1
1977. No cell phones. An old-fashioned, pre-tech world, if you will. An innocent world that seemed guilty. A year of death, pardon, disco, and, as the year wore on, gas lines. The death penalty was reinstated with the execution of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the U.S. of A. since 1967. Gerald Ford, then-president, pardoned Tokyo Rose. Pardons were the order of the day. Jimmy Carter, from the peanut-farming family, arrived in the White House just about the time when the economy began taking a downturn. Soon enough, gas lines lengthened. It was a strange year of unrest and discontent, and nobody knew why.
If you were in college at the time, and it was a little private middle-of-nowhere college in Virginia, in the mountains, you probably were a preppie, and you probably were in a fraternity, and you wanted to get the hell out of there except your folks were divorced, nobody really wanted you home for spring break, half your friends were heading to Virginia Beach, half to Florida, but the girl you wanted badly was going to make a fast trip to California and get back to campus within two weeks.
You owned a car and wanted to drive her out there and back. Four days out, four days back, four days in L.A.
Not bad.
It was a crazy thing to do.
But you were nineteen, hated your life, and crazy was something you needed.
She was someone you needed.
“Attraction can really fuck you up,” Josh said.
He’d stretched out on the lawn because he drank too much that night and felt too awful and wished he were somewhere else and could be someone other than Josh, first to go to college on a scholarship, no less, and further from his dreams than he was from the stars above him.
2
Night descended, then grew luminous with the lights of the college and town. Jackson College, liberal arts, private, over-priced, party school.
It was one of those genteel colleges, nestled in the Blue Ridge, with columns and Old South delusions and tradition fermenting in the overcrowded boxwoods and magnolia overhangs. The town was quaint and small enough to support a single movie theater called the Bijou, and after nine o’clock, all the traffic lights flashed yellow. Fraternity Row was on a street called Willow Avenue. The houses looked as if they were all built the same year, with colonial columns and balconies, and a grandness all mushed nearly side-by-side: Lambda Chi, Deltas, Pi Phi, Zeta Beta. The frat houses all lined up in perfect rows, and on this particular Friday night, all were lit up with parties and drunken students and dance music blasting out of the open windows.
Josh, nineteen, lay back on the lawn in front of the Delta house, looking up at the stars.
He tried to identify the constellations—the Pleiades, Orion, Scorpio—but he nearly flunked astronomy. To him, they just looked like pinpricks in the fabric of the world. The darkness, with the holes in it that hinted at another side—a bright paradise somewhere far away.
He was drunk on the cheapest beer from a warm keg out back in the driveway, and he’d stumbled to the front lawn, where girls stepped over him on the way into the party.
The party roared—its music and screams spreading out into the night, but he heard it like the ocean in a seashell at his ear.
It was both distant and close, and all he thought about was the girl he wished would be his.
“Attraction can really fuck you up,” he said to no one. “It can mess you up good. You gotta choose the right person, because if you don’t, and you choose the wrong one, or you let nature take over so you always pick the wrong ones, it sends you to hell. Hell in a handbasket.”
He thought of Bronwyn.
3
Bronwyn Shapiro: brown hair that was straight and long, five-foot-three, wore black too much, smoked too much, no breasts to speak of, but somehow was more skeletally advanced than other sophomores. She wore glasses but looked intellectual instead of geeky, didn’t put up with any crap from the guys at the frat, wrote poetry that she considered puerile but she took creative writing classes, anyway. That’s where Josh first saw her: freshman year, Expository and Creative Writing 101, Michael Framington—the short story writer—teaching. Bronwyn read a poem about setting fire to her roommate’s hair. Framington called it the worst case of overwrought emotional baggage with the sensibility of a disturbed eighteen-year-old that he’d heard in years.
Josh wanted to hear it again.
After that class, he went to her and asked her what she was reading. She glanced up at him from the tamped-down carpet of fresh grass. Then she shut the book, tucking it under her arm.
“It’s called a book,” she said.
“Now that’s a suitably bitchy thing to say,” he said.
“You know, when I’ve noticed you in class, I’ve always thought you were a loser and now you’ve just confirmed it for me,” she said. “Please leave.”
And that was the moment he felt that he had to have this woman in his life no matter what.
A year later, lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, Josh wished she were with him.
4
Bronwyn sat on the stairs, nursing a beer, and wishing she were anywhere else but in a frat house the night after second-semester finals.
“See him?” she nudged her friend, Alli. Her target was Mitchell Sloane, from Poughkeepsie, New York, wearing his cardigan and khakis, vodka gimlet in one hand, cigar in another. “He’s a classic closet case. His friends think he’s male bonding or something, but look at how he’s sizing up Joe Welsh. He wants to plant a big wet one on Joe’s puss.”
“Half these frat boys are closet cases,” her friend said.
“How’d you do on the accounting final?”
“Okay, I think.”
“I bit the dust,” Bronwyn said. “I thought that last question about debits and credits was a trick question. I wrote a note to Jones that he was trying to trick us on the final and that the answer was that it was impossible. I think I just flunked. Look at him.” She pointed with the bottle toward Dave Olshaker. “He’s pathetic. He’s looking for Tammy Detweiler.”
“The hose queen,” Alli said.
“Exactly. He thinks she must love him just because he gets a boner when he looks at her.”
“Detweiler’s incapable of love.”
“So’s Olshaker. Maybe they’re made for each other. Besides, Olshaker’s a psycho, and him,” Bronwyn’s bottle tipped over to a guy with filthy long hair and dirty jeans and a stained T-shirt.
“He looks like a scrappy dog.”
“Ziggy. He’s just looking for weed. He dropped acid seventeen times before he was eighteen. You can be declared legally insane for that. He’s legally insane too many times over. But hell, he’s got a light. I need a light.”
5
“Where’s Griff?” Bronwyn asked, leaning over Kathy Emmons to light her cigarette from Ziggy’s magical torch.
Ziggy gave a blank look. “No idea.”
“God, this cigarette tastes like pure unadulterated . . . poop.” Bronwyn took another drag off the cigarette, then stubbed it out against the wall of the frat house. “He’s with her, isn’t he?”
Kathy nodded. “Of course.”
“Damn it,” Bronwyn said. She let out a vile string of profanity, but her curses couldn’t be heard above the thud of the music on the floor below.
“Let’s get high,” Ziggy said.
“You’re already high. Give up the drugs, Ziggy. I’m telling you. You are going to mess up your entire life and maybe even your chromosomes so your future wife might have turtle babies someday. You’re going to end up in rehab anyway. Just stop now. ‘High’ is not the natural state for human beings. Low is. Get low. Low is good.”
“I want to get high,” Ziggy said, as if he hadn’t heard a word. He glanced at the others, then wandered off, claiming that he’d left a bong somewhere in the kitchen.
“Why are you obsessed with Griff?” Kathy asked. “He dumped you.”
“No,” Bronwyn said. “I dumped him.”
“Okay. Either way, a dumping was had by all. Many moons ago.”
“I don’t give a damn about him,” Bronwyn said. “I just don’t get what he sees in Tammy. Jesus, she has him, and Olshaker wants her back. What is it about her? She’s the poster girl for the living dead. Is it just boobies? Is that all boys are about? Boobies?”
“I think so.”
“Yeah, sadly, sometimes I think so, too,” Bronwyn said, her cigarette nearly gone to ash. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t give a damn.”
6
A room upstairs in the frat house. Smell of beer and sex in the room. Tammy on top of Griff Montgomery. His pants around his ankles, which dangle over the edge of the slender bed. His starched white button-down shirt open at the chest.
Tammy’s jeans on the floor, her tank top half-pulled up around her neck, the small gold cross that hung from her neck bouncing up and down as her thighs wrap around, obscuring and engulfing Griff.
“God, do you feel my big boy?” he asked, too loud.
“Uh?”
“My big boy,” he repeated. “Do you feel it? I feel like . . . like I’m God or something. It feels so big.”
“Uh,” Tammy muttered, “uh, sure. Yeah. Sure. Anything you say.”
“Don’t you like it? Tell me how much you like it.”
“Oh yeah, I like it. I love it.”
“Say it.”
“No. You know I don’t want to.”
“Aw, please. Baby. It does so much for me.”
“Okay. Okay. Your . . . big boy. Your big boy is so good.” She began giggling a little, but he didn’t notice.
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah!” he groaned against her ear as she leaned into him.
“It’s the biggest one I ever had. It’s the biggest. I don’t know if I can take it all. Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.”
In her head, Tammy was thinking about how she worked too hard and how he needed to move around some more.
7
In his head, Griff was thinking about two other girls at school, and pretending that it was both of them, kissing him, taking him into themselves, flicking their tongues all over him, and whispering obscenities like they were good luck charms.
8
They thrashed, and finally, they fell over on the floor, a heap in the heap of dirty laundry that Griff left there.
She didn’t kiss him afterward, but got up, pulled on her panties, and looked in the long mirror on the door to his room. “I think I’m getting fat.”
Griff, lying on the dirty clothes, some of which bunched up uncomfortably under his lower back, considered whether he should shower.
Without saying another word, he bounded out of bed, grabbing a towel from the heap of dirty clothes in the corner by the dresser. He picked up his shirt, jeans, and briefs, gave her a wink and a too-brief hug, and went out into the hall.
9
In the shower, one floor down from his room, Griff took the Ivory soap and scrubbed away. Tammy had this smell that he couldn’t stand. When it got on him, it reminded him too much of his mother’s closet where he used to hide, and he hated that smell.
Then he thought of someone else, someone other than Tammy, and he got hard again.
10
“You whore,” Dave Olshaker said.
He stood in the doorway of Griff’s room, staring at Tammy.