december
I had to admit, the news about Mike intrigued me. Declining to go to college for no good reason seemed like a dumb idea, but transferring from Harvard to the University of Kansas—for a girl—seemed pretty dumb as well. I wondered what was going through Mike’s mind. Maybe he needed me as a friend. Maybe I also just needed to talk to him, because I was bored, because I was lonely, because Jane had told me to, because some part of me had to see if what was happening to Kate was also happening to Mike. Each time we’d talked since Thanksgiving, she mentioned some new guy that she had a crush on or was hooking up with (and I learned that “hooking up” in college means “having sex” and not “kissing or anything else” the way it did in high school). It seemed to be a different guy each week. I was having a hard time telling the difference between these guys—or caring. If Mike was also turning into a college clone, then I wouldn’t have to think about him anymore.
One day, when both Dad and Germaine were out of the house, I sat down at the desk that was in the dark corner of our kitchen. I needed the quiet to think. I stared at the computer screen hard until I got mad at it for not giving me a sign one way or another what I should do. Then I let my eyes go out of focus as I debated. My brain hurt. It felt like I hadn’t really had to think that hard about anything for a while.
Finally, I opened up a new e-mail. Hey, I typed. What’s up?
I hit send before I had time to rethink it. So I wasn’t exactly spilling my guts out. But I had finally e-mailed Mike. Now I could quit worrying about whether to e-mail him and start worrying about whether he would write me back, whether he would get the e-mail, or whether he would ignore the e-mail.
Other than the painful-yet-admittedly-kind-of-fun anticipation of waiting to see if Mike would write me back, Christmas was crappy. I honestly don’t know why I would have expected it to be otherwise; it wasn’t like I had done anything to deserve much more than a lump of coal in my stocking. The year before, I had received lots of stuff to take to college: a new laptop (which Josh ended up appropriating), some reference books that I’d probably never use, little knickknacks for my dorm room. This year, Dad got me a college guide.
“Are you serious?” I asked after I opened the present. We’d had our usual Christmas dinner of Popeye’s fried chicken around the dining table and now we were upstairs in the family room, sitting on the couches by the tree (which I had decorated this year in shades of purple and gold) and listening to the cheesy Christmas carols radio station while Superhero went nuts with a pig-ear chew toy. I’d gotten the same book junior year. Only now I had a more up-to-date version. I was rarely that rude, but I couldn’t help myself.
“We stop getting more than one present each from Dad after we graduate from high school, remember?” said Josh. “Family policy.”
“Oh, was that why you didn’t want to go to college?” added Germaine. “Because you didn’t want to stop getting presents?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said, staring at Dad, who was watching the floor, swirling around the one glass of expensive Scotch he let himself have per year. I was pissed. I was annoyed at myself for being pissed, because I felt like I was too old to be mad about what I got or didn’t get for Christmas. But it wasn’t really that. I didn’t like passive-aggressive hints. He had been doing things lately like leaving me clippings from newspapers about picking the right college, or how many great amenities freshmen were getting lately. I’d rather he pound a huge drum and stomp around the house chanting “Back to school, back to school” than this.
“Well, thanks,” I said, putting it aside.
“Your mom sent over some stuff,” said Dad, pointing to a big black shiny shopping bag next to the tree. This had better be a redeeming present or else I was giving up Christmas forever. Inside the bag was a black leather jacket from Italy. Admittedly, it was pretty cool, but it certainly wouldn’t be warm enough in Chicago to wear anytime soon. Also included was a cardboard tube. I could tell that the jacket was going to be clothing when I saw the box, but this was a surprise.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” said Dad, while Josh and Germaine tried on their jackets. We didn’t mind if we all got the same present from her, because if it was good, we all got something good, and if it was bad, we could all complain together.
I pulled the metal cap out of one side of the tube and extracted a big poster. It was so huge that when I spread my arms to see it, it still didn’t open up all the way. We had to put two mugs from our hot chocolate down on the ends to see what it was.
“Sexy,” said Josh. It was a black-and-white photo of a couple kissing in some café. I think it was French. The café, not the kissing.
“What is this?”
“There’s a card,” Dad said, handing me a business card with some scrawling on the back.
For your dorm!!!! Xoxox, Mom had written on it.
“That’s great,” I said. “She doesn’t remember that I’m not in college.”
“Maybe it’s for when you go back,” said Josh.
“If you go back,” said Germaine.
I stood up. “Where do we keep the wine?” I asked, picking up one of the mugs and letting the poster roll back up with a snap. “I need a drink.”
“Shut up,” said Dad.
I left the college book in the family room for a few days, hoping that maybe somebody would make it disappear. I would rather get a booster shot and my teeth cleaned simultaneously than have to look at, and apply to, colleges again.
A few days after Christmas, I woke to the smell of waffles cooking: Dad sometimes made special breakfasts for us while we were all on break. Of course I wasn’t really on Christmas break, but I was happy to enjoy the benefits of Dad’s and Josh’s. I wandered downstairs in my sweatpants and T-shirt and found the table set, with the dreaded college guide on my plate. Cute.
“What is this?” I asked. “Where are my waffles?”
“This is a trap,” Dad said, talking above the radio set to NPR, which he always listened to too loudly. “To get you to look at schools again. You need to at least start thinking about what’s going to happen this summer.”
“This summer,” I said, “it’s going to be hot. Perhaps a thunderstorm or two.”
“You’re going back to school,” he said, pointing his spatula at me. “We just have to face facts and get to it, unless you want to have a big fight over it.”
“Don’t point that thing at me,” I said. He poked me with it instead and put down a plate of waffles with whipped cream and strawberries.
“Enjoy!”
I sat down and flipped through the book while I ate my fancy waffles. The kitchen had seemed so bright and clean and happy and welcoming, especially the sunshine bouncing off the fresh snow in the yard, but it was all a horrible mirage.
These college guides are supposed to help you make an educated decision about what schools you are interested in based on several factors, such as size, location, and academic strengths and weaknesses. But in reality everybody just reads them to find out how the food is or what the party scene is like. I read a description of one school that called the town it was located in “One of the Seven Gates of Hell.” If that’s not intriguing, I don’t know what is.
My vision began to blur as I stared at the book. It described colleges in the most boring way possible:
The “Christian Path” is considered an essential component of the university’s curriculum. . . .
Too religious. I hadn’t been in a church since the last time my mom pulled me into one in Europe to look at the frescoes.
Inherently, the student body is issue-oriented. Students spend a good deal of time in the library. It’s also joked that each professor believes that you’re majoring in his or her subject. Approximately 70 percent of each graduating class moves into the job market after matriculation. . . . Too boring. And with lame jokes.
There are no core requirements: students are encouraged to create their own majors, with mandatory enrollment in at least four areas of study at all times. All students must take classes in the fine arts, social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.
Too intimidatingly brainy.
The student body eagerly looks forward to key social events each year that attract swarms of men.
Too many women.
Dedicated environmentalists abound. . . .
Too good. Too many hippies.
Approximately 75 percent of the student body go Greek, and those who avoid the Greek system tend to feel excluded from the social scene.
Too horrible to even consider.
After about fifteen minutes, I put my head on the kitchen table, wondering how bad Dad would feel if I were found dead like that. The book was giving me a headache. I groaned.
“Nice try,” Dad said, taking my plate from me. “But you’re not going to get off the hook anymore. I want you to think about this, Cecily. Fun time is over.”
“When was fun time?” I asked. “I must have missed that.” I started heading up the stairs.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Come here.” And I walked halfway back down the stairs.
“What?” I said snottily. “I have to go upstairs and research schools.”
“Come here,” he repeated, pointing to the floor. I rolled my eyes. I hated feeling like this, like I was ten.
“You’re going back to school. If it’s not going to be Kenyon, you’d better figure out which school it is going to be. We’re going to have to fill out applications, go to interviews, the whole shebang—all over again. And by ‘we,’ I mean you, because I don’t have time to go over it all again, but I do have time to make you do it yourself.”
I rolled my eyes again.
“Also, I called Kenyon and talked to the admissions office after we came back last fall. They said it’s okay if you want to come back, because I originally told them that you were just deferring enrollment.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” I somehow felt betrayed. I was so used to not doing anything with this year that it felt like an invasion that he had done anything productive without me knowing it.
“But if you decide that you don’t want to go to Kenyon, that’s fine. You just have to figure it out now so I can let them know you’re not going there. That’s why I got you the book.”
I moaned. The last thing I wanted was choices. “All right, Dad,” I said. “I’ll let you know in a few weeks.”
“Days.”
“Fine,” I said. “Sounds good. See you later.”
I started back up the stairs, and, for some reason, seeing Germaine’s closed door made me stop. I went back halfway down the stairs.
“Dad?”
“Yes, baby?”
“How come you let me stay here? This year?”
“I thought you wanted to stay here.”
“Yeah. But . . . how come you didn’t make me go?”
“I don’t make monkeys,” he said, and made a face.
“Funny.”
Conrad and Germaine were watching a movie in the living room. I was sure that they wouldn’t mind if I joined them as I looked through the college guide book more. Germaine rolled her eyes several times and mouthed a few variations of “Get out,” but I pretended not to see.
“What are some things that I want in a college?” I wondered aloud.
Conrad perked up. “Do you want activism? Do you want to do community service? Do you want to study abroad? Do you want a campus friendly to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered community? A medieval society?”
I stared at him. I’d never heard him speak so much in his life. And he wasn’t making any sense.
“Huh?”
“Choosing a college is one of the most important steps you’ll ever take in your life. It will affect who your friends are, what your interests are, where you find a job, who your lovers are. What sort of organizations you might be interested in, what activities, study options. It can really help define who you will be. I can help you if you want.”
Define who I would be? I now wanted to not be here, not having this conversation. Germaine stared at me so hard, I got a little scared.
“Where did you originally go?” he asked.
“She went to Kenyon,” Germaine said.
“Oh, you went to Kenyon?” he repeated.
“For about five minutes,” I said. “Actually, maybe more like two hours.”
“That’s a good school,” Conrad said. “I had some friends there. Did you know Todd Turkowitz?”
“Did I!” I exclaimed. “He was like my best friend there! We’d have ever so much fun. We would laugh and laugh.”
“Don’t listen to her,” said Germaine.
“Thank you so much, Conrad. This has been most helpful. I will be sure to come to you if I have any further questions. Good day.” I tipped an imaginary cap and walked out of the room.
Germaine and I were still annoying the shit out of each other, so it was nice having Josh back for Christmas, just because he seemed glad to be home, which made the house feel a little happier in general. I was not terribly happy, though, when we heard that his girlfriend was coming to visit. I was pretty sure her name was Angie, but I couldn’t be positive. (Actually, I knew it was Angie, but I kept pretending that I forgot it whenever I talked about her to Dad or Germaine. Neither of them found this amusing.)
Josh and I had never really hung out, just the two of us, outside the house. In fact, he’d sort of ignored me at the beginning of high school, which was devastating at the time. He apologized later, saying that he was just trying to fit in with his friends, but it took me a while to get over the first few days of school, yelling “Hey, J-baby!” (Mom’s nickname for him) in the hall only to have him walk by and not even look at me.
But we have gotten along fine ever since. I wasn’t sure how Josh ended up seeming so much more easygoing than Germaine and me. Who knows, maybe he was full of secret turmoil and he just managed to act like nothing bothered him too much. But he didn’t seem to get irritated by Dad the way Germaine always did, and when I heard him on the phone with Mom, he didn’t seem to hate talking to her the way I did.
So I wasn’t sure what it was that I distrusted so much about this girlfriend, but I knew that Josh had been a little annoying since he’d gotten home for break, squirreling away in his room and talking on the phone and making stupid giggly noises, so I had to assume she was the cause of it all. Plus, Yolanda had to come an extra day during the week to clean for the houseguest, which put me in a bad mood because whenever Yolanda cleaned, she moved my stuff from where my stuff needed to be. I had very specific piles around my room that meant certain things. These I would file at a later time. These would get thrown away on Tuesday. This one would just stay around for a while. She consolidated them all, and it drove me wild.
I knew that Angie was coming the day before New Year’s Eve, so to avoid the grand entrance, I hid in our local Barnes & Noble, which was a bad plan since the store was full of kids off from school and people returning gifts. I bought a celebrity trash magazine and sat in the corner of the café with my back to the room, so if anybody from my school came in, they wouldn’t see me. Eventually I finished the magazine, and I felt that if I ordered another hot chocolate, my teeth would fall out of my head, so I headed home.
I just had to stay out of the common areas of the house where Josh and Angie might be hanging out. I didn’t want to know what they were doing, but I imagined they were staring at each other and sighing in adoration.
When I came home, Dad was in the kitchen, paying some bills.
“Angie’s here,” he said, smiling.
“Oh yeah? What’s she like?”
“She seems really cool.”
“Cool?”
“She definitely doesn’t seem like she’s in a bad mood, unlike you. I might trade her for you.”
“Look, I can’t promise I’ll be in a good mood, but what if I just keep my bad mood away from them?”
“That’s fine,” he said. “Just be polite. Are you jealous or something?”
“No,” I said. “I just don’t like people in my personal space.”
“I guess it’s a bad idea that I told her she could sleep in your bed,” he said.
“Ha-ha.” I went upstairs to brush the chocolate taste out of my mouth. When I stepped out of the bathroom I saw my brother smooching somebody blond and petite in the hallway. I figured that people who make out prefer to do it on couches or beds or in bars, but anywhere seemed to do in the case of these two perverts.
“Hi.” I tried to sound like this was all perfectly normal, that I was cool with running into weird makeout sessions. Even Germaine had the decency to close the door when she and Conrad did the disgusting things they did. My brother blushed, but the blond person looked up and smiled.
“Cecily, right? I’m Angie! It’s so nice to meet you.” She marched toward me with her hand held out. She gripped mine, perfectly firm. If I were giving her a job interview, I would have hired her on the spot, based on the handshake. She wore a red sweater that somehow showed off her small waist and looked comfy and warm, too. I never knew where girls found such sweaters.
I glanced at Josh, but he was busy staring at Angie with big, wet, shiny, adoring cow eyes. I wanted to puke.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. I think that’s what you said in situations like this. You lied.
“Were you out returning Christmas presents?” she asked.
“I wish,” I said. “I wish I had presents I could return.” She laughed loud.
“This is Angie’s first time to Chicago,” said Josh.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I hope you like it.”
“I do,” she said. “Josh and I are going to go to the Art Institute in a little bit.”
“Oh really?” I turned to Josh.
“Why ‘oh really’?” Angie asked, as Josh looked at the ground.
“This one time Dad tried to take all three of us to the Art Institute, Josh was so determined not to see any art that he sat in the car the entire time we were there. Even though Dad promised he’d get us all something from the gift shop. And even though we parked in an underground garage.”
“So you didn’t have a book or anything?” asked Angie.
“No,” said Josh.
“You were that determined not to see art?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I thought it was lame.”
“How long ago was this?” Angie asked.
“It was last week,” I said. She laughed again. After they left, I had the sinking feeling that it was going to be really hard to hate Angie, so I went and bugged Germaine to get off the computer and let me check my e-mail, even though I knew I didn’t have any.
“I’m using it,” she said.
“Dad, Germaine won’t let me use the computer,” I called to his office, in a voice I had perfectly pitched so that I knew he couldn’t hear it but she’d think he could.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Have it. God.”
That felt much more natural.
Angie ate dinner with us, although Germaine had escaped by going to Conrad’s place. He shared a dumpy apartment in the city with five other guys, and Germaine only went there in the direst of circumstances, like when she had to be pleasant to houseguests. Dad was fascinated by Angie and wanted to know what she thought about the Art Institute, since she had just finished an art history class at school and he’d minored in that when he was in college.
Angie seemed all right. But something about the way she was so friendly yet polite was almost professional. Or too adult. Or too happy. I felt like she was an actor pretending to be somebody who was twenty instead of an actual twenty-year-old. She just seemed so damned nice and polite, and I kept waiting for her to turn into Germaine, or Kate, or any of the other girls I knew who had gone to college. Secretly she had to be fake, or boring, or a bitch. Even though it wasn’t fair of me to assume this, I kept expecting the transformation to happen. I was just nervous being around someone, too, whom I had to behave around.
“We rented some movies tonight if you want to watch them with us,” said Josh. “Ghostbusters and What About Bob?. Some Bill Murray stuff in honor of Angie’s first time in Chicago.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said. Sitting around watching movies with them sounded awkward.
“I’m going to hang out and watch them, too, Cecily,” said Dad. “You should join us.” I tried to think of any reason I could not watch the movies with them that didn’t involve me sitting awkwardly and quietly in my room, not doing anything. But I had no plans, nobody to call.
“I got some ice cream,” added Dad.
“Okay,” I finally consented. What can I say, I like ice cream. Who doesn’t?
Upstairs with our ice cream, as What About Bob? began, I kept sneaking glances at Angie. It was weird being in close proximity to another girl, one who wasn’t my sister, our cleaning lady, or my mother. She ate her ice cream without looking at it, just sticking her spoon into the blue ceramic bowl and lifting it to her mouth. She wasn’t messy or anything, but she didn’t take care to parcel out tiny portions of ice cream into her spoon the way Germaine did, didn’t wipe her mouth constantly the way Mom did. Her hair was really blond, unlike Germaine’s, which was sort of dirty blond. It was pulled back in a ponytail with little pieces falling perfectly around her face. She had a little turned-up nose and big brown eyes. In order to have an excuse to stare at her, I started talking.
“So how did you and Josh meet?”
“He stalked me,” she said. “For a year.”
“I had a Dante class with her that I couldn’t stand, but she told me she was signing up for a Chaucer class, and I did it, just so I could hang out with her,” Josh said.
“Finally, at the end of the term, he told me that he was only doing it so he could study with me. So I told him to go screw himself.”
“And she kicked me in the groin!”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s cute.”
I shut up, and we went back to the movie. I liked that Angie laughed at the movie, loudly and without waiting to see if we were laughing, too. I had always thought the movie was okay, but I never enjoyed it as much as I did watching it with Angie.
I had another appointment with Jane coming up, so I decided to go the extra mile and try calling Kate again. We had been speaking less and less often, or actually, she was. I had been leaving voice mails and e-mails—not any more than I usually would have, but I felt like a pathetic stalker. Without her, I’d have no friends to talk to and I knew that wouldn’t be good. We had meant to get together while she was home for Christmas, but the one time that we made an actual plan, she had canceled, citing “family plans,” which I thought was total bullshit. I had never heard of her canceling fun to do something with her family, especially if her parents were on the verge of killing each other. My hands shook when I dialed. Stupid Kate.
“What’s up?” she asked when she picked up the phone. They had caller I.D. in her room, which had been making me paranoid.
“How’s school?” I came up with lamely, after running out of preliminary conversation.
“School is cool,” she said. “It’s cool to be in school. And follow the rules. And drool. While wearing mules.”
“Shut up.” I didn’t even have a clever comeback.
“Seriously, things are going good.” She started telling me about some guy named Greg that she had been e-mailing me about. He was really cute. He was in her Spanish class.
“So, we kind of hooked up on Thursday night at happy hour.”
“Now, is he the one who lives on your floor? The football guy?”
“No, the football guy and I were just friends. That’s Quinn. The other guy on my floor is Randy, and we don’t speak anymore. That was just a one-time thing. He has a girlfriend anyway.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Actually, they’re having some kind of Round-the-World party thing outside in my hall right now, so I have to go. See you!”
“What’s a Round-the-World party?” I asked, but Kate had already hung up. A Round-the-World party, as I later found out, is an excuse to get drunk. Everything in college that is not class is an excuse to get drunk, it seems. St. Patrick’s Day is an excuse to get drunk. The fifth of May is an excuse to get drunk. A warm day is an excuse to get drunk. A Round-the-World party is just another one, only in this case people wear togas and yarmulkes and sombreros.
Kate and I tried to get drunk once or twice in high school, not because we were going anywhere special, but almost as an experiment. We wanted to see what it was like, if it was really that great. One time, she slept over at my house, and we took a bottle of kiwi-strawberry Snapple, crept downstairs to Dad’s sparse liquor shelf in the kitchen, and put about a drop of vodka in the bottle. We shared sips, watching Saturday Night Live and giggling together about what we’d act like once we got drunk (start beating each other up? cry and call ex-lovers?), but not surprisingly, we didn’t get drunk. We tried it again another night at her house, with the same flavor of Snapple, only we added her mother’s rum. A lot of it. Probably too much, because after a few sips we agreed it tasted bad and poured it down the toilet.
I really never got drinking. I guess my parents had unwittingly sabotaged that whole thing, since I had been around alcohol my whole life. Not that either one of them was a big boozer, but they just didn’t treat it like it was anything too special. Dad would have a drink of wine every now and then and Mom, when she lived with us, liked her Manhattans, and I thought both tasted like crap. I much preferred to sneak sips from Dad’s creamy, sugary coffee.
I tried to get drunk; I just never got there. I’d get tired before I got to the giggly, laughing point that my friends did. I remember one particular Christmas dance. Meg had smuggled a bottle of white wine from her parents’ house over to Kate’s, and Meg swigged from it as we got ready for the night. I remember that it was the sophomore-year dance, because I let Kate do my makeup and was surprised that she actually did a good job—she did something with some eyeliner that made my eyes look fascinatingly gray and not that drab-gray that was too indecisive to be blue or green. I also let her do my hair, some twisty thing she had accomplished so that I had little tendrils along the sides. Who knew that Kate had such skills? I had expected her to make me look like a cartoon character. I guess we got too into it because Meg sat on the toilet (seat down) the whole time and drank from her bottle, and by the time we left she had drunk almost the whole thing, which we didn’t realize until we got back.
At the dance, we acted stupid as usual, shaking our butts on the dance floor in inexpensive formal wear, and Meg began throwing herself around harder and harder.
“Do you think Jaash likes me?” she yelled in my ear. My brother had graduated from our high school the year before.
“No,” I said. I was positive that Josh didn’t even know who she was.
“Shut up!” she squealed, and slapped me across the arm, hard. “I think he’s sooooo haaht,” she said, and this time I could smell her hot breath, and it smelled like ass.
“Hey, is she okay?” yelled Kate.
Meg rested her hand heavily on my shoulder to tell me something else that I’m sure was very important, but she fell down, bringing me to the floor with her. She screamed with laughter, and I tried to pretend to laugh along with her, but soon she dissolved into tears.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked, even though I knew what was wrong with her.
“Nobody luh-huh-hoves me,” she blubbered. Kate and some of our other friends came over and were trying to pick her up, but Meg was playing the wet noodle game with her bones and felt like she weighed three hundred pounds.
“We gotta get her out of here before she barfs all over the place,” Kate said. “Or before she gets in trouble.”
“Or before people start sliding around in her barf,” I said. We started giggling and then laughing. For some reason, the deejay made the music even louder at that point, so we couldn’t hear anything, not our laughing, not Meg’s groaning, just Sir Mix-a-Lot’s approval of big butts.
We eventually hustled Meg to the gym exit and found a cab. Kate and I had to do rock-paper-scissors for who was going to sit with her in the backseat, and I won, for the first time in my entire life (scissors). Kate propped up Meg against the window behind the cabbie so he couldn’t see her, sticking her mouth and nose out like a dog so that her little bursts of clear puke would slide down the outside of the window. The driver didn’t notice, or at least he pretended not to.
Maybe getting drunk in college was different from getting drunk in high school. Everyone in college seemed to do it, it seemed. Everyone expected that you’d do it, so maybe it was more . . . what? I didn’t know. It was more relaxing? You weren’t as worried about getting caught? You didn’t have to do it in such a hurry? It made you charming and delightful, as opposed to barfy?
After the night of the Round-the-World party, I tried calling Kate a few more times. She was so busy with classes and a fun new boy named Adam that as our talks grew fewer and farther between, it was harder to catch up. Our conversations would have to be an hour long for me to hear everything she was up to. When I called, I usually got either her roommate or their voice mail, which consisted of them singsonging that they weren’t home. Even though I didn’t know her at all, I grew to hate the roommate, with her loud voice and New York accent that, I’m sorry, sounded fake. Otherwise, Kate was just using that caller I.D. and wasn’t picking up because she didn’t want to talk to her stupid former friend who was too much of a baby to leave home.
For New Year’s, Josh and Angie ended up going down to Navy Pier to watch the fireworks. Germaine was out with Conrad. I realized that this was a good reason for me to be talking to my friends, the way Jane had recommended. I had no plans, and while I didn’t mind sitting at home with Dad on any other night, tonight just seemed extra pathetic. I told Dad that Kate and I were going to a party, even though I knew she was going out in the city with some friends from college. He seemed so happy that he offered to give me cab money. I promised him I wouldn’t touch any alcohol and borrowed the car. I spent the night slowly driving up and down the lakeshore, through the towns that got richer and smaller the farther north I went. I listened to music and sang to myself and would feel pretty hollow when certain songs would come on, and I felt like if life were a music video, I’d be crying beautifully at that moment, but it wasn’t and I didn’t, not at all. I brought myself home around one o’clock, when I knew Dad would be asleep already. The next morning, I told him that Kate and I didn’t go out; we just stayed in and watched movies. He didn’t question me further.
