. It was my life. Kyra was the star of the movie of my life? When had that happened? It was so unfair.