by Hamel, B. B.
Apparently, he had only a few close friends. I did some more Facebook stalking after talking with Chris on our stoop the day before, and even went so far as to ask Selena more questions. Fortunately, Selena was a pretty clueless person, and always eager to dish gossip. According to her, Noah had few close friends, though plenty of girlfriends. Back in the day, his dorm was more or less a revolving door of one skank after another, which grossed me out. She said he spent most of his time hanging out, drinking too much, and going out to bars, which disappointed me. Still, he was in the honors college, which meant that he had to be a pretty decent student. He was on some rec league sports teams, and he was a peer student teacher for a film class on Stanley Kubrick. Basically, he seemed like the model collegiate student, except that he wasn’t. He drank and smoked pot and slept with whatever girls he wanted to, and he was a complete asshole.
I couldn’t seem to figure him out. Sitting next to him during Professor Johnson’s lecture, his weird comment rolling around in my head, didn’t help at all. Part of me wanted to interrupt everything and ask Noah exactly what he meant, but that was insane. Instead, I sat quietly, dutifully taking notes, or at least taking some semblance of notes.
Eventually, the period ended, and Professor Johnson wrapped up his lecture. Noah turned to me as soon as everyone started packing up.
“So, polka dots, what are you doing now?”
I looked at him, surprised. “Nothing really. Why?”
He grinned. “Don’t be so shocked. Want to go for a walk or something?”
I stared for half a beat. Was I stuck in some parallel universe where a guy like Noah Carterson wanted to spend time with me? I mean, I wasn’t exactly unattractive, but I wasn’t winning any beauty contests, either. I didn’t think I was remotely his type, and I definitely wasn’t putting out anytime soon. So why was he suddenly interested?
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” I managed to get out.
“Cool,” he grunted, as we packed our things.
My head was swimming with questions, totally unsure about why Noah wanted to go for a walk, or what he even meant by going for a walk. I realized I was spinning in circles when I started to analyze what “going for a walk” really meant, and concentrated on getting myself together instead.
We went out into the hall together, the last to leave the room, and headed down the hall, toward the stairs. We chatted idly about Professor Johnson, making jokes about how spacey and weird he was. It was actually pretty normal and nice; Noah didn’t once make a sexual innuendo at my expense. He kept calling me “polka dots,” though, which annoyed me, but not enough to ruin the good mood. We climbed down the stairs together then headed outside. We walked toward the bell tower, moving slowly. It was sunny out and warm, and everyone was sitting on benches or in the grass. The campus seemed more alive than usual, and I guessed it was the weather.
“So, are you looking forward to working at the worst theater in the world?” Noah asked
“It’s not that bad. I’ve been to much worse,” I said, and it was true. I’d seen much crappier places. My mother loved to cart me all over the place, taking me to every theater imaginable to see every small budget indie film possible. She said she wanted to give me an experience of the world, but really I thought she just wanted to see whatever movie was playing. I briefly wondered if Noah’s father had done the same for him.
“I know. It’s really not that bad, I guess. Miss Havisham, though...” He whistled and made a face
I laughed, knowing exactly what he meant. “She’s a character.”
“She’s pretty nuts. But she goes way back with my family, which is why she’s around.”
That was the first time Noah mentioned his family, or even his connection to the theater. I was a little surprised, but decided not to make a big deal out of it. I got the sense that he was pretty private about his home life.
“My mom likes her, too. I bet she has an interesting management style.”
Noah laughed. “Yeah, management style, right. Miss H has feather boas and long stemmed cigarettes, and that’s about it.”
“She has drama, and that’s all you need.”
He nodded, pretending to be serious. “That’s true. The only thing a good indie movie theater needs is drama.”
We laughed together at that, and he bumped me with his shoulder. I savored the light and brief contact, smiling up at him.
As I looked forward again, I noticed a few people walking by were staring at us. I knew Noah had a reputation on campus because of his father, not to mention his amazing good looks and his money, but I hadn’t realized how far that extended. I saw a few girls standing over by a group of bikes whisper to each other and throw me dirty looks, but Noah pretended like they didn’t exist. I didn’t really mind; it wasn’t like I’d see any of them again. It felt weird, being the object of attention and jealousy, even if it was only because Noah felt like getting to know his new workmate.
We turned right at the bell tower, and walked up a short, grassy hill covered in people. People called that spot “the beach.” It was probably the nicest area to sit on the whole campus, at least when the weather was decent. It got a lot of light, which kept the grass nice and dry, and people sat in small groups scattered all over. It was centrally located right next to the bell tower, which meant it was prime for people watching.
Noah picked his way through the crowd then sat down toward the back. I sat next to him, and he leaned back onto his hands, folding his legs under him and smiling. It was oddly comfortable to sit in a huge group of people with Noah, and although people kept glancing at us, and some were whispering, I felt calm. It wasn’t every day that I got to spend time on a beautiful day with a gorgeous asshole.
“So, polka dots, got a boyfriend?” Noah shifted his weight, and I was intensely aware of how close his knee was to mine. I winced at the nickname, but let it go again.
“No boyfriend,” I said. I had no clue why he was asking, but I realized it was my perfect opportunity. “What about you?”
He grinned at me. “Nope, no boyfriend.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great joke. Seriously, what about that blonde girl?”
He looked a little confused for a second then laughed. “Oh, you mean Ellie.”
“Yeah, Stripper Barbie. That’s what I said.”
“Is that a little jealousy I’m sensing?” He shifted his weight a little closer to me, and I felt my stomach do flips.
“Nope, no jealousy. Just an observation.”
“Yeah, sure. You’re practically spinning with envy.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I notice you’re avoiding the question.”
He shook his head. “She’s just a friend.”
Just a friend. I had heard that one before. Was she just a friend that he happened to sleep with?
“Pretty good friends?” I asked, pushing it.
“Yeah, actually. She’s been going through some shit lately.” He gave me a look, and suddenly I felt bad. I had no clue why I was giving him a hard time about that girl. He was free to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. We barely knew each other. Plus, I shouldn’t have assumed he was banging everything around him, although he probably was.
“Sorry to hear that,” I same lamely.
He grinned and shrugged. “It’s cool, she’ll get over it.”
There was a short silence as I ran over the last few minutes in my mind. I was surprised he was being so genuinely nice to me. It didn’t seem like his nature to try kindness first instead of aggressively hitting on someone.
To change the subject, I brought up an old movie I had seen the week before starring Charlie Chaplin. We started to talk about our taste in movies before things got too awkward. He listened to me while I went on and on about the classics, and I realized he was genuinely interested in what I had to say. It turned out he was equally into movies as I was, and we talked about all the nerdy details I had been dying to dissect with someone.
I guessed it was beca
use we had such similar upbringings, with one of our parents in the film industry, although they were in pretty different parts. He had a really interesting working knowledge of the business side of things, and told me some interesting facts about how the original studios worked, with their commission structures and payments to the set workers and designers. That part wasn’t something I knew much about, and he made me realize how many people were involved with movies, not just the actors and directors. It took hundreds of people to make a film, from gaffers to sound guys to catering.
As we kept talking, comfortably and idly, sharing our favorite nerdy parts of the movie industry, I kept wondering why he was spending so much time with me. There were plenty of other girls on campus that would have thrown themselves at him, most of them prettier than I was, and yet he was spending the afternoon talking about lighting directors and sound mixing instead. I felt my confusion begin to boil up, and I knew I was going to say something stupid. I had the tendency to do that; I had always just spoken my mind, even when I shouldn’t.
Actually, especially when I shouldn’t.
Noah wrapped up his thoughts on classic lighting techniques, and there was a short pause in the conversation.
“So what’s the deal with this?” I blurted out suddenly. I turned bright red and looked away, annoyed that I had asked such a blunt and stupid question.
“What do you mean, dots?”
Dots? That was a new one.
“I mean, what’s with this wanting to get to know me thing?”
I had suddenly pulled us out of the comfortable flow of a normal conversation. He looked out across the sea of people, at the myriad faces and relationships and didn’t answer right away. I decided not to press, letting him think about what he wanted to say, and we lapsed into a short silence. Finally, just before I was going to give up and go into exile out of sheer embarrassment, maybe move to Australia where I would never have to see or hear from any Carterson ever again, he spoke up.
“Not sure. Just felt like having a conversation, I guess.”
“You didn’t seem like the conversation type,” I said, joking, and he gave me a look. I realized I had crossed a line.
“What would you rather do?” I heard the tone of his voice, and I definitely caught his meaning. It was true that part of me wanted to drag him into the library’s bathroom and tear the clothes off of his perfect body, but that wasn’t what I meant.
“That’s not where I was going with that,” I said, trying to explain myself.
He smirked at me. “Are you sure? I mean, that’s the type of guy I am, right?”
Shit. Was I suddenly the asshole?
“Really, I was just trying to say, you never wanted to chat before.”
“It’s cool, don’t worry about it, dots.” He sat up straight and stretched. “I have to get going to class soon, anyway.”
I looked at my watch and realized we had been sitting there for an hour. I couldn’t believe how easily the time had gotten away from me. Noah stood up, and reached his hand out. I grasped it, and he pulled me to my feet easily. I brushed off my butt then picked up my bag. We walked together off the beach and stopped in front of the bell tower.
“Okay, I’m going back to Anderson. I’ll see you at work, dots,” he said.
“Sounds good.”
He gave me a nod then walked off into the between-classes crowd. I watched him go for a second, and felt like a total idiot. I had obviously insulted him, but I still wasn’t exactly sure how. He was trying to be nice to me, for whatever reason, and I blew it. I wanted to chase him down and apologize, but I knew that would look desperate. As I walked, I decided I had to try and make things right at work that night.
Chapter Six
Since I didn’t have work until Monday, and my class with Noah was only on Mondays and Wednesdays, I had no real way of apologizing to him.
At first, I agonized over everything. I spent most of my time from Wednesday after I left Noah to Thursday night running over how stupid I was. That was my normal reaction to anything unpleasant. I couldn’t say why, but for some reason my brain decided it wanted to grab onto every little detail, every stupid gesture and possibly misunderstood comment, and replay them over and over and over. It was a pointless and useless thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. I had no control over my idiotic brain.
Chris usually talked me through it, but she had a big test coming up already, and had locked herself in her room to study. Instead, I had the Internet to keep me company. On Thursday evening, my first impulse, the healthiest impulse I could imagine, was to start to stalk his Facebook. I logged in and found his profile, which was easy enough. We weren’t friends yet, so there was limited information on his page. I stared at his profile picture for a minute, biting my lip, remembering how close his body was, and the very tip of the chest tattoo I saw through his V-neck shirt. Without thinking about it, I clicked “Add Friend.”
Horrified, I shut my laptop as fast as I could. I almost stood up and screamed. How could I have been so stupid? I hadn’t even meant to, I was just hovering over the button, considering whether or not I should, and of course I shouldn’t, but I did. It was an involuntary reaction; my body decided on its own to go ahead and click the track pad.
I had just added Noah Carterson as a friend, completely randomly.
If there was any doubt in the world that I was stalking him, that doubt was totally gone. He’d know immediately that I found him on Facebook. That was really the only way I could have found him on my own, if I had typed his name into the search bar, specifically looking for him. Now he was going to think I was a crazy stalker girl.
Great. I could be such an idiot.
I rolled back onto my bed and stared at the ceiling, mentally kicking myself. First I insult the guy, and then I go ahead and add him randomly on Facebook. What an insane set of mixed messages. I had no clue what he was going to think, but it couldn’t have been pretty.
Exasperated, I wracked my brain for something more productive to do. I got up and sat back down at my desk, and paged through some reading assignments I had to do for class the following week. It was Thursday, and I had nothing to do Friday, but I could get a jump on my next week’s work. After a few minutes of fitfully trying to read, I threw the book down with annoyance.
I grabbed my phone and texted the only person who could make me feel better: my mom.
6:45pm Me: Hey, Mom, any plans for tomorrow?
7:10pm Mom: Nothing special, just classes. Want to visit for lunch?
7:12pm Me: Yes! See you in your office at one?
7:13pm Mom: Okay sweetie, see you then.
Feeling slightly relieved already, I turned back and tried studying some more. I knew my mom would have good advice, even if she disliked Noah’s dad.
Maybe I could even use my visit as an excuse to dig up more about his family.
I went back to my reading, and eventually I got into the flow of things, and forgot all about Noah Carterson for a few hours.
The University of Pennsylvania’s campus was in west Philadelphia, a relatively short subway ride away from Temple. I climbed up from the Blue Line, and looked out across Penn’s campus. It was one of the prettiest parts of west Philly, with smooth cobblestone walkways and plenty of trees. Everything was nice and manicured, and on one hand I loved it, but on the other it was very unlike Philadelphia. The area surrounding Penn had gone through a lot of changes over the years, and Penn was like an oasis in the middle of a bunch of bad neighborhoods. Temple was like that too, but somehow Penn was worse.
I walked across campus, feeling like an outsider, and entered into my mom’s building. It wasn’t crowded, and I moved easily through the lobby and up the stairs to the third floor. My mom had been in the same office for ten years, and I had visited her a bunch of times since moving into the city. It was a pretty typical-looking college administrative building with a bunch of different rooms and areas. I walked down the carpeted halls, found her door, and knocked.
I pushed the door and entered. Inside, the space was cramped. Books were stacked everywhere, and every shelf was brimming over. That was typical of my mom; she probably hadn’t read half the books in there, but she was a huge collector. I stepped over a stack of magazines, careful not to start an avalanche of paper.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
She looked up at me and took her glasses off, smiling.
“Hey, sweetie, how are you?”
I sat down in a chair in front of her desk. I felt like her student for a second.
“I’m good, how’s the grading?”
She sighed and leaned back. “Fine, I guess. Feels like I’m reading the same awful essay over and over again, though I seem to always give them at least a B.”
That felt better. She would never talk like that to her actual students.
“Do all teachers hate their classes as much as you do?”
She laughed. “You know I don’t hate it, I just like to complain.”
“Yeah, I know. You passed that on to me.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful. “I sure did. And you got your father’s nose. Speaking of which, call your father. You haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Working on his next masterpiece, like usual.”
We both laughed. It was tough to keep in touch with my dad. He was a poet, but he was also pretty spaced out and difficult to pin down. He was constantly starting new projects, floating around from one thing to the next, dropping old projects when he got bored and starting new ones. He seemed to always have at least ten different things going on at once, and he rarely finished any of them.
There wasn’t anything in the world he loved more than to obsess over some new thing, whether it was 18th century Japanese ship making or indigenous Australian butterflies, he’d lose himself in whatever his new thing was for weeks. Sometimes, I’d call and he’d do nothing but talk about some African tribe that dyes everything blue for hours. I loved him, but he’d always been distant, and we never developed a great relationship. My younger brother, Andrew, got some of our father’s obsessiveness, and they seemed to get along pretty well.