Cum Laude

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  The pimply guy behind the counter stared her up and down. He was probably wondering why he’d never laid eyes on her before. She was kind of hard to miss.

  “I only have a dollar,” she told him boldly. “But I don’t want to spend it.” She was fond of getting away with murder. It was her favorite sport.

  “That’s okay,” the guy responded, staring moronically at her chest. He dragged his palms across the green fabric of his apron. “What can I get for you?”

  She glanced up at the board again, searching for the most expensive beverage they offered. “I’ll take a venti mocha cappuccino thingy with lots of whipped cream and chocolate powder and a couple extra shots of espresso. And give me one of those chocolate biscotti cookies too, please. Oh, and make sure you use fair trade coffee.”

  The guy’s pimply cheeks turned pink. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fair trade.’ It’s okay if you can’t pay for it.”

  She stared at him, enraged. How hard was it to know what was going on in the world? How hard was it to use your mind? “You sell coffee but you don’t know what fair trade means?” she demanded with disgust. “And they call this a liberal arts college. Who grew that coffee? Who picked it? Who’s profiting here?” She blinked her feathery black eyelashes angrily. “I’m still in high school, but I can guarantee you that I’m going to college someplace where people know what’s what. Maybe not even in this fucking country!”

  The boy blinked mutely back at her, obviously depressed that he’d dropped so miserably low in her supreme estimation. “Do you still want your mochaccino?” he asked timidly. “I’ll throw in an extra biscotti.”

  “Fine. Sure.” Fair trade or not, she really did want the coffee.

  She turned her back as the guy fussed with the machinery. Afternoon sun flooded into the Student Union through a giant wall of glass facing the road. Adam tooted his horn and she waved at him, waggling the fingers of her left hand to indicate that she’d be back in the car in five minutes, tops.

  Adam was such a loser. In two days he’d be starting college at Dexter as a day student. Dexter, of all places! So what that it gave Maine residents discounted tuition? So what that it rated up there with the Ivies and had a brand-new Starbucks café? So what that it had been selected as 1992’s Prettiest New England College by both USA Today and Yankee magazine? Adam could have gone to California or Colorado or Florida or the Sorbonne, in France. Even U-Maine Orono—where most of Home High’s college-bound graduates went—would have been ten times more interesting. Orono was far enough away that he would have had to live in a dorm. He would have been able to eat nonorganic, artery-clogging, delicious dining hall food. And she could have left Home to visit him.

  Dexter prided itself on being part of the community and encouraged Maine residents to apply. Because Adam had graduated from high school with honors, Dexter had given him a free ride, but due to the housing squeeze, it had fallen short of providing him with a room. He would be a day student and continue to live at home. This was fine with him. He hadn’t even signed up for the freshman orientation trip, claiming that it was too expensive. “I know where I am,” he’d insisted. “I don’t need any orientation.”

  In truth, Adam had no idea where he was. He was eighteen years old and bursting with potential. He liked to read and play tetherball. He could pick a shitload of blueberries. He could weld. He could shear a sheep. But he’d lived every one of his eighteen years with a sense of detachment that frustrated him. When would he start to live, full throttle? When would he begin to engage with his surroundings? Even the Dexter College campus, which had existed prettily in the background throughout his entire life, felt strange and menacing. He felt as if he were seeing it for the first time. The buildings were pristine. The grass was green. The chapel was as white as his car had probably been when it was new, long before his time. He was about to spend the next four years of his life here, patrolling these green lawns, attending seminars in these immaculate brick buildings, or concerts and lectures in the quaint white chapel, but right now he was too terrified to even get out of the car. Tragedy was right, he was a pansy.

  Adam tapped lightly on the horn, but he doubted his sister could hear him. The glass walls of the new Student Union were incredibly thick, built to withstand the frigid temperatures of the long Maine winter.

  The guy behind the counter was still grinding, filtering, and steaming. Tragedy was about to inform him that she could have flown to Guatemala, picked her own coffee, milked a fucking cow, and baked a batch of biscotti herself by this time, when the door to the bathroom swung open and a guy with a blond beard wandered into the café. He wore a black parka, maroon Dexter sweatpants, and old work boots. A thick book was clutched in his grease-streaked hands. He looked young and old at the same time, as if he’d been through a lot and didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Shit,” he muttered as he walked by.

  “Hey!” the guy behind the counter called out. “Hey man, I told you yesterday. You’re not supposed to use the bathroom unless you’re a student or a customer.”

  Ignoring him, the bearded man pushed open the glass door and stepped out into the sun.

  “How do you know he’s not a student?” Tragedy demanded. “He’s wearing Dexter sweatpants.”

  The guy placed an enormous cup of coffee on the shiny black countertop, squirted a dollop of whipped cream on top, and sprinkled it with cocoa powder before securing the lid.

  “We only opened a few days ago and that guy’s been in here every day to use the bathroom. He never buys anything. He’s always wearing the same clothes. He always looks a little dirty and acts a little weird. He’s no student.” He slipped a cardboard sleeve around the cup and handed it to her. “One venti mocha cap with two shots and two biscotti,” he announced, pushing the cellophane-wrapped cookies across the counter. He winked. “No charge.”

  The coffee weighed a ton. Tragedy grabbed the cookies and tucked them into her back pocket. “You tell your bosses the next time I’m in here I want to see some fair trade fucking coffee,” she reminded him.

  The bearded man was sitting on a bench in a sunny spot outside the Student Union, reading his book.

  “Hey,” she greeted him. “I’m Tragedy. What’s your name?”

  He looked up, his gigantic light blue eyes staring without seeing. His face and hands were dirty, and he was younger than she had first thought, but older than her brother was. His parka had a feather-oozing gash in the chest and must have been hotter than hell. The book in his hands was Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. She recognized the erupting volcano on its cover from a 60 Minutes episode she’d watched one Sunday night. The report was all about why Scientology was so appealing to celebrities, who tended to have “lifestyle problems.” The Church of Scientology encouraged fucked-up people to delve into their pasts and “audit” their shitty memories or “engrams” to get “clear.” The thing was, you had to pay them to do the auditing because, goodness knows, delving into your past is not something you should try on your own at home. Just another totally wack concept brought to you by the modern world of Planet Starbucks.

  The guy was still staring at her. Or staring through her. She didn’t mind. At least he wasn’t staring at her boobs.

  “Patrick,” he said finally. “Pink Patrick.”

  “Here.” She offered him the mochaccino. As with everything, now that she had it, she didn’t really want it. “Take this too,” she said, handing him a biscotti. “Sorry, the other one’s for my brother.”

  Pink Patrick tore open the wrapper with his teeth and devoured the biscotti.

  “Fuck it,” she said, and handed him the second one. Adam wasn’t hungry, not like this guy. The dude in the café was probably right. He wasn’t a student.

  Adam observed the proceedings from across the road. He didn’t like the guy’s ripped parka or how he was talking to his sister without looking at her. He didn’t like his beard or his dirty boots. He didn’t like how she’d given him all her food,
especially not after she’d taken so much trouble to procure it. He tooted the horn again.

  The bearded guy shot to his feet and lunged toward the car. “Hey! What’s your problem?” he shouted as he stormed across the road. “Is there a problem?”

  Adam locked the door. His window was wide open, but he didn’t want to roll it up for fear of pissing the guy off even further. He started the engine, revving the gas pedal with what he hoped was a menacing roar. There were crumbs in the guy’s beard and his blue eyes were round and fierce. He looked like Kris Kristofferson on crystal meth.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Tragedy called out as she sauntered across the road to the car. “That’s just my brother, Adam. He’s harmless.” She opened the passenger door. “Hey, want a ride?” she asked the bearded guy.

  “Jesus.” Adam let his head fall back against the headrest, resigning himself. The guy was either going to hurl that huge cup of steaming hot coffee in his face, scarring him for life, or he was going to get into the backseat and ride with them for a mile or so before bashing their heads in with his boots.

  “No thanks.” The guy turned abruptly and walked up the road, away from town.

  Tragedy got in and pulled her door shut. She picked up her Rubik’s cube and swizzled it around. “I got you a cookie but I gave it away. Guy was fucking starving. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that hungry.”

  Adam let the car coast in a free fall down the hill toward town. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty. “Guy was nuts,” he said.

  Patrick carried the coffee into the parking lot across the road from his old dorm. Even though it served no actual purpose, Buildings and Grounds kept the grass surrounding the lot neatly mowed. He circled the tidy, green perimeter, headed for the depression in the lot’s far corner, one of his favorite resting spots. He liked to stretch out in the sun in that particular grassy dimple, obscured from the road and the rest of campus by the cars in the lot. But today a black Mercedes sedan was parked at an awkward angle, half in the lot and half in the grass. The car bore Connecticut plates and a Greenwich beaches parking sticker. It was the car he’d learned to drive on, and it was in his spot.

  “Shit,” Patrick swore, about to turn and run. After all these years they’d finally come after him. Then he noticed the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. His parents hadn’t smoked when he lived at home, and it was doubtful they’d taken it up since then. He moved closer to the car and put his nose up against the driver’s-side window. Gum wrappers and cassettes littered the passenger seat, along with a rumpled white Greenwich Academy sweatshirt.

  The door was unlocked. Patrick slid in behind the wheel and put his coffee in one of the cup holders between the seats. Closing the door, he sank back into the cushiony tan leather. The car smelled stale and sweet. He touched the steering wheel with his fingertips. It was hot.

  Shipley had been nine years old when he left for boarding school. Whenever he got kicked out, he’d return home for a brief stint before moving on to yet another school. But even as the years passed, he still thought of his sister as that nine-year-old girl, dutifully setting the table, a headband in her blond hair. Her fingernails were clean, she chewed with her mouth closed, she wore a tutu. How could anyone be that good all the time? She was fourteen when his family dropped him off at Dexter. She wore braces and dangly earrings, but she was still good. And she seemed frightened of him, as if his complete disinterest in pleasing anyone else would somehow rub off on her, cause her to miss the school bus.

  Was it possible that Shipley was now at Dexter?

  He removed a cigarette from the half-empty pack and lit it with the little yellow lighter that was tucked inside.

  The summer he was sixteen, he’d gone on an Outward Bound hiking trip in the Canyonlands of Utah. The group consisted of seven kids between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, three other guys, three girls, plus two trip leaders who were both male and in their twenties. He was the only kid whose parents had paid for the trip. The others had been sent as an alternative to juvenile detention or drug rehab, and their tuition was subsidized. His sister was up in Vermont at sleepaway camp, learning to ride horses and shoot a bow and arrow. She’d begged their parents to go. He hadn’t made any plans at all. So there he was, in Utah.

  “Let’s gather around in a circle,” one of the leaders said on that first morning, after a van had dropped them off in the middle of some dusty nowhere and they’d strapped on their packs and hiked for a few miles. Except for the provisions that had been distributed evenly among them, Patrick’s pack was empty. Outward Bound had sent a list of what to bring, but he’d left his bag on the plane. He was totally unequipped. He didn’t even have a toothbrush.

  “We’re going to do a little get-to-know-you exercise,” the leader explained. He wore a pair of Smith ski goggles on his head even though it was summer.

  “Just say your name and then the first thing that comes into your head,” the leader continued. “We’ll start with you first.” He smiled at a skinny girl with bruised shins.

  She squirmed around a little before speaking up. “I’m Colleen. I steal.”

  The leader nodded like that was good news. He pointed at the next kid.

  “I’m Roy. I’m jonesing.” Roy had a red mohawk.

  The leader pointed at Patrick.

  “I’m Patrick.” He told them. “Pink Patrick.”

  The entire group howled with laughter, leaders included.

  “Motherfucking faggot!” Colleen shrieked, covering her mouth with her gold-ringed hands.

  After that he was Pink Patrick for good. On the second night of the trip, he hitched his pack onto his shoulders and started walking. No one followed him. They were too busy playing I Spy and Concentration.

  He walked through the desert for an entire night and all the next day without eating or drinking anything. It was hot. He was wearing jeans. His eyelids and tongue were swollen and heavy. Finally he reached an Indian reservation—a group of trailers and RVs with pieces of Astroturf cut to fit around them like lawns. An overweight Indian smoking a cigarette in a plastic lawn chair outside an RV stood up and handed him his half-empty can of Tab. Patrick gulped it down, feeling it burn the lining of his stomach with its fizzy brownness. He waited on the piece of Astroturf while the Indian went inside. He came out and handed Patrick a package of Oscar Meyer thick cut bacon. And that’s what he ate that day—raw bacon and Tab—until he made it back to Moab and got a bus home.

  His parents were on a cruise in the Greek Isles, so he hid out in Greenwich for a whole month, lying beneath the sprinklers out on the lawn, letting the water tickle his tongue. When they came home, they didn’t want to know anything about what had happened. All they knew was his dirty laundry was all over the floor, he’d drunk everything in the liquor cabinet, and the kitchen was a disaster. His sister came home from camp looking happy and suntanned, with a wristful of lanyard bracelets. Soon after that he’d left for another boarding school. He was never home much.

  Patrick reached for the warm coffee and took a sip. It tasted like a hot fudge sundae made with coffee ice cream. It was blended heaven, better than anything he’d ever tasted.

  Dexter’s overnight orientation trip had been much the same. He’d introduced himself as Pink Patrick just to see how everyone would react. Of course they laughed, and then they avoided him. He’d requested a single in Coke, so when they got back to campus he kept to himself. Those first few weeks he tried to go to class, but he couldn’t see the point. He felt like he was standing outside a fish tank watching a busy school of fish. They just kept on swimming.

  Since leaving school he’d been as far as Miami, but he always circled back to Dexter again. He liked Maine’s extreme weather, its rugged shoreline, its endless greenery, and its relatively tolerant population. No one minded a loner like him. Plus, it was always easy to find food or grab a shower and some clean clothes on campus. But he always had that nagging feeling that he was waiting f
or something.

  He took another sip of the warm, sweet coffee. Maybe this was it.

  3

  It’s often said that the best way to strengthen a relationship is to go camping. The simple tasks of choosing the campsite, unpacking the supplies, setting up the tent, gathering firewood, preparing and cooking the food, and washing the dishes allow each person to demonstrate their strengths and encourage teamwork. At the end of the day, when the coals are dying and each member of the group is snuggled up in their warm sleeping bag under a starlit sky, they can congratulate each other on a job well done, feeling grateful that they were not alone to conquer the elements.

  “Keep looking,” Tom commanded as Nick scrambled around on his hands and knees. Before leaving them to fend for themselves for the night, Professor Rosen had split the group in two. The three girls in pink Dexter T-shirts were on one side of the river while Tom, Nick, Shipley, and Eliza were on the other. As soon as she’d dropped them off, Professor Rosen had disappeared into the woods with her sleeping bag, promising to come back for them at daybreak.

  Shipley and Eliza put themselves in charge of setting up camp and sent the boys to collect firewood. Tom was really jacked up about it. He snapped a thin twig in half with his hands and tossed it onto their measly pile. “Come on, man, before it gets dark.”

  Nick wasn’t at all sure he would survive the night, let alone a whole year, living with this brute. He sneezed four times in quick succession and wiped his nose and eyes on his shirt. “Any special wood we should be looking for?” He assumed Tom knew all sorts of manly stuff about which wood burns the longest and the cleanest.

  “Fuck if I know.” Tom peeled a skinny green branch off a nearby bush. “I’m from Westchester.”

  Nick pressed his lips together in a determined half smile and tried to maintain his usual sunny outlook. Life at boarding school often fosters a hunger for philosophical exploration. The Berkshire School in Massachusetts, from which Nick had graduated in June, went so far as to offer a course called Adventures in Eastern Philosophical Concepts. The Tao of Pooh and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were required reading. “Everything is an analogy.” “When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret: Life is Fun.” It was Nick’s favorite course.