This oafish pledge tried to talk to me, “What’s up, Victor!”
“Not really,” I told him as our shoulders hit.
“Huh,” he said, “What’s wrong, man?”
“Back out,” I snapped, or something like that—it’s not important. I cut through the bathroom on the way to Drake’s room. There was a chance—sure—that I could never have a relationship with Em and I could get sucked into just sitting in front of my computer screen, suckling off her thoughts like some helpless infant as Drake dribbled me her Google cookies and her scantly clad pictures. Was that what Drake wanted? What was he thinking? Did he think? Did he—
I kicked the bottom of Drake’s closed door with my running shoe. “Ahh! Shit!” The toenail of my big toe burned and throbbed at the base. “SHIT!” I opened the door and hobbled in. The room was empty and the casement was open on the drawn window letting sunlight finger over all his ridiculous slacker stuff that he left lying out all over the place. I looked at his computer. “I can still find it!” I told the empty room. I yanked the chair back and then I started to click his mouse but the thing fought me so I yanked it, pulled out the cord, threw it on the floor and stomped the shit out of that thing. There! That was better. I slumped at Drake’s black task chair with my chin in my palm. I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing but it came back to me. Drake had forced me into doing something wrong. He had raped me into doing it. And then he had ran off to class like some spineless coward. I could make things right by using Drake’s program to find my computer and email Em a listing of my own Google cookies. So that’s what I started doing:
babe forum, big boobs, mapquest, heartburn,
propecia, comma use, unstoppable confidence,
oil bath babes, flawless openers, nice legs,
text message game, driving directions…
But when I saw my own Google cookies, I had second thoughts. I was so pathetic—all boobs and Nietzschean, Will to Power bullshit. Pathetic. But, hey, fair was fair. I emailed her the list with my real address. As I walked out I saw the crushed pieces of the plastic mouse on the floor. The clock seemed like it was ticking now.
* * * * * *
I was walking back from a physics class, late that same afternoon, when Em called my cell.
“Hello,” I said.
“Are you good with computers?” she snapped.
Her question was so open-ended, so vague. My stomach sank. There was no logical way she could have connected anything to me or Drake. “Is something wrong with your computer?”
She sighed and something rustled in her background. “Are you good with them or not, Victor?”
“Uh, yah, they don’t, you know, cry or anything when I type with them…”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Bad joke. Bad joke. Abort! Abort! “I mean, I’m probably good enough with computers for whatever you need done.”
“So girls aren’t good with computers?”
I sighed. “What do you need done, Em?”
“It’s just locked up. Can you come to the House?”
“You mean the Omega house?” I felt my heartbeat as I walked through our main hallway with the phone smushed against my ear.
“Yah. Of course. What did you think I meant?” Something rustled on her end. “I need to get this straightened out soon. I’ve got this deadline.”
“Homework?” I asked.
“Something like that,” she said. “Can you come over in, like, the next fifteen minutes or so?”
“Yah,” I replied. “I can lend a hand… or, you know… or two.”
“Thanks, Victor. You’re so sweet,” she told me. “We’ve only got a little while before those bitches have their father/daughter dinner.”
“O—kay?” I drawled, suspiciously.
“See you soon!”—she made an exaggerated kissing sound, “Mmmmmuah!”
I headed upstairs to my room to drop off my bookbag. Like I mentioned earlier, my relationship with the Internet had had a renaissance after I met Em and found her pictures. My head buzzed with physics equations as I climbed the stairs and I felt that nagging pressure in my loins. It sounds absurd, but I felt the need to look at her before I went to see her. The strangeness of this gave me a moment of pause where I stood motionless in the center of our grey carpeted hallway. As I turned the corner to enter the Nerd Leg of our hallway and approach my room, I still had not decided if I would look at her before I went to see her. It didn’t matter. I was locked out of my own room. I pounded the door and tried the knob, “Wilfred! Are you in there?”
“Give me fifteen, Victor,” he mumbled.
He had set a time constraint. He wasn’t with a woman.
He was jerking-off with my computer… again. “You better not be using my files!”
“Chill,” he mumbled, “You casa, me casa.”
The thought of him sitting in that same chair climaxing to the same images I’d sought-out fought its way inside—images of Em, the girl I wanted for my girlfriend! “Gross! Fucking gross, Wilfred!” I turned to leave and saw Dubnicek rapping on his closed door:
“Let me in, Rex! Quit wasting time! I’m sick of this!”
“So Rex is becoming a bigger fan of the Internet, now, huh?” I asked Dubnicek.
Dubnicek leaned against the closed door and started talking without looking at me, “I actually have no idea what he’s doing in there. Nicodemus got him kicked out of the House.”
“So what’s he still doing here?” I asked.
“They’re letting him stay here until the spring semester ends. They’re afraid his parents will sue if they don’t.” Dubnicek looked down. “He’s not Alpha anymore.”
I looked at his right hand. It was bare. “Wow, Dubnicek! You got your cast off. That’s cool.”
“What?” He turned his head to me. “Yeah…” his irritated expression flattened, “let’s drop it, Victor.”
“What?” I asked.
He looked back at the closed door. He pounded.
Rex opened the door. He was in a red bathrobe and his hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in days.
“How’s it going, buddy?” Dubnicek asked.
Rex shrugged.
“Still not talking?”
He shrugged and looked over blankly at me.
Seeing him so down, I felt myself experiencing a sudden change of heart.
“Rex,” I said. “I understand you must feel like crap right now—”
Dubnicek leered at me suspiciously and clenched my shoulder. “Victor—”
“But, Rex,” I continued, “this fraternity was founded by rebels over a hundred years ago. In between then and now there’s been a lot of complacency. Maybe this disrespect explosion of yours will start something new again. Maybe, in that sense, you’re the truest Alpha of us all.”
He made me the slightest smile. It seemed almost as if he began sifting through the seeds of some entirely new scheme.
“You—ah,” I hesitated. “You take chances with your relationships with women. That’s something I probably need to do more.”
I headed back toward the stairwell to start my walk to the Omega house.
Outside, the sun shone warm and golden through leafy, yellow-green treetops. The sidewalks were littered with cut blades of their freshly-edged overgrowth of lush, pungent crabgrass. Birds chirped. Lovers with bouncing, textbook-filled backpacks walked back to their Greek houses. I was miserable. Em wasn’t going to put-out for me as well as her pictures would; I just knew it. Then, a thought struck me: what if Drake’s program had caused the problem with Em’s computer and this was a trap?
The Omega house was only a couple blocks away and it had a wide, red brick walkway that met the sidewalk. Some Epsilons crossed the street from their front yard toward this walkway. They wore cargo shorts and flip flops and matching, camouflage tank tops. They bantered as they cut through the Omega’s green, trim grass to circle around the back. Some Greek thing, like a pledge class function be
tween Omegas and Epsilons, must have been going on. The Omega’s house had an impressive three-story white façade with cherrywood trim, three huge dormers and a recessed spire which was topped with an impressive wrought iron weathervane.
When I got to the door I wrapped the French door’s large sliver knocker. I did it boldly, three times. Then—feeling a little silly—I discovered the doorbell and pressed it.
A pretty redhead answered the door. She was accompanied by a lovely and stout brunette. They were both in evening wear and I assumed that this was for some event, though, probably unrelated to the camouflage Epsilons I’d seen a second ago. The receiving room was painted white with a high ceiling which dangled a twelve-armed, golden filigree chandelier. Behind them, a mahogany pedestal table displayed a glass vase brimming with long-stem tulips and behind that a beige staircase swept up to the second level. To my right, I could hear the headphones of a maid’s cassette walkman. They buzzed with something like ranchera as this dark-haired, dark-complexioned woman stood inside the well-appointed, off-white Victorian guest room wrapping her vacuum cleaner’s cord around her elbow in quick, measured strokes.
“Did you use the knocker?” the redhead said, somewhat haughtily.
“Yes,” I said, “But it’s cool. I found the doorbell so I’m not pressing charges.”
“Is this your first time here?” the brunette accused while studying me.
“Yes,” I said as I stepped inside the receiving alcove. “It is.” The place smelled like pepperoni pizza.
“Don’t you like us?” the redhead inquired with a sheepish grin.
“I like you fine. I’m just a busy man is all.”
“Enough,” the brunette declared, “Are you a Roger Penson or not?”
“A what?” I asked.
They looked at each other and then burst into laughter.
“Are you a Roger Penson?” she continued, impatiently, “Are you going to wash our dishes?”
“A Roger Penson?” I asked. We went back and forth like this several more times. I didn’t want to seem needy or anxious so I indulged them. Apparently, Roger Penson was an actual person who had been hired-on to wash the Omega’s dishes after suppers. I couldn’t figure out why they kept referring to him as ‘a Roger Penson’ as if he was one of a set of Roger Pensons because they also spoke of him as if he were a unique person.
“Who are you here to see?” the redhead asked.
“Emily Green-Portsmith,” I said.
The brunette cackled. “Emily Green-Portsmith?” she asked, dubiously, “…esquire?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “I’m not sure how a woman can be an esquire but, sure, Emily Green-Portsmith, esquire. Whatever.”
“Is Miss Green-Portsmith expecting you?” the redhead asked.
“Yah, she wants me to help her with her computer.”
The two girls looked at each other. “Eeeeew,” the redhead cooed. “He has an excuse!”
“What’s your name, buddy?” the brunette asked, pointing at me.
“Victor Hastings,” I said. “Are you two drunk?”
The girls looked at each other. The brunette lifted her hand toward the swept beige staircase. “Right this way, the Victor Hastings.”
“Thanks,” I said. They parted from each other and giggled. I walked between them toward the staircase, still wondering if they were drunk. Girls were strange.
The hallway felt a little too pristine and vibrant for my liking. It was this well-lit, blue-on-white, paisley-wallpapered contrivance to help sell other sororities their hallways. A door opened and a tall woman in a pink bathrobe and towel-wrapped hair emerged. “Aw!” she shrieked and playfully placed hands high and low across her fully-clothed body, “You saw me!”
“Yes I did,”—I pointed at her—“Gotcha! Hey, can you tell me which one is Emily Green-Portsmith’s?”
“Which one?” she asked. “Hmm, which one?” She pressed a finger into her temple to think hard. “It’s the three-man room at the end of the hallway.” She pointed and found the empty, open door with her eyes. “You know? the one we all imagine with a big line of boys coming out of it,” she added with a sprinkle of vengeance.
I looked to the empty doorframe with her. “It is, huh.”
“Sorry,” she remarked as she passed.
I walked to Em’s doorframe and knocked on her door.
“Come in,” she said. The room was dimly lit with halogen torches and desk lights. She hunched forward on a director’s chair at a combination desktop and shelving unit. Emily and her roommates’ stuff were all mixed together over the floor. It was messy yet clean. Every empty Diet Coke can had its own vintage glass coaster resting beneath it. High school yearbooks and dead rose arrangements lay scattered across aqua carpet. A cappuccino machine burbled and hissed on her desktop and, on the floor, past the yearbooks and flowery mess, lay a row of colorful thongs.
She stabbed a key on her keyboard, winced and pecked forward, “It won’t…”
“What’s the problem,” I said. I walked behind her and placed a hand across her shoulder blades to see if that shit would fly.
She startled and turned back to look at me.
I broke the contact.
“It’s got all these programs running,” she said. “I almost got them all to stop. I tried the control-alt-delete thingy but it locked-up, again.”
“Is there another chair in here?” I asked.
“No,” she said and started getting up. “Here,” she invited me to sit in her chair and she moved to the futon behind us.
I sat there for a while and thought. I hit a few keys to ensure the futility. Yep, futile. “I’m going to have to hit your computer’s reset switch.”
“Hello?” she said. “Hi…”
I turned back. She was on her cell phone! I tried to get her to look at me so she could see my disgust. It was useless. She was in another realm. A wiser man would have got up and left right then. But, this wiser man—he wouldn’t have spent numerous hours downloading sexy pictures of her, either… nope.
“What’s up Steve!” she said. “No, we left right after that. I keep, I keep telling you: she’s no good for you.” She folded over and cozyed up to herself, “Aww, you’re just my baby, aren’t you?”
“Emily,” I interrupted, “Em!”
She looked up. “Yah—oh—one second, Steve. What?”
“I’m gonna have to hit your reset switch. You could lose anything you haven’t saved.”
“What?” she snapped at me in a huff, “I didn’t sabotage my own computer, Okay Victor?”
“Ah… chill, Em. I didn’t say anything about that.”
So, I did what I said I would; I fixed her computer. I hit the reset, then I hit F8 while the thing was booting-up to take me into her BIOs, then I went into safe-mode, then I used the system restore to restore back to an earlier date, then I deleted some foreign executables that had managed to remain in her directory. Only these weren’t typical spyware stuff. Some of the executables had names that I recognized from campus such as mascots and football quarterbacks and the like.
“You’re under-siege,” I told her (feeling guilty since I knew Drake had made one of those executables). “It looks like a bunch of guys from campus are trying to steal pictures from your computer before you even upload them to MySpace.”
She broke free of a brown-dress-shoe conversation with her older brother. “Oh…” she gave a nonchalant glance, “shit, I knew that, Victor.” She grinned. “You can’t blame them for being anxious, can you?”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Hold on a second, k,” she told her brother, “I got a beep.”
I glanced over my shoulder to say something else to her. She spread out a little on her black futon in her short blue shorts and her red T-shirt which had this pink screen print that said ‘Smooch me… I’m Epsilon!’
“Yah,” she agreed, separating her glossy black hair into strands, “you can lose a shit-load of
weight eating bagels instead of cereal…” Her long, bronze legs couldn’t decide between athleticism or the epitome of femininity. Their indecision transfixed me and even more so as they moved and I saw those pointy, delicate knees. If I could make those legs mine, somehow—more than just touching them. I wasn’t sure entering her would be enough. I needed to block-out a few hours for her kisses. But that was the brink of craziness. So I broke the mental-thread and practiced a little imaginary algebra in my head—terms division mostly—everyone’s got their tricks.
“Cool. No, cool. No, we’ll do it,” she told her phone. “K, bye.” She looked up to me and hunched her shoulders with excitement. “Is it fixed?”
“Yah,” I said, “all fixed.”
She jumped up and clapped. “Awesome!” She sashayed toward me. “Guess what, Victor?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What?”
“Fine.” She pouted. “Don’t guess. I’ll show you.”
Her boobs brushed my back and that lilac perfume washed over as her maimed hand rested over mine in an attempt to commandeer the mouse. Her injured fingers were soft and warm. “Here,” she pealed my hand off the mouse, “let me drive.”
“Drive where?” I asked.
“You’ll see.” She took us to the Sports-n-Looks website. And there it was at the top of the site’s entrance page, the picture of her doing the Frogman on my messy frat-room floor where she had looked back over her shoulder at the camera and winked.
Growing Up Wired Page 22