Perfect Fifths (19 page)

"Ha!"

"It's even funnier when ... when ... uh ..."

[Pause.]

"Jessica?"

"Huh?"

"You just kind of stopped in the middle of a sentence."

"I did?"

"You did."

"I did. I'm so sorry, I'm just really dis—"

"Distracted, I know. Now give me a dollar."

"A dollar? For what—Oh, dammit. Here it is."

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"Thank you."

"You're still down by two."

"This conversation isn't over yet."

"No, it's not."

"How's it going so far?"

"What? The conversation?"

"Yes. The conversation. Are you enjoying yourself?"

[Pause.]

"Yes, I am."

"I am, too."

[Pause.]

"Is it going the way you thought it would?"

"No ...and yes."

"Meaning?"

"I didn't really know how it would go, but in that unpredictable sense, it's going exactly as I thought it would."

"I'm in full agreement."

[Long pause.]

"Now look what's happened."

"I know! Our in-the-moment analysis of our conversation brought it to a dead stop."

"Let's avoid getting meta-conversational again. Let's just talk."

"Sure. Let's just talk. There's just one problem."

"What's that?"

"I totally forgot what I was talking about. I lost my train of thought."

"You were talking about the girl who had never fucked in a hammock."

"Right, her. Her..."

"And the essay was funny because ..."

"It was funny because, uh, she had never even kissed a boy when she wrote it. Hey, excuse me for a moment, okay? I'm just going to check to see if I missed any calls."

"Are you expecting to hear from someone?"

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"Sort of. Maybe. But... nope. No missed calls."

"Do you need to make a call? I don't mind."

"Do I need to make a call? Uh, no. It's fine. I can wait. It's ... perfectly fine. Perfect."

[Pause.]

"Do they only write personal essays, or... ?"

"No, no. We do exercises in all kinds of forms and genres. Nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting, poetry. But as an introductory writing exercise, we ask them to recount a turning point in their lives."

"Like the classic first-person college application essay."

"No, actually. The first-person essay has become such a cliche, you know? By the time they hit high school, they've already written so many first-person turning-point essays that they've run out of turning points. That's why we make them write that first assignment in the third person."

'Third person? Why?"

"Brace yourself for another two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar word."

Two hundred and fifty thousand?"

"The average sticker price of four years at an Ivy League college."

"Oh. Okay. Consider me braced."

"Prosopopoeia."

"It sounds just like the last quarter-million-dollar word."

"That was 'prosopagnosia.1 This is 'prosopopoeia.'"

"Well, no duh."

"'Prosopopoeia' is a literary device in which a writer speaks as another person."

"Okay."

"Research has shown that when you tell a story in the omnipotent third person, it creates a buffer between the narrator and the character in the story, even when the story is autobiographical and the protagonist is a version of yourself. Still with me?"

"I'm still with you."

"That shift in point of view helps painful stories feel less painful. You become an objective observer of all the Sturm und Drang and not the unfortunate person going

through it. Therapeutically speaking, we hope the writer can actually learn something about herself and how she goes about making certain life choices ... Ugh. I'm sorry, this is all from the mission statement again."

"Gimme a dollar."

"Dammit. Here you go, Marcus. Don't spend it all in one place."

"Thank you. What a shame. You were on such a roll."

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"Now we're even. Deadlocked."

"It's not a game, Jessica."

"It's not?"

"Oh, well, I suppose it is."

[Pause.]

"I was waiting for you to call me the Game Master. Were you tempted to call me the Game Master?"

"I judiciously refrained. That's so senior-year-of-high-school, isn't it?"

"You've evolved."

"Oh yeah, I've totally, totally evolved. I'm, like, way, way more mature than to resort to high school taunts."

"Even for nostalgia's sake?"

"Especially for nostalgia's sake. Now, what was I saying earlier?"

"Oh, right. The third person. We call this writing exercise the turning point of view. The change in narrative perspective triggers an internal psychological shift that allows you to see past decisions in a whole new way. It's similar to when you see a friend making a huge mistake and it's just so obvious."

"Yet at the same time, you're blind to your own foibles."

"Right."

[Pause.]

"What about happy stories, Jessica?"

"Happy stories?"

"Yes. Happy stories with happy endings."

[Long sigh.] "Unfortunately, Marcus, there aren't enough of those. But..."

4

The third p—1

4

4

e ght

(doth protesting)

Hold that thought—now I'm vibrating. Let me see who it is. Oh, never mind."

"Who was it?"

"No one I need to talk to right now, either."

"Anyone I know?"

"Do you remember meeting my roommate, Natty?"

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"The freckle-faced little boy from Alabama?"

"That freckle-faced little boy from Alabama is all grown up. He's a Rhodes Scholar."

"That child is a Rhodes Scholar? Oh my God. I'm so fucking old."

"You're old? I'm ten years older than my lab partner. She barely remembers boy bands."

"That is a serious gap in her knowledge. How did she even get in to Princeton?"

"I know. She knew very little about the rivalry between the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. I had to educate her."

"That's important work."

"Indeed."

"So you and Natty are still friends."

"Yes. He's my best friend at school. He can be an immature, er, dick, for lack of a better word, but that's just part of his charm. He's like the pain-in-the-ass little brother I was but never had."

"Talk about strange but true."

"You don't know the half of it. Natty's parents waged a campaign to have me kicked out of school."

"Are you serious?"

"Serious. Of course, that only made Natty even more determined to be my friend, as these parental social interventions tend to do."

"How did they try to get you kicked out? And why?"

"Why? They hated me on sight. And really, who could blame them, right? The Addisons of Alabama had spared no expense in molding their son—a mediocre student

and hopeless athlete—into the very model of an Ivy League superachiever. They knew how much time, effort, and money it took to win a coveted spot in Princeton's Class of 2010. One look at my dreads, my tats, my terrorist beard, and they were one hundred percent convinced that I was an impostor admitted to Princeton under fraudulent pretenses. There had been a few cases of older students with untraditional backgrounds faking transcripts and test scores to get into top schools, and Dr.

Addison was damned before he was going to let another one besmirch his alma mater's good name."

"What happened?"

"They hired a private investigator to run a background check."

"No!"

"Yes. My academic record has more holes than a paper target at a firing range. One incomplete after another. The Addisons tried to argue that I never technically graduated from high school and was therefore ineligible for enrollment as a first-year student."

"Obviously, nothing came of it, right? Because you're still graduating this spring."

"Princeton investigated my application and ultimately stood by my acceptance."

"That's a relief."

"It should have been."

"What do you mean?"

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"A big part of me agreed with the Addisons. I was a fraud. I had willfully deluded myself into thinking I was anything other than a deviant low-life dreg. They were right!

I didn't belong in the Ivy League! I didn't deserve to walk among their privileged ranks! And why would I even want to?"

"Marcus, you're being way too hard on yourself."

"I second-guessed my reasons for applying in the first place. What was I hoping to gain from a diploma from Princeton that I couldn't get anywhere else? Sure, a

Princeton diploma is a passport to opportunities, but I was motivated by far more than job prospects."

"Validation, maybe? That you had transcended your trashy roots? I felt that way after I got in to Columbia. After all, our town had semifamously become the

representation of dumb, debauched suburban youth."

"Maybe. But more of a redemption, I think. Applying to Princeton made me both a con artist and the conned."

"How so?"

"I knew the Office of Admissions would come all over itself at the sight of my application. See? The American meritocracy is not a myth. I could serve as living proof that anyone who works hard enough can rise above his station into the upper tiers of society. Which, of course, is total horseshit. Because the moment I found myself among the elite, the elite—as personified by the Addisons—wanted no part of me. I kept asking myself: Does being here make me a better person, or even a different person, than who I was before? I felt like a fool, a millennial Fitzgerald simultaneously trying to fit in to and fight against the hypocritical foundations of the American class system."

"Uh, wow. To quote you from earlier: You've obviously put a lot of thought into this."

"And to quote you right back, Jessica: more than you know."

"You said yourself that a lot of that dregginess was an exaggeration."

"A lot but not all. Despite my best efforts to be the biggest fuckup I could be."

"I don't believe that you went out of your way to make bad choices when you were a kid."

"I beg to differ, Jessica. I was held back in kindergarten. Do you know why?"

"You sexually propositioned the lunch lady?"

"That was fifth grade."

"Late bloomer."

"No, I was held back for being an underachiever. I was this close to being a kindergarten dropout."

"Just like the book."

"There's a book?"

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"Yea/?, there's a book. Kindergarten Dropout: Underachiever at Six, Unwanted at Eighteen, Unemployed at Thirty, Dead at Sixty. Or some crap like that. It's a huge best seller. I've seen the MILFs poring over it at Bethany's place."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not. I wish I were. I think the child psychologist-slash-author-slash-evil genius appeared on Dr.

Frank Show a few years ago. You obviously predate the book and the hysteria that followed it."

"Gee, I'm so proud to be a part of the slacker vanguard. Let's just say I scored extremely well on a pre-K IQ test, and my parents thought I wasn't living up to my expectations in kindergarten. So they held me back to teach me a lesson, I guess. I needed a strong dose of discipline to rise to the standards of my IQ test. The only lesson I learned was that I was bad."

"You weren't bad. You were probably just bored."

"You're right. But I grew up feeling like I was always already in trouble for one reason or another. After a while I decided to live up to that rebellious reputation, since I was getting punished for it anyway. And guess what? It turned out that I was very, very good at being bad. Too good. And now, years later, that disreputable label still clings to me, Jessica."

We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful what we pretend to be.'

"Exactly. That's exactly right. Who said that?"

"I can't remember who said it first, but I heard it from Mac—you know, Samuel MacDougall—years ago, and I never forgot it. He has a habit of offering inspiring quotations for every occasion. I wish I could remember who originated the pretend-to-be quote. I like to give credit where credit is due. Especially when I come off sounding like a bumper sticker."

"Or a bad tattoo."

"Vonnegut! Kurt Vonnegut!"

"Now you can move on with your life. Again."

"Yes, I can. Okay. So what I don't get is... you were under eighteen when you got in the most trouble, right? You were a minor. Aren't those youthful indiscretions considered privileged information? How could the Addisons access any of those records?"

"They had ties to the Bush White House. My kindergarten report card was clearly a matter of national security."

"You're kidding."

"Barely. That's the irony of the situation; they couldn't even get their hands on the worst of it. They couldn't get police reports or rehab charts or any psychiatric evaluations from that time period. Just my Pineville High transcripts."

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"They probably bribed Brandi in the guidance department to get those. Do you remember Brandi?"

"I can't say that I do. Which one was Brandi?"

"She looked like she was auditioning for the role of Nympho Hood Ornament in an eighties hair-band video."

"Hmm ... I saw so many counselors and therapists and psychiatrists between the ages of twelve and eighteen that they kind of blend together."

"Brandi was the only one I was ever forced to talk to. I guess that's why I remember her so vividly."

"Why did you have to talk to her?"

"My tenth-grade chem teacher thought I was suicidal."