Текст книги "Just One Day"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Fifteen

OCTOBER

College

Iput off thinking about Parents’ Weekend as long as I can and then the Thursday before they’re due to arrive, I look around my dorm and see it not as I see it—walls, a bed, a desk, a dresser—but as my parents will see it. This is not the dorm of a Happy College Student. There’s dirty laundry spilling out of every drawer, and my papers are everywhere. My mother despises clutter. I ditch my classes and spend the day cleaning. I haul all the dirty laundry down to the washing machines and sit with it as it turns and gyrates. I wipe down the dusty surfaces. In the closet, I hide away all my current schoolwork—the Mandarin worksheets, piling up like unread newspapers, the Scantron chemistry and physics exams with their ominously low scores scrawled in red; the lab reports with comments like “Need to be more thorough” and “Check your calculations!” and the dreaded “See me.” In their place, I set out a bunch of decoy notes and graphs from early in the term, before I started obviously bombing. I unwrap the duvet cover we bought at Bed, Bath & Beyond last summer and put it over the plain quilt I’ve been sleeping under. I grab some of the photos from the boxes and scatter them around the room. I even drop by the U bookstore and buy one of the stupid banners with the school name on it and tack it above my bed. Voilà. School Spirit.

But somehow I forget the clocks. And this gives me away.

When Mom comes into the dorm, after cooing over our tiny dump of a lounge, she oohs over Kali’s pictures of Buster and then looks at my relatively bare walls and gasps. By her look of horror, you’d think I’d decorated with crime-scene photos. “Where’s your collection?”

I point to the boxes in the closet, unopened.

“Why are they there?”

“They’re too noisy,” I quickly lie. “I don’t want to bother Kali with them.” Never mind the fact that Kali blasts her radio at seven in the morning.

“You could put them out and not wind them,” she says. “Those clocks are you.”

Are they? I don’t remember when I started collecting them. Mom liked to go to flea markets on weekends and then one day, I was a clock collector. I got really into it for a while, but I don’t remember the moment I saw an old alarm clock and thought, I want to collect these.

“Your half looks terribly barren next to Kali’s,” Mom says.

“You should’ve seen my dorm,” Dad says, lost in his haze of nostalgia. “My roommate put tinfoil on the windows. It looked like a spaceship. He called it the ‘Future Dorm.’”

“I was going for Minimalist Dorm.”

“It has a certain penitentiary charm,” Dad says.

“It’s like a before/after on one of those home décor shows.” Mom points to Kali’s half of the room, over which every inch of wall space is covered either with posters, art prints, or photos. “You’re the before,” she says. As if I didn’t already get that.

We head off to one of the special workshops, something insanely dull on the changing face of technology in the classroom. Mom actually takes notes. Dad points out every little thing that he remembers and every little thing that is new. This is what he did when we toured the school last year; both he and Mom were so excited about the prospect of me going here. Creating a legacy. Somehow, back then, I was excited too.

After the workshop, Dad meets up with other legacy parents, and Mom has coffee with Kali’s mom, Lynn. They seem to get along famously. Either Kali hasn’t told her mom what a dud I am, or if she has, her mom has the good grace to shut up about it.

Before the President’s Luncheon, all four members of the Fab Four and their respective families meet back at the suite and the parents all introduce themselves and cluck over the tininess of our rooms and admire what we’ve done with our tiny lounge and take pictures of THE FAB FOUR WELCOMES THE FAB EIGHT sign that the rest of the group made. Then we all walk out onto the quad together and tour the campus, going the long way around to point out some of the older, statelier buildings, reddening ivy creeping up old bricks. And everyone looks nice together in flannel skirts and tall black boots and cashmere sweaters and shearling jackets as we swish through the autumnal leaves. We really do look like the Happy College Students in the catalogs.

The luncheon is fine and boring, rubber chicken and rubber speeches in a big, cold echoey hall. It’s only after the luncheon that the myth of the Fab Four starts to unravel. Ever so subtly, Kendra’s and Jenn’s and Kali’s families all peel off together. I’m sure they’re talking about Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays and spring breaks and potlucks and things like that. My mom gives them a look but doesn’t say anything.

She and Dad go back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. Mom tells me the place is fancy and suggests I wear my black and red wrap dress. And that I wash my hair, which is looking greasy.

When they come back to pick me up, there’s an awkward moment as my family meets up with the rest of the Fab Four and their Fab Families, who are all going together to a big group dinner at some famous seafood place in downtown Boston. There’s a sort of standoff as my parents face the other parents. The rest of my roommates, their faces pinking, take a huge interest in the industrial gray carpeting. Finally, Jenn’s dad steps in and offers a belated invitation for us to join the rest of them for dinner. “I’m sure we can squeeze three more in.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Mom says in her haughtiest voice. “We have reservations at Prezzo in Back Bay.”

“Wow! How’d you manage that?” Lynn asks. “We tried and couldn’t get in until next month.” Prezzo, according to Mom, is the hottest restaurant in town.

Mom smiles mysteriously. She won’t tell, though Dad told me one of his golf buddies had a friend on the faculty at a hospital in Boston and he pulled some strings to get us in. Mom had been so pleased about it, but I can see now the victory is sullied.

“Enjoy your chowdah,” she says. Only Dad and I catch how condescending she’s being.

Dinner is painful. Even sitting at this chichi place with all the best Bostonians, I can tell Mom and, by extension, Dad feel like rejects. And they’re not. It’s my rejection they’re feeling.

They ask me about my classes, and I dutifully tell them about chemistry, physics, biology, and Mandarin, neglecting to tell them how hard it is stay awake in class, no matter how early I go to bed, or how badly I’m doing in subjects I aced in high school. Talking about, or not talking about, all this makes me so tired I want to put my head down into my thirteen-dollar salad.

When the entrees come, Mom orders a glass of Chardonnay, Dad a Shiraz. I try not to look at the way the candlelight dances against the colors of the wine. Even that hurts. I look down at my plate of ravioli. It smells good, but I have no desire to eat it.

“Are you coming down with something?” Mom asks.

And for just the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I’m not the girl in the catalog at all. I’m not a Happy College Student. I don’t know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don’t want to be her anymore.

But this is not an option. Mom would just be aggrieved, disappointed, as if my unhappiness were some personal insult to her parenting. And then she’d guilt me out about how I’m so lucky. This is college! The college experience she didn’t get to have. Which was one of the reasons she spent all of high school like an army general, plotting my extracurriculars, getting me tutors for weak subjects, signing me up for SAT prep.

“I’m just tired,” I say. This, at least, isn’t a lie.

“You’re probably spending too much time in the library,” Dad interjects. “Are you getting enough sunlight? That can really affect your circadian rhythms.”

I shake my head. This too is true.

“Have you been running? There are some nice tracks around here. And it’s not too far to the river.”

I think the last time I went running was with Dad, a couple days before I left for the tour.

“We’ll go out tomorrow morning, before the brunch. Burn off dinner. Get some air in those lungs.”

Just the thought of it makes me exhausted, but this isn’t an invitation so much as an expectation, and the plans are being made even before I’ve agreed to them.

_ _ _

The following morning, the rest of the girls are sitting in the lounge drinking coffee, happily chattering about their dinner, which included some incident with a cute waiter and a lobster mallet that’s already being mythologized into a tale called “The Hammer and the Hottie.” They double-take when they see me in tracksuit bottoms and a fleece sweatshirt, looking around for my running shoes. Our dorm has a state-of-the-art gym that Kendra and Kali are addicted to and Jenn gets dragged along to, but I have yet to set foot in.

I just expect my dad, but Mom is there too, all perky in her black wool pants, a cashmere cape. “I thought we were meeting at brunch,” I say.

“Oh, I just wanted to spend some time in your dorm. It’ll help me to picture where you are when I’m not with you.” She turns to Kali. “If that’s okay with you.” Her voice is so polite, Kali might never catch the bitchiness in it.

“ Ithink it’s sweet,” Kali says.

“Are you ready, Allyson?” Dad asks me.

“Almost. I can’t find my running shoes.”

Mom gives me a look, like I obviously lose everything all the time now.

“Where’s the last place you left them?” Dad asks. “Just picture it. That’s how you find missing things.” This is his typical advice, but it usually works. And sure enough, when I picture my shoes, still packed in the suitcase under my bed, that’s where they are.

When we get downstairs, Dad does some halfhearted stretches. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this,” he jokes. He’s not much of a runner, but he’s always telling his patients to exercise, so he tries to practice what he preaches.

We take off on a path toward the river. It is a true autumn day, clear and brisk with a sharp bite of winter in the air. I don’t love running, not at first, but usually after ten minutes or so, that thing kicks in and I sort of zone out and forget what I’m doing. Today, though, every time I even begin to lose myself, it’s like my mind defaults to that other run, the best run, the run of my life, the run formy life. And then my legs turn into waterlogged tree trunks, and all the beautiful fall colors fade to gray.

After about a mile, I have to stop. I claim a cramp. I want to go back, but Dad wants to check out the downtown and see what’s changed, so we do. We stop at a café for cappuccinos, and Dad asks me about my classes and waxes nostalgic for his days in organic chemistry. Then he tells me how busy he’s been and that Mom is having a really hard time and I should go easy on her.

“Isn’t she supposed to be going back to work?” I ask.

Dad looks at his watch. “Time to go,” he says.

Dad leaves me at the dorm to change before brunch. As soon as I step inside, I know something’s wrong. I hear ticking. And then I look around, and for a second, I’m confused because the dorm no longer looks like my dorm but like my bedroom at home. Mom has dug up all the posters from my closet and put them up in the exact same configuration as at home. She’s moved my photos around, so they too are a mirror image of my old room. She’s made the bed with a mountain of throw pillows, the throw pillows I specifically said I didn’t want to bring because I hate throw pillows. You have to take them off and reorganize them every day. On top of the bed are clothes that Mom is folding into neat piles and laying out for me, just like she did when I was in fourth grade.

And along my windowsills and bookcases are all my clocks. All of them wound up and ticking.

Mom looks up from snipping the tags off a pair of pants I haven’t even tried on. “You seemed so glum last night. I thought it might perk you up if it looked more like home in here. This is so much cheerier,” she declares.

I begin to protest. But I’m not sure whatto protest.

“And I spoke to Kali, and she finds the sound of the clocks soothing. Like a white-noise machine.”

They don’t sound soothing to me at all. They sound like a hundred time bombs waiting to explode.

Sixteen

NOVEMBER

New York City

The last time I saw Melanie, she had a fading pink streak in her blond hair and was wearing her micro-skimp Topshop uniform with some teetering platform sandals she’d picked up at the end-of-season sale at Macy’s. So when she charges at me on a crowded street corner in New York’s Chinatown as soon as I’m disgorged from the bus, I hardly recognize her. Now the pink streak is gone; her hair is dyed dark brown with a reddish tint. She has severe bangs cut short across her forehead, and the rest of her hair is secured back into a bun with a pair of enamel chopsticks. She’s wearing this weird, funky, flowered dress and a pair of beat-up cowboy boots, and she has cat-shaped granny eyeglasses on. Her lips are painted blood red. She looks amazing, even if she looks nothing like my Melanie.

At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen, not lose it.”

“Have you had dining hall food?”

“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”

I pull back. Look at her again. Everything is new. Including the eyewear. “You need glasses?”

“They’re fake. Look, no lenses.” She pokes through the air right to her eyes to demonstrate. “It’s part of my whole punk-rock librarian look. The musician guys love it!” She pulls off her glasses, sweeps down her hair. Laughs.

“And no more blond hair.”

“I want people to take me seriously.” She puts her glasses back on and grabs the handle of my suitcase. “So, how’s almost-Boston?”

When I chose my college, Melanie made fun of the fact it was five miles outside of Boston, like the town we grew up in was twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. She’d said I was circling urban life. She meanwhile, dove right in. Her school is in downtown Manhattan.

“Almost good,” I answer. “How’s New York?”

“Beyond good! So much to do! Like tonight, we have options: There’s a party at the dorm, a decent club with eighteen-and-over night on Lafayette, or a friend of a friend invited us to a loft party in Greenpoint, where this awesome band is playing. Or we could go to the last-minute tickets place in Times Square and see a Broadway show.”

“I don’t care. I’m just here to see you.”

I feel the slightest pang when I say that. Even though it is technically true that I’m here to see her, it’s not the whole story. I was going to see Melanie at home for Thanksgiving in a few days anyway, but when my parents booked my tickets, they said I had to take the train because flights were too unreliable and expensive on a holiday weekend.

When I imagined six hours on a train, I almost felt sick. Six hours of pushing back memories. Then Melanie mentioned that her parents were driving down the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to do some shopping and driving her back, so I got the brilliant idea to take the cheap Chinatown bus to New York and catch a lift back home with Melanie. I’ll get the bus back to Boston too.

“Aww, I’m happy to see you as well. Have we ever gone this long without seeing each other?”

I shake my head. Not since we met.

“Okay, so dorm party, Broadway show, club, or really kick-ass band in Brooklyn?”

What I really want to do is go back to her room and watch movies and hang out like in the old days, but I suspect that if I suggested that, Melanie would accuse me of being adventure averse. The party in Brooklyn sounds the least appealing, and is probably what Melanie wants to do, so it’s probably what I should choose. So I do.

It’s like I picked the right answer on a test, the way her eyes light up. “Excellent! Some of my friends from school are going. We’ll eat first, then go back and drop your stuff and get ready and trek out together. Sound good?”

“Great!”

“We’re already in Chinatown, and my favorite Vietnamese place is nearby.”

As we wind through the twisty, crowded streets, full of red lanterns and paper umbrellas and fake pagodas, I try to keep my eyes on the sidewalk. There are signs everywhere. One of them will inevitably say double happiness. Paris is more than three thousand miles away, but the memories . . . One pops up, I push it away. But then another appears. I never know when one is going to jump out at me. They are buried everywhere, like land mines.

We go into a tiny restaurant, all fluorescent lights and Formica tables, and sit down at a corner table. Melanie orders us some spring rolls and a chicken dish and tea and then she folds up her glasses and puts them into a case (to better protect the imaginary lenses?). After she pours us each a cup of tea, she looks at me and says, “So, you’re doing better?”

It’s not so much a question as a command. Melanie saw me at my absolute lowest. When I got back from Paris and completely lost it, she let me cry all night long, cursing Willem for being a sleazy scoundrel just like she’d suspected all along. On the flight home, she cast scathing looks at anyone on the plane who looked at me funny when I kept crying for the entire eight-hour trip. When, somewhere over Greenland, I started hyperventilating, wondering if maybe I hadn’t made an epic mistake, if maybe something hadn’t happened, if maybe he hadn’t got waylaid, she’d set me straight.

“Yeah. He did. He got way laid. By you! And then he got the hell out of Dodge.”

“But what if . . . ” I’d begun.

“Allyson, come on. In one day, you saw him get undressed by one girl, take a secret note from another, and God knows what happened on the train with those other girls; how you think he really got that stain on his jeans?”

I hadn’t even thought of that.

She’d taken me into the tiny airplane bathroom and shoved the Sous ou Sur T-shirt in the garbage. Then we’d flushed the coin he’d given me down the toilet, where I imagined it falling all those thousands of feet, sinking into the ocean below.

“There, we’ve destroyed all evidence of him,” she’d said.

Well, almost. I hadn’t told her about the photo on my phone, the one Agnethe took of the two of us. I still haven’t deleted it, though I haven’t looked at it, not even once.

When we got back home, Melanie was ready to put the trip behind her and turn her attention to our next chapter: college. I understood. I should’ve been excited too. I just wasn’t. Every day we schlepped to IKEA and Bed, Bath & Beyond, to American Apparel and J. Crew with our moms. But it was like I had a permanent case of jet lag; all I wanted to do was take naps on the display beds. When Melanie left for school two days before me, I burst into tears. Everyone else thought I was crying for the pending separation from my best friend, but Melanie knew better, which was maybe why she sounded a little impatient when she hugged me and whispered into my ear, “It was just one day, Allyson. You’ll get over it.”

So when Melanie asks me now if I’m better, I can’t let her down. “Yes,” I tell her. “I’m great.”

“Good.” She claps her hands together and pulls out her phone. She fires off a text. “There’s a guy going tonight, a friend of my friend Trevor. I think you’ll like him.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”

“You just said you’re over the Dutch dickwad.”

“I am.”

She stares at me. “The first three months of college are the most action you’re supposed to get in your life. Have you so much as blinked at a guy?”

“I’ve mostly kept my eyes closed during all the wild orgies.”

“Ha! Nice try. You forget I know you better than anyone. I’ll bet you haven’t even kissed anyone.”

I pull the weird innardy parts out of the spring roll, wiping the excess grease on a paper napkin. “So?”

“So the guy I want you to meet tonight. He’s way more your type.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Though I know what it means. It was absurd to think that hewas ever my type. Or I his.

“Nice. Normal. I showed him your picture and he said you looked dark and mysterious.” She reaches out to touch my hair. “Though you should cut your hair into the bob again. Right now it’s more of a blob.”

I haven’t cut my hair since London, and it hangs down my neck in a messy curtain.

“That’s the look I’m going for.”

“Well, you’re achieving it. But anyhow he’s really nice, Mason—”

“Mason? What kind of name is that?”

“You’re getting hung up on a name? You sound just like your mother.”

I resist the urge to stab her through the eye with a chopstick.

“Anyhow, who cares? Maybe his name is really Jason but he just wanted to call himself Mason,” Melanie continues. “Speaking of, no one calls me Melanie here. They call me Mel or Lainie.”

“Two names for the price of one.”

“It’s college, Allyson. No one knows who you were. There’s never a better time to reinvent yourself. You should try it.” She gives me a pointed look.

I want to tell her that I did. It just didn’t take.

_ _ _

Mason actually turns out to be not that bad. He’s smart and slightly nerdy, and from the South, which explains the name, I guess, and he speaks in a lilting accent, which he makes fun of. When we get to the party on a desolate stretch of windblown street, miles from the subway stop, he jokes that he’s from the hipster police and do I have enough tattoos to be in this part of town. At which point Trevor shows off his tribal armband and Melanie starts talking about the “tat” she’s thinking of getting on her ankle or butt or other places girls get them, and Mason looks at me and rolls his eyes a little.

At the party, an elevator opens up directly into a loft, which is both huge and decrepit, with giant canvases all over the walls and the smell of oil paint and turpentine. It smelled like this in the squat. Another land mine. I kick it away before it explodes.

Melanie and Trevor are going on and on about this kick-ass band, whose grainy video they show me on Melanie’s phone. They’re congratulating themselves on seeing them at a place like this, before the whole world discovers them. When the band fires up, Melanie—Mel, Lainie, whoever—and Trevor hop to the front and start dancing like crazy. Mason hangs back with me. It’s too loud to attempt conversation, which I’m glad about, but I’m also glad that someone stayed with me. I feel my tourist sign flashing, and I’m on native soil.

After what seems like forever, the band finally takes a break; the ringing in my ears is so loud it’s like they’re still playing.

“Care for a libation?” Mason asks me.

“Huh?” I’m still half deaf.

He mimes drinking something.

“Oh, no thanks.”

“I’ll. Be. Right. Back,” he says, exaggerating the words like we’re lip-reading.

Meanwhile, Melanie and Trevor are doing a kind of lip-reading of their own. They’re in a corner on a couch, making out. It’s like they don’t notice anyone else in the room. I don’t want to watch them, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Seeing them kiss makes me physically ill. It’s hard to push that memory down. The hardest. It’s why I keep it buried the deepest.

Mason comes back with a beer for himself and a water for me. He sees Melanie and Trevor. “It was bound to happen,” he tells me. “Those two have been circling each other for weeks like a pair of dogs in heat. I wondered what was going to trip the wire.”

“Alcohol and ‘kick-ass’ music,” I say, making air quotes.

“Vacations. Easier to start something up when you know you don’t have to see someone for a while. Takes the pressure off.” He glances at them. “I give them two weeks, tops.”

“Two weeks? That’s pretty generous. Some guys wouldn’t give it more than a night.” Even over the din, I can hear my bitterness. I can taste it in my mouth.

“I’d give you more than a night,” Mason says.

And, oh, it is so the right thing to say. And who knows? Maybe he’s even sincere, though by now I know that I cannot be trusted to discern sincerity from fakery.

But still, I want to be over this. I want all those memories to disappear or to be supplanted with something else, to stop haunting me. So when Mason leans in to kiss me, I close my eyes, and I let him. I try to lose myself in it, try not to worry if the bitterness in my mouth has actually given me bad breath. I try to be kissed by someone else, try to besomeone else.

But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has since healed, and I pull away.

He was right, after all; it didn’t leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had. At least I’d have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. Stains are even worse when you’re the only one who can see them.