(You) Set Me on Fire (9 page)

My burn, which had stopped hurting on any regular basis, was seared and sore today where Shar’s fingernail had made contact. A sharp red line dissected its shiny, slightly puckered layer of new skin.

“I need to fix my hair,” I said when she returned with a fistful of hair product.

“Yeah. You should go black,” Shar mused, rubbing a drop of product into the fragile ends of her bangs. “You look a bit washed out.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Yeah. And maybe sometime you could borrow some of my clothes. My black jeans would look good on you.”

“Really?”

Shar shrugged. “Why not?”

Outside the door there was a thump, followed by a whimper. We peered out of the bathroom to find Rattles in the hallway, lying on the carpet, clinging to her cell phone.

When I walked up to her she rolled over into a fetal position.

“Are you okay?” I asked, bending down on one knee.

Rattles turned her head and pushed her face into the carpet, possibly dragged him back to apologizeOIAF breathing in small particles of leftover barf.

“Noooooooooo,” she moaned. Her body, appropriately, rattled with sobs.

“Allison. ALLISON.” Shar stood by her room. “I’m starving. Let’s get out of here.”

“She’s upset,” I mouthed, one hand tentatively placed on Rattles’s shaking shoulder.

Shar frowned, pushed the door open, and disappeared into her room.

“Rat— Natalie?” I whispered. “What happened?”

I had no idea what to do. She clearly didn’t have any bleeding wounds.

Just then Rattles let out a howling sob from the bottom of her lungs. Which is about when Asian Patty cracked open her door.

“What’s WRONG?” she cried. “NAT! HEY, GUYS!”

Asian Patty’s cry was enough to alert the whole floor. Pretty soon a small mob had gathered around Rattles, squeezing me out of the immediate circle of assistance. Carly arrived from out of nowhere and was soon wedged under Rattles’s sobbing frame.

Someone I didn’t recognize pressed her ear close to Rattles’s face, like you’d press your ear against a train track. “Oh my gosh, her boyfriend broke up with her,” she whispered. “On the PHONE.”

“NO!”

“SHIT.”

“Oh Nat. I’m so sorry. It’s going to be okay.”

“I’m ordering pizza,” someone in the back piped in.

“I’m getting beer.”

“Oh I have some booze left.”

“I have chocolate!”

“Someone get ice cream!”

A potluck. Actually, these group get-togethers over boyfriend breakups had been springing up with increasing frequency since September. By November, more than half the girls who’d arrived with boyfriends were single/slutty.

“Is she going to be all right?” I asked Carly, for no reason other than the fact that she seemed to be at that moment the most physically bonded to Rattles.

“It’ll be okay.” Carly smiled. “Right, Natalie? This boyfriend stuff sucks but it will pass.”

Eventually Shar reappeared from her room and tapped me, hard, on the shoulder.

“She’s not DYING, Allison, and she’s got the whole ER now. Can we go?”

In the elevator, Shar scratched at a heart that someone had carved in the faux wood finish of the wall. “Those girls are so fucking pathetic it kills me. You know, the more you pay attention to someone like that, the worse they get.”

That night, to celebrate her new hair, we went to THE KEGGER, a fraternity fav hangout, and spent the
whole night vying to see who could get away with stealing more beers from drunken boys. Extra points were awarded for whole pitchers. It wasn’t really much of a contest. I was too timid. Shar stretched out an early lead. She swiped beers directly from frat boys’ fraternity">OH sweaty palms, distracting them with a smile and a flash of platinum blonde. Every stolen drink was followed by a hysterical victory lap on the dance floor, which became increasingly jubilant as morewith one perso

EIGHT

Perished-ables

The theory of evolution, as I’ve always understood it at least, says that creatures need to adapt to their environments … in order to survive. So, it’s either adapt or, you know, “perish,” which is a nice way of saying “die,” although it’s also, confusingly, a term my mom used to use for dairy products that had gone bad.

Perished-ables.

To “adapt” to college life can mean a number of things. For some people it’s adapting to the schedule, which is not really all that different from high school’s if you go to classes. Other people talk about adapting to the party life, to drinking and staying up late. Technically this is a matter of building up your tolerance. Although from what I saw, the puke patches became more frequent, not less, as the months got on.

Really, adaptation is change that you eventually become used to or okay with. It’s change that’s not accompanied by a meltdown.

Some things can adapt. Like people—okay,
most
people. There are other things that can’t adapt.

Like fish. Fish are pretty much screwed if you try to make them adapt. I know this as someone who has killed the odd goldfish. You can’t even mess with the temperature of their water. They will die on you. Truth.

People not adapting at things I needed to be doing bwhoel college seemed to experience similarly drastic consequences. The boyfriend breakup thing is a good example of typical college freshman freak-outage.

There was a mix of responses to the breakup. Girls who’d once stayed home waiting for phone calls started going out and getting wasted and then loudly calling their (ex-)boyfriends when they returned. One girl, in the room right above mine, broke up with her boyfriend on the phone and then threw her cell out the window. It hit some guy’s car parked on the street and cracked the windshield. Which is a $2000 fine.

Whoops.

Boyfriends weren’t the only reason people freaked out at college. Overall, as it got colder and people got more and more into college life, it sort of seemed like
there was a growing number of students going a bit nutso. It was as though everyone had been playing the same video game for too long, eyes all fringed with thin red lines.

Foreshadowing these meltdowns, around the end of November, posters showed up all over campus with the message, “ANXIOUS? We’re here to help!” The poster had information about a college-run website and a bunch of little tags with the address on them. Like those LOST DOG PLEASE CALL posters with the phone numbers. It wasn’t long before those little tabs started to get ripped off a lot. You’d see them peeking out of the tops of people’s textbooks and wallets. Like a little ANXIOUS flag.

The whole thing reached a noticeable decibel around the end of term when suddenly everyone had to hand in papers and study for exams, which, I have to say, just sort of suddenly HAPPENED. One day Shar and I were in Cultural Studies for the screening of a movie Carly had warned me wasn’t available anywhere else, and I noticed a date written on the front board.

“Holy shit, is that our EXAM?”

Several students nodded. Several more rolled their eyes.

“What is that, next week?”

“Two weeks,” Carly, who was sitting a row behind and two seats over, mumbled, looking at me the way a person looks at a stupid younger brother.

The next obvious question being what, other than the movie we were about to watch, would be on that exam.

“Ask Superstar for her notes,” Shar suggested, wadding up a ball of gum in her fingers and planting it under her seat. “Wait, why are we seeing this movie?”

Of course I was an arts student, a group that’s almost expected, from what I understood, to screw off on their exams. I heard this one story about a guy who didn’t study or go to class for any of his courses because he wanted to see if he could pass without doing any of those things. He failed, but, you know, at least it wasn’t a wasted effort. The other story I heard in the caf was about a guy who’d just Wikipedia’d the key words from the titles of all his courses the day before exams. But by the time I heard that rumour the dude was a second-year student, so, you know, he must have passed something.

The people who were truly, and rightly, tearing their hair out were the science students who had real exams that were, I heard, super difficult. Hope, the engineering student on my floor, abruptly stopped drinking alcohol at the end of November and
started chugging energy-boost drinks. She hated her room and so more often than not she studied in the bathroom, throwing dirty looks at anyone who and walked out the doorspDo went in to use the space for … well, what you’d normally use a bathroom for. Eventually the whole floor got sick of fighting with her and we all started showering and peeing and everything else on the next floor up.

My plan for exams, once I realized they were happening, was really an adaptation of Shar’s, cooked up over late-late-night pizza and
The Shining
in the common room. Basically, I would read everything I could find, beg, borrow, or steal that related to the course. And in reading I would hope that SOMETHING would lodge itself in my brain. Hopefully something useful, like a date or the name of a dictator or a fact.

“Your brain is stickier than you think,” Shar reasoned, pressing her pizza-smudgy finger into my forehead. “All you really need to do is read everything once. It’s not like you’re becoming an expert or anything. You’re a FRESHman.”

Which is how it happened that, on the night of Rattles’s accident, Shar and I were in her room reading. Truthfully what I was doing would probably be better described as “looking,” staring at the pages of my textbook in sequence, while Shar watched videos on the internet of people drowning. We
almost didn’t hear Rattles over the cries of the tidalwave victims floating across Shar’s screen.

Rattles, since her tragic breakup, had not quite embraced the single lifestyle. If anything she seemed to have given up the notion of any kind of lifestyle at all. She’d gone from preppy chic to a wardrobe of utter indifference, wearing the same giant college sweatshirt and baggy-kneed yoga pants. Her hair was always tied up in a loose ponytail that appeared to be, kind of tellingly, unravelling. At night she would wander the halls of the dorm, aimlessly peeking into various rooms to say hi to whoever was awake.

“Hi. Um. Hey. Um. What are you doing?”

If you were eating she’d pick at your food. If you were reading she’d interrupt your reading to ask you what you were reading. If you were watching TV she’d perch somewhere on the side, expel deep sighs, and ask questions like “So what’s going on? Is that guy dead? Is this a history movie? Are you guys finding this hard to follow?” All in the same squeaky, sad-sounding voice. Eventually she’d sigh and move on, like an animal in the zoo that’s tired of looking at you through the fence and so retreats to its cave.

At some point she’d duck out to a convenience store and return with massive bags of salt and vinegar chips and big bottles of Coke, which she was reluctant to share.

“Oh you want some? Um, yeah. I guess. But, um, this is kind of all I can eat now?”

Rattles was in the music program, and so at least half of her exams involved playing really long and really hard piano pieces. From her constant whimpering, just about everyone in the dorm knew she’d had a lot of trouble practising since her boyfriend broke up with her, which was causing her, to say the least, a lot of stress.

As soon as I noticed the sound of crying that night I knew it had to be Rattles. When I opened the door to see what was going on, she was on her hands and knees on the hallway carpet picking pills up off the floor. Her pale face looked even paler under the fluorescent hall lights.

“I spilled my pills,” she sobbed.

“Oh,” I said, hoping the pills were at least over-thecounter m handful of , cedication.

“Where is everyone?” Rattles looked up, her eyes pressed into her skull.

“I think they’re all at the library or something.”

“They’ve all gone to see a movie,” Shar hollered from behind me.

“Oh yeah. I guess you guys didn’t want to see a movie?” Rising from the carpet, not unlike some sort
of creepy flickering Japanese horror film character, Rattles slowly shifted toward me. Her track pants were too long and the cuffs scraped against the carpet the way little kids’ pyjamas do.

“You guuuys,” she whined as she brushed past me, zombie-like, “I don’t know what I’m going to DOOO!”

Three steps into Shar’s room, she sunk down to the floor. “I have an exam tomorrow!? But I CAN’T take it, you know? I just CAN’T. It’s like … It’s like OH MY GOD, you know?” Tears dribbled down her cheeks. “I’m so stressed out.”

Shar snapped her laptop shut and moved to sit on the bed. I sort of thought she would ask Rattles to leave.

Looking at the pills in her palm, Rattles sighed. “It’s like, I wish maybe I had some sort of massive injury, you know? Like, can they make you take an exam if you have a broken leg or like a torn tibia?”

“Well,” I reasoned, “probably not an exam where you need your feet. Don’t pianos need feet? Or, like, involve you using your foot?”

Shar shifted. Looked at me. Looked at Rattles. She lit a cigarette and opened the window a crack. “Obviously. Obviously they won’t make you take an exam with a broken leg. You’d be in the hospital.”
She took a long drag off her smoke. Exhaled. Then, checking on Rattles again, she said, “I think they have to let you out of an exam if you’re unfit to write—”

“Oh my GOD I’m TOTALLY unfit to do ANYTHING right now!” Rattles sobbed. “I, like, can’t sleep. I’m sad all the time. I’m like DEPRESSED, you know? It’s like, FUCK! I’m like EATING all the time—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shar cut in. “Except they can’t just go letting people who are depressed get a free pass for feeling sad. No offence, but lots of people feel sad. What I’m saying is that you’d need to be PHYSICALLY unfit to get out of an exam.”

“Oh,” Rattles moaned, threading her fingers into her hair and pulling. “UGH! Whatever. It’s HOPELESS. I’m going to fail!”

“Sure.” Shar nodded. Her voice had taken on a weird rhythm—like something almost robotic, but soothing, steady, and deliberate. “Or. Maybe. Maybe you COULD find some way out of it. It’s like you said, if you were INJURED you couldn’t play, right?”