by R. T. Lowe
Caitlin groaned. “Fine. So what do you want to know? I can tell you…” She hesitated. “Okay, so I’ll tell you why I’m a virgin.”
“I think we know why,” Lucas quipped.
“That’s not what I meant, dummy. So anyway, I decided a few years ago that I wouldn’t have sex until I’m married. And it’s not because of religious reasons or anything like that. I’m Catholic. But so is Harper. And she’s not a virgin.”
“Caitlin!” Harper shrieked. “Hey!”
“I’m sorry.” Caitlin ducked her head apologetically. “I didn’t mean it like that. That came out all wrong.”
Harper laughed. “I’m just kidding, dear. It’s okay.”
“What I was trying to say,” Caitlin went on, “is that I won’t have sex until I’m married because my virginity is a gift. I can only give it away once. It’s special. And the person who receives it should be the man I spend the rest of my life with. I know that makes me seem old-fashioned. But, well, that’s just how I feel.”
“That’s how I feel, too,” Lucas deadpanned. “I’m saving my special little gift for the woman I marry.”
“I take back everything I said about how much I respect you!” Caitlin snapped, scowling.
“That hurts,” Lucas said, clearing imaginary tears from his eyes. “But seriously. Why don’t you marry me, Little C? I’ll cherish your special little gift. I’ll cradle it and treasure it and—”
“I hate you!” Caitlin jumped up from her pillow and threw herself on top of him. Lucas rolled onto his side, laughing hysterically. “I seriously hate you so much!” Caitlin squealed. “Why can’t you be normal like everyone else?” When she finally got up, she fixed her hair and stumbled back to her pillow, embarrassed, but trying not to show it. Then she glared at Lucas. “I better get a pass!”
Lucas sat up, still giggling like a little boy. “Yes, my lovely little treasure keeper, you passed. Okay, who’s next? Harper, right? Harper Connolly, you’re next. Who needs wine?”
Caitlin and Felix raised their glasses. Felix was drinking it like water. Not only was the wine the best thing he’d ever tasted, the alcohol was numbing his mind, mellowing him out, calming his nerves. There hadn’t been nearly enough time to assimilate everything that had happened to him, to think it all through, and now he felt less pressure, less necessity, to make sense of it all. The wine was exactly what he needed.
Lucas uncorked two bottles, passed them around, and said to Harper, “Make it good.”
“Give me some of that.” Harper reached for Caitlin’s bottle, filled her glass and took a big drink. “So my secret is a secret, because, well, I don’t tell people about it. I know that sounds brilliant.” She laughed nervously. “And I haven’t told anyone because it makes me seem shallow and superficial, and like I’m not such a good person.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“So anyway, you know how sometimes we talk about the thing that scares us the most? People say stuff like drowning, or clowns, or spiders, or shit like that, right? Well, the thing that scares me the most is growing old. Just the idea of growing old freaks me out. I honestly can’t even really understand or… um… how do I say this? I can’t imagine myself being old. You know, like, I can’t picture someone asking me how old I am, and me saying, ‘I’m thirty’. And it’s not the part about dying that scares me. But for some reason, when I think of being older, I have this feeling I’m in somebody else’s body. I just feel like, and I know this sounds weird, but I feel like I was always meant to be young.” She looked right at Felix and smiled.
He smiled back.
“That probably means I have some kind of major psychological issues,” Harper went on. “I guess I’ll have to deal with that later. I mean, I do understand I won’t be eighteen forever. I’m not crazy or anything. I guess I’m just a little vain. Maybe I’m just a stupid girl. I like girl power anthems, and shoes, and handbags and Sex and the City. And I can’t imagine not liking those things. In fact, I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t like those things. It’s like I was born at fifteen. But now… now I’m afraid if I’m fifty and I haven’t changed, I’ll be kind of pathetic. I don’t know. I am what I am. Sorry. I hope you guys still like me.”
“Are you kidding?” Lucas said. “Weren’t you listening? I’m illiterate. Nobody wanted Allison. Felix got dumped because he’s white trash. And there isn’t a single guy in the whole world who’ll have sex with Caitlin. You’re just the Kardashian of the group. Every group needs one of those.”
Harper smiled.
“And you passed,” Lucas told her. “More wine anyone? I’m making a new rule: no one leaves until the room’s dry. Bottoms up!”
Chapter 34
What the Cat Dragged In
Caitlin dropped her tray on the table noisily and stuffed a cherry tomato in her mouth before sitting down. She chewed it up and swallowed, and without looking up, popped in another one.
“What’s up with her?” Felix asked Harper. He nearly had to shout to be heard. The cafeteria was packed. When it was raining, like now, the kids living in Downey tended to stay in for dinner, and stay longer than usual; given the number of rainy days so far this semester, some were already well on their way to packing on the dreaded ‘freshman fifteen’.
Felix was feeling fairly stable—for the moment. His stability levels were constantly in flux, a fact that had shadowed his day-to-day since the night Bill had showed him the journal. Despite what the calendar said, the past two weeks had felt like one endless night. Sometimes he fared pretty well, getting through the days like a normal college kid, and other times he couldn’t rein in his wandering, questioning mind and it challenged his sanity at every turn. He tried to put his thoughts on lockdown, to stay in the present, but it was an arduous task. Conversations, in particular, were a slippery beast. There were times—entire days on occasion—when the only way he could keep up was to ask everyone to repeat themselves. He’d said “huh?” and “what?” so often, he wondered if his friends thought he might be suffering from hearing loss. Allison, of course, knew what was going on, and where his head really was.
He watched her across the table casually cutting up fingerling potatoes and a side of string beans. He was envious. Allison was a rock, an actor extraordinaire; Felix’s incineration of her room didn’t seem to affect her behavior at all. Must be nice, he thought enviously, to be able to compartmentalize like that.
Caitlin was in a dour mood. She was turning her fork over and over and staring at her food like it had just called her a Republican.
“She got a B on her Political Science midterm,” Harper said by way of explanation.
“Oh.” Felix didn’t see the connection.
Lucas swallowed a mouthful of chicken cutlet. “So what are you so pissed about?”
“What am I pissed about?” Caitlin shouted, snapping out of her stupor. “I killed that exam! I’m pretty sure that… that… maybe the prof made a mistake. Maybe she gave me the wrong grade.”
“Did you get it back?” Allison asked her. “You could check.”
“I already did.” Looking discouraged, Caitlin ate another tomato. “But I still think she screwed it up somehow. Maybe the stupid TA graded it. He looks like The Kid With The Hood anyway.”
Felix blinked. The Kid With The Hood. That’s what everyone was calling the dorm invader. How would Caitlin react if she knew that she was sharing a salt shaker with The Kid With The Hood? Probably not very well. He’d first noticed the posters on the community boards inside the Student Center about a month ago and now they were all over campus. The posters were an artist’s rendering of a man’s face, a man wearing a hood, and below the face was a caption that read: Please Contact Campus Security If You See This Man. Everyone knew that the guy on the poster had broken into a dorm room in Astoria Hall—room 444—but the posters had become a campus-wide joke and were frequently the subject of clever satirization in The Weekly Sturgeon, which implicated the school’s administrators
and professors, including President Taylor and Dr. Borakslovic, in the mysterious dorm room invasion. The sketch was so bad—the hood concealed everything but the mouth and chin—it could have been just about anyone between the ages of fifteen and a 110.
Lucas grinned at Caitlin. “It’s awesome that you’re finally taking out your anger on those vegetables ‘cause you know it’s totally their fault you didn’t get an A.” He cut up some chicken and added: “You know what your problem is?”
“Oh do tell,” Caitlin sighed wearily.
“Expectations. You’d be much more at peace with yourself if you didn’t aim so high. I’ve always said the key to success is low expectations. I'm full of wise sayings like that if you take the time to get to know me.”
“I don’t like you,” Caitlin said sourly, forking a cucumber slice.
“Getting a B’s pretty good,” Felix offered.
“No shit,” Lucas agreed. “I got one B, two C’s and an A, and you don’t see me acting all homicidal at my dinner.”
“That’s exactly what I got,” Felix replied. He’d hoped to do better, but he could live with being in the chunkiest part of the bell curve.
“What’d you get the A in?” Allison asked him.
“Psychology.”
Allison looked surprised. “I thought you said you bombed that one. Isn’t that Professor Malone’s class? He’s supposed to be a tough grader. I know a girl in your class who’s super smart and she got a B minus.”
“Sucks for her.” Felix shrugged. “I thought I did okay on it. I didn’t think he’d give me an A, but I’m not gonna ask him about it. How’d you do?”
Allison grinned sheepishly. “Okay.”
Caitlin looked up from her plate. “All A’s. Congrats.”
“Good job,” Harper said.
“Thanks.”
“Speaking of straight A wonder children,” Lucas said, chewing on a french fry, “did you all hear about the girl in Arizona? Gabriela something? They just found her body in the desert.”
Everyone nodded. It had been all over the news.
“I guess that puts things in perspective,” Caitlin muttered guiltily. “I’m all upset about a dumb test, and this girl in Arizona—Gabriela Conseco—was shot in the face six times by the Faceman. And she was such an amazing girl. Did you read about her? Four point student. Captain of the volleyball team. She built houses for the homeless in Nicaragua during the summers. And they said she’d gotten into Yale.”
Allison put her fork down and said grimly, “She was only seventeen, just a year younger than us. All that potential. And in an instant, a goddamn serial killer took it all away. I wish they’d catch that bastard.”
“It’s terrible,” Felix said in a low voice. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like if the Faceman was pointing his gun at you. Talk about a nightmare.”
“It blows,” Lucas said. “When they catch him, they should shoot him in the face six times. Let the punishment fit the crime.”
“That’s the last thing they should do.” Caitlin shook her head vigorously. “The government shouldn’t be permitted to kill anyone. He should be locked up for the rest of his life. I think if the government did something about all the guns out there Gabriela might still be alive.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding!” Lucas exclaimed. “He deserves to die! And banning guns wouldn’t prevent that psycho from killing people. You’re nuts if you think that…”
Felix glanced around the cafeteria to see if Lucas’s shouting had caused heads to turn, but no one was paying any attention to them. No one could hear them. The room wasn’t designed with acoustics in mind, so the roaring background din of a few hundred boisterous students—laughter, loud conversations, cutlery scraping against porcelain, and the clankety-clanking of kids stacking and setting aside dishes and glasses at the clean-up stations—went bouncing and reverberating off the wall panels instead of the wall panels absorbing the collection of sounds.
“Come on you two,” Harper said mildly. “If I’d known you were going to get into the merits of capital punishment and tighter gun control laws, I’d have eaten in my room.”
“Totally agree with that.” Felix smiled at her.
Harper returned the smile, holding it a second longer than he was comfortable with. She still made him nervous sometimes.
“You’re right,” Lucas said brightly. “I can convince her of the error of her liberal ways later.”
“I really don’t like you,” Caitlin grumbled. “Seriously.”
“You know you love me. Oh—I almost forgot! I wanted to show you guys something.” Lucas reached under the table, fumbled around in his backpack for a moment, and with a “ta-da” came away with a cylindrical container with a blue and white label which he held up for everyone to see.
“What the hell’s that?” Felix asked, as Lucas placed it next to his plate.
Allison read the label out loud: “Super-Six-Pack-Power-Protein-Plus. Hey! It’s that S-S-P-P-P-P stuff!”
“I just got it today.” Lucas was grinning like he was up to something. “I thought we could all try it out. You know, see if you guys like it.”
“Cool!” Harper said.
“And if we like it,” Allison said to him, squinting hard to read the label, “you’ll agree to endorse it?”
Lucas looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “And you got straight A’s? Talk about grade inflation. I’m already endorsing it.”
“What?” Caitlin said, surprised. “I thought—”
“I agreed to try it. I never said I had to like it. Money’s in the bank.”
Caitlin plucked up her fork. From the look on her face, and the way she was holding it, she was seriously thinking about skewering Lucas’s hand—or some other body part.
“Well, I think it’s cool he’s at least trying it,” Felix said to Caitlin, hoping to defuse the situation before they launched into round 322 of their year-long bickering session. “And I’m sure it’ll be good. It’s just protein powder. How bad could it be?”
“Exactly!” Lucas said. “See! Felix knows what’s up. Allison has a four point, but we got common sense.” He popped off the plastic cover and peeled away the aluminum liner beneath it. He leaned forward and submerged his nose into the container, giving it a sniff. Then he jerked his head back like he’d been blasted in the eyes with pepper spray and pushed it away, nearly knocking it over.
“Oh God!” Lucas gasped, making a face like he’d walked in on his parents having sex. “That smells… a… a little funky. Whadya think?” He retrieved it, holding it up so Felix could get a whiff.
“Ewwwwww!” Felix covered his nose, and yanked his face away from the container. It was absolutely rancid, a mixture of sour milk and foot fungus. “Cat piss! I mean, seriously. My grandma had this old cat with a kidney problem that pissed all over the house. And that”—he pointed at the S-S-P-P-P-P—“smells just like her house.”
Caitlin crossed her arms, looking smug and self-satisfied. “I hope your cologne smells just like it. Then everyone can experience the mystery and lifestyle of smelling like cat urine. Not that you’d care. Drink up, wise old sage.”
“Kinda serves you right,” Allison said, laughing. “Maybe next time, you’ll actually try the product. Now you’re the face of protein powder that smells like piss.”
Lucas put the cover back on the container and slipped it into his backpack. “Ah well.” He shrugged. “Live and learn, right? Wow, that stuff’s disgusting. I’d love to try it just to shut you guys up, but I’m pretty sure I’d toss my cookies.”
“Please don’t,” Caitlin told him, her expression serious. “I’m not interested in substituting my vinaigrette for your vomit.”
“Anyone else not in the mood to go to the library?” Harper sank back in her chair and looked around the table. “Wanna watch a movie in my room? My weirdo roommate’s out again with her weirdo boyfriend.”
“Sounds good,” Lucas said. “I don’t need an excuse not to study.”
“I’m in,” Caitlin said.
Allison nodded. “Sure.”
Shit, Felix thought, staring down helplessly at his half-eaten plate of pasta, trying to decide what to tell her. He knew that he should have concocted something in advance, but he hadn’t had a minute to himself all day. And now that he was on the spot, his mind was drawing a blank.
“Felix?” Harper said expectantly. “We can even watch some mindless Dirk Rathman action flick if you want. You in?”
Felix smiled in an attempt to conceal his consternation. “I can’t,” he muttered.
“Sorry?” Harper said, tilting her head in surprise. “Why not? You have something better to do?”
“I… I uh… I need to study. I’m really behind in Psychology. Malone gave the class like a hundred pages to read, and I haven’t even started.” That made no sense whatsoever. Stupid.
Harper’s face flushed, her jaw tightened. “You can’t be serious. Finals are like a month away, and Malone just gave you an A. You’re killing that class.”
Felix didn’t know what to say. He shifted around uncomfortably in his chair, started to mumble something, and ended up looking down at his plate.
“I don’t get it,” Harper said, the anger in her voice apparent to everyone at the table. “Why would you go to the library when the rest of us are—”
“Hey!” Allison snapped, her eyes flashing. “Why are you jumping down his throat? He wants to freakin’ study. Cut him some slack!”
“Chill out!” Harper snapped back. “I didn’t jump down his throat.”
Felix sat there silently, embarrassed. No one spoke for a good minute.
“Well go study!” Harper shouted at him. Now she was really fired up. “You have pages to read, don’t you?”
Without making eye contact with anyone, Felix gathered his things and got up from the table. He made his way out of the cafeteria, berating himself for not having prepared a better excuse. Just when he reached the lobby, he heard Allison calling his name.
“What’s going on?” she whispered, once she’d caught up to him. “You’re not really studying, are you?”