Class (12 page)

Shipley shrugged her shoulders. “We don’t really stay in touch.” She shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair. The meeting wasn’t going the way she’d planned.

Professor Rosen studied the poem again. “It’s very good,” she remarked. “It shows your curiosity about him. I like the dichotomy that someone we grew up with and should know so well can be a complete stranger to us.”

Shipley nodded eagerly. She hadn’t thought about any of that when she wrote the poem, but what Professor Rosen was saying made her sound insightful and wise.

Professor Rosen removed a red pen from the chipped mug on her desk and scribbled a giant capital A below the last line of the poem. Then she tucked the piece of paper back into the manila folder. “You might want to think about East Anglia for your junior year. They’ve got a great poetry program.”

Shipley gazed blankly back at her.

“It’s in England. We have an exchange program.”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Shipley said. “My junior year.” She tucked her hair behind her ears.

“No, of course not.” Professor Rosen drummed her fingertips on the cover of her old address book, looking distracted. A collection of crystal prisms hung from the windowpane. The sun came out from behind a cloud, casting trippy rainbows all over the puny room. Was the meeting over? Shipley wondered. Were they finished?

Professor Rosen pursed her lips. “I didn’t like that trick you pulled at orientation, but you seem like you’ve got your head screwed on right after all. You come to class. You do the reading. You write very nicely.”

Shipley waited for the catch—surely there was one.

“While I’ve got you here, I may as well ask. Do you happen to babysit? Our regular sitter just got sent home with mono and we have tickets to see a play in Augusta Sunday night. I wanted to eat out afterwards.”

The professor leaned forward in her chair, the waistband of her olive wide-wale corduroys stretching tight across her flat, wide hips. “I asked Eliza and she said, and I quote, ‘I’m not into being nice to mutant gremlins.’” She shook her head. “What a character. But at least she was honest.” She smiled at Shipley. Her teeth were long and crooked. “Don’t tell me you don’t like kids either. Our guy’s only six months old. He’s a peach.”

Shipley smiled back, an image forming in her mind of Professor Rosen’s charmless brick house, her nerdy clean-cut husband from the Computer Department, and their bucktoothed, spikyhaired baby, a mini version of Professor Rosen. A lot of the girls at Greenwich Academy had babysat; she’d just never been asked. The baby would probably sleep the whole time anyway. She could eat donuts and watch
Pretty Woman
on HBO.

“I could if you wanted me to,” she offered.

Professor Rosen slapped her palm on the desk. “Good. We’re in the directory. Just swing by around six. There’s a good chance I won’t be there because I’m supposed to be rehearsing my one-act. That is, if I can find someone to play the other lead. It’s a pretty demanding role. Pretty far out. I don’t know what it is about the boys this year, but I can’t find anyone to do it.”

She cocked her head, her murky hazel eyes widening.

“Hey, what about that hunky boyfriend of yours? What’s his name? Timothy? He’s big enough to scare the living daylights out of people.” She faltered. “When he gets fired up, I mean.”

“Tom?”

Obviously the play had something to do with the zoo. Shipley tried to imagine Tom and Adam flitting around onstage together wearing black unitards, their faces painted like mimes as they pretended to be tigers or gorillas or boa constrictors. She’d slink onstage wearing a black cat suit and lick her paws seductively while they fought over her, waiting to be claimed by the last beast standing.

Tom didn’t seem like the theater type, but Professor Rosen was just starting to warm to her and Shipley wanted to give her everything she could give. Besides, Tom’s grades were terrible. He could use the extra credit.

“Sure, why not? He’d love it.”

“Tell him I want to start rehearsing as early as tomorrow if we can.” The professor pulled on her earlobes and looked at her watch. “The show’s at the end of term, which is a lot closer than you’d think.”

Shipley stood up to leave, but Professor Rosen held up her hand. “Not so fast. We’re supposed to talk about whether you like your classes or not and what you want to major in. Do you miss home, are you happy, that sort of thing.”

Shipley shrugged her shoulders. “So far I love it.”

Professor Rosen smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how rarely I hear that.”

Success!

Shipley wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but she and Professor Rosen were practically best friends now. Outside the office, she scribbled Tom’s name on the sign-up sheet for the play, ignoring the rush that coursed through her when her fingertips accidentally grazed the green A of Adam’s name.

9

N
ovember was a curious month. Some days it was warm as summer. Some days it rained. And some days the wind ripped the leaves off the trees and scattered them mercilessly all over campus. Buildings and Grounds worked round the clock to keep the quad green and leaf-free. Weekends the leaves were burned, filling the air with pungent gray smoke. The heat had come on in the dorms and hot chocolate was served in the dining halls. There was a briskness to the student body, too. Midterms weren’t far off, and after that, vacation. Of course Thanksgiving was first, but anyone who lived farther away than New York stayed on campus for the turkey buffet in the dining hall.

Now was the time when students became aware of how well they were doing in school. Tom was nearly failing Portraiture. Economics was impossible. English sucked. Geology required way too much memorization. And there was a good chance he would be replaced in Professor Rosen’s one-act play, meaning
that he would fail to obtain the extra credit. Today he’d decided to try something new.

“It’s like this,” Wills explained. He tied his long platinum dreadlocks in a knot on top of his head to keep them out of the way of the hot pink ecstasy tablets he was counting out on Root’s kitchen table. “You do E every two days. On the off days you smoke pot and cook huge meals and eat like a king. On E days you chew gum—lots of it—and run around outside. Or, if you can’t get any E, you steal ether from the chemistry lab. It doesn’t last and it stinks, but man—you got to try it at least once. Between the drugs and the running around and the healthy food, your body stays in shape, and basically you’re golden.”

Each tiny pink pill had the almond-shaped outline of an eye stamped on it. Tom watched as Wills sorted the tablets into neat piles, four for each of the Grannies, and four for him. He’d agreed to purchase the E on the condition that the Grannies do it with him, in case he freaked out.

Back in Bedford, Tom had stayed away from drugs. Mostly because of sports, but also because he wasn’t sure how he’d behave. Drinking was okay. His parents drank. Everybody drank. His dad was even cool with picking him up at rugby team parties at 3
A.M.
when he was stark raving shit-faced with puke on his shirt. Still, he’d always been curious about drugs, and now that he was away at college, why not? Mainly he was looking for a way to loosen up.

“Dig deeper. Go nuts. Let yourself come unhinged!” Professor Rosen had screamed at him during his first rehearsal. Then she and that quiet kid, Adam, had stood there gawking at him and waiting for him to go nuts, but all he could do was talk louder and wipe his nose a lot and apologize for being such a shitty actor and forgetting his lines.

“You will never create something that is truly yours until you let go of your inhibitions,” his painting teacher, Mr. Zanes, would murmur. Mr. Zanes was a whispering graybeard who padded around the studio in bare feet and was forever sucking on lollipops. “For my laryngitis,” he said. Apparently his work was all the rage in Prague in the early eighties, but the only evidence of his artistry was a teetering mound of lollipop wrappers in the corner of the studio.

Of course it was nearly impossible for Tom to let go of his inhibitions when the subject of every class was Eliza in all her naked glory. Eliza sitting with her angry chin on her fists. Eliza in profile. Eliza lying on a sofa with her dark hairy crotch in plain sight. Every time Tom looked up, she would mouth “suck my tits” or “olive juice” or “blow me” while subtly giving him the finger. In retaliation Tom would turn her face into a giant oozing sore and omit her pale but rather nice tits. Now he was getting a D+ in Portraiture, which was supposed to be his easy A. And the play was a fucking disaster. Drugs were his last and only hope.

“You know this stuff is all-natural? Comes from the oil of sassafras root,” Wills said. “Used to find sassafras oil in soap and root beer and all sorts of shit till the FDA got involved in the sixties and banned it. I was gonna order a big ole sassafras plant through the mail so I could make my own E, but then I was like, do I really want the FBI parked outside my dorm? Do I really want my phone tapped? Do I really want the pigs up inside my sphincter? I think not.”

Tom nodded. The little history lesson was interesting and all, but he really couldn’t give a fuck. Grover sat down next to him at the table, his electric shaver in hand. He turned it on and ran it over his closely shaved head, buzzing off the few filaments of brown peach fuzz that had accumulated since he’d shaved his
head the day before. The kitchen windows just grazed the grassy edge of the quad. Outside a bunch of sporty-looking girls played Ultimate Frisbee.

“What you do is put it on your tongue, flip it back, and swallow it,” Grover explained, pinching a tablet between his thumb and forefinger and demonstrating the technique.

Liam came over and stuck out his tongue with a lizardly flicker, waiting for Wills to place a tablet on its tip. He flicked his tongue back inside his mouth. “It goes down kind of dry, but pretty soon you’ll be feeling it and you won’t care.”

Tom poked at one of the tablets with his fingertip. It looked like confetti or baby aspirin. “Feeling what?”

The Grannies chuckled. Wills leaned over and sucked a tablet into his mouth right off the table like a human vacuum cleaner. “Like a god,” he elaborated enticingly. “Like you’re all dick.”

Tom liked to think that he felt that way all the time, but maybe the enhancement of his existing attributes was exactly what Professor Rosen and Mr. Zanes meant by digging deeper. He put a pink tablet on his tongue. It was bitter and wrong-tasting, like he was eating a crumb of squirrel shit off his shoe. He swallowed it down. If this smidgen of trash could get him off, he’d be pretty freaking amazed. “Now what?” he demanded. He couldn’t just sit in his dorm kitchen staring at the Grannies while they waited for the E to kick in.

Wills pushed his chair back and stood up, his wraparound skirt cascading down to his ankles. “Now we go for a really long walk.” He reached out and patted Tom’s shoulder. “And when we get back, you’ll be a different man.”

H
ands tucked innocently into their coat pockets, the pre-rapturous huddle of boys crossed the quad and headed for the five
mile running loop that snaked around the periphery of Dexter’s pretty brick and ivy campus. Mr. Darius Booth, the frail president of the college, could be seen creeping along the loop every morning at 5:45
A.M.
with his three terrifying German shepherds. Tom knew this because he’d actually woken up a few times at that hour and gone jogging himself. He’d thought he wanted to stay in shape, but all he got from running that early was a killer cramp and some serious heartburn that lasted all day.

He’d come to Dexter with every intention of joining the rugby team. After all, he’d played rugby for the Bedford school district since he was twelve. But he really wasn’t up for spending weekends at away games and going through the fratlike hazing rituals of a men’s team. Weekends were all about having sex with Shipley, sleeping late with Shipley, and ordering in with Shipley, not necessarily in that order. Besides, he’d heard the guys on the rugby team actually made the freshmen eat a saltine with a senior team member’s jizz on it. Not exactly appealing. So he’d skipped the first practice and didn’t even mention it to his dad, who’d been captain of Dexter’s rugby team his senior year and had probably eaten a whole bucketful of jizz in his day.

Tom hadn’t noticed before what a perfect fall day it was. The leaves were gold and crimson and hot pink, and the fading sun slid down the hill behind campus like a giant egg yolk. As they walked, the hair on the backs of his hands took on a lovely coppery sheen. Wills walked directly in front of him, his tie-dyed skirt swaying back and forth, his long platinum hair bouncing liquidly in the late afternoon light.

“Nice,” Tom observed, allowing Liam to take his hand. Grover started to skip. The toes of his dirty bare feet were painted with silver nail polish. He played a cheerful Irish-sounding ditty on the harmonica strapped around his neck, accompanied by some enthusiastic chest beating and overall strap jangling.
Grover liked to make noise, which made sense, given that he was the Grannies’ percussionist.

A jogger strode up behind them. His long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and his cheeks were sunken and sallow. A maroon Dexter basketball shirt flapped from his bony shoulders as his sinewy arms and legs pumped away. Besides the shirt, he sported a pair of those flimsy Dexter running shorts with the built-in mesh underwear that no full-grown man would ever wear, and white Asics running shoes with no socks. The thing was, this guy wasn’t full-grown. In fact, he looked like he was shrinking as he ran. When they were shoulder to shoulder, the jogger turned to look Tom square in the eyes, not accusing or threatening, but penetrating Tom’s very soul and mind-melding with him. A powerful chemical odor pervaded the air. If Tom weren’t on E, he would’ve been freaked out.

“That guy eats only Granny Smith apples,” Liam explained in a whisper as the jogger pulled away from them. “You know how the grocery store puts wax on the apples to make them shiny? Well, he scrapes the wax off with the file on a pair of nail clippers because he doesn’t want to ingest the extra calories.”