Twelve

 

1.

Charlie sat in class, trying to listen to what Professor Yamamoto had to say about Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The problem was the student sitting next to him. The guy kept answering Yamamoto’s questions as soon as they left his mouth, as if he were sitting in Yamamoto’s office with him and the rest of the class didn’t exist. Charlie could see the other students rolling their eyes. The student next to him, the know-it-all, had messy black hair and a very wrinkled shirt and what looked like a coffee stain on his nose, perhaps from drinking from a thermos. He also had an adversarial relationship with his desk: one of those long-legged guys who were always shifting around in their seat, as if holding in a fart. He’d use some word Charlie had never heard before—“ontological,” say, or “ineluctable”—squirming all the while inside the prison of his desk. Even Yamamoto seemed a bit put off by him, though it was clear, too, that he was impressed. Charlie would have been more annoyed by the guy if he didn’t recognize something in his restlessness, an aspirational quality that seemed at odds with his confidence. He wasn’t one of the prep schoolers from Exeter or Andover. He was from the West, like him. Probably not California. There was a Rocky Mountain drift to his vowels. Plus he had a way about him—an eagerness, cool for not giving a shit whether it was cool or not—that suggested he’d spent his life dreaming about going to a college like Middlebury and was determined to squeeze every last drop he could out of it.

The beautiful girl sitting on the other side of the guy’s desk must have seen something in him too, because she introduced herself after class. Charlie eavesdropped while zipping up his backpack. Sabina, she introduced herself as—though Charlie already knew her name. Sabina Gonzales was one of those goddesses who, miraculously, also seem to be warm and approachable and friendly to mortals. They’d made a kind of altar to her in the bathroom on Charlie’s hall, her class picture taped to the mirror above the sink. The graffiti surrounding it was more chaste than obscene: a couple marriage proposals, a cartoon wolf with an enormous heart trampolining from his chest, the poignant You Give Me Hope to Carry On that nobody would own up to.

The know-it-all stayed to chat with Dr. Yamamoto while he erased his notes from the board, and Charlie deliberately lagged in the hall, waiting by the stairs. He couldn’t say why he wanted to meet the boy so much. It was an instinctive thing, a vague tingling promise, as if some of the boy’s galling confidence would rub off on him. In the three months he’d been at Middlebury, Charlie had met lots of fun, likable guys who enjoyed playing foosball or knew how to get a bottle cap off without an opener or maybe even whose favorite movie was A Clockwork Orange—but nobody Charlie could really talk to about things. He’d imagined college would be like it was in certain movies he’d seen, that he’d be staying up all night debating the existence of God, or at least doing inspired and memorable things, but so far it was just like high school. In some ways, in fact, it felt more like high school than high school itself. Kahlúa was humiliating enough, but Jell-O shots? Charlie had always assumed they were a hoax, like the left-handed Whopper. But no—they actually existed. Not that he didn’t like to get loaded; he just wanted to get loaded with brilliant, funny, exceptional people.

“Did you get that girl’s number?” Charlie asked the guy when he finally left class, feeling how supremely unexceptional a question this was. He’d rushed to catch up with him. The guy started a bit, as if surprised to be spoken to.

“She’s not really my type.”

“Not your type! She’s everyone’s type.”

The guy stopped to open the door. “I’m not sure that exists. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, Ingrid Bergman.”

Charlie followed him outside, the air numbing his face. What sort of kid made Ingrid Bergman references? Charlie had only a vague idea who she was. The December sky was flat and pitiless, so gray that looking at it felt like a kind of blindness. Recently the snow on the ground had melted a bit during a brief last gasp of fall and then frozen again overnight, turning every walkway on campus into a bobsled run. It was the season of the embarrassing injury. All over campus people were slipping and bruising their tailbones, sometimes worse. Charlie had already fallen twice, landing cartoonishly on his ass. It was so cold in the morning that he’d stopped showering before class, worried his wet hair would freeze into a helmet; he’d heard about a freshman who’d gone bald because an upperclassman had smacked his hair, shattering it clean off his head.

Now Charlie did something he hadn’t expected to do. He slipped on the ice again. Or rather, he pretended to slip, knowing that the guy from Yamamoto’s class would stop and help him up, that they’d be forced to shake hands. It was a freaky thing to do—he’d never pretended to fall before, even to meet a girl—but Charlie did it anyway.

Sure enough, the guy leaned down and helped him up, their breath merging into a single cloud. Charlie proceeded to be grateful. “You’ve got to watch out for the ice,” he said, brushing the snow off himself. “It’s a real pain in the wazoo.”

The guy smiled. “Did you just say ‘wazoo’?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“I’ve just never heard anyone say that before. In the wild.”

Charlie blushed. His mother was the one who said “wazoo” and “crumbum” and “har-dee-har”; for years Charlie had been trying to shed her influence, a kind of congenital dorkiness. But in this case it seemed to pique the know-it-all’s interest. He was suddenly looking at Charlie in a curious, attentive way. Often, years later, Charlie would credit the birth of their friendship to that fact that he’d used the word “wazoo” instead of “ass.”

“I just mean you’ve got to watch your step,” he said.

“I’m acquainted with ice. We’ve got plenty of it in Missoula.”

“You’re from Montana?”

The guy nodded.

“I go to Salish every summer,” Charlie said happily, unable to contain himself. “We’ve got a house on the lake. I mean, my parents do. My great-grandfather built it. I’ve been going there since I was a baby.” He stopped, realizing how this must sound. There’s a major trucking route in front of the house, he wanted to say, but that would only have sounded worse.

“My grandparents live near Jewel Basin. Not too far from there.”

“Amazing!” Charlie said, though his new acquaintance didn’t seem to find the connection particularly impressive. Perhaps he had deeper things on his mind. They introduced themselves, the guy presenting his name—Garrett—as if it were perfectly in tune with the Trips and Blakelys and Campbells they went to school with. Charlie hadn’t known how lost he felt on the sea of Eastern preppiness he’d been navigating for the past three months until he heard the Western homeliness of that name. It was like the sight of land on the horizon. They walked toward the dining hall, hunched together for warmth. It was so cold that you had to think about moving your lips when you talked. Garrett asked if he was planning to be a philosophy major.

“Are you kidding?” Charlie said. “I’m premed.”

“You want to be a doctor?”

“A cardiac anesthesiologist.”

Garrett laughed. “That’s very specific.”

“Well, I’m into saving people’s lives, but I don’t think I have the nerves to be a surgeon. Those guys are like the fighter pilots of medicine. It’s all about going into combat. I’m more of a, I don’t know, tactician. Plus I loved making potions as a kid.”

Garrett laughed again, perhaps assuming this was a joke. Charlie felt vaguely hurt. He asked Garrett what he wanted to major in.

“I’m thinking about a triple major, actually,” he said. “Philosophy, English, environmental studies.”

This time it was Charlie who laughed. Was he serious? Did triple majors even exist?

The trees around them had frozen into glass replicas of themselves, some of their branches glued to the ground. Charlie and Garrett passed a snowman that had been rained on overnight and then refrozen into a volcano. Just beyond it, the path slanted downhill at what was usually an inconsequential pitch, made harrowing now by a sheen of ice. The slope was long and ran all the way to the road; rather than imperil their lives, previous travelers had cut a bootleg trail through the snow.

Garrett stopped at the top of the hill for a second, as if taking in the view. Then, flashing Charlie a grin, he leapt flat-footed onto the slope, sliding down the iced-over path in his snow boots. He picked up speed, gradually at first and then more and more rapidly, managing somehow to stay upright, bending his knees and thrusting his arms behind him as if he were tucking down a ski jump. He barreled toward the road, where a line of cars had stopped at a traffic light. Charlie yelled out. He would crash! Split his head open and die! Garrett sailed toward the wall of traffic—Charlie bellowing now, sure he would smash his brains all over the road—but then Garrett sprang off the path at the last minute, arms outstretched like wings, and landed gracefully in the snow.

“Come on!” Garrett called up the hill. “It’s a blast!”

“No way!”

“It’s just like skiing!”

His face looked demented. It seemed impossible that this was the same guy just talking about Kierkegaard’s refutation of Hegelian determinism in class. Charlie was scared to do it but also knew that he’d look like a chickenshit if he didn’t. He was an accomplished skier, though only when he was on skis. Why did he want to impress Garrett so badly?

In the end, he did what he did when working up the courage to drop into a treacherous chute: he imagined that his body was on fire. Skiing downhill was the only way to put it out. He inched forward, one Sorel at a time, doing a kind of rehab shuffle until the path steepened and he found himself bending his knees and precipitously taking flight, sliding down the ice at a speed he hadn’t imagined possible without something strapped to his feet. The air froze his face, squeezing tears from his eyes even though he was laughing, savoring the pride of his own daring while realizing at the same time what a dumbass he was, that what he was doing was profoundly stupid, nothing to be proud of at all, possibly even a cry for help—I’m in college and I still say “wazoo”!—and yet he hurtled toward the road, whooping like an idiot.