Jupiter
After some serious sweet-talking, I somehow convinced the school to let me into Haggett Hall early. I had to stay in a hotel the first night while they got it ready, which ate up a huge chunk of money, but they gave me a single dorm, which rocked socks! It only took me two hours to unpack my case, since I hadn’t really brought much, but I had a feeling it would eventually fill up with stuff as that’s how life usually goes.
Although the building was a little dated, it was still infinitely better than back home. I didn’t realize what having an average home, well, average for seventy-five hundred other students like myself, would do to my insides but that was the point, wasn’t it? University of Washington was a clean slate for me. No one would know about my place back in Florida. No one would have to know anything about me that I didn’t want them to. Do I not want people to know about the people I love, though?
It was with that sudden thought I realized I was no longer embarrassed by my silly family, nor that I cared what anyone thought about me anymore. Watching Ezra, and sometimes even Kai, showed me that ninety-nine percent of being cool was owning what you loved and not giving a damn what people thought. When you show you don’t care, people start to accept what you are. It’s crazy to think about, but it’s true.
I dug through a drawer at the desk that held the laptop Frankie gave me and found the only album of pictures I’d brought with me, then proceeded to tack random images of my family, my house, and my friends with me and Frankie, all over the board against the desk backing.
I studied a picture of Frankie and me, then one of myself and Mercury, and felt sick to my stomach. I missed them so much. I grabbed a handful of quarters, locked my door, and studied the key on my way down to the pay phones. Having my own place felt so strange. I was going to live alone, in a strange, foreign place, and the only person I knew there shattered my heart in a million pieces in Chicago.
I fought back the tears, refusing to let them fall. I needed to be strong for myself. I wrapped my cardigan tighter around my arms, feeling the nip of fall already and beginning to wonder what the hell I was thinking going to a school in the northwest.
I slipped four quarters into the old, dilapidated-looking pay phone and clicked out my home phone number. It rang and rang and rang but no one answered. I allowed three tears to slip down my cheeks but stopped myself there. I hung up the phone and the machine ate my quarters. Two more tears came, but I refused to allow any more. I stuck another dollar worth of quarters into the slot and dialed Frank.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Frankie’s House of Frankfurters!” she greeted.
“Frank?” I sobbed into the phone.
“Oh, cheese and crackers! Jupiter! What’s wrong, sweetie?”
I mumbled something unintelligible, trying to suck back tears, only they didn’t care and came anyway.
“Honey,” she interrupted, “I literally don’t have a clue what you’re saying. Take a deep breath.”
I did as I was told. “I don’t have a phone.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Right,” I remembered. “I’m in Seattle.”
“That was fast. You weren’t supposed to be there for a few days.”
I began to sob again. Frankie waited for me to collect myself.
“Please deposit fifty cents,” I heard over the receiver.
I stuck another dollar and two quarters in the coin slot.
“Ezra is an arsehole.”
Frankie paused then harumphed.
“He is!”
“Okay,” she said, “how?”
“His cousin bet that he could get me in the sack by the end of our Chicago visit.”
“That guy is the arsehole.”
I hitched a breath. “And Ezra bet that he could seal the deal before his cousin could.”
Frankie paused for several long seconds. “That doesn’t sound like Ezra, Jupiter.”
“Well, believe it. It happened.”
Frankie’s bed squeaked as if she’d been lying down then leapt up. “Did Ezra try to explain himself?”
“What? No! I wasn’t going to stick around there to listen to his sorry excuses!”
Frankie took a deep breath. “Okay, well, I can understand that.” But I could tell that wasn’t all she wanted to say.
“Spit it out, Frank.”
“Well,” she hesitantly sang, “I wouldn’t go jumping to conclusions just yet.” I scoffed. “Listen, listen, listen. I’m just saying boys do a lot of stupid crap and almost none of it they mean to do. They’re a lot of talk.”
“Frank!”
“Listen, I’m just saying, if he comes around, hear what he has to say. If he doesn’t have a plausible excuse, then kick his ass to the curb, babe.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“What?” she asked.
“You!” I said. “Willing to give a boy the benefit of the doubt while he tried to explain himself for something that is pretty skeevy.”
“I know. Trust me, I’m the last person I thought who’d be saying this, but I know Ezra Brandon and he’s a lot of things, but skeevy boy is not one of them.”
I sniffled. “I’m so mad at him, though, that I don’t even want to listen to what he has to say.”
“I get it. So let him stew in his own guilt for a few days before hearing him out, just promise me you’ll hear him out, at least.”
I paused, unwilling to concede. Finally, I sighed. “Fine.”
“Good. I love you, baby butter billy goat.”
“Love you too, wittle woolly wombat.”
She snorted. “You’re an idiot.”
“Please, billy goat? They always look like they’ve smoked a bunch of weed!”
“Whatever! At least billy goats are cute!”
I acted offended. “Excuse me? Baby wombats are friggin adorable!”
“Fine. Bye. I love you.”
“Bye. Love you too.”
I hung up the phone and swiped my palms beneath my eyes. I didn’t want to cry again for the rest of the day and promised myself I wouldn’t. I decided to head back up to my dorm to grab my bag. I needed a few things for the room that I hadn’t anticipated. Like, a mop and broom? The room had tile in it and I suspected it’d been swept, but it definitely had not been cleaned. I also wanted to buy a rug because I couldn’t imagine putting my feet on cold tile in the dead of winter.
I would have looked up the nearest thrift store on my phone, but that wasn’t going to happen for painfully obvious and really inconvenient reasons. Instead, I tried getting directions the old-fashioned way. By talking to a person. Gasp! I know.
I walked around the campus, half familiarizing myself, half enjoying the walk, and stumbled across a man in a blazer with elbow patches. I took a shot in the dark.
“Professor!” I shouted, and he turned around. Score!
“Sorry, I’m looking for a thrift store around here. Would you know where I could find one?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just head that way down the path. You’ll hit Fifteenth. Look for Forty-Third then walk two blocks until you get to University. There should be a thrift-type store there, I think.”
“Thanks!” I told him with a smile and set on my way.
There was a thrift store on University named the Nifty Thrifty. It had this old-school sign, probably from the fifties or so, and it was so.freaking.cool.! When I opened the door, it had a recorded chime that rang out, “You go, girl!” and that made me laugh, and then for some reason, also think of Ezra so I started to cry, and then I started to laugh again at my own idiocy.
“Are you okay?” a clerk asked, a witness to my Kathy Bates in Misery moment, no doubt.
I cleared my throat and wiped my eyes dry. “Yes, I’m fine, thanks.”
I grabbed a shopping cart from the five they had available and started perusing the quirky, narrow aisles barely big enough to fit one cart. Since Ezra hadn’t let me pay my part in gas, I had a little bit of money left over in my budget, even after my bus fare and the hotel stay. I felt the tears begin again at the thought of his generosity and cursed myself. Steeling myself yet again, I pushed the cart forward. I had no intention of spending every dollar I had left from the savings, but I did intend to make my dorm as comfortable as possible. I needed it to feel like home or I was never going to last.
There was a large rainbow-colored braided rag rug for seven dollars, and I thought it was great. I rolled it up and put it in my cart, along with an ancient Paramount desk phone circa 1930s because I had no intention of calling people on the pay phone anymore, and my dorm had a phone outlet. I asked the clerk I’d wigged out earlier in front of if I could plug it into theirs to see if it worked and it did. I snatched that up for four bucks along with a framed poster of Kurt Cobain smoking a cigarette that someone had taken a set of watercolors to, to make their own, I guess. It was pretty rad.
I was browsing the framed images when my eye spotted one of a UFO print that made me laugh. It was only three bucks so I threw that in. I got a huge black-and-white medallion tapestry I planned on tacking up in lieu of wallpaper for the wall next to my bed. They even had a mop still in its original box, though a little beat up, but I didn’t care, it was still a new mop. They didn’t have a broom, but I figured I could get one later.
I scored a big blue velvet curtain for the window with a rod, an industrial copper-esque floor lamp I had the perfect corner for since the light in the room was pretty crappy, and a couple more little tchotchkes. I didn’t spend more than a hundred dollars, which I was particularly proud of, but I also didn’t think about how I was going to get all my stuff back to Haggett.
Fortunately for me, the store’s owner, Aida, did free deliveries. I asked if she’d deliver me too, to which she laughed and told me it was no problem. She was a bad ace. When she dropped my goods and me off at my dorm, I thanked her and dragged everything to my room. I set to work right away to distract myself from how lonely I felt and how empty all the other dorm rooms were. The first thing I did after I mopped the floor was hook the phone up and call Frankie just to get the number that popped up on her phone. Then I called my family again and this time they picked up. Mercury was out, but I talked to both Mom and Dad and tried to act as cheery as possible, finishing by giving them my dorm number. Trying to explain what happened to my cell would have been difficult, so I lied and told them I misplaced it. Eventually I knew I would have to replace it, but I had no idea when or how, really.
I washed the curtain, tapestry, and braid rug in three washers and dryers since no one was around to complain and around five that night, when I was done putting up all my new-to-me stuff, I looked around the room and for the first time since Chicago felt somewhat secure. I knew it was only a matter of time before the dorm really felt like home. I needed to tough it out.
I took a deep breath, lugged my shower stuff to the showers, and proceeded to clean the day off. In the cold, cubed alcove, with the flimsy curtain, and room-temperature water, I felt what happened between Ezra and me bubble up to the surface, but this time I couldn’t stop it. It was too powerful to convince so I let myself feel the pain that needed to be felt.