(You) Set Me on Fire (4 page)

My first “girlfriend.”

I’m actually still not sure whether or not to call her that.

That’s stupid but that’s reality. Every time—even every, like, “mental” in-my-head time—I call her my “girlfriend,” I still feel a little pinch.

The first few seconds after waking up was a pretty potent time for thinking about Anne because of this memory I have from the morning after the first and only time she ever slept over, also the morning after the first and only time I ever slept with a girl, when she rolled over and looked at me and said, “It’s you.”

That’s what I used to see over and over again whenever I daydreamed or closed my eyes or sat down or heard any song by a woman sung in a breathy voice: Anne’s face pressed against my pillow, her sleepy eyes opening, eyelashes fluttering back to reveal cool blue eyes, irises focusing on me.

Anne’s little pink lips folding over her words, “It’s you.”

What’s that saying? About how you don’t know you want something until you have it and it things I needed to be doingR",’s taken away? Is it the one about the eggs?

I don’t know.

I also didn’t know at the time that Anne woke up every morning not knowing where she was or thinking she was somewhere she wasn’t. Apparently, the morning she woke up in my room, she thought she was at her grandma’s house—partly because of my flowery sheets.

When she said “It’s you,” I thought she meant, like, “You’re the one. It’s you.” “It’s you” was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard anyone say when it came from Anne’s mouth. The words felt like a breath of perfect cold winter air. It wasn’t until a week later, between first and second period, that I heard about the grandma thing and the waking up stuff.

“So what did you mean when you said ‘It’s you’?” I asked.

“Duh! I meant, like, not my grandma!” Anne scoffed, I would say overly defensively. “What did you think I meant?”

What did she think I thought it meant?
I wanted to say that the grandma thing was messed up considering what we’d done to each other the night before, but I didn’t.

I can’t imagine what thoughts Metallica inspired in the other people on the eleventh floor. I’m pretty sure they weren’t very, uh, positive thoughts.

Mostly people screamed at Hope to “SHUT THE FUCKING MUSIC OFF.” Or just to “FUCK OFF.”

A more delicate approach was taken by Katy, my next-door neighbour, a social work student with a frizzy perm and plans to get her degree, return home, and marry her boyfriend of eight years (which meant they’d gotten together when they were in grade school). Katy had a pad of sticky notes on which she would write long and involved messages to Hope about the “best interests of the floor.”

I don’t think Hope read Katy’s notes. She didn’t even bother to peel them off her door. As an engineering student, for the first week of school she had a million frosh activities to go to, some of which involved painting herself red, many of which involved running around with the rest of the engineering students from sun-up to sundown. So I almost never saw her.

I probably couldn’t even tell you Hope’s eye colour, but if you gave me a keyboard I could recreate the opening of “Enter Sandman” for you. Now and possibly for the rest of my life.

You’d think there’d be some sort of administrative solution to something like a morning heavy-metal wake-up call. I mean, you know, there were all these brochures on college life and LIVING IT UP IN RESIDENCE, plus we sat through this three-hour snooze-fest “Welcome to Dylan Hall” orientation meeting the second day, where all the floorfellows got up and talked to us about how following the rules would make everyone’s life better.

That meeting was one of many events I ended up going to with Carly. After barfing on me, she seemed to think it was her responsibility to make sure I had someone to go to things with. Before heading out just about anywhere, most especially to a meal, she’d knock on my door.

“Hey you! You wanna go get some grub?”

Carly wasn’t like anyone I’d hung out with for a very long time, partly because I didn’ things I needed to be doingicddt hang out with a very wide selection of people. For one thing, she was always really fucking happy. Happy in the way a child who knows nothing of sorrow is happy. Happy in a way that radiated out of her face and clothes and hair. The first day I met her I guessed she’d never broken a bone and I was right. The girl was, like, born in sunshine or something. Sometimes, instead of walking, she would bounce down the stairs and then land at the bottom with a swivel turn.

The other amazing thing about Carly was that, despite her intensive happiness, she did not appear to be stupid. I used to have this theory that happiness was oblivion, you know? So in order to be happy you had to be able to block out reality. Carly, on the other hand, seemed to have a pretty firm grip on the world around her. Like she had this insane ability to remember everything anyone ever told her. By the end of the first week she knew everyone’s name, floor, and what classes they were in, even if they had no connection to what Carly was taking. It was like walking around with a human Google search page, or a mom. Every five minutes it was like, “Oh look, there’s ______.”

Sample:

Carly: Oh look, there’s Sandy.

Me: Sandy. Sandy? The girl with the slightly infected nose pierce?

Carly: Uh. Ew! No! Sandy. She’s on the ninth floor. From Indiana?

Me: Yeah. I think. Yeah. With the nose pierce and the slight BO? Who’s in East Asian History?

Carly: Oh my gosh, you’re SO FUNNY.

I am not a human memory stick so I typically didn’t know who Carly was talking about. In fact, I think
the only time we ever did zero in on the same girl was in Cultural Studies, which just about every first-year student was enrolled in, when Carly leaned over and said, “There’s Sharon.”

She was pointing at the girl I vaguely recognized from our hazy, barfy, lighter-searching encounter after the Tower of Power.

“Sharon?”

“Sharon. Or, wait, Shar? No, it’s Shar. She’s on the sixth floor. I think she’s friends with that Asian girl in the stretch pants.”

“Who? Where?”

Carly pointed with her pinky.

Shar.

As the majority of the class leaned forward in the McDonald’s-like bucket seats of the Leacock auditorium, conceivably to hear the thin strains of the prof’s instructions coming through the classroom’s ancient speakers, Shar, sitting several rows over and dressed entirely in black, skin-tight clothing, leaned back, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and yawned. Like a fat cat on a windowsill.

I’m trying to think of the best way to describe Shar to you without using words like “beautiful” and “model,” which are accurate but not helpful. She
had a tiny body and a large round head framed by blond hair. Her skin was ivory white, glowing at the edges of her black collar. From a distance she looked like an ad, like someone who existed only as a visual representation of something expensive. I briefly considered the possibility that she was a movie star or something. Movie stars go to college too, right?

Suggesting that Shar might be a movie star was one of the first embarrassing moments of my college career, which is sad consideringRTEEN

“A MOVIE STAR?” Carly cackled, in a rare moment of disbelief, biting into the soft jelly-like middle of her Dylan Hall cafeteria mystery dessert. “Okay. You are SOOO FUNNY!”

“Forget it. What time is it anyway? I think I have class.”

“One oh four.”

Social Problems. One-thirty p.m. Main hall.

Of all the courses I was forced and happy to take my freshman year, probably the one cool one was Social Problems. Social Problems had me at “hello.” I mean, first of all, it was a class that’s about current events and fricking craziness, wars and riots and all that. It was a class all about fucking up, like, on a
large scale. Had to connect to me somehow, right? Second of all, the professor was hilarious.

Professor Jawari moved with what you might describe as a vampire-like, uncanny lightning speed. She streaked from the auditorium door to the lecture podium in a blink. It was incredibly difficult to track her movements. She just appeared.

“Okay, miscreants,” she barked our first day, towering over the lectern like a wizard or maybe a mythical beast that’s really tall. “This is Social Problems, this is not a cheese course, I have no patience for kids surfing the net in my class, so shut your laptops NOW. Like right NOW. HEY! I’m teaching. If you’re here I want you HERE. Okay? I’m not your mom so don’t make me sound like your mom by making me repeat myself a MILLION TIMES. NOW!”

A series of laptop clicks echoed across the crowd of hundreds of seated course-shoppers. Many students mouthed, in mock horror, “MOM?”

Professor Jawari squinted. “My name is Professor Jawari. You can call me Professor J, although, technically, this is a first-year class and none of you should have any reason to call me. This is not a class for lecturing, this is a class with questions, because the social sciences, of which this is one, involve QUESTIONING and so I will ask questions. A lot of questions. If any of this scares you I would suggest
you get the heck out of here now, before I waste a dead tree on you with one of these here OUTlines.”

The woman was crazy like a talk show host. Like one of those judges on one of those TV court shows.

It was amazing.

More people should talk like this, I thought. It would make life way more interesting.

About forty kids got up and left before she was even finished speaking. She waved them off then chugged a bottle of what looked like energy drink.

With a mass of sweatshirts and bodies removed, I noticed Shar sitting in the front row, her stiletto boot dangling out into the aisle.

Thirty minutes into the class, everyone noticed Shar.

“Okay. So, for example, name one social problem you would obliterate if you could,” Professor J had challenged.

“War!” someone called out.

“Violence,” someone else added.

“Poverty.”

“Racism.”

“Violence against women.”

“Television,” someone else offered.

“Capitalism,” the massive hippie with the beard next to me called out.

“Obesity,” someone behind me interrupted, ignoring the hands-up rule.

Shar must have yawned. Professor J bent over her lectern and looked at her, zeroed in on her.

“And you?” she asked. “What’s your big contribution?”

Shar’s voice was sharp and clear, a clean note amongst the fuzz of that much space. “Nothing,” she said.

“Not going to stand in the way of any world-altering problems?” Professor J persisted.

“No.”

“Just going to relax and watch the carnage unfold?”

“Of course.”

At the back of the room, a boy dressed in a top hat and a trench coat laughed loudly and clapped.

Professor J also chuckled, slamming her lecture book closed. “Okay, on that note, that’s it for today. Don’t be morons. Do the reading and I’ll see you next week.”

Carly was waiting in the hall under a WELCOME banner with a handful of free-for-student snacks. Apparently a bunch of people were outside dressed as chip bags, juggling snacks and throwing them at passing students.

“This is why we’re all going to get huge,” I observed, slamming a handful of chicken-flavoured bagel bits in my mouth. “Freshman fatteners.”

“Not if we join that morning jog group,” Carly noted.

As we munched, I noticed that the top hat guy had grabbed a seat on the floor in the centre of the hallway and become a human road bump as the crowd swirled around him. Under his top hat he had huge eyebrows and, from what I could see, some skin problems that rivalled what was happening on my neck.

“That guy’s in my class.” I nodded in his direction.

“Hey! I like his hat. What’s his name?”

“Dunno.”

By the time we got to our ravioli dinner that night in the Dylan Hall cafeteria, the big story was that, shortly after we left, some guy had broken his arm tripping over top hat guy. This was pretty bad news because the guy who tripped was a basketball player. I guess a lot of people were pretty pissed. This girl
from my floor, Mary, said that the top hat guy ran off before the paramedics got there and some other students dragged him back to apologize.

“Dragged?”

“Totally DRAGGED. Like, apparently, he ran really far, too.”

“What’s his NAME?” Carly asked.

No one knew.

“He’s in Allison’s class,” Carly added.

“Really?” Mary asked.

“Yeah. Social Problems.”

“I heard that class is all crazy hard and the teacher is a psycho.”

I shrugged.

“I also heard that this girl was inRTEEN

“That’s not what she said,” I mumbled, stabbing my stale ravioli and trailing it through the ketchup– tomato sauce coating my plate. “She just didn’t have anything she’d like to eradicate.”

“A pacifist,” someone else I didn’t recognize observed.

“No.”

Funny the things we know before we actually know them.

Months later, when our friendship became a topic of conversation, Shar would say that we were sitting together in that first Social Problems class.

“No, I was sitting next to a hippie in a beard who was against money,” I corrected. “We met at film club.”

Of course, it’s not really important that the first time I actually spoke more than a handful of words to Shar was several days after that first class, at the first meeting of the Film Appreciation Society (which later wouldn’t be called that). But it was, for a long time, what I considered to be our first meeting.

It was Carly’s idea to go. I guess she heard some other girls talking about it at lunch and totally fell in love with the idea. At the time we were doing pretty much everything together, so I decided to go too. I’m not huge into film but, you know, why not? I thought maybe we could watch a bunch of free movies.

The film group itself was dreamed up by this guy named Boris Borlau, if you can believe it, a hand talker who wore, among other things, a charcoal turtleneck and a pair of Ray-Ban shades perched in his crown of thick, curly black hair. Guy looked like Bob Dylan. Carly and I sat next to the clearly gay
guys in the clearly gay fuzzy sweaters and hair full of product. The gay guys were all talking about Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson, although I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying. The rest of the people in the group, all blondes, were talking about some band when Shar slipped in the room and grabbed a chair. As she calmly untangled herself from her scarf, Boris clapped his hands.