English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

The first night all three of us were back, Cristina, Melanie, and I threw a little impromptu party in my room. We ordered takeout and drank entirely too much and sang along to terrible songs for numerous hours. Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits, which Melanie inexplicably owned, was only one among many eighties-based groups who figured prominently.

  “I wouldn’t eat food I don’t like,” Melanie moaned the next day. “Why do I drink things I know I’ll regret? I wouldn’t eat something that I had demonstrated a consistent allergic reaction to. Why did I drink gin?”

  “If these are your regrets,” Cristina muttered from where she was, facedown at the table, “you have no regrets.”

  “I have no regrets at all,” I chirped. “I’m just pleased the two of you are back, so I don’t have to navigate my life here alone anymore.”

  I was maybe a little too cheerful. All that drinking with Toby and Jason had left me much more prepared and much less hungover. This meant I had the tolerance of a seven-foot-tall burly truck driver, but I wasn’t concentrating on that part. I chose to concentrate on my mother’s latest package instead. Cheez Whiz and Triscuits, which had entirely disintegrated on the trip across the pond. I aimed a squirt of processed cheese at my forefinger and licked it off.

  Melanie eyed me, and shuddered at the Cheez Whiz. “Perhaps you’ll reconsider your regrets when you recall that you were belting out ‘Born in the USA’ at two in the morning. Quite on your own.”

  I eyed her right back. “Fine,” I said. “And who was that who made an even bigger scene to ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’?”

  Melanie pinkened.

  Cristina raised her head and glared at us both. “I don’t really think either of you is in a position to throw stones,” she said. “Do you?”

  “And by the way, I still think you should sort out that teacher,” Melanie continued in an uncharacteristically aggrieved tone. Clearly the hangover at work. “He’s not actually a celebrity, you know.”

  “Weren’t the three hours we spent on this last night enough?” I rubbed at my eyes.

  “You must show him who is boss,” Cristina said, or anyway I think that’s what she said as she cradled her head in her arms.

  “Just get pissed and snog him,” Melanie suggested, sounding more like her normal self. “It’s a great British tradition.”

  Having nothing at all with which to reply to that, I returned to my room to place a dutiful call to my mother.

  “Brennan.” Toby said my name with great resignation when he swung by to accompany me to the library. “What was going on last night?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said coolly.

  “I think you do,” he said. “In case you wondered, you woke me from a sound sleep. You were screaming American rock anthems at full volume. And I do mean screaming and not singing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said with tremendous dignity. “I was in bed last night by ten.” I glared at him as we set off along the footpath. “And don’t you have better things to do than worry about what I might or might not be doing? Like worrying about your girlfriend?”

  Toby winced. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But she doesn’t know that.”

  Although, in truth, I kind of thought she ought to.

  I was actually a little amazed that Suzanne’s expectations of a single drunken snog were so high. If it had been me, I would have assumed that Toby was never going to speak to me again. In fact, when it was me, I had automatically assumed that we would never discuss the incident, and, sure enough, Toby and I were as okay as we’d ever been pre-kiss. I would never have run in the opposite direction altogether, claiming a relationship. The very idea made me cringe.

  Not that I could really claim that my behavior was a guide, given the profound lack of any reasonable romantic interests in my life. In fact, maybe Suzanne had the right idea. Those girls who made assumptions and refused to slink off into their shame tended to end up with the man after all. Michael, Robin, and I had watched this phenomenon play out repeatedly. Okay, sure, we didn’t much care for the tone of the ensuing relationships, but they had the ensuing relationships. We just had painful tales to tell one another over cocktails.

  When we got to the library, Toby disappeared immediately into the stacks. I arranged my notebooks and my books and my study materials very carefully around my workspace and stared at them. I decided I required a cigarette for motivational purposes, and sauntered right back down the stairs and outside into the cold. The smokers huddled together in the entranceway in smoky solidarity. At least it was covered over. You might freeze, and you would definitely damage your lungs, but you could avoid the ever-present rain. I was trying to pep myself up into a frenzy of academic zeal—with only moderate success—when Jason appeared from around the side of the building. I flicked my finished cigarette off to the side and grinned at him.

  “Excellent!” he cried. “Let’s have a cigarette! May the dark night of the soul never rob us of these moments, Brennan. Though the pub calls, know that it can only be sweeter by our working for it. What could be better than a smooth pint after a long day’s toil?”

  “You haven’t started either?” I asked dryly.

  “Not a word,” Jason said cheerfully. “And I have a shocking lack of interest.”

  “I would take comfort in that,” I said. “Except I know you, Jason. You’ll moan about everything and whip us all into the heights of panic, and then you’ll sit down and dash off a paper in the course of a single night. And get distinction on it.”

  He grinned mischievously. “Or I might simply have a heart attack,” he said. “I can’t take the pressure. All these expectations. I might just choke.” He sounded as if he might find that amusing.

  The papers we were all working on were supposed to be five thousand words long. As we had all theoretically started them before the holidays, we were all theoretically well along the way now. Let me stress theoretically. Five thousand words worked out to only about fifteen pages. Fifteen pages didn’t scare me. When I’d been at college, I had once memorably pounded out a twenty-page paper overnight, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and a total lack of interest in the subject that was outweighed only by my fear of the teacher. I’d gotten a really good grade. But this was different. It wasn’t the length that worried me, it was the quality. Suddenly every word counted. Suddenly I was a graduate student, and bullshit papers just weren’t permitted anymore.

  It was terrifying.

  Jason and I made plans to meet in the pub that night for restorative pints and a collective moan, and I decided to have one more cigarette while he raced inside to bother Toby. I stared out across the expanse of campus before me. It looked like some kind of small city, all those flat-topped concrete rectangles and antennae. It was a profoundly ugly place. Just when I thought I’d acclimated to it and gotten over it, I was struck anew.

  I saw Suzanne barrel up the path toward me, her head tucked down toward the ground and her legs eating up the distance in impressively long strides. I had the opportunity to duck inside and avoid her, but I didn’t take it. Something perverse in me stirred to life and waited for action. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I lounged against the doorframe and waited for her to glance up.

  “Hello,” she said when she reached me. “Have you been here long?”

  “A while,” I said. No need to advertise that I hadn’t actually done any work yet.

  “I heard your party last night,” she said. I got the accusing green-eyed stare.

  “I guess everyone did,” I said. I laughed. “I guess we got a little carried away.”

  “I’m surprised no one called security,” Suzanne said.

  Lines like that were the ones I reported, with great umbrage, to my friends. And whether those friends were in England or in New York, they all groaned and demanded that I stop giving the girl the time of day. I never knew why I didn’t heed their advice. Except, I supposed, it was simple arrogance—I thought Suzanne needed my frien
dship to function as some kind of voice of reason in her personal cacophony of drama. I figured that the fact that she annoyed me wasn’t reason enough to avoid her.

  “You should have called security yourself,” I said lightly.

  “You can tell me if Toby was there,” she snapped. “I won’t hold it against you.”

  Although she quite evidently already did.

  I sighed. “He wasn’t.” I was watching her closely. “It was a house thing.”

  Something shimmered behind the impassive face she was trying to wear. “Whatever,” she said bitterly. It occurred to me that she might think I was lying.

  “He really wasn’t there,” I said. “He wasn’t invited and, Suzanne, why would I lie about it?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. Her eyes were dark. She tugged her coat tighter around her and shook her bright hair away from her face. “I don’t know why anyone would do anything. I have to get to work.”

  She smiled at me, though. It was meant to be a reassuring kind of smile, I thought. As if to smooth over the fact that she thought I was a liar. And something else, something worse.

  We walked in together. I got the impression that she wanted to run away, but she didn’t. We climbed the first set of stairs in tandem.

  “I’m sitting with Toby,” I said without inflection.

  “I’m meeting people,” she retorted.

  She looked at me. I kept my face blank, and she sighed again. “Are you going out tonight?” she asked.

  “Probably,” I said. I smiled. “I usually do.”

  “Call me,” she said. “Depending on how much work I do, maybe I’ll come.”

  I watched her hurry away into the stacks and frowned. Maybe it was right then, right at that moment, that I first considered the possibility that Suzanne very seriously disliked me.

  “Which kind of sucks, I guess,” I told Cristina later that evening as we were getting ready to go out. “But on the other hand, why should I care?”

  “Because who knows what she might do,” Cristina said darkly.

  “Please. What can she do? So she doesn’t like me and she thinks there’s something between Toby and me when there isn’t. So what?”

  “You should be worried that she has always thought there was something with you and Toby, and still declared herself for him, and still jumped him. Now she blames you.” She shrugged. “I think maybe her real crush is on you.”

  “I don’t think she’s gay, Cristina,” I protested.

  “I don’t think she is either.”

  Cristina and I stared at each other. I frowned, thoughtfully.

  “Huh,” I said.

  We both lit our cigarettes and blew it all away like smoke into the night.

  I wrote like a madwoman. I felt like a madwoman. The paper crunch was on.

  Toby and I ranted down the phone to each other, and sometimes met for emergency coffee and in-person ranting sessions throughout the long nights. There was very little sleeping. I tended to wake at dawn with a jolt, gasping for breath, and would leap up and return to work no matter what time I’d crawled into bed the night before.

  My housemates gave me a wide berth. I stormed back and forth to the printers and cursed everyone and everything. I read, I wrote, and then I tore everything up and wrote again.

  First there was a blank screen. Then some quotations, and then a few sentences. Then suddenly there were pages, and the kernel of an argument. And then somehow there was a paper. It was always a mystery.

  Cristina and I were lounging in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine. We’d both had work and had avoided the pub, and so decided a later drink without the hassle of socializing was the way to go.

  “You seem sad,” I said. I didn’t dare say the words “Physicist” or “David.” She shrugged.

  “I’m not,” she said. “Or anyway, there’s nothing to do about it.”

  “I hear that,” I muttered ruefully. We wallowed for a moment, and then we both snickered at our own wallowing.

  And then we both jumped when someone pounded on the kitchen window from outside. We stared, and then stared at each other. A figure had attached itself to the window with the side of his face, and was sliding off. A figure that looked suspiciously like . . .

  “It can’t be . . .” I breathed.

  We watched him topple over. Cristina and I stared at each other for a moment and then leaped up and raced for the door.

  Outside, now lolling about on the ground, lay George.

  “He’s drunk!” Cristina was agog.

  “Maybe he’s just really sick,” I said. “Does he even drink?”

  Closer inspection showed that George thought Hawaiian shirts were best paired with patterned trousers and high-top sneakers. And that he smelled like a brewery. George moaned incoherently. Cristina and I looked at each other.

  “Good Samaritans,” I ventured. “Very good karma.”

  We each took an arm and pulled him to his feet. He staggered, but we were able to direct him inside. We sat him down at the kitchen table and began plying him with pint glasses of water.

  “What’s going on, George?” Cristina prodded. “Why are you in this state?”

  “I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen,” he replied, though not quite so distinctly. Exposure to Evan had sharpened my ear for quotations, and I scowled at George from across the table.

  “Don’t you dare quote Say Anything!” I gasped. I jabbed an accusing finger at him. “You are not Lloyd Dobler! That’s sacrilege!”

  In response, George did a header onto the table.

  “He is too drunk,” Cristina said dismissively, losing interest.

  She settled back into her chair and sipped at her wine. As if we were alone. We resumed talking, moving away from depressing subjects and concentrating on sharing wild and unsubstantiated rumors about some economics students we knew.

  “Let’s talk about Sean Douglas,” Cristina said with a leer, when we exhausted the gossip thing.

  “Sean . . .” I sighed, smiling.

  “I do not agree with this George Clooney idiocy,” Cristina said sternly. “You are a woman and he is a man. You must claim him.” She waved her cigarette at me. “You must declare yourself to him!” She smirked as her ringing tone echoed around the room.

  “And that would lead directly to him declaring me mentally unstable,” I told her gently. This was not the first time we had had this conversation since the Jet Lag Dinner.

  We both sighed dreamily. It was still a great fantasy.

  After about an hour’s snooze, George reared up again and stared around in alarm. Cristina and I had polished off one bottle of wine and were working on our second. We’d segued from Sean to celebrity crushes.

  “It’s all fine,” I told George in what I hoped was a soothing tone. “Cristina and I rescued you.”

  For some reason, that didn’t appear to really comfort him. Cristina and I watched in horror as his eyes welled up and he began to wail. It wasn’t a pretty sight. It was kind of scary. As much as I thought George was a tool, I didn’t wish him ill, and pain was pain. I didn’t know what to do with his. A hug was more than I could bear, and whispering “there, there” while patting him on the forearm seemed somewhat shabby.

  I was briefly alarmed when Cristina ran out of the room, but she returned at once with a roll of toilet paper in place of tissues and thrust it at his head. She and I were stricken into silence. Also trapped. You could hardly bolt for cover when someone started bawling. Although as he continued I was giving it serious consideration.

  “She left me,” George cried. “She said our politics would never mesh. She said I represented everything she hated about American cultural imperialism.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped, immediately roused from my quasi-respectful silence. “You should have told her to get a grip. No one’s begging her to watch American movies or shop in American stores or eat in American fast-food restaurants. She’s like a political vegetarian who storm
s around at PETA rallies in leather boots. I saw that Gap sweater she was wearing! Her hands are totally dirty.”

  “Alex!” Cristina made a quelling sort of face at me.

  “I can’t believe Fiona dumped you for political reasons,” she said in a soft, compelling voice I had never heard come out of her mouth before. I stared, and she winked at me. “That seems so cold and impersonal.”

  “Sounds like our Fiona,” I muttered. Well, he was too drunk to really hear.

  “Political philosophy is Fiona’s life,” George moaned. Even with the moaning, he sounded far less slurred than before. Apparently his nap—or brief coma, call it what you like—had perked him up. He was now wasted, a big step up from paralytic.

  He blotted at his face and seemed to be finished with the actual sobbing. Which came as quite a relief. I was used to my own crying, but anyone else’s made me uncomfortable. You never knew what to do, or what they wanted you to do. Some people wanted hugging and some people wished you would just leave them to it. It was all too confusing.

  “But to dump someone over such a thing seems so harsh.” Cristina’s voice couldn’t have been more encouraging. She was hanging on George’s every word—a sensation that must have been new for him.

  “We got together because our sexual attraction was so intense,” George confessed, to Cristina’s and my absolute shock. And to our equally horrified delight. It was like a tabloid come to life! Troll and Vulture in Sex Escapades!

  George laughed hollowly, and heedlessly continued. “We barely got out of bed for three months.”

  The visuals that accompanied that statement nearly made me swoon. Cristina and I engaged in a brief kicking session under the table, each of us near hysteria and yet maintaining completely straight faces where George could see them.

  “That’s always the way,” I commiserated. “But eventually, the real world must intrude, no matter how fantastic the sex.” My voice rose a little on that last word, and I had to gulp back the laughter as further visuals flooded my brain. Cristina managed to change her bark of laughter into a serious cough.