I never thought I’d hate college so much, but I did. I thought I’d want to be at a big school in Boston and be anonymous for a change. I thought I’d like being in a class where no one knew me, instead of being in a class with the same kids I had known since I was five.
At a big college, no one would remember the time I peed my pants in kindergarten, or cried because I forgot my lunch, or had a screaming fight with Pepper Toohey at the Dock n’ Dine, or ran home barefoot crying from a party on Hazard Point.
But it was awful. There were over two hundred kids in my American History class. I agonized over papers only to find out they were read and graded by some graduate student who couldn’t even match my name with my face. My professor called me Clara. He didn’t give a crap about me or anyone else in that class. Plus, I quickly made a new list of screwups to be remembered for.
First, there was The Boyfriend. I met him on the very first day, before classes even began, during the move-in. Dad had just helped me unload everything. There was one box of books left, and I said I could handle it. He drove off, and I found out I couldn’t handle the box of books, but the soon-to-be boyfriend swooped in and carried it up the three flights to my dorm room. He lived in the same building, one floor down.
From that moment, we were inseparable. We went to the freshman welcome lunch together that afternoon—and every meal after that. We studied every weeknight together. He wasn’t a party animal like the Tooheys, so although we partied a little bit on the weekends, we mostly explored the city and each other.
Then, he went home for the long weekend in October, where, as his roommate told me, he called his “real girlfriend” back home “Claire” instead of “Heather” while they were “at it” in her bedroom.
Whatever the catalyst, the consequence was she came up the following Saturday and kicked my ass right in the laundry room. I was folding a load of lights when she came in the door.
“You Claire?” she said, blowing a big pink bubble and inhaling the gum back into her mouth with a loud smack. Dummy me answered yes. She took three long steps toward me—she was a high school basketball star and five-foot-eleven—and punched me in the face so hard I fell over into my laundry basket. Then she sat on me and pounded on me right on my own clean sheets while her friends cheered her on.
Someone called campus police, and her friends pulled her off me, and they all ran out the emergency exit. I had to walk around with two black eyes for a week—earning me the nickname “Sluggo,” which stuck. The smell of fabric softener still makes me want to puke. But the absolute worst was that her gum got stuck in my hair, and I had to cut it all off. I didn’t realize how beautiful it was until I saw it in a pile on the floor of that cheap chain salon, where they hacked out the giant gum wad and then tried to make a hairstyle around it—my first short hairstyle since my second-grade pageboy.
“My hair really doesn’t look like this,” I found myself saying to the student who checked our IDs at lunch. But it did. Probably worse in the back where I couldn’t even see. The Boyfriend was history. His giantess girlfriend now came up every weekend and was a formidable presence on campus from dinnertime on Friday until eleven at night on Sundays—to keep an eye on him. Not that I wanted anything to do with him after that, anyway.
“We still have all week,” he had said to me. I told him to shove it. Now I had to make all new friends and habits, since everything I had done since I had moved in involved him. But it wasn’t long before a November nor’easter changed all that.
“Isn’t that where you’re from, Sluggo?”
I was in the common room, watching the storm on television when there it was—Keech Harbor on the Boston news.
“Tragedy struck this close-knit coastal town in the storm-related, accidental death of 58-year-old nurse Eberta Raymond, who fell off the roof of her home while clearing the gutters of clogged leaves.”
Ebbie! There, while I sat in shock over the horror of Ebbie’s death, from the back of the room, some guy yelled “Keech Harbor! I went to a party there once where there was this couple making out in a playhouse, and then she ran home crying in her underpants, and then I ended up doing shots with the guy.”
I wasn’t sad to be leaving school for a few days; in fact, I told the registrar that Ebbie was my aunt, and I was given leave till after Thanksgiving because the first holiday would be “a tough one.”
Mom actually took time out of her busy social life to drive me to Portland, where she put me on the bus home.
“What a shame she won’t be able to get Ebbie’s life insurance or anything since they weren’t married. Tell Flo we send our condolences,” she said, while the car idled in front of the bus station.
“I will. I will tell the woman who raised me—that job you didn’t want—that you are very sorry she can’t get Ebbie’s money,” I said and slammed the door.
Dad picked me up at the bus stop in Freeport. Flo was with him. She just sat there in the car, like a sad lumpy old lady, staring at the dashboard. I lugged my giant duffle full of dirty laundry and tossed it into the trunk, realizing she probably knew what was in it. Dad told me that while I was home, it would be my job to do Flo’s job—cook, clean, and do the groceries, while he helped her make arrangements. It was the least I could do.
Everyone says it was a blessing that Ebbie didn’t suffer, but wouldn’t an actual blessing have been if Ebbie had said “screw the gutters” and just let them overflow rather than climbing up there herself?
Dad dropped me off at Mulligan’s with the shopping list while he and Flo met with Ebbie’s sister, who had come up from Rhode Island to see what kind of house she had inherited and to remove anything valuable. Ebbie hadn’t made a will, so now Flo was soon to be without the home she had known for 30-odd years.
Despite all this, it was a relief to be back in Keech. The storm had stripped every leaf off the trees, and low gray clouds sat like a lid over the quiet village, now devoid of both tourists and, for the most part, Tooheys.
Just the same, I scanned Mulligan’s aisles through the window just to make sure. I went in and pushed the cart, loading it with the items on Flo’s list—potatoes, turnips, carrots, butternut squash, then onto the end cap with the holiday specials, Bell’s Seasoning, cans of pumpkin purée, and unbleached flour. Placing the bag of flour in the cart, it occurred to me I would be doing the baking and the cooking. I didn’t even know how.
I rounded the corner into the baking aisle to get the rest of the things on the list, and bam! There was Grannie and Pixie by the packaged nuts. They didn’t see me, and I was able to swing the cart around, park it by the office, and hide in the ladies’ room.
Pixie! Of all the Tooheys, she’s the one I wanted to see the least. I still felt embarrassed, and I owed her an apology for invading her private reading cottage. It was Scout’s idea, but I knew better. It was wrong to be in there without her permission. Maybe we could still be reading buddies and go to book sales. But in my heart of hearts, I knew she was petty enough to never accept my apology or want my friendship back. So I sat, pants around my ankles, on the toilet, reading the graffiti on the back of the stall door—highlights included a peace sign that had been engraved and re-engraved with pen deep into the wood; the name Molly in childish scrawl, allegedly done by the second-grade teacher when she was a child; and, my favorite, in extra-thick black marker, Mulligan is a cheap SOB.
Then, the bathroom door opened, and in walked someone wearing bright red sneakers and argyle knee socks and Christmas pins on her shoelaces. And there was only one person in Keech who would be dressed like that.
First, Pixie cranked some paper towels. Then she opened the door to the stall next to me and began pulling toilet paper off the roll. But the stall had a wonky dispenser (which is why I didn’t use it), and it took her forever to unroll the amount she wanted because it only gave up a couple of squares at a time. Squeak-clunk, squeak-clunk, squeak-clunk. She must have placed it on the seat, but it fell on the floor.
“Ew, gross.”
She kicked it aside and started again.
And back to the toilet paper dispenser. Squeak-clunk, squeak-clunk. Then more paper on the seat. This went on and on until I felt ridiculous sitting there, but not so ridiculous to want to leave the safety of the stall. How much toilet paper did she need to protect herself from a seat at Mulligans? When she finally sat down and started peeing, I made a run for it.
And ran straight into Gran.
“Flipper!” she said. “What a pleasure to see you! I was so sorry I didn’t get to wish you well before you left for college. I didn’t realize you’d be heading off to school while I was away.”
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“You’re in town for the funeral? Your cleaner, her friend? I understand they were close. Please extend my condolences. Did you see Pixie when you were in there? Pixie, come out and see who I ran into!”
Just then, I saw my dad pull up in front of the store.
“I can’t stay. Lots to do,” I lied. I didn’t have half the things I needed in the cart. And now there was a line at the check-out! Two whole people—where did they come from?
So I left the cart by the office and ran out to the car.
“Where’s the food?”
“I left it.”
Flo turned around to look at me. And despite her grief, she still put me first.
“I’ll finish. Is there a cart?”
“By the office door.”
“Period trouble,” she whispered the lie to my dad.
I lay down in the back of the car like a coward.
Dad said nothing to me because he did not want to talk about period trouble.
I got out of Keech ten days later without seeing another Toohey. I got off the bus in Boston to hear some guy shouting at me.
He was my age, nice-looking and friendly.
“Hey, where do I know you from? Did you go to Loomis? No, it’s not school. I know—it’s Keech! Keech Harbor, Maine, right?” I didn’t recognize him. He was wearing a Northeastern University sweatshirt. But no one I knew from Keech went there.
How could he know me from Keech Harbor? He wasn’t a townie … or a Toohey.
“Keech Harbor party, at the Toohey’s. You were that girl in the pool house.” I felt sick. My red face told him I was that girl, even though it wasn’t a pool house. There wasn’t even a pool. Dumbass.
“Hey, sorry. No offense,” he said softly. “Listen, everybody has a story about that party. And no one cares. My uncle projectile vomited off a balcony, and now he’s vice president of sales in Asia-Pacific for Toohey International … So where do you go to school? We should hang out sometime.”
“No,” was all I said and kept walking.
I didn’t go home again until Christmas. Flo spent the holidays with us, staying in the first floor bedroom that used to be my grandmother’s. To cheer her up, Dad took her ice fishing on New Year’s Eve.
That was followed by snowshoeing in January, cross-country skiing in February, and then a church bus trip to see the Boston Bruins in March. Then they golfed, mountain biked, even learned to kayak together.
“She’s not my girlfriend, you know, because she’s not like that.” My dad had told me when he picked me up at the bus station. “But honestly, this is the most fun I have ever had in a relationship!”
I said nothing. And hoped that was all I would hear about it.
I hated my major. Finance was boring and heartless. And I began to suspect that every finance major I met had been at that last Toohey party. So at the end of the year, I withdrew. I transferred to a small school in southern Maine. I changed my major to liberal arts. Which meant I lost all my financial aid. Which meant I’d have to work my tail off all summer. And that’s how I ended up back in Keech that June, working at the Dock n’ Dine with Skanky as my supervisor.