by Steve Bloom
“Excuse me,” I say. Pushing her into the lobby as our door compartment passes it, I continue revolving without her. Back outside on the red carpet, I dart after Shelby, who’s giving her ticket to a different parking guy.
“Shelby!” I gasp. “What happened?”
She turns and looks at me, her impossible beauty marred with little streaks of makeup that somehow make her even more must-have-able. “I just broke up with Tommy!”
I erupt into a huge smile. Another auspicious omen. Tonight the impediments to consummation are coming down fast and furious. It’s clear sailing, all systems go, full speed ahead. Shelby dries her tears with a crumpled cocktail napkin that has Cassie’s initials embossed in gold letters on it.
“I know he’s deeply shallow, but Tommy was my first real boyfriend,” she sniffles adorably. “This is an extremely traumatic moment for me.”
“There, there, Brooks is here,” I soothe, taking the napkin and gently dabbing. She lets me, obediently still. “Poor, poor baby.”
“I feel kind of bad,” she allows sadly. “He just got a tattoo of my name.”
I bust out laughing. I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself. I mean, what kind of nitwit gets a tattoo of his high school girlfriend? Your high school mascot, maybe. Let’s get real here.
“Oh man, that’s so great!” I chortle in deplorable delight.
“Oh, you enjoy seeing me in mental distress?” she inquires coyly, her luscious, glistening lips mere centimeters from my thirsting ones.
“No, I mean it’s so great you’re single.”
I stop dabbing. We’re down to millimeters. I breathe her ultraexpensive scent in. She says in a husky voice, “Why, Brooks? Why is it so great that I’m single?”
“Because you can do tons better,” I stammer, lost in her unblinking cat eyes, drowning in a vortex of desire. “Tommy Fallick doesn’t deserve you. Especially with a name like that.”
“And who does deserve me, Brooks?” she presses against me, knowing the answer but insisting I say it, which I’m all too willingly about to do when, over Shelby’s shoulder, I spot Celia Lieberman glowering behind her, arms folded sternly, impatiently tapping a pointy-toed shoe that looks like it could do real damage.
It occurs to me with thunderous dismay that not all impediments are gone. Not officially. Celia Lieberman has yet to break up with me.
“I can’t tell you now,” I tell Shelby, which I can tell doesn’t go over too well.
“When can you tell me?” she demands.
“Could I tell you in, say, twenty minutes?” I query, signaling spastically with my eyes at Celia Lieberman to bug off.
This, of course, causes Shelby to turn around and see the same Celia Lieberman who, to add salt to the wound, gives her a little wave.
“How about ten?” I implore.
Shelby’s Beamer screeches up. The parking guy clambers out of her way as she leaps into it. Meanwhile, Celia Lieberman marches to me, indignant.
“You mind?” she glares. “You’re still my boyfriend!”
As I’m yanked hard by the hand inside, I watch in quiet devastation as Shelby floors the gas and zooms into the night. Yessiree Bob, there’s nothing like the acceleration of a precision-tooled internal-combustion engine. Sure as hell not a battery-powered motor.
---
The ballroom churns with scions of privilege, the tunes are tight, and I’m fuming. I don’t know if and/or how I’ll ever recover my losses after this latest setback with Shelby, but, damn it, I’m sure going to try. I won’t let it end, not when I was oh-so-close. But first and foremost I must divest myself once and for all of Celia Lieberman.
“Go ahead,” I prompt. “It’s showtime, folks. Let me have it.”
“But we just got here,” she says, sipping a Coke.
“Why waste time?”
“Listen, Rattigan, you can’t be dumped by me one minute, then chase after Shelby the next.”
“So I bounce back fast.”
“You could act a little upset,” Celia Lieberman demurs, bopping to the beat, determined to draw out my agony. “It wasn’t all bad, you know. We had our moments as a fake couple.”
“Oh yeah, thanks to you, she left,” I grumble with profound bitterness. “Now we may never hook up!”
“I HATE YOU!!!” Celia Lieberman suddenly shouts just as the band arbitrarily decides to take five. A sea of coifed heads turns to us. However, I’m too steeped in self-pity to care.
“Now she hates me!” I beseech the vaulted ceiling and the cosmic forces that somehow continue to conspire against me. “She couldn’t hate me like twenty seconds ago!”
“YOU ARE SUCH AN ASSHOLE!!!” Celia Lieberman roars, all flushed, veins sticking out, expression twisted. I’m riveted and more than a little taken aback by the intensity of her performance.
“Celia, I really like where you’re going with this,” I whisper, smiling all the while, playing to our riveted audience. “But could you bring it down a notch . . .”
“ALL YOU THINK ABOUT IS YOUR DICK!!!”
Livid, Celia Lieberman throws her drink in my face and stalks away. I stand there, dripping. Coke, no less. My dry cleaning bill is going to be exorbitant.
---
The drive back, as you can imagine, is interminable. We’re both brooding, although what Celia Lieberman has got to be sore about is beyond human comprehension. I ask you, who’s the aggrieved party here?
“The dick remark was effective enough,” I finally say as we pull into her driveway. “Was the drink-throwing thing absolutely necessary?”
“All part of the act,” she says stonily, staring out her window.
“Well, you were very convincing.”
“Actually I couldn’t be more delighted that you and Miss Homecoming Queen can finally screw your tiny little brains out.”
“Really? Shelby was Homecoming Queen?” I ask, quite pleased by this tidbit of information. I mean, come on, what guy doesn’t nurse a secret hard-on to score with a Homecoming Queen?
The second the Prius halts, Celia darts from it.
“You are such a putz!”
“Now what did I do?” Genuinely mystified, I trot after her.
“You are so superficial!”
“Oh yeah? Shelby thinks I’m deep!”
As Celia Lieberman charges up the walk, the front door swings open for her. Gayle and Harvey, again in their jammies, hover in it, beaming expectantly.
“So? So?” they chant.
“Oh, God, would you two get a life!!” shrieks Celia Lieberman, plowing inside between them and slamming the door right in my face.
---
Free at last. At last I can proceed with a somewhat clear conscience.
Instantly I mobilize into action. The first thing I do when I get home is scrub the Web of all remaining traces of my name and image, which isn’t that hard to do since, fueled by scurrilous rumors of College Admissions Committees checking out applicants online for incriminating posts and compromising pictures, I’ve long been scrupulous about limiting my social media exposure. During free period, at ten sharp the next morning, I’m waiting in the Beast in the parking lot for the cellular phone place to open.
“Let me get this straight,” the overweight put-upon salesman guy says. “You want all your calls forwarded to a 917 area code?”
“That’s right,” I reply. I’m there to upgrade to a new phone and new cell number with a Manhattan area code. I can’t communicate with Shelby without one.
“But you live in 732?” he questions, giving me the dirty eyeball.
“That is correct. Yes,” I affirm a bit sheepishly. Great. Why do I get the guy missing the self-edit button?
“What’s wrong? Is 732 not good enough for you?” he asks, hitting my bull’s-eye.
---
Back safely in the Beast and properly if reluctantly equipped, I punch in the digits to Shelby’s cell number, which I secured from her Facebook profile, and type in the letters to the text that I’ve b
een composing in my mind over and over again. Here goes nothing.
“Me,” I tap with trepidation. “I deserve you.”
Actually I don’t deserve her on a million different levels, primarily because I’m not who and what she thinks I am. But no matter. I press Send anyway.
Who knows if she’ll respond, but at least I’ve launched my initial salvo. But she does respond. Out of the blue, two hours and thirteen minutes later, in the middle of Statistics class.
“What about Celia Lieberman?” reads her text.
Celia Lieberman. Always Celia Lieberman.
“Ancient history,” I hurriedly transmit back.
“Yeah, I heard,” her message bubble pops.
Pretty short. Pretty cryptic. Could mean anything. I tense up, all nervous, unsure what to write next.
Then another bubble pops on my screen.
“”
Yes! The Brookster lives! The journey to ultimate ecstasy continues!
Shelby texts more. She’s with Cassie in the sauna at school and they’re shaving their moist appendages. The image makes me shift and cross my legs. Cassie’s told Shelby all about Celia Lieberman’s big breakup with me, having witnessed the whole debacle. Shelby hears it was brutal. Cassie, not Shelby mind you, thinks if anyone was going to do the dumping, it would have been the other way around.
I’m inclined for once to agree with Cassie, but I can’t. Instead I’m philosophical.
“It was time,” I type.
Shelby surmises a different scenario. Her theory is that it was really all my doing, and I gallantly fell on my sword and allowed Celia Lieberman to have the honors to save her minimal standing. Is she right? Is that true?
To my eternal discredit, I allow it to be true.
Since Spring Fling season’s just getting into full swing and I’ve got three bookings and she’s flying out, private jet of course, to the villa in St. Barts for break, it takes a little back-and-forth before we’re able to coordinate our schedules.
We make a date for dinner two weeks from Friday. I can’t wait. It’s first down and I’m on the ten-yard line, the goal finally within reach.
The Word
“April is the cruelest month,” the poet I was so unfortunately assigned once famously poeticized. Well, he’s wrong. March is. Late March, to be semi-exact.
That’s when I finally hear. After taking the better part of an entire school year, They can’t give you a specific date or approximate time. No, that would be considerate, that would actually be humane. Instead, They want you to writhe in suspended agony. And I do, second by interminable second. “Late March.” What does “Late March” even mean? The last two weeks? The last week? The last few days? Oh, those miserable mothers!
So starting the sixteenth, I’m online like every ten minutes to check if thumbs up or down’s been posted, and naturally it never is. By the twenty-third, I’m a basket case, constantly muttering non sequiturs to myself, nails chewed down to bloody nubs. By the twenty-ninth, I’m climbing the walls, triple-checking like every ten seconds. Logging in and out, out and in, over and over again, in a mindless trance. Hours go by. And this is all night, three, four in the morning, because I can no longer sleep because I’ve basically morphed into a walking zombie.
So there I am, ebbing in and out of consciousness through AP English, when the news floats through the ether that just this moment Phil Chen’s gotten into Columbia, which doesn’t surprise me, and that he immediately flipped off the principal, which does. I bolt upright. My last check online was a full twelve minutes ago. I curse myself. How could I have let so much time go by? Frantically I bring up my keyboard on my iPhone and attempt to log on to the official Columbia University website but the official Columbia University website doesn’t come up because the official Columbia University website’s freakin’ down. The reason the official Columbia University website’s freakin’ down is because across the continent and around the globe, all 34,929 regular admissions applicants are frantically clicking just like me on the same link at the same time.
Which leaves the letter, or what’s known in the college racket as the “invitation” if you’re in and the “eat shit and die” if you’re not. Columbia times its letters to arrive the same day that decisions are posted online. My fate’s signed, sealed, delivered, and lying on its side in our mailbox. Even though there’s still another ten minutes of class, I am out the door with my teacher’s sympathetic acquiescence.
The drive back’s a frenetic blur. This, my friends, is finally it. The Word. What I’ve worked and sacrificed for. The years swirl around me. The endless hours studying subjects I could care less about, the tedious books I slaved through, the grueling months of preparing for the SATs. The few ups, the many, many downs. The constant anxiety. All for one single purpose. Columbia. I don’t want to know and have to know at the same time.
Double-parking, I explode from the Beast and sprint into the dingy lobby of our building. PO boxes fill an entire wall. I dash to ours. Hands trembling, I dial the combination and swing open the little frosted glass door. My fingers grope inside, find nothing. Kneeling, I anxiously peer into the metal compartment. Empty. I can see all the other boxes have stuff in them. The mail’s been delivered for the day. Which can only mean one thing.
Charlie. A wave of horror engulfs me as I realize it’s Friday. Charlie gets afternoons off on Fridays because he works Saturday mornings. God, no. Charlie’s got it!
I clamber up the stairs, three at a time, all the way to the fourth floor. Tear along the shabby hallway lined with doors to identical cubicles. Fumble for my keys, only to see the door is open a crack. I barrel in, breathless.
“Did it come?”
Charlie’s slumped at the table in his blue postal uniform, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is the open bottle of whiskey. Charlie’s a stoner, not a drinker. Guzzling brown liquid from a glass, he grimaces as it goes down, obviously in distress.
“It’s not important where you get in, Brooks,” he says softly. “It may seem like it is, but it really isn’t.”
Then I spot the printed piece of embossed paper spread out in front of him. He’s read it. He knows before I do. I’m beyond pissed.
“You had no right opening it!”
I snatch the letter from the table. The world’s spinning. It’s over. I can’t bear to look. My legs go all wobbly. I have to sit down.
“The least you could do is let me get rejected firsthand,” I whisper in defeat.
“You didn’t get rejected, Brooks,” he says, pouring himself another slug.
“I didn’t get rejected?” I look up at him, stricken. “No, please don’t tell me I’ve been Wait-Listed!”
Wait-Listed. First Deferred, now Wait-Listed. Is there no end to this misery? I give up, I can’t take anymore. Oh, those mothers!
“You got in, Brooks,” Charlie says.
“What?” I say, barely listening.
“You got into fucking Columbia,” he states.
“I got into fucking Columbia?” I repeat, incredulous. Can it really be true? I read the first paragraph of the letter. It starts with “the greatest pleasure.” None of that let-you-down-easy bull about receiving more applications than any time in recorded history, blah, blah, blah, before they give you the old boot. Instead, They’re inviting me, Brooks Rattigan, to join the Columbia community. It’s not the thin envelope. I got the big fat thick one. I’m in. It’s true!
Instantly Queen’s “We Are the Champions” is pounding in both ears. I’m up on my feet, dancing around, shadow boxing and flattening any and all comers. I rock, baby. I am the shit!
“I GOT INTO FUCKING COLUMBIA!” I exult. “I GOT INTO FUCKING COLUMBIA!!”
I cannot believe I got into fucking Columbia. I thank Farkus, my lucky stars, but most of all Uncle Max who, it turns out, is a man of his word and must have tipped the scales in my favor.
“You’re getting twenty thousand a year toward tuition,” Charlie says, gulping down another be
lt of whiskey.
“Twenty grand! All right! I’m going to fucking Columbia!!”
“Which leaves us, or rather me, owing a mere $44,144. And that’s just for the first year.”
But the numbers aren’t sinking in. Nothing is. I just keep feinting and punching thin air. I’m in the club, one of the select few! I made the cut! Me! I made it!
“Tuition, $46,846,” Charlie reads through the list in a dull monotone. “Room and board, $11,978. Love it how they’ve got it down to the exact dollar. Fees: $2,292.” He laughs mirthlessly. “What the hell are fees? Like tuition’s not a fee? Books and personal expenses: $3,028. For a grand total of $64,144.”
As swiftly as it arrived, the joy drains out of me, but I stubbornly continue my celebration.
“Take off room and board,” I declare grandly. “I’ll commute from here.”
“Okay,” Charlie sighs, pained that he’s not getting through. “That still leaves $32,166.”
I creak to a crawl. Thirty-two thousand? Thirty-two thousand’s serious.
“Can’t we get a loan?”
“The twenty grand is a loan, Brooks.”
“Then we’ll get another loan,” I persist. I always knew money would be an issue; I mean, I’ve been working and saving since I was sixteen. But I always figured somehow it’d take care of itself. The all-important thing was to get in. Which I just fucking did, damn it. I’ve done my part.
“With what? For God’s sake, tuition alone is what I make in a year.” Charlie suddenly stands in agitation. “I mean, what universe have you been living in? Wake up! I don’t own this place or have any savings to speak of. I lease my car. I have nothing.”
Silence. He looks down, unable to look me, his son, in the eyes. He has nothing. He is nothing.
“I’ve tried to tell you, Brooks,” he says. “But you just wouldn’t listen . . .”