Class (7 page)

“That’s a lot of blueberries,” Tom observed with his mouth full of cookies. He’d never eaten anything so good in his entire life. He could actually taste the cocoa beans in the chocolate chips. He could taste the sunshine that had shone down upon the heads of the chickens that had laid the eggs that were in the batter. The cookies were life-changing.

A large gray cat swaggered lazily through the kitchen, licking her chops. Yellow fly tape hung from the ceiling like an orna
ment, festooned with dead flies. The air smelled of blueberry jam and freshly baked cookies.

Shipley sat directly opposite Tom, sipping her wine with rhythmic precision. She was glad she’d already peed.

Eliza bit the rim of her glass. Any minute now she’d hear the roar of a chain saw and heads would begin to fly.

“Hey, we should play a drinking game or something,” Tragedy suggested.

“Please, no,” Adam groaned. Tragedy always had the worst ideas.

T
hey played Bullshit with two decks of cards. Tragedy called “bullshit” every hand, which was annoying, but meant that they all got very drunk. Six bottles of wine and a case of beer later, Shipley lay on the living room sofa with her head in Tom’s lap and her feet in Adam’s, watching Tragedy and Nick dance to the Gatzes’ collection of Bee Gees albums. The operatic wails of the brothers Gibb sounded almost futuristic, even though the music had come out almost two decades ago. Eliza knelt on the floor next to the coffee table, staring at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The
Scooby Doo
marathon continued to play on the muted TV. Scooby and Shaggy tiptoed around a deserted amusement park, their teeth chattering noiselessly. It was two o’clock in the morning. The sheep would be waiting for their grain at six.

“Plum,” Tom said, gazing down at the side of Shipley’s head. “That’s what color I’d start with if I were going to paint your hair. Everyone thinks blond hair is yellow, but it’s really not.”

“Mmm.” Shipley had never been this intoxicated. She’d long given up trying to speak. Way down at the other end of the sofa she could feel Adam’s knuckle brush against her bare foot. She closed her eyes.

The next song was a slow one. Rather than attempt an awkward promlike slow dance, Tragedy and Nick knelt down beside Eliza to help her with the puzzle.

“It’s from the Mensa Society,” Tragedy told them. “I joined just for fun. It’s a picture of the first landing on the Moon and it’s got eighteen hundred pieces—eighteen hundred and only four corners. I’ve been doing it for almost a week and I lost the cover of the box with the picture on it so now I’m really screwed.” She grabbed the piece Nick had just picked up. “Hey, gimme that. That’s Neil Armstrong’s thumb.” She pressed the piece into place. “One small step for womankind!”

Another slow song came on, and even as their bodies continued to participate with what was happening in the room—talking to each other, moving puzzle pieces around, pretending not to fall asleep or stroke a foot or a lock of hair—their minds were elsewhere. Each of them in his or her own way was marveling at how they’d gotten there, to this particular house in Maine, this wee-hour moment together, when at breakfasttime they’d been in their own houses, in their own hometowns, with no inkling of this whatsoever.

“Life is like an hourglass. Consciousness is the sand.” Nick repeated a phrase he’d memorized from a book of Taoist meditations, or maybe it was another one of Laird Castle’s bumper stickers. His mom had been putting away money to send him to college since he was in utero, and here he was, throwing it all away on the very first night. It was only a matter of time before they got caught, and then they’d be in deep shit.

Eliza weighed her own propensity for violence. In the last twelve hours she’d seen five guys fall under the spell of Shipley’s infuriating white shorts—their neighbors in the dorm, the injured Nick, puke-faced Tom, and now this farm boy. If the serial killer never showed, she would have to murder Shipley herself.

Tom was having second thoughts. When he’d filled out his preregistration forms, it was all about Economics and Government. But Shipley’s hair was an inspiration. Tomorrow he’d sign up for painting. Even if he sucked, it would probably be an easy A.

Tragedy had just realized that she did not own a single book about space travel. After she’d visited every destination she’d marked up in her travel guides, she’d start saving for the Moon, Mars, or your anus—
gotcha!

Adam was also dreaming of an extraterrestrial existence. If this were
Star Trek,
he thought, boldly taking hold of Shipley’s drowsy bare foot, I’d beam everyone back to the ship except for her. We’d start our own civilization on some abandoned planet, and I’d set up some kind of force field around her so nothing bad could ever happen to her. Even if keeping up the force field meant sapping power from the planet, or losing contact with Earth or the mother ship, I’d do it. I’d even die for her. All at once, his life was imbued with meaning.

But in the fecund forest of her imagination, Shipley had already yielded to another boy’s charms. The wood creaked as Tom carried her upstairs, the gray cat butting ahead of them like a nosy chaperone. He laid her down on a bed. The comforter was purple and blue Ralph Lauren paisley and the walls were decorated like a diorama at the Museum of Natural History. Ducks skated across icy ponds, the tips of their wings touching. A rabbit crouched, sniffing the air as it held up its injured foot. The branches of a willow tree wafted over a burbling brook. Sheep grazed on a grassy hilltop. A wolf looked up from its prey, its fangs dripping. Tom kissed her and their clothes fell away like onionskins. The animals stood watch while they made love.

Tragedy picked up her Rubik’s cube. “Who wants to time me?”

Like jigsaw pieces that had been cut to fit but until now had
roamed randomly disassembled in the box, the six of them were now inextricably linked. Of course the puzzle was largely unfinished—it would take a lifetime to complete, or at least four years.

The screen door banged in the kitchen. Shipley bolted upright on the sofa, relieved to find that she was still wearing her shorts.

Here we go, Eliza thought morbidly. Cue chain saw.

“If you’re in there, I want your rear ends back in the van!” It was Professor Rosen. She sounded winded, like she’d been running hard. “I’m taking you back to campus. Obviously you can’t be trusted on your own in the woods.”

5

C
ollege has a break-in period. First there is the unfamiliar task of sleeping in a strange bed in a noisy building with a virtual stranger sleeping across the room from you. Your roommate might be an early riser who, after snagging the first shower, is fully dressed and blow-drying her bangs by seven. The roar of the hair dryer hurts your head. When you get up, you will probably have to wait outside the bathroom down the hall to use the toilet or shower or sink. You might be hungover after staying up most of the night doing funnels with the upperclassmen next door. Then there is breakfast in the dining hall, a confusing combination of preschool cereal options and tiny cups of weak coffee.

Next is registration, a madhouse in the field house. Professors of unpopular courses like Geology or German try to hawk their syllabi like door-to-door salesmen, while the line to sign up for Creative Writing or Film Studies goes out the door. You remember what your high school guidance counselor said about taking a variety of courses your first two years of college. By dabbling in
every subject you will open up more options as to your major and complete your core requirements so you can focus on the courses you really want to take. Besides the required Freshman English, you sign up for Intro to Geology to fulfill your science credits, Intro to Psychology to use up your social science credits but also because you think the class consists of lying on a couch and talking about yourself, Music Comprehension (aka Clapping for Credit), The Romantics because it sounds romantic, and Creative Writing: Poetry because Fiction was full and poems are shorter and therefore require less work.

For the first week of school you cling to the people you met on orientation, not because you have anything in common, but because you don’t know who else to talk to besides the guys in the room next door who are both majoring in their favorite subject: beer. You enjoy your classes and lectures this first week because they are among the faculty’s best performances, their chance to win you over so you won’t drop the course before Friday’s add/drop deadline. Since most of the students are still in the process of buying their books, the workload is light, a false representation of what it will be like later on.

Cut to Friday, the end of the first week.

Just like all the other freshmen, Shipley, Eliza, Tom, and Nick remained clustered in their orientation clique, eating together in the dining hall, studying together in the library, watching TV together in their respective dorms, not because they liked each other particularly, but because they were being punished.

“The punishment must fit the crime,” Professor Rosen had said before giving the four miscreants “roaming restrictions,” which meant that for the first week of school they could not leave campus.

By Friday morning, Shipley had had enough of that. Dexter’s
welcome BBQ picnic was tonight, and she needed cigarettes, insect repellent, and if she could muster up the courage to buy them, condoms. She’d never even seen a condom out of its wrapper, but it seemed to her that every self-respecting college girl, however virginal, should have condoms on hand just in case the guy she’d fallen for during orientation stopped bickering with his roommate and started noticing her. Her first class didn’t start until eleven, and there was a gas station with a convenience store only just down the hill. The week was almost over. Surely Professor Rosen wouldn’t mind if she roamed to the edge of town for just a minute.

The car should have been right where she left it, nose in the shallow dip of mown grass in the rear corner of the lot, tail sticking out onto the pavement, keys on the left front tire as was her family’s habit. She circled the perimeter of the lot, glancing back across the road at her dorm to make sure she was in the right place—the student parking lot across from Coke, where she’d left her car last Saturday. There were very few black cars in the lot at all, and the only Mercedes was an ancient beige convertible. Her car was gone.

Shipley folded her arms across her chest and bit her lip. Who could she tell? Not her parents, and definitely not her advisor, who happened to be Professor Rosen. She’d seen a Campus Security car patrolling the road at night, but it seemed to be a oneman operation, and she wasn’t sure how to contact him. Perhaps it was best not to tell anyone. The car would turn up eventually—maybe. And it might be a good way to get to know people, having to ask for rides. Tom had a car, and she definitely wanted to get to know him. Blushing to herself as she played out a little fantasy of losing her virginity to Tom in the backseat of his Jeep, she traipsed down the hill toward town, flip-flops scuffing the
loose stones on the shoulder of the road, early September sun baking her bare arms. It wasn’t long before a white Volkswagen pulled over to wait for her.

Adam couldn’t believe his luck. He’d been looking for her all week. In fact, he’d seen her several times—at registration, buying coffee at Starbucks, in the library, in the computer lab—but she was never alone, and there was such a rush of blood to his extremities every time he saw her, he was afraid of what he might say. Tragedy wasn’t with him, but it was her voice he heard yelling,
Stop, you wussy, stop! Pull over!
So he mustered up his courage and stepped on the brake.

“Need a ride?” he called out through the open window.

It was the boy from the farmhouse. “Oh, it’s you,” Shipley said, embarrassed that she couldn’t remember his name. “I was just going down the road to buy cigarettes. I lost my car,” she explained, opening the VW’s passenger door.

“Here. Sorry.” Adam swept the pile of books and caseless cassettes from the front seat to the back so she could get in. “Do you want to file a report with the police—for your car, I mean?”

Shipley yanked her denim miniskirt down over the tops of her legs. “Police? No, that’s all right. I just want some cigarettes.”

The car careened down the hill toward town. Monday had been Labor Day, and summer’s warm breath was already tainted with the chilly afternote of fall. Soon the leaves would turn and the woods around campus would echo with the sounds of gunshots. Hunting was big in Home.

“Are you going to the barbecue tonight?” Shipley asked brightly. “I heard there’s going to be a band and everything.”

Adam turned on the radio and quickly switched it off again, unsure of what to do with his hands besides change gears and rotate the steering wheel. “I would go if…” His voice trailed off. Why had he begun the sentence that way? If
what
? If she went
with him and held his hand? If she promised to go home with him afterward? If she let him kiss her?

Shipley didn’t seem to mind that he’d left a blank for her to fill. “Well, we’re going. Me and my roommate, Eliza, and Nick and Tom.” She cocked her blond head. “We’ve been hanging out all week.”

Adam bristled at the mention of Tom, his apparent rival, and abruptly changed the subject. “How long have you smoked?”

“I only just started.” Shipley laughed. “It’s not like I’m addicted or anything. I’m just trying it out.”

Adam squeezed the button that dispensed windshield wiper fluid onto the windshield and switched on the wipers. They flapped wildly back and forth before he could stop them again. Scummy blue fluid dripped into the open windows. “Sorry,” he muttered, annoyed with himself.

The gas station was just ahead. “You can drop me off here,” Shipley told him. “I don’t mind walking back.” She was about to get out of the car when she saw Professor Rosen pumping gas into a white minivan.

“Shit!” she cursed, ducking down in her seat. “I’m not supposed to be off-campus.” She glanced at Adam and smiled, her cheeks flushed. “Do you mind just sitting here until she leaves?”