Polly

by Amy Bryant

  “He’s a blight on the entire D.C. scene!” Theresa shouted.

  Mike Franklin had seen Joey, too. Probably at this very second he was feeling sorry for me. Or laughing about it with Adam and Todd Wilson. I couldn’t decide which was worse, being pitied by Mike or being laughed at.

  Theresa and Carrie moved on to the girl Joey was with. They said she looked like the kind of girl who would be more comfortable in a cheerleader uniform than at a punk-rock show (“She didn’t even look like she knew one Bad Brains song, it was, like, so obvious,” Theresa said). And she was definitely still in high school, they were sure of that. Probably not even a senior.

  Finally they were quiet. I lit one of Theresa’s Camel Lights. I wondered if Joey had met this girl at a show, too. Maybe he had given her a note. I balled my hands up and sat on them. My cigarette was still in my mouth, and my eyes stung from the smoke.

  “Okay, so there’s something else I have to tell you guys,” Theresa said as we pulled into the cul-de-sac where the party was. The street was packed with people, and one of the bands was already playing.

  “Okay, let’s have it,” Carrie said.

  Theresa laughed. “This is stupid, but. I totally made out with Todd Wilson last night. I don’t know what the fuck came over me.”

  I let out a moan. I wanted to switch places with Theresa. She knew the difference between a guy you just made out with and a guy you could actually call your boyfriend.

  “Are you okay?” Carrie asked. She was pulling over behind an old, wood-paneled station wagon.

  A few warm tears rushed down my face, disappearing as quickly as they had come. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. I mean, I feel like shit and all.”

  “Do you want me to take you home?” Carrie asked. Theresa had already opened her door and had one foot on the ground.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “I can go to a stupid garage party.”

  Fred Paige was the first person to stop me. Fred went to the other high school in Reston, and I knew him only in passing. His long hair was permanently tangled, and he was at all the hard-core shows.

  “Dude, I saw that guy you go out with at the Bad Brains show last night,” he said. “Is he your boyfriend still?”

  Carrie made a clucking sound.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I found a phone in a kitchen that was decorated in varying shades of yellow. Even the appliances were yellow. I picked up the yellow phone that was mounted on the wall and dialed Joey’s number. As it rang I crouched down on the floor and lowered my head into my chest. I didn’t want anyone to overhear me.

  “It’s my honey!” Joey crowed when I got through. “I just tried to call you!”

  I couldn’t help smiling. I had gotten used to his joyous, nasal voice.

  “So Joey, I have to talk to you about something,” I said. Now that I had him on the line I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I miss you! When are you coming over? It’s been forever!”

  “I’m calling you from a party,” I said. “A party full of people who saw you making out with someone else last night.”

  “Oh, they must mean Dawn,” Joey said, and for a second I thought there might be a reasonable explanation. “That’s no big deal. That was just because I was upset over what happened with you and Mike. I guess you could say I staged the whole thing.”

  I lifted my head from my chest. He sounded like a sports announcer, not like someone who had just been caught cheating on his girlfriend.

  “So we’re even now,” he said.

  I forgot about not wanting to be overheard. “We’re not fucking even! So don’t turn this around on me! Something happened with Mike by accident, and I told you about it! I didn’t go to some show and make out with a random guy for no reason! And if you were so affected by it, why didn’t you just break up with me?”

  “Because I didn’t want to break up with you. You’re my honey.”

  “Don’t call me that. I hate it when you call me that.”

  “Wow. This is like our worst fight ever,” Joey said.

  “This isn’t a fight, Joey. I’m breaking up with you.” I felt a small, unexpected sense of relief as soon as I said it.

  “Oh, come on,” Joey said. “Don’t be like this. Come over and we’ll talk.”

  “No.” I twisted the yellow phone cord around my finger. “I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore.”

  “Well then, if you’re going to be like that, I should tell you that Dawn isn’t the only one I was with while we were going out.” He finally sounded how he was supposed to sound. “You know, that first night at Verbal Assault I asked you if you had a boyfriend, but you never asked me if I had a girlfriend.”

  “Are you telling me you have a whole other girlfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But there was Tiffany. You met Tiffany when she watched the table for me, remember? She was upset when she saw us holding hands that first night, but I told her you were my old girlfriend and I was consoling you because you’d just been dumped and she bought it. And then Robin—you never met her. She came over and gave me a blow job one night after you had gone home. She still calls me, but she’s even younger than you, so I really shouldn’t—”

  “Is that all, because I’m in the middle of a party here,” I said. My stomach was queasy. He had been waiting to tell me. To let me in on the joke.

  “Come on, Polly,” he said. “I’m twenty-two. You’re seventeen. We weren’t even sleeping together.”

  I found Carrie and Theresa standing at the foot of the driveway, watching the band. We chose a place on the lawn to sit and drink from a bottle of tequila Theresa had brought. Fred and a couple other guys that I was used to seeing him with came over to our spot. Everyone but me started talking about how great the Bad Brains show had been. They had played for two hours. H.R. had done a standing front flip onstage.

  The band that had been playing in the garage stopped, and Massive Hemorrhage started setting up. Lyle and the Chrises were putting the drum set together. Mike was moving back and forth between his amp and his guitar, turning knobs, making adjustments. I took a sip of tequila and passed the bottle to Fred. The liquor burned its way down my throat, settling warmly in my stomach. More people sat down around us on the lawn. I was starting to have a pretty good time.

  five IAN

  Virginia Tech was in rural southwestern Virginia, built in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blacksburg was in the middle of nowhere, but there were people everywhere—more than twenty-five thousand students, all of them roughly my age. I felt like I had joined a large cult or the armed forces—albeit one marked by backpacks and textbooks and parties instead of weapons or religion or Kool-Aid. The boys wore baseball hats and T-shirts with slogans like WHY DON’T WE GET DRUNK AND SCREW or listing ten ways beer was better than women. The girls had large, unmoving hair and sorority allegiances.

  The locals hated the students. They were outnumbered, and mostly employed by the school. In town they stared menacingly over their steering wheels as they rolled by in their pickups, waiting for a reason to shout obscenities at us.

  I had no family or friends for 250 miles, and I was scared. Theresa had insisted on leaving the state for a small liberal-arts school in Ohio, and Carrie had another year to go before college. I had wanted to apply to the same schools as Theresa, but Mom and William could only afford to send me instate. Besides, they reasoned, Virginia Tech had a terrific math department.

  I wasn’t the sort of person who made friends easily. “Shy at first,” my elementary school teachers wrote in the Comments section of my report cards, “but opens up just fine once she has time to adjust.” I wasn’t adjusting. There was something about college that kept me in a permanent state of embarrassment. I felt flattened by the sheer effort it took to act normal as I traveled from one awkward situation to the next, and I hated the conspicuousness of not knowing anybody. My dormitory had the barren, impermanent air of high tur
nover, and it was impossible to think of the skeletal bunk beds flanked by two desks and two dressers as home. I kept my headphones on constantly and waited for someone to befriend me.

  Mom sent me large padded envelopes filled with things she picked up at Kmart: undershirts and socks and long underwear and Bic ballpoint pens. She didn’t include a letter or even a note; there were just the envelopes showing up every so often, addressed in her handwriting with our return address.

  Every night on the way to the dining hall I wondered what Mom and William were having for dinner at home. I missed Mom’s fried chicken. I missed William’s meatballs and biscuits. All I could bring myself to eat at the dining hall was soggy noodles with a sugary marinara sauce, and maybe a wilted salad drenched in oil and vinegar. For breakfast and lunch I ate cereal. I’d heard jokes about the “freshman fifteen,” the extra weight that girls tended to put on in college, but I was in danger of getting even skinnier than I already was.

  At least I didn’t have to eat dinner alone. To “foster friendship,” the dorm resident advisers required us to eat with our hallmates for the first two weeks of school. There were eight rooms and sixteen girls on my hall. Most of these girls were of the big-hair, sorority-rush variety, with a few notable exceptions. I ate with the notable exceptions.

  Notable Exception Number One: Laura was my roommate. Laura was from Burke, a suburb near Reston. Laura played clarinet in the Virginia Tech marching band, but had elected not to live in the band dorm so she could make “regular friends,” as she put it. Laura was one of those people who looked normal from the waist up, but from the waist down she was larger than you’d expect. She wasn’t huge, exactly, just out of proportion, with a wide butt and thick thighs. Laura was way ahead of me on the friend-making front, as the marching band got to school three weeks early to practice for football season. When she wasn’t with her band friends, Laura was usually talking on the phone with one of them. When I came in she would put whoever it was on hold to say hi and to remind me to just let her know if I needed the phone. I had nothing against Laura, but it was clear that we weren’t going to be spending a lot of time together.

  Notable Exception Number Two: Sharon lived across the hall from Laura and me. She was from Virginia Beach. If you couldn’t guess that Sharon was a deadhead from her printed peasant skirts and her tie-dyed shirts, she was ready to remind you at every lull in conversation that she had seen the Dead eleven times in the last two years. A long shelf in Sharon’s room was filled with bootleg tapes, and Sharon could identify the date and location of a particular Dead show with her eyes closed. “That’s 1986, Madison Square Garden,” she’d report as I passed by her room on the way to the bathroom. Sharon liked to keep her door open so we could see her swaying back and forth to the music, her eyes closed and her arms upraised. There was something evangelical about the way Sharon danced. It gave me the creeps.

  Sharon was quickly adopted by the other deadheads on campus, and after the second week of school I rarely saw her. When I did see her she greeted me with an enthusiastic “What’s up, sister,” that I found off-putting.

  Notable Exception Number Three: Marissa was from Norfolk. She was the dorm slut. At first I pegged Marissa as a sorority girl, but then the stories started to circulate: Marissa had snuck a guy into the dorm and fucked him in the shower. Marissa gave a guy she met in the laundry room a blow job. Marissa didn’t come home all night. All this in the first two weeks of school.

  Marissa wore tight jeans and had big boobs. She had long bangs that she parted on the far right so they covered her left eye. Marissa had pouty lips and a menacing grin that she flashed around in the hallway. Instead of eating a regular meal in the dining hall, Marissa drank Coke after Coke. You could tell she wasn’t interested in making friends with any of us. I envied her steady gaze and her unflinching attitude in the face of all that gossip. When I passed Marissa in the hallway she looked right through me, smiling that vague grin of hers. She reminded me of the girls in my high school who got into fistfights. Only the girls in my high school who were like Marissa didn’t go to college.

  Notable Exception Number Four: Julie was from Richmond, and had the room diagonal from mine. She smoked Marlboros and had hung a Clash poster over her bed. Julie was definitely not in the “shy at first” category. She said hi whenever she saw me like we were already close friends. She complimented me for being the only girl on the hall besides her without a floral print bedspread. Sometimes after dinner Julie would invite me over to her room for a cigarette.

  Julie’s roommate, Debbie, had come to college with her boyfriend. Debbie spent most of her time in her boyfriend’s dorm room, which was just fine with Julie. Julie had gone to boarding school, so she had a blasé attitude about living away from home that I found comforting.

  “Just avoid anyone wearing white sneakers and you’ll be fine,” Julie said over cigarettes in her room after dinner. She was balancing a cup of coffee and a plastic ashtray on her stomach as she lay in the hammock she had hung up under her loft bed. Though I hadn’t known her long, I knew that footwear was one of the markers Julie used to measure who could be trusted. Also brands of cigarettes and, especially when it came to boys, haircuts. She reminded me of Theresa.

  Now and then in the dining hall or traveling back and forth to class I would recognize a bop from high school. There were five or six of them that I’d noticed so far, and every one of them went out of their way to say hello, as if there hadn’t been an unbridgeable chasm between us for years. It was no surprise to me that these warm greetings were discontinued as soon as they began rushing various sororities and fraternities. Greek letters appeared on their clothes much in the way their varsity letters had figured on their clothing before, and with the new letters came their familiar blindness to those who were not a part of their scene. But I didn’t care. Even if they’d wanted to look me up in the student directory, they wouldn’t have been able to. I was no longer known as Polly Elaine Clark. I was Polly Elaine Hessler.

  I decided that Polly Hessler wouldn’t take any math classes first semester. The only problem was, no other subjects leaped out at me. None of my classes had fewer than two hundred students, and my teachers were openly disinterested. Geology was the most boring. We looked at slides of rocks while the professor droned away in the shadows. My English professor read aloud to us in Olde English, without bothering with the translations. My Introduction to the History of Art professor mumbled and cleared his throat every fifteen seconds. Sociology was interesting, but I didn’t get the this-is-it feeling I felt I needed to declare a major.

  Five weeks into college, I had racked up a couple of bad grades, an advanced smoking habit, some seriously dark roots, and a startlingly large phone bill. I liked the way my roots looked, but I was determined to raise the grades and lower the phone bill. I needed something besides studying to replace the hours I spent on the phone with Theresa and Carrie. But I was in Blacksburg. There was nothing to do in Blacksburg.

  One afternoon on the way home from class I noticed a flyer in the lobby of my dorm announcing a meeting for the campus radio station. I tore off one of the takeaway parts of the flyer that had the date and location on it. When I was a kid I liked to watch WKRP in Cincinnati. I had fantasized about being a DJ like Johnny Fever or Venus Flytrap.

  That night over a cigarette in her room I asked Julie if she wanted to come with me to the meeting.

  “I don’t know,” she said, without a glimmer of interest.

  “Don’t make me go by myself,” I said. “It could be weird.”

  The meeting was held in a classroom on campus instead of at the radio station. Most of the seats were filled with people wearing band T-shirts. A couple of aloof, unfriendly-looking guys from the station stood off to the side, waiting their turn to speak. Once everyone was settled in their seats, one of the unfriendly-looking guys walked over to the chalkboard. He picked up a stub of yellow chalk and scribbled Ian Cross, Music Director.

  “First off,
I’d like to thank you all for showing up tonight.”

  Ian Cross’s English accent wasn’t pronounced, but I noticed it right away. His face was pudgy and boyish, even though he had a lot of stubble. And he was wearing a beat-up old army jacket that was a lot like the one I owned. I was sorry I hadn’t worn it.

  “You won’t get anywhere at the station if you aren’t willing to work,” Ian admonished us. “And even if you do work, it will still be a long time between your first day as a volunteer and becoming a DJ.”

  “Jesus, it’s not like there’s any money involved,” Julie whispered. She kicked her shoe against the carpeted floor.

  A girl with long stringy hair and cat-eye glasses raised her hand. “How much of a time investment are you talking about? I mean, most of us are full-time students.”

  “The time investment depends on you,” Ian said. “I think you’ll find that it’s entirely possible that you can do schoolwork and the radio station, too.” The girl nodded and wrote something down in her notebook.

  “I suggest that you think about how much you really care about music, in addition to how much time you’re realistically able to put in, before you commit yourself to WUVT,” Ian continued. Instead of saying the call letters, he pronounced them like a word, woovit.

  “I definitely don’t have what it takes,” Julie said in a stage whisper.

  I gave Julie my best Be Quiet stare, the one I used when I was a babysitter. Julie had the kind of face that was so perfectly in proportion, it made me realize that most people’s faces were actually lopsided in one way or another. (For example, Ian’s chin jutted to the left slightly.)

  “I don’t mean to scare you off, but you musn’t think that the radio station is a place for hanging out, or listening to music with your friends,” Ian said with renewed fervor, as if we hadn’t really been listening until now. “You can do that in your dormitories. What I need is real, honest, unglamorous help.”