Loner

by Teddy Wayne

  I quickly asked for vanilla. “No, wait,” I said as he plunged his arm into the bucket. Vanilla was what I always picked, the gastrointestinally safe base that deferred flavor to its toppings.

  “Chocolate,” I revised. “With rainbow sprinkles, please.”

  I was tucking into my audacious dessert, wondering how long I could last without speaking to anyone, when Sara materialized in another well-timed intervention. She wore a capacious L.L.Bean backpack and was empty-handed.

  “No ice cream?” I asked.

  “I was hoping there’d be sorbet. I’m pretty lactose intolerant.” She added, with mock solemnity, “We all have our crosses to bear.”

  The spare lactase-enzyme supplement bulged in my pocket. I reached in and fingered its single-serving packet. To offer it to her would be an admission that we together were fragile Jews in the crowd, unable to stomach a treat little kids gobbled unthinkingly.

  “Here,” I said quietly, handing her the packet as if making a drug deal. She recognized what it was and smiled.

  “Thanks,” she said, tearing it open and depositing the pill on her tongue. I felt a curious surge of warmth toward her.

  We drifted back to the ice cream table. “So, a fellow digestively challenged Ashkenazi,” she said. “You are Jewish, right? Your last name sounds like you’re a member of the tribe.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “You haven’t been around in a while. Were you in hiding?”

  “Ah, you’ve seen through my facade,” she said. “Underneath this pleasant exterior lies a deeply antisocial personality. I’m a closet sociopath. Or psychopath, I mean. I always confuse them.”

  She chuckled. I spooned some ice cream into my mouth and nodded.

  “Groups aren’t my thing,” she went on, waving her hand at the masses around us. “I’m an extroverted introvert at best. But everyone says that, right? They want to claim the best parts of each—that they can be charming when they need to, but they really prefer solitude. No one’s ever, like, ‘I have the neediness of an extrovert and the poor social skills of the introvert.’ Sorry I’m talking so much. I’ve been in the library all day prepping for my freshman seminar.”

  “I’m not that good in groups, either,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Rice’s letter of recommendation. “Or one-on-one.”

  She laughed authentically.

  “Like, when it’s just Steven and me in the room, I’m not any more comfortable than I am here.” It was a clunky segue to my next question. “Who’s your roommate?”

  “Veronica Wells? The really pretty girl?”

  Feigning ignorance, I shook my head. “I haven’t been paying much attention to the people in our dorm. Is she nice?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Sara said. “I’ve seen her maybe five times. I think the last conversation we had was when she turned on the light at four in the morning and said, ‘Sorry.’ ”

  “Oh, you’re also in the front room,” I said. “That’s annoying, huh?”

  She shrugged.

  “So do you have any sense of her?” I was leading the witness ham-fistedly, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Not really. She and her crowd seem a bit too-cool-for-school.”

  “Does she have gatherings in your room?”

  “No, thank God.”

  A spastic “Hey, guys!” interrupted us. It was Steven, in the second physics-pun T-shirt he’d worn that week (MAY THE M•A BE WITH YOU).

  With breathless excitement, he informed us that there was a proctor in Grays who wasn’t cracking down on freshman parties, and they were having a big one tonight, the other Marauders were being lame, but did we want to come?

  “I’d better stay in,” Sara said, taking a skittish step back.

  You and your too-cool-for-school friends might be there, at an unsanctioned event. Sara and you clearly weren’t friends, but she could nevertheless provide a bridge, rickety though it was. And thus far hardly anyone else was even talking to me.

  “C’mon,” I said. “I thought groups were your thing. What are you, a closet psychopath?”

  The reference was just enough of a gesture toward intimacy to elicit a giggle. Parroting something a person had previously said in a different context, I was figuring out, was a winning tactic. The subject is flattered you paid such close attention in the first place and commends her own intelligence for catching the allusion.

  “When in Rome,” she said, hands clenching the straps of her backpack like a soldier preparing to parachute into enemy ­territory.

  Inside the rain forest fug of the dorm room, we leaked through a strainer of bodies toward a desk that had been transformed into a bar. I poured myself half a cup of gin and glazed it with tonic water; Sara reached into a cooler of beer cans bobbing in a slushy bath. A poster of Bob Marley exhaling miasmically presided over the festivities. Clubby music blared a beat resembling a spaceship’s self-­destruct alarm.

  I scanned the room. You weren’t there. But it was early.

  Steven ambled off to find some people he knew; he had already gotten himself elected mayor of Harvard’s nerdy township, of which the Matthews Marauders was one of many districts.

  Sara and I were left alone. In between baby sips of her beer, she confessed she’d hardly drunk alcohol before this week.

  “I wasn’t what you’d call Miss Popular in high school.” She wiggled the tab on her beer can like a loose tooth. “Unless ‘mispopular’ became a word. Thank God for Becky and Ruma. Those were my two best friends.”

  I had always envied the depth of female friendships—even the abjectly ostracized seemed to have a soul mate on the margins with them. I’d have traded that for my tenuous coterie of fools.

  “I was sort of the same,” I said. “I had two hundred classmates, and I bet half of them wouldn’t even remember me.”

  The tab on Sara’s can snapped off and, with no garbage nearby, she slipped it into her pocket. “But the anonymity is kind of nice,” she reflected. “I always felt a little sorry for the kids at the top. Everyone’s watching them. That can’t be easy. If no one’s paying attention to you, at least you can be yourself, do your own thing.”

  I was about to counter that whatever things the anonymous accomplished, they were of little consequence, since nobody noticed. But she had a point. Unseen, you could take your time, slowly amass knowledge and skills. For years everyone could believe you were a faceless foot soldier; they hadn’t investigated more closely, or they simply lacked the necessary powers of discernment. Then, in a single stroke, you could prove them all wrong.

  Someone jostled my arm as he passed, spilling gin and tonic on my wrist.

  “No one paying attention to you.” I licked my sticky skin like a cat. “I guess that’s something I identify with.”

  “Something with which you identify,” she said playfully. “Aren’t you glad you’re talking to that fun girl at the party who reminds you to never end a sentence on a preposition?”

  “You should also try to never split an infinitive,” I said, but whoever was manning the volume control cranked it up and she didn’t hear me.

  “Just one request, please,” the rapper boomed from the speakers, and everyone in the room pumped their fists and chanted along to the next line: “That all y’all suckers can choke on these!”

  The volume was lowered. “I hope to play that at my wedding someday,” I said with a nervous laugh.

  “What a coincidence,” Sara said. “I was saving it for my father-­daughter dance.”

  She looked down, cheeks reddening, and excused herself for the bathroom. As I refilled my drink, Ivana showed up.

  “So, Sara’s cute,” she said, much like a mother suggesting a piece of fruit for dessert.

  That word again. I considered her assessment. Sara’s dishwater-­brown hair was generally pulled back in a ponytail, and her face looked like a sculp
ture someone hadn’t thought worth putting the finishing touches on, its planes and protrusions not fully defined. But when she smiled she was, I supposed, cute.

  “Mmhuh,” I grunted.

  “Oh, you’re playing it cool.” She smirked. “No worries. By the way, do you have any idea if Steven’s hooking up with anyone?”

  “Steven? I doubt it.”

  “To both of us playing it cool, then,” she toasted, bumping her beer against the rim of my cup and spilling it again.

  Sara returned. Ivana gave me a knowing look as she melted back into the throng.

  Two ovals of perspiration had bloomed in Sara’s underarms. She noticed right after I did, noticed I’d noticed, and crossed her arms.

  “Well, screw it,” she said, uncrossing them. “I sweat. Big deal.”

  She finished her beer and I asked if she wanted another. “I was thinking about heading back, actually,” she said. “But I can hang out for a little more if you want to go after this drink.”

  It wasn’t that late yet. You might show up.

  “I’ll probably stick around for a while.”

  “Okay,” she said. “See you later.”

  I got another drink and searched for Steven and Ivana. I didn’t find them but saw a face that looked strangely familiar, as if it were the instantiation of one I’d hazily conjured up in nightmares over the years. Pug-nosed and short, he nonetheless commanded the attention of a circle of listeners. At one point he tipped his head back in amusement at something he’d himself said. Over the music I heard a strident cackle, the sound a pterodactyl might make if it could laugh.

  Scott Tupper was at Harvard.

  One day in fifth grade, Jessica Waltham, one of the popular girls, passed me a note in homeroom.

  “I have something to tell you at recess,” she’d written. The i of something was dotted with a heart.

  At the appointed time Jessica stood alone while the rest of our class frolicked on the playground. I timidly approached.

  “I love you,” she said, looking at her sneaker as she toed the rubber matting.

  Even in those latency-phase days I understood that this was ­socio-romantic validation of the highest order.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  Neither of us spoke. Then Jessica looked over her shoulder at Scott, who had seemingly come out of nowhere, his minions in tow.

  “Did he say he loves you?” he asked.

  Jessica responded with a less-than-convincing nod, but that was enough to send the boys into hysterics.

  I wasn’t familiar with the word entrapment, but knew I’d been the victim of something. Nor was I aware that Scott and Jessica had recently begun “dating,” whatever that meant at our age. I protested that I hadn’t said I’d loved her, I’d only thanked her, but it fell on deaf ears. By the end of recess it had become gospel in the class that David F. said he was in love with Jessica.

  The next day I noticed a rancid stench in my cubby as I took my winter jacket out for recess. After I zipped it up, I felt dampness on my back.

  “Eww!” Scott shouted after our teacher had led the first wave of students out of the room. “David peed himself!”

  His cronies howled with disgusted delight. Compounding my humiliation was that I was, in fact, an occasional bed wetter. It must have been a coincidence that he’d chosen that way to debase me, though at the time it didn’t seem like one, and, feeling outed, I never reported anything to our teacher; I just wanted the incident to go away.

  Those two episodes apparently quenched Scott’s thirst for cruelty, as he did nothing else the rest of the year. Still, I developed a precautionary habit of sniffing my jacket before putting it on every single time, and my fears of additional torment manifested themselves in stomachaches each morning. My parents asked what was wrong, why I kept making excuses to get out of school. As much as I craved justice, I refused to tattle. Openly admitting my status as a target of bullies would authenticate it on the deepest of levels.

  Scott’s family moved away the next year. That he had gotten into Harvard came as a shock. He hadn’t distinguished himself as a student, and I’d always assumed he would grow up into the sort of druggie who fried his brain with pot while supplying it at a suburban markup to his deep-pocketed classmates.

  After refilling my cup with gin—just gin—I retreated to the opposite corner of the room, blending into the nubby white wall. Once I had enough alcohol in my system I was ready to initiate a confrontation. I advanced toward him, armed with my opening line: Scott, it’s David Federman. Remember me?

  But I shouldn’t have had to jog his memory, shouldn’t have had to be the one to approach; he should see me, feel guilty, and come up and beg forgiveness. I stopped before infiltrating his ring and stared at him.

  We briefly made eye contact before he returned to his conversation. Not a flicker of recognition.

  I was one of a few dozen forgettable boys he’d arbitrarily victimized over the years, and after a while we’d all become constituent parts of one effete, thin-wristed composite, a chorus of panicky titters preceding whatever indignity we were about to suffer.

  Maybe the experience had made me more sensitive, more academically focused, and I’d been rewarded with acceptance to Harvard; that was fine. But if the world were really fair, people like him would be punished for their loutish misdeeds, not given the same prize. The Scott Tuppers should have been banished to community college.

  I stumbled home through a ginny fog, somehow fit my key into the lock, and sprawled on my bed. Drunken sleep had nearly overtaken me when I heard a sound like an army of mewling mice from Steven’s room. Once I’d started to pay attention, it was too loud for me to fall asleep, so I hoisted myself up to investigate and put my ear to his door.

  It wasn’t rodents; it was his bouncing bedsprings.

  Subatomic Steven was having sex his first week of college. And I was forced to listen to it.

  I woke up for the beginning of shopping period with my first hangover and groggily dropped in on an art history lecture, The ­Renaissance to Impressionism, chosen purely for its convenient location. Smaller classes would have been a better way to make friends outside of the Matthews Marauders, but I hadn’t applied in advance for any of the freshman seminars, which winnowed out dispassionate students by requiring an essay attesting to one’s interest in the subject.

  When I saw you poised to leave Annenberg at lunch, holding your tray aloft, it occurred to me that I could follow you around for the afternoon and sign up for the same classes you did.

  As I took a final bite of cereal and trailed you outside, I imagined revealing to you, in the future, this moment of my taking decisive, romantic action. Just think, we would conjecture, we might never have gotten together; life is so random.

  You proceeded toward the redundantly named Harvard Hall, the contours of your shoulder blades pulsing under a thin black sweater, your gait as fluid as the motion of an underwater breaststroker. We arrived at a second-floor lecture room and you took an aisle seat. I found a free chair in the row behind, from which I had an unobstructed view of your profile.

  A professor, his white hair fringing a dome that shone brilliantly under the lights, fiddled with his notes at the podium. The syllabus was distributed: From Ahab to Prufrock: Tragically Flawed Hero(in)­es in American Literature, 1850–1929.

  Throughout the eighty-five-minute lecture I was riveted on you and only you, the professor’s voice droning like talk radio in the background. You composed notes in longhand, scribbling in your Harvard-insignia blue spiral notebook, periodically snake flicking your tongue between your lips to moisturize them before flexing the angle of your mandible. At one point you massaged your nape, precipitating a delicate flurry of dandruff that drifted onto your shoulders, becoming a constellation of stars on the night sky of your sweater.

  When you tilted your head in m
y direction to work out a knot, I looked at my laptop screen and busily typed Professor Jonathan Samuelson’s last insight, about how the whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick enables it to stand for anything in the minds of both Ahab and the reader.

  “Its very blankness, the colossal void it imposes on the text, reifies a central tension of post–Manifest Destiny American literature,” he proclaimed with closed eyes and an upturned head, as though channeling his wisdom from above. “The twinned desires of narrative and of capitalism. The populist author entices the ravenous reader via withheld information to keep him wanting more and more, just as the free market promises additional capital to seduce the never-satisfied worker. To quote Blake, ‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained . . .’ Anyone know the rest? TFs?”

  One of the graduate teaching fellows who had helped hand out the syllabus spoke up from the back of the room. “ ‘And the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling,’ ” he recited behind a trim sandy beard and tortoiseshell glasses. “ ‘And being restrain’d, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.’ ”

  At the end of the lecture Samuelson announced that those planning on taking the class should sign up online for one of the four graduate student–led weekly discussion sections. I had no way of knowing which one you’d be in—assuming you even remained in the course.

  You slipped out ahead of me. By the time I exited the building you were traversing the Yard, your over-the-shoulder bag—its handsomely distressed leather standing out in a sea of gaudily zippered backpacks and nonprofit-logoed totes—rhythmically colliding against your hip.

  I stopped and prodded at my phone when you crossed paths with one of your dining hall friends, a sharp-faced, nearly translucent girl with blond hair (Jen Pelletier, East Eighty-Seventh Street in New York; a fellow alumna of the Chapin School). You each pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, in defiance of the Yard’s ­tobacco-free policy. That was the end of your competitive running days, I surmised, not without some disappointment; I liked imagining you extricating yourself from your social circle to log hours on a chilly outdoor track, the masochistic introversion of the ­middle-distance runner.