by Nathan Holic
“Charles…hasn’t been back to this page in months.”
“Charles…wonders what’s on the other side of this login page. How has the world changed? Check it out. Just a peek, just a peek. Sign up, Charles. Reactivate yourself.”
But I don’t. I erase the [email protected], the password, because I’ve come too far and I won’t slip back into the old me, and I simply type “Nu Kappa Epsilon, Rush Party, Illinois” into the search box, because—now that I’m here—I want to find the event page that this chapter created, the event page that alerted the Headquarters to this nightmare and brought me here. Not too tough. It’s the first search result listed:
“Charles…is shocked that it’s so blatant.”
“Charles…is actually impressed that there are 3,245 RSVPs. That’s a hell of a party.” And the girls…so many girls attending…picture after picture of young women in short jean skirts, in tight black shorts that end just south of their asses, so many swooping necklines, so many breasts and so much exposed skin that—as I’m scrolling through the attendees—I look back over my shoulder here in the hotel room to make sure no one’s watching me.
It’s just me and this hideous bedspread, of course, and this laptop, and this event page, and all of these sexy profile pictures, but before I know what I’m doing, I’m clicking onto their profiles and searching whatever half-pornographic pictures these girls have made public for all the world to see.
Snapshots of a 21-year-old female standing/crawling on bartop, t-shirt soaked from spilled tequila. Another photo: her tits perked out like this is part of a portfolio she sent to Maxim. Panoramic shot of seven sorority girls in bikinis so tiny, so precariously adjusted over the choice sections of their anatomy, that it seems any movement at all—a single step, a slightly raised arm—might tear the fabric, might rip the whole top free.
“Charles…shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Charles…is staring directly at Jenn, now.”
And yes, at some point, I typed “Jenn Barry” into the search field, and now I’m lurking on her profile page, but she’s set it to “Private”—viewable only by friends—and I no longer have a Facebook page myself and thus am not her friend and thus can see only her profile pic (Jenn on a beach chair, wearing a pink tank top and a pair of white shorts, sipping a margarita, and you can barely see another arm on the photo’s left side, and it’s my arm because I’m in the next beach chair over, and have I been cropped out of the picture?) and her most basic information (“School: Edison University,” “Hometown: Tampa, FL,” “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”), and that’s all I can view as I scroll through her page as a stranger, and I rub my eyes and close the Facebook page, and “It’s Complicated?” Did I just see that? I shut my laptop and look over my shoulder again. Alone. This is what I’ve become?
Six months ago, I was Adam Duke. Senior in the fraternity house. President. In charge, directing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar budget, honored at the Alumni Ball, ready to graduate and assume some important job. “Man on campus,” people joked. I wasn’t just sitting on a beach chair nearby; I was in the Facebook photo, not an empty hotel room drinking Jack Daniels.
Blank side of the business card, all that white space.
And minutes later, I’m back in my Explorer and I’m driving toward the Nu Kappa Epsilon fraternity house, toward the party, ready to do something, who knows what?
*
Erratic, shaky, my driving, and I pass a police car parked at a gas station and I grip the steering wheel harder and try to drive straight but I slip over the center line in the street and have to correct myself. I watch out my rearview mirror, slow down, but the cop doesn’t follow.
When I finally arrive at the house, the parking lot is packed, bumper to bumper, and so many kids are standing in the front yard in a winding line from the curb to the porch and the door, that I park around the corner and watch the party from a distance. One of the fraternity brothers—could be Adam, for all I can see—stands atop a keg on the porch and points to someone in the line and shouts and laughs. Another pack of girls, white pants and tube tops, saunters past my Explorer and joins the slow-moving line into the party. From inside the house, the microphone feedback has been replaced by the steady bass-thump of party hip-hop. I can only imagine what’s happening in there. Hundreds of students holding plastic cups full of keg beer, guys pressed against girls, strobe lights and smoke in the air, so loud with the combined noise of a thousand conversations and a band and a DJ that you can say anything you want, move anyway you want. My hand is on my door handle, shaking on the door handle.
And suddenly there is a knock on the window of my car, the sound of fingernails or jewelry tapping against glass.
I jump back, nearly bang my head against the ceiling, and there is a girl at my door. Dark hair and makeup so bold that—under the strange glow of the streetlights—her face carries an exotic tone, indigo on bronze. But even with the alien lighting, she is stunning, and she is only two feet away from me, and we are separated only by my window. She wears a bright pink club top, cut so high at the bottom that I can see her flat 19-year-old abs, so sparing at the top that her bra straps are visible under the thin straps that crest her shoulders.
Her fingers still touch the glass and she says something, but I can’t hear.
“Roll down your window,” she mouths.
I realize that I’ve been pressing back against my center console for five seconds, ten, eyes looking shocked or scared and hand still gripping the handle tightly, so I loosen up, comply.
“Hello,” I say when the window is down.
“Hey. What are you doing in there?” she asks.
“I’m just, you know, sitting?”
“Sitting outside? While your party’s going on?”
“Sure?”
“Must be a crazy-good time in your car to keep you from the party,” she says, and she peers inside, scans the dark interior. I wonder what she sees, if these folders and snap-shut cases and hanging rods disturb her, if they tip her off that I am not whoever she imagines me to be. “No. Definitely doesn’t look very fun in here.”
“It isn’t,” I say, and wish I could have said something flirty, the sort of mindless boy-girl banter I was able to spin off without a second’s thought back at EU.
“So why are you out here?”
I open my mouth, but I can’t stop staring at the bare skin of her shoulders.
“Are you smoking?” she asks with a smile. “Are you about to light up?”
“I don’t…” I start, but I don’t want to let her down, this girl who approached my Explorer. “Not now. Um. Not yet.”
She licks her lips. “Well. Come get me when you do.”
“I will. Are you,” and I swallow, “are you going to be inside there? In the house?”
“Please,” she says. “Free beer.”
“Right. Dumb question.”
“Your car’s pretty full,” she says. “Why?”
“I had a long drive. I’m packed up.”
“You just got into town? Classes started a week ago.”
“Oh, it’s…I’ve been busy.”
“You really should unpack. You don’t want someone breaking into your car, messing with your stuff.”
“No. No, I don’t want that.”
“You sure there’s going to be room for me in there?”
“I’ll make room.”
“Why don’t you come inside now, Adam?” she asks. “Fill up at the keg, then we’ll come back out later and, you know, take care of business. Light up.”
Head pounding, but finally in a good way. Pounds with possibilities: follow this girl, this sorority girl tanning lotion model with the tight body, follow her across the street and up the stairs of the front porch, in full view of the Nikes on the porch. And they’ll ask, “Is that the fucking consultant?” and I’ll laugh and shrug and follow her inside and we’ll stand in line for the keg and we’ll drink up, an
d in the hot, close crowd of the packed living room, I’ll be pressed up against her and we’ll drink, our bodies on top of one another, and later, hell, she could come back with me to my car, come back with me to my hotel.
“Tania!” someone screams from a distance.
“Oh my God!” my girl shrieks, and turns. “I didn’t think you were coming!”
“I told him I had to take care of something,” says the other girl, ten feet away, five, closing the gap, and now my single girl has become a group of five girls, all dressed to party, and they’re all hugging and making shrill noises, greeting one another, and one of them looks at my window and asks, “Who is that?” and my girl says, “That’s Adam,” and then, “What’s he doing in there?” and they all think I’m someone else, and I don’t make any noise, and suddenly I just want all of this to go away so that I won’t have to explain that I’m not who they think I am, that I am instead some creepy guy in a dark SUV hovering outside the party, and now Tania asks me, “So are you coming inside, creepster? Or you just going to sit out here all night?”
“I have to make a call,” I say. “Be inside in a second.”
“All right,” she says. “Find me.”
And they’re gone, across the street and into the line without me, up the front porch without me, wrist bands and red cups, disappearing into the strobe lights of the party. One by one, new packs of girls stream into the house, new groups of guys, and I‘m still alone, and the way the night continues to move, so quickly, it feels as if the previous five minutes never even happened.
And, I realize after awhile, my hand remains on the door handle. And I stay that way until the long line outside the house dwindles, until the party’s energy has been sucked inside, until there are only a few people left on the porch, drinking beer and chatting casually. One of them looks like Adam Duke, could be, and he stares directly at my Explorer with such a concrete-hard expression that he might as well be shaking his head.
I watch the party awhile longer, but eventually I return to the hotel.
*
Sometime after 3 AM, I wake up because I’ve got to piss. I’m still fully-clothed, my head hurts, and I walk into the bathroom and pee for two full minutes. I think I dreamt about urinals for the past few hours. Urinals and college bars.
As I piss, I’m thinking: where am I going tomorrow? And when I come out of the bathroom, I rummage through my papers because my head is mixed up and I forgot what school I’m supposed to be at next after St. Joseph’s, details slipping, and I discover—holy shit—that I’m supposed to be in New Mexico next, in Las Fucking Cruces, and my flight leaves out of Philadelphia on Saturday morning. I booked that flight because I was supposed to be at St. Joseph’s, so now I’ve got to drive all the way back to where I came from, Philadelphia, all twelve hours, and my head still pounds and I’m dizzy and still drunk.
First thing tomorrow morning. Drive.
Illinois to Philadelphia.
Flight out of Philadelphia. Flight to New Mexico.
I’m supposed to pretend that this day never happened?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Vacation Visit.
“Consultants have a tendency to feel broken-down at the halfway point of the semester,” LaFaber told us in our summer training as we all sat in the conference room at the National Fraternity Headquarters building. He’d just handed us—Brock, Nick, and me—our travel schedules. “Right now, I know that you’re all ready to take on the world, but this can be a rough job. You visit places that aren’t exactly tourist destinations.”
Nick and Brock pored over their own schedules with curiosity, nodding and pointing to various destinations as if discovering the names for the first time. “The Deep South Territory,” Nick read from his sheet. “North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Georgia…” Nick had graduated from UCLA with a tan as deep as mine, and so it seemed only natural that he’d be assigned a travel region that included schools where real “winter” remains forever a state away.
“A great territory,” LaFaber said. “The Deep South. The fraternity’s most historic and influential chapters. Quite the honor.”
Brock, a graduate of Central Texas, received the “Gulf Coast Territory,” a wide-stretching and amorphous territory including chapters in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and bits and pieces of the Rocky Mountain states. Perfect for a boy built like a tractor. A cowboy consultant for cowboy fraternity chapters.
“The Great Midwest,” I read from my own sheet, confused. “New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania? That doesn’t sound like the Midwest.”
“A geographically misleading title, certainly,” LaFaber said, “but it’s the most challenging territory, without a doubt. States where fraternity life hangs by a thread. Some tough schools, tough chapters. I thought you’d want a challenge, Charles.”
“Oh. Definitely, definitely,” I said.
Of course, this was the moment when I should have realized I’d never be able to drive home to Florida on weekends, and any promises I’d made to Jenn would go unfulfilled. Maybe I could have been realistic, and that night called her and told her that I’d work something out for Thanksgiving, but a quick jaunt from Delaware to Florida was not in the cards. But I’d written my goals, and I wasn’t about to abandon any of them to something so silly as reality.
“Each of you will also notice that we’ve given you vacation visits,” LaFaber told the three of us as we ran our fingers down our travel schedules, coming inevitably to a series of California or Washington or Arizona colleges. “Costs way too much to have you drive all the way out to the West Coast. The gas, the hotels, the man-hours spent driving cross-country, back and forth. That’s pure fantasy when you’re working for a non-profit, gentlemen.”
“So,” Brock said, squinting at his paper, “you divide the West Coast between us?”
“Correct. We want you to get a breather,” LaFaber said. “Enjoy the sunshine. Enjoy traveling by air, stress-free, leaving the highways behind for a couple weeks, accumulating frequent flyer miles. Vacation visits. Perk of the job.”
So the National Headquarters books flights to Los Angeles or Phoenix or Seattle, and when we arrive, the chapter brothers drive us around for the duration of our visit. Stress-free, he said, but we’ll have no cars. No rentals. Our lives in the hands of fraternity boys to whom we have not yet even been introduced.
*
Late Friday afternoon and I’m standing on the side of the highway waiting for AAA. Sun high over the horizon. Ninety degrees, no shade. Been parked here along I-70, somewhere south of Pittsburgh, for hours. Behind schedule to make it back to Philadelphia by tomorrow morning for my cross-country “vacation visit” flight, my front tire a gashed rubber mess torn apart by a deep pothole several hundred feet back.
A semi-truck roars past me on the interstate, eighty miles per hour, its windy wake rattling my parked Explorer on the road’s gravel shoulder. Each passing semi (and there have been hundreds so far) feels deadlier than the last, faster, closer, each rumbling along so effortlessly to its destination…
Earlier today, I left Illinois in a hung-over haze: the Midwestern landscape rolled with anonymous hills, receded to jagged strip-mining, then became green and lush again; mile after mile, landscape shrinking, growing, rising, falling, flooding, emptying, melting, as though I was watching millions of years of Earth-change in minutes, hours. Making good time, ready to forget the past week, thinking I could stop soon for lunch. Then—
Potholes. Until today, they’d been nothing more than a minor frustration, weather-induced stretch marks on the smooth paved skin of Indiana and Ohio. But as I entered Western Pennsylvania two hours ago, a series of ever-sharper and deeper cuts opened in the highway, and suddenly the car in front of me switched lanes, and there—before me—coming at me quickly, unavoidably—no chance to switch lanes—a dark hole in the pavement, and my first thought was that all of those images I’ve been picturing—stuffed in my Explorer, topping a hill, speeding downward toward som
ething black and unknown—had come true. Front tire fell first, fell hard like a ballet dancer misjudging her steps and tumbling into the orchestra pit. Then the back tire, a crunching metal noise, Explorer tilting. Steering wheel slipping from my hands, assuming control of itself, and I swerved into the center lane, then into the shoulder, where my lopsided SUV finally slowed, kicking up dust and gravel as it came to a rest.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened. Adrenaline was animating my every tired muscle, but still I couldn’t move because I didn’t know where to start. Hanging rod in my backseat had come loose, sending shirts and pants into the shadowy corners of my floor; Atlas and CD case had disappeared from the seat, bags and suitcases rearranged throughout my car, under or on top of one another. Smoke rising from the front of the car, from the back, a combination of hot rubber and disturbed dust, and I worried what else might have happened in that dark pit. Severe damage to the undercarriage of my car, some one-in-a-million gas tank puncture? It took me five minutes to finally open my car door…clumsily, head pounding…I stayed close to my car, shivering or flinching each time a semi passed.
A little over five hours of driving left to Philadelphia for tomorrow morning’s flight, and I’d been hoping for a hotel room tonight. Just outside Philly. A place to stretch, to sleep, to beat this headache before I hop on a plane and fly across the country.
And now another semi passes, its accompanying wind gust shaking me so vigorously that I wonder if any of these drivers are coming closer just to scare me.
Philadelphia to Champaign-Urbana. Champaign-Urbana to…here, somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, some grassy spot without mile markers, no distinguishing landmarks that I could list for the AAA call center. “Might take longer than usual,” dispatch told me when I called. “Are you in a safe place?”
“I’m fine,” I said, but that was a mistake which put me at the bottom of his list.
But there—out in the distance—a single willow tree far out in the valley, a pack of cows huddling together under the only shade for miles in this hot September field. So I called back AAA and told the dispatch operator that yes, there is a landmark here. There is. A single tree and a group of cows. She sighed, told me she’ll make a note of it.