Principles of Love (18 page)

The ancient “boom box” (I call it thus because written in white-out across the front two tape-decks are the words boom and box, probably circa 1984 when the thing was made) uses a twisted coat hanger for an antenna. I fiddle with it until WAJS comes on. Lucky for me, I don’t have to hear any of my own ads — no feminine protection nor beds. Just the nighttime “Desert Island Disks” — songs callers have written in to say they’d take on a Survivor-type excursion. Mable’s Time/Life series comes in handy for shows like this — there are always groovy songs from the 70s like
Hot Child in the City
and
Tonight’s the Night
. And then there are some I don’t know — but Jacob, who appears in the doorway, does.

He sings along with the radio and ventures over once I’ve given him a smile. He produces from his backpack three bags filled with confetti — glitter confetti.

“Musical notes — fun!” I say, a junior Martha Stewart (minus the jury). Then there’s regular sparkles, and moons and stars. “A for effort.”

“E for effort, no?” Jacob pulls a chair over and we begin the session by using popsicle sticks to spread paste onto the edges of thick paper. Soon, we’re back into the swing of the coffeehouse evening with me spilling my guts about loving trashy chart hits from the bellbottom era and Jacob — when pressed — giving details of his first kiss (baseball game, seventh grade, popcorn aftertaste). The red glitter I shake onto my paste pile makes me think of Valentine’s Day, reinforced by the radio’s selection of love songs.

“This is cool,” Jacob says, pulling off the direct emotion by avoiding eye contact and focusing on sifting stuff onto the construction paper. “Maybe I’ll even do you the honor of attending this open mike night. I heard the last one was pretty great.”

It’s the first time he’s addressed the fact (or alluded to it anyway) that we spent the night together (why does that sound more torrid than it was?) and had a kick-ass time.

“Yeah, it was,” I say. “So I hear,” I add, covering my ass.

Jacob shifts in his seat and then stands up. He comes over to me and puts himself in front of my face. We’re almost the same height this way.

“You’re sparkling,” he says.

Can he see me blush in this dim light? “Really?”

He nods and swipes a piece of glitter from my cheek. “There. That’s better.”

I can feel the tracing of his finger on my face and wish he’d put his hand back on me. In the comfort of this room with him I can almost forget about a boy in a dorm room waiting to see if I’ll have a clandestine meeting with him later. Will I?

How could I risk everything if I’m having so much fun with Jacob? I am emotionally schizoid. Must be. Or just won over by Jacob’s sincerity and the way he listens. And his shoulders. And his voice.

And just as I’m about to be wooed into momentary forgetting about Robinson and fling myself into my mini-movie of me and Jacob writing songs together (chart hit #1 being his ode to me, of course) I get the dreaded:

“Well, my friend, I have to go — work to do.” Now, hearing he has work isn’t the issue. Nor is the leaving part. That’s all fine and par for the course (golf imagery even though I’ve never played — thanks, Dad!). The key problem with his sentence is the
my friend
. Could this be a casual conversational device? Maybe. But, more likely, Jacob sees me as his cool friend. The girl he can talk to — welcome back Friend-Girl — but the one he’d never make a move on. After all, he let an entire night slide by, unparented, unwitnessed and didn’t act. Clearly he can’t feel anything but the effects of Friend Girl’s magic powers.

And right then and there, I decide to throw caution to the proverbial wind and potentially check my future out the window by climbing into one of Whitcomb’s.

“Hey,” I call to Jacob, who finishes washing his hands in the industrial sink and dries them on the rough brown paper towels. Since I’m now in official nothing-but-friends mode with him I ask, “Ever snuck into anyone’s dorm room at night?”

Jacob grins. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“If what you’re asking is if it’s a smart move or not — then I’d have to tell you it depends entirely on the situation at hand.”

I figured he’d say something like that. “I get it.”

“You have to follow your heart, right?”

It never occurs to me then that he might have thought I was suggesting a Romeo and Juliet encounter with him.

With each hollow night air step, I hear an imaginary warning “big mistake, big mistake” and then, when I make myself nuts, I say out loud, “Fun and Great” instead. I’m just stretching my boundaries, exploring the territory of the teenage mind. Ah, justification feels good.

I turn back and look at my house. Dark and turreted, I can picture my dad sound asleep and secure in the knowledge that his only daughter is safe upstairs. Guilt. I am guilty — or will be. But then I calm myself down by remembering that at four-thirty in the morning, when I do the campus creep and crawl (as Cordelia’s explained the walk of shame is called at Hadley), I’ll be back in my room with my dad none the wiser. Thank God for mandatory fire escapes and WD40 (the oil I sprayed on the latch and hinges of the ancient window in my room).

Fear is lurking around each bush and tree root I trip over, sending shivers and waves of nausea over me, but I push it all away and focus on Robinson’s mouth, the way his face lighted up when he asked me to come over. I can finally step into the romantic phone booth and bid a semi-fond farewell to Friend Girl. If this works, it’ll be the first time I’ve made this transition from confidante to girlfriend. Dance date. Prom date? Whoa. Slow down.

I do. I slow down and cringe as each boot print crunches on the icy grass. Around the back of Whitcomb where I saw Robinson playing Frisbee months before, I follow Robinson’s instructions and climb the back stairs to the flat roof. Instead of indulging in horrific fake headlines (
Principle’s Daughter Falls from Roof While Falling from Grace
) I focus on the positives of this situation; I’ll be in the warmth of Robinson’s arms (and bed?) soon, I’m following in the tradition of my Hadley Hall hornies before me, and for once, I’m putting fear away and acting on impulse. Okay, not impulse (and thank God not smelling like it) since impulse implies acting quickly and this took me the better part of a day and evening to sort out.

“He’s waiting for you,” Channing says, the decoy sent to the bathroom to fetch me. Scrunching into a ball, I dangle my legs over and narrowly miss the seatless toilet. Channing picks me up and I follow him one door down from the bathroom to where, in an also unlighted room, Robinson waits for me.

Cue the not-yet-super-famous female singer-songwriter’s future hit single. Cue the blue moonlight. Cue the doves. Okay, no doves, but pretty damn close. Robinson watches me check out his room. One wall is covered with an Indian print tapestry (typical Hadley Hall décor), a large bookshelf jammed with paperbacks and texts is on the far wall. He’s cleaned up — I think — since the room is free of guy evidence (balled up underwear, drapes of clothes hang over chairbacks). Noticeably lacking are the movie posters I expected. Instead, in frames, are three script covers from award-winning films — all signed and with penned words such as “Robinson — You the Man! — [insert famous name here]”. Very cool.

“I’ve visited a lot of sets in the past which was really exciting,” Robinson says quietly, nodding to the script covers in reality and no doubt his producer dad in his mind. “But none of that compares to right now.”

He walks over to me and unzips my coat. With his hands on my waist he pulls me into him and we press against each other. He lifts my hair up and puts his lips to my neck. Then he pulls back and looks at me. This is it — the moment. The ultimate film-worthy essence of what I’ve been wanting.

I tilt my face up to Robinson’s. He drags his fingers through my hair (points for prior conditioning treatment). Then he leans down and BAM! ZING! CRASH!

No, these are NOT the sounds of love and mayhem in my head, nor the sounds of hormones and bodies clashing. Rather, these are the semi-tragic (in my case possibly not semi, just total) blarings of the fire alarm.

In an instant, all of Whitcomb’s emergency lights flash on — think putrid green with a touch of bright white and the hallways are filled with shirtless boys and the dorm parents, the dreaded Von Tausig’s, flinging open doors to do bed checks and rid the entire house of its occupants.

“Fuck me!” Robinson says and it’s sadly not a command.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” I ask. “Window?”

“No way,” he says, throwing on a pair of unlaced boots and a sweatshirt. He looks panicked. “You can’t go back the way you came — it’s a trap. We’re supposed to meet out back by the grill — there’s no way you’ll get down in time.” Not even if I jump in one last dramatic plea?

“I could hide,” I say and crouch down near the (unused) bed checking for space underneath.

He shakes his head. Shrieks from the hallway. Channing bursts in and directs his sorry grin to Robinson. Leave it to him to be succinct and totally accurate. “Dude, you are so fucked.”

Oh, like I’m not?

For the record, I owe my demise to Clive the exchange student. He got high with some stoner senior and freaked out, pulling the fire alarm handle and thus submitting me to torture in the form of my father who, as the Dean of students, arrives bathrobe-clad and concerned at the back of the dorm. Needless to say, surprise understates tenfold the expression on his face upon seeing me between two irate dorm parents. I told Robinson and Channing to leave me in the room — in the hopes that there wasn’t a real fire, just a drill — and save themselves. I’d just say I was acting on a dare. Which, in a way, I was — a dare from myself to stop being so cautious. And look where that got me.

I was busted alone — caught actually heading into Robinson’s closet to try to hide when the Dorm Parents of Doom, making their way through each room (thanks to the overly litigious/paranoid board of trustees, each room has to be cleared lest any heavy sleepers burn in a blaze).

I had to endure the, “Well, who do we have here?” from them — pure evil — and fought the urge to say “whom”.

So, alone and in mucho trouble (have not yet learned how to say trouble or busted in Spanish) I trek back through the wintry grounds with my principal — I mean my father — and into my house where he wordlessly sends me upstairs and I panic my way into a light sleep.

However, instead of waking up to screaming and yelling from my parental source, I wake up to the feeling — or at least the sounds — of nothing. Quiet invades the grey morning light, seeps into my unset alarm clock. Snow day? I prop myself up and look outside. No plows, no piles of white. I look again at my clock and then, noticing it’s already eight o’clock and I am absolutely triple-screwed if I receive a tardy from Math Hell Thompson and her assembly attendance-tally, I fling on some clothes and sprint down the stairs. Out through the kitchen, the only thing that gives me pause is the white piece of paper taped to the door.

Love — As per the decision of the disciplinary council (myself included) you are hereby suspended from Hadley Hall for two (2) days. Considering the parietals and the hour at which they were broken and the assumed intent by which the rules were disregarded, you are also banned from attending the Valentine’s Day formal dance. Of course, this will be part of your permanent record.

I’ll be back after school.

Dad

Thoughtfully, this little poem of love was written on Dad’s Hadley Hall emblemed and titled stationary as if I weren’t privy to his role here — at school and in my life. And I hate the way he wrote out two/2 as if I might misunderstand what that meant. I pull the note down and read it again, fuming.

Assumed intent? Who are they to know what my intent was sneaking in — I don’t even know! I mean, sure, my intent was to visit a boy, but more than that, who can say? So while I won’t be getting any tardy slip today, I won’t be getting any dress or going to the dance this weekend. I hate the note.

Mainly, I hate that I got caught. Little sniveling English boy Clive and his pot-induced paranoia make me want to send him back to the land of Kings and Queens. His way of blending in has been to befriend the stoners and Phish-followers, sticking labels from the supermarket bakery on his baseball cap and back pocket of his jeans — the most common one being “freshly baked” followed closely by “baked daily.” Three cheers for cultural enrichment! Hopefully, whomever St. Paul’s sends next year will not enrich my life in the way Clive has. Knowing my luck, the girl will be his sister, who will rat me out for doing something I can’t even fathom as of yet.

I watch morning tv. Chirpy newscasters are completely unaware that in a town outside of Boston, a girl named Love is miserable. Lifetime sends out mushy messages of lost mothers (which I have), sexual issues (which I kind of have, if not having any sex qualifies as an albeit small, problem), and possessive fathers (sort of have this base covered — more sports analogies!). Then the weather channel provides solace. Somewhere, not here, it’s warm. Somewhere, not here, public school kids are getting ready for vacation. Hadley, like all private schools, follows the prep school calendar and has March factored in as mid-term break, and so even though February is technically the shortest month — for me, this year anyway, it’s the worst.

When I tire of celebrities promoting themselves and morning videos fail to make me wanna get up and shake my thang, I ooze upstairs and get in the shower. All by Myself, Owner of a Lonely Heart, Don’t Leave Me this Way, Live to Tell — I pound my way through whatever songs come to mind, belting them out at full force, even when the shampoo leaks into my eyes and I scurry like a blind hamster towards my washcloth.

I am of myself, I am of the world. I am of myself, I am of the world.
I repeat the words in my head and then say them, seeing if any brilliant essay ideas charge out of my brain. No such luck. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to believe I have a future in writing anything at all with the way the words seem to halt themselves on the page. But maybe I’m just passing the buck (is that originally a sports analogy? Note to self: Look it up) and it’s not the fault of the words, but solely mine.