That was actually the same thing that first attracted me to Andrew. He was the only guy in my high school who cared more about Plato than pigskin, and believed in soul mates instead of random hookups at parties. Ironically, we did meet at a party, but we didn’t make out or anything. Instead, we talked for hours—I remember at one point he said something really profound about the human condition. Or it might have been about hair conditioner. It had been hard for me to concentrate with his brown hair flopping endearingly over one eye. No matter how many times he tossed his head, it always fell right back. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.
Obviously, Ami doesn’t have the benefit of all these great memories, so she continues to think that he doesn’t treat me as well as I deserve. Which, in a way, is totally loyal and cool of her—but completely unfounded. Well, mostly. If anything, his main problem is just that he’s too smart. He has so much going on in his brain at any given moment that it’s no wonder he’s a little absentminded sometimes.
And yet tonight, I was the one who’d almost blown off our date. Because of this, I took extra effort with my appearance, even applying Ami’s mascara to my eyelashes in the hope that a little definition would make my eyes appear more silver than gray. Andrew’s always going on about my hair—which is the exact color of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee the way I take it, with double cream and double sugar—and so I wore it the way he likes, falling in a straight curtain to the middle of my back.
My hair is the only thing about myself that I like. Not that I’ve got body image problems (well, aside from the normal ones). It’s just that my nose is too sharp, my chin too angular, and I have this weird constellation of freckles on the side of my neck. And although I haven’t had any problems being recognized as a girl since my second grade bowl-cut fiasco, let’s just say that I always have to look in the “boyish” section when magazines are giving tips about what kind of swimsuits to wear (FYI, it’s all about the halter tops).
It wasn’t until I opened the door and saw Ami still standing there that I even remembered that she had been talking to me. Underneath her olive coloring her skin looked a little gray, her face twisted up with guilt.
“Leigh, you know I don’t really mean that,” she said. “You and Andrew have been together a long time—I lose my car keys every two months, so there’s no way I could keep a boyfriend for a whole year. I guess he and I just didn’t hit it off, but I don’t have anything against him. Honestly.”
Back in Sedona, there’s a barbecue place by my house called Trust Me BBQ. We never eat there, based on the name alone. So the word honestly would’ve tipped me off even if it hadn’t already been abundantly clear that Ami disliked Andrew from the minute I introduced them. Not that Andrew is Ami’s biggest fan, either. He thinks she’s an artistic flake (which she kind of is) and that she should live her life with a little more responsibility (which probably wouldn’t hurt). He hates the outfits that she throws together out of old thrift-store finds, he hates that she stays up until four and sleeps until two, and he hates that she sometimes mutters things about him in fluent Spanish that I, who won the sobresaliente award for Spanish excellence in high school, don’t even understand. He also thinks she’s a terrible influence on me.
I don’t know about that last part, but after spending the first couple months of my college career trying to get them to like each other, I’ve learned to accept the fact that they don’t get along and probably never will. Ami is my roommate, and Andrew is my boyfriend. I just try to keep them separated and, failing that, hope they don’t kill each other.
“So, how do I look?” I asked Ami, performing a small pirouette.
“Fabulous,” she declared. “Except…”
“Except what?” I demanded, glancing down at myself. The shirt didn’t show too much cleavage, did it? As if I had much to show. For shoes, I had elected to wear my “dressy” shoes, which basically meant flip-flops covered in this black satiny material with little butterflies printed on it. Two months in California, and I’m already totally out of the habit of wearing real shoes.
“It’s just…” she trailed off, pursing her lips. “Maybe you could jazz it up just a little bit? I have some Bakelite bracelets that would look amazing, or these awesome pointy-toed stilettos that are genuine alligator skin. I got ’em for a steal in the Village.”
I rolled my eyes. “Nice try, Ami, but no. When you dress like that you look like something out of a 1960s Vogue, whereas I just look like a seven-year-old who had a little too much fun going through her mother’s wardrobe.”
Ami chuckled before looking down at the paper still clutched in her hand, as though just remembering it. With one decisive motion, she crumpled it up and tossed it toward the garbage can, where it bounced off the wall and landed on the scuffed linoleum in a harmless ball.
“You don’t need Ellen Chandler—or for that matter some guy named Rotter—to make you doubt your life,” she said. “Just go enjoy yourself for once without overanalyzing it.”
APPEASEMENT DISPLAY: A gesture or pattern of behavior which signals defeat in a conflict
ANDREW lived on the other side of campus, in what everyone called the suites. Basically, these were the same as the regular dorms, only instead of one larger room, there were two separate rooms with a shared common area. They weren’t as nice as the apartments or the singles (which were reserved for thesis students), but they were better than what Ami and I had. And they were definitely better than C-Dorm, which featured rooms the size of shoe boxes and a community bathroom. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to who lived in C-Dorm—freshmen, transfer students, or foreign exchange students. The only requirement seemed to be that you had to be a little eccentric and willing to put your desk in the closet.
Of course, by the time I pulled into the parking lot in front of the suites, my makeup was melted, my hair was flat, and the thin fabric of my shirt was sticking to my back. These were all side effects of driving what Ami refers to as “the green monster” or, as I like to call her, Gretchen.
Gretchen is my 1971 Gremlin, complete with stock bubble windows in the back that make her look like some kind of strange, ugly spaceship. She’s my baby, but I wasn’t kidding on the Incomplete Sentences when I said that I suffer to drive her. The seats are green vinyl, everything inside is unapologetically scalding metal, and the air doesn’t work. Although apparently it used to, because there’s a switch with the words COLD—COLDER—FOR DESERT USE ONLY above it, which is sometimes so cute I forgive the air for not working and other times such a tease that I want to break the little switch right off.
Andrew says that Gretchen is the most impractical car he’s ever seen, considering that the gas gauge doesn’t work and it takes a million tricks just to start her up. I call it my antitheft system, since it’s nearly impossible to open the doors unless you know the right move (a hip motion somewhere between a bump and a twist) and any wannabe thief would run out of gas before Sacramento. These features are especially nice in light of the fact that the locks don’t work, either. When I tell this to Andrew, though, he just points out that Gretchen’s biggest safety feature is the fact that nobody would ever, ever want to steal her.
It’s easy for Andrew to talk. He drives around in the barely used BMW that his parents bought him as a graduation present. Yeah, I got an Elvis quilt, and he got a Beamer. Not that I’m complaining—Elvis is totally awesome. But Andrew’s parents could’ve at least had the decency to get him a Kia or something.
Although I have to admit (not that I would ever say this to Gretchen’s face), the BMW is pretty nice to ride in. It has air, a working gas gauge, and even the completely-frivolous-yet-completely-delightful option to heat your individual seat if you want to. But then, every time I ride in it I feel so guilty that I overcompensate by making Andrew ride in Gretchen, hoping that neither he nor Gretchen will sense my secret weakness for German manufacturing.
I peeled myself off the seat, bumping the door with my hip to close it behind me. There
was a small slip of yellow paper underneath one of my semifunctional wiper blades, and I groaned as I slid it out. It had been flapping throughout the entire drive to Andrew’s apartment, but I just ignored it, hoping it would blow away and I could forget all about it.
I don’t know why I do this to myself. Most people take a very direct approach to parking at college—they buy a hangtag, put it on their rearview mirror, and then feel free to park wherever they want. It’s a beautiful system, and I’m sure it works for some people, but it just isn’t my style. I need more procrastination, more strategy, and apparently way more hassle in my parking life. It’s already halfway through the semester and I still haven’t purchased a permit, despite being reminded about twenty thousand times during orientation to get one.
I climbed the stairs to Andrew’s dorm and knocked on the door. Andrew always tells me that I can walk right in, but somehow I’m just not comfortable doing that. Nobody answered at first, and I waited patiently for a few seconds before raising my hand to knock again.
My hand was still poised like that, suspended in a fist, when the door was flung open. It was Andrew’s roommate, Nathan. I snatched my hand back, startled, and for a few minutes I stood there, like an idiot.
It wasn’t just Nathan’s timing that took me aback. He had answered the door wearing only a pair of low-slung jeans, his chest bare except for the acoustic guitar strapped across it. I’m loyal to Andrew and everything, but let me tell you—Nathan has a nice chest.
His gaze flickered down the length of me before he stepped aside to let me enter. “Andrew’s in his room,” he said curtly, leaving me to close the door as he strolled back to the couch, strumming his guitar.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. I don’t think Nathan likes me very much, even though I’ve never been anything but nice to him. Maybe there’s something about roommates and relationships that just doesn’t mix. Whatever it is, I always get this vague feeling of disapproval emanating from Nathan.
I stepped into Andrew’s room, rapping lightly on the open door. “Hey, there,” I said. “Ready for our date?”
Of course, I knew the answer before he gave it to me. He was sitting at his desk, still wearing an old t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants, furiously typing on his keyboard. He whirled around in his desk chair to face me.
“Aw, Leigh, I’m sorry,” he said, running a hand through his longish brown hair. “I totally forgot.”
Never mind that I had done the exact same thing only an hour ago. “You forgot?” I repeated incredulously.
“I said I was sorry,” he shot back. “It’s just that I really have to finish this reading response by the end of the week.”
“A reading response? Andrew, those are like three pages long. Double-spaced.”
“Yeah, but I have to read six chapters of this book first.” He gestured to a battered paperback with a French title that hopefully wasn’t actually written in French. Although he thinks he’s awesome at them, Andrew really sucks at languages. Once, he tried to speak French to this woman who owned the C’est La Vie bakery back home, and she gave him a cookie because she thought he was mentally challenged.
“Okay,” I said. “But it’s not like you have to read the whole thing. Just skim it for the good bits, come up with a discussion question or two, and crank out a few pages about how it made you feel.”
“This isn’t psychology, Leigh.”
No, it was philosophy: the most useless major EVER. I mean, there’s only so much that you can adopt of other people’s ideas before it’s just old-fashioned copycatting. And I know they say that imitation is the best form of flattery, but I’m pretty sure that Kant would tell Andrew where to stuff it if he heard some of the far-fetched crap Andrew comes up with.
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” I said, nudging the door shut. No need for Nathan to hear this particular issue rehashed. “In psychology, just so you know, we’d call that denial. But, whatever. You’re going to have to eat sometime—let’s just grab a quick bite.”
“Why don’t we just walk down to the Hyatt and get something there?”
The Hyatt is what Stiles College calls the cafeteria. Well, not officially. But ten years ago or so, the same company that supplied the nearby Hyatt with their food also supplied ours, and so the name just kind of stuck. It couldn’t be more of a misnomer, believe me.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve barely spent any time together since the summer. Let’s just go out somewhere.”
“Look,” Andrew said, throwing his hands up in the air, “I’m sorry that you feel I don’t want to spend time with you. But I don’t know what I can do about that.”
Whoa. That was so not called for. “How about not saying things like ‘I’m sorry you feel’ and just saying you’re sorry?”
“And here we go with the pseudoscientific brainwashing,” Andrew said. “I did say I was sorry. What more do you want?”
“For you to mean it.”
In a perfect world, I would have delivered that last sentence with quiet dignity, leaving it to hang poignantly between us. Instead, it fell somewhere closer to pathetic. I could feel tears burning at the back of my eyes and turned, not wanting Andrew to see the one that started slipping down my cheek.
“Just forget about it,” I said.
I was hurt and I was angry and I was frustrated, but mostly I felt…stupid. I felt stupid standing there, wearing one of my best bras and as much makeup as I’d worn to my senior prom. I felt stupid for all the times I’d answered yes to the question, Do you really think a high school relationship can last through college?
Which, when you’re the only one not looking to hook up with someone at orientation, you get asked a lot. Believe me.
“Wait,” Andrew said, springing up from his chair and massaging my shoulders lightly. “I’m sorry, Leigh. I’m just under a lot of stress with this six-course load. Can we try this again?”
Even Andrew’s academic adviser had called him “terminally insane” (not recognized by the DSM-IV, by the way) when Andrew said he planned on taking six full classes. But that’s just who he is. “I guess,” I agreed reluctantly.
He smiled—that same boyish grin that I had fallen in love with—and I felt my anger start to ebb away. “Great,” he said. “Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll be ready.”
After Andrew closed the door, I lingered in the hallway, swiping my fingertips carefully under my eyes so as not to wreck my mascara. (Note to self: Do not borrow Ami’s mascara if crying may be involved, as hers does not seem to be of the waterproof variety.)
Once I had myself back under control, I stepped into the common room, averting my face slightly as I crossed over to the couch. Nathan had put on a shirt, thankfully, but I was the one who felt really weird and exposed in my slightly too-revealing top and probably smeared mascara.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
My throat felt tight and itchy, and I could do little more than nod. I didn’t mention what I wanted to drink, and Nathan didn’t ask. Instead he grabbed each of us a Coke from the minifridge that served as an end table, setting mine in front of me before settling back on the couch.
I waited for him to break the silence, but he didn’t, and instead we spent several awkward minutes watching TV. I didn’t even register what we were watching until a car suddenly slammed into the guardrail in what the announcer said was “number twenty-seven on the top fifty most extreme car chases.”
“That was pretty intense,” I commented lamely.
“Yeah,” Nathan agreed, his gaze never leaving the screen.
Like Ami and me, Nathan and Andrew were random-selection roommates. But while Ami and I have already made a pact—we’ll room together for the next four years, no matter what, and we’ll each be the maid of honor in the other’s wedding—I can’t tell if Nathan and Andrew are close or not. They seem to get along, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t secretly want to rip each other’s throats out. Guys are weird like that.
I don’t know a lot about Nathan. He wants to be a math major—I bet he never failed geometry once, much less twice—and he wakes up early every morning to run. Those two facts alone make me think that he must be uptight.
“So, um,” I said, with no real idea what I was going to say next. Maybe something about how it seems like commercials are getting funnier and funnier, although it could be a self-reporting bias, since it’s not like I remember every commercial that aired two years ago.
But then Nathan switched off the TV, stood up, and went into his room. Just like that. As if we hadn’t been sitting on the couch, about to have a totally normal conversation about television commercials.
Every time I think that maybe Nathan doesn’t completely hate me, I realize that the problem was never that he hated me. He just couldn’t care less.
“Ready to go?” Andrew said, finally emerging from his room wearing a polo shirt and khakis. It was obvious he’d made an effort to look nice, and I smiled at him.
“Sure,” I said. “Let me just dump out the rest of this Coke.”
“Why’d you open one if you didn’t want it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He gave me a strange look, but then his face lit up. “Oh!” he said. “I’ve got something for you. Hang on just a sec.”
He disappeared back into his room, and came out holding a grocery bag. “What’s in it?” I asked.
“A bunch of those sticky things to hang your posters up with,” he said. “I grabbed a whole handful during orientation, and I’ve been meaning to give them to you. I know you love your posters.”
I really do. I’d found this Web site that lets you order twenty posters for a hundred dollars—which is a ton of posters, but also a really, really good deal. So now I have enough to last me all four years, and that’s even if I cycle out my decorating for the seasons like they’re always showing on those design shows.
Psych Major Syndrome Page 2