To Sarah, Kim was just a friend. Kim, however, had obviously considered the possibility that knowing a hot freshman girl might pay dividends in the Fall. There was little effort in maintaining the Facebook friendship, and Kim had seen how things change between girls and their “serious” boyfriends. Especially when the boyfriend is suddenly a thousand miles away and the girl is plopped down in a campus with 30,000 undergraduates. It was just a fact of life and it cost Kim nothing to wait and see.
So when Sarah called him suddenly last week—an actual phone call, not a text or email—crying about how she broke up with her boyfriend, Kim was glad she couldn’t see his shit-eating grin. He consoled her for as long as he could stand it, then offered to cheer her up with a trip into the city. Kim was already out of school for the summer and had scored an awesome internship at the MOMA. Another intern that he was hooking up with had told him about Stark Raving Mad and after a few texts, he had two wristbands.
The ironic thing was that Sarah only agreed to go into New York to see Kim because she thought Noah was going to be at Marco’s house. She just didn’t think she could deal with seeing Noah all weekend long. So Sarah lied to her parents and took the train into Grand Central by herself.
Kim met her by the clock with a big hug. Sarah hadn’t really thought of Kim in that way before, but after talking to him the other night and seeing him now, she couldn’t help but wonder if something might happen between them on this visit.
Kim took her to the theater district to get Ethiopian food (which Sarah had never had before). Then they went back to Kim’s sublet on the Upper West Side that he shared with five other guys from Madison. After a million questions about the school, and some obscene Are you going to bone her? gestures behind her back, Sarah stowed her stuff and changed to go out.
Sarah wasn’t sure she was ready to move on just yet. She felt a pang of guilt about even being on this trip. Even though she and Noah were over, they had been a couple for a long time and they were in love, for Christ’s sake. You don’t just move on to some other guy after one week. But all her friends told her she was crazy not to go off with a hot college guy like Kim Striker, so she did it.
They took the C train downtown together, listening on split headphones to Kim’s iPod. He was playing some band Sarah had never heard of before called “Vivian Girls.” But it was good and Sarah looked over at Kim and they shared a smile. It occurred to her that sitting with Kim on the subway just kicking back and listening to music like this was actually kind of romantic. She didn’t know where things were going to wind up tonight, but part of her decided then and there that it would be good for her to go off to college with a little more sexual experience.
Noah was inconsolable. All he wanted to do now was get to the damn party and talk to Sarah. They made their way from Washington Square Station to Bleecker Street where the car was parked.
Only there was no car.
Dylan looked up and down the street. There were no cars parked on this side. He looked at the signs and concluded, “This is a tow zone.”
“No, it’s not,” Noah argued.
The truth was, it was pretty hard to tell what the hell was going on with the signs posted above the parking space: “Alternate Street Parking Tue&Fri,” “Meters Not In Effect Above Times,” “No Parking 2AM-5AM,” “6PM-midnight M-F metered parking,” and a few others thrown in for good measure.
Noah stood by his interpretation. “We followed the rules. Monday through Friday, metered parking.”
“Yeah, only it’s Saturday now,” Dylan corrected.
“Oops.”
“Nice going, genius,” Dylan shot back. “You said we could park here!”
It was true that Noah had said he could park there. Though Dylan was the unofficial leader of the group—based on his general confidence in life and his success with women—Noah was the brains of the operation. You don’t get into Brown with Bs, and while Walker was smart (at least book smart), Noah was practically a genius. Dylan relied on that fact, and part of being a good leader was recognizing and utilizing other people’s talents. So if Noah said, “You can park there,” Dylan parked there without a second thought.
“All right, look, I’m sorry,” Noah apologized. “But let’s just forget the Cube for now and take a taxi to the party.”
“Yeah, great idea, except the wristbands are in the car.”
Noah was desperate, grasping at straws. “Maybe we can get new tickets somehow—”
Dylan would have liked to have been the one freaking out here—after all, it was his car that got towed to God knows where—but Noah had called dibs on being upset, so it was Dylan’s job to make him feel better. Dylan put his arm around Noah’s neck in a manly hug and cut to the chase. “This is a good thing, Noah. Sarah is moving on. It’s only going to get easier from here on out.”
Noah looked down. “I don’t want it to get easier.”
“Look. We’re still going to the party. But we need the wristbands and that means we need the car. Okay?”
Noah was still stewing.
“Okay?” Dylan repeated.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Come on,” Dylan said as they started down the street. “Let’s find out where the fuckers towed it to.”
Onstage at der Freiheitsgestalt, the Chinese person was now completely bald and the naked haircutter took a bow. Everyone snapped and Walker half-heartedly joined them. He checked his watch. How do I always wind up in these situations?, he wondered.
Outside in the alley, Pike passed a joint to Haley. She took a deep drag.
Haley was in grad school in women’s studies at N.Y.U. Normally she wouldn’t have hung out with a high school kid like Pike, but he was funny, good-looking (in a young Sean Penn kind of way), and most importantly, he lived in the moment. Besides, grad school had opened her mind to the rich diversity of human existence and she was trying not to discriminate against upper-middle-class white people like herself.
On top of all that, Pike was a good listener and seemed to really understand where she was coming from. They were talking about some pretty deep shit and Haley was getting excited. “What I’m saying is,” Haley continued, “we really need to explore the unstable nexus of gender, sexuality, race, and class in order to subvert the phallocentric hegemony.”
“Oh, my God,” Pike exclaimed with absolutely no idea what she was talking about, “I was just saying that same thing the other day!”
As Haley passed the joint back to Pike, it occurred to her that she was really starting to like this kid.
Back inside the club, a guy with piercings all over his body (like Hellraiser) exited the stage amid a chorus of snap applause. Thoroughly annoyed, Walker checked his watch again. He couldn’t believe Pike had ditched him, and for all he knew, he wasn’t coming back. He figured he’d give him ten more minutes before he bailed and tried to find Dylan and Noah.
Onstage, a goateed host dressed in a black turtleneck (What a cliché, Walker thought) introduced the next performer. “‘A Decomposition,’ by Genevieve,” he announced dramatically. He stepped away, there was some snapping, and Genevieve took the stage.
Walker squinted to see her face but he was pretty sure it was the weird girl from their school.
She wasn’t dressed in her usual flannel Nirvana-is-still-cool attire, and her hair and make-up were totally different. She actually looked… pretty.
She took the stage and sat on a stool. “Your essence destroys paper,” she began.
This is what I learned,
cleaning up the wine you spilled.
On the table’s dark lustrous skin.
The audience seemed bored. This was after all pretty tame compared to the crazy shit that went before her.
But Walker was enraptured.
“Like opals, like your eyes,” she continued. She was reciting it from memory and Walker could tell there was some truth and pain behind the poem.
The varnish holds a thousand colors captive.
In its depths: the surface is black, but underneath,
there stirs a lake of amethyst. While, still further down,
the uncrackable hardness of blood awaits.
As far as poetry was concerned, Walker thought this was pretty damn good. But the crowd disagreed and some murmurs began to rise from the dark room. Walker looked concerned for her. Apparently, she was bombing and from the look on her face, she knew it.
Still, she soldiered on.
I let the muscular tide pull my eyes swiftly downward,
a force that shatters the body and turns the mind to mist,
a mystifying force that drags me down
into the rainbow heart of the wood.
A woman from the crowd yelled out, “Do something!”
This rattled Genevieve. She seemed to lose her train of thought for a second but quickly recovered.
Which is more than a table,
a secret we tapped last night—
A man with a bull-like nose ring heckled, “You suck!”
Genevieve really flinched this time. The crowd was just not into this fairly pedestrian poem, and some people in the back got up to go have a smoke outside. Others just started talking among themselves. Walker couldn’t believe how rude they were being. Onstage, Genevieve fought back tears.
“Last night,” she repeated, “when we discovered a table can be a bird—”
The second heckler booed her.
Walker impulsively jumped up and turned to the guy behind him. “Shut the fuck up! She’s a million times better than the freak with the pierced dick!”
Walker received some snaps from the audience members who agreed with him. He sat back down and Genevieve finished.
Like crushed fur: this wine I am now trying to soak up
with a paper towel. The napkin comes apart
in my trembling hand, it turns into a foam.
Genevieve bowed slightly to indicate it was over.
Walker stood and applauded. Like a normal person. With his hands.
But Genevieve still hurried off the stage.
Over by the bar, she was met by Jerome, a pretentious-looking dude with hipster glasses and a vintage Army jacket. He was clearly older than her, maybe in his late-twenties, but when he hugged her, it was clear they were more than friends.
Walker got up and headed over to her. But when he arrived, for some reason Genevieve avoided eye contact with him.
“Hey. You go to my school, don’t you?” Walker asked, just to be sure.
“Uh, yeah,” Genevieve replied, grabbing Jerome’s hand and clearly sending Walker a buzz-off vibe.
But Walker wasn’t much for reading body language and continued, “You were great.”
“Yeah, thanks. Good seeing you.”
She turned her back to Walker but Jerome interjected, “Who’s your friend?”
“Nobody—” she tried to say, but Walker offered, “I’m Walker. We go to high school together.”
Genevieve buried her head in her hands and Walker slowly began to piece together that this was one of his frequent “oops” moments.
Jerome dropped Genevieve’s hand and asked accusingly, “You’re in high school?”
“Maybe,” Genevieve replied with a sense of humor.
But Jerome was not to be trifled with. “You told me you were a postdoc candidate!”
“Relax. I’m eighteen,” she reassured him.
But Jerome just took her gently by the face and imparted, “A relationship cannot survive if it is based on lies. One day you’ll understand.”
Then he kissed her forehead patronizingly and took off.
Genevieve watched him go then turned to Walker. “Great. Thanks a lot.”
“Sorry.” Walker did feel a little bad, but seriously, how was he supposed to know?
“Tonight is going so well,” Genevieve sighed.
“I really did think you were great,” Walker offered honestly.
Genevieve looked up with a tiny hint of a smile. “Really?”
“Really,” Walker confirmed and met her smile with one of his own.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WALKER SAT AND had a beer with Genevieve. It turned out that not only did she make her own clothes, as she was known for around school, but she was something of a regular on the New York hipster scene. She regularly performed her poetry at clubs all over lower Manhattan and enjoyed going to art openings and hearing obscure indie bands play in unmarked venues.
Basically, Genevieve was an adult trapped in a high school girl’s body. Her parents were professors, long divorced, her dad in English Literature at Columbia and her mom in Religious Studies at Trinity in Hartford. Genevieve lived with her mom, obviously, but went into the city whenever she wanted and just crashed at her dad’s. He usually didn’t even need to know she was coming. She had a key and there were many occasions when he was off at some conference anyway.
Genevieve didn’t hate high school, she was just largely indifferent, biding her time till she went off to college. She never really fit in—she was just so far beyond the kids at Hall High, emotionally, intellectually, sexually, that she often felt like a detached investigative reporter on an undercover assignment as a high school student. She put up with the mentally unchallenging teachers—after all, they tried their best (except once when she came down hard on her health teacher who refused to accept her definition of “steroid” as “a terpenoid lipid with a sterane core and a hydrocarbon functional group”)—and she put up with the juvenile antics of her classmates the best she could. Then she headed out to the city most Fridays to live her real life.
She had met Jerome at a wine tasting. He was a struggling writer working on a screenplay about a post-apocalyptic America where all meat has become poison to humans. (His day job was as a copyrighter for a pharmaceutical company.) Genevieve had long-ago made up the cover story of being a post-doc candidate, as she found that, despite what the popular porn genre would have you believe, older guys in fact found dating high school girls to be generally off-putting. They’d only been together less than a month, so it was no big loss to see him go. Still, her plans for the evening were ruined and now, oddly, she found herself tossing back a Guinness with one of her high school classmates.
“Do you come into the city a lot?” Walker asked innocently.
“Yeah. I usually read my poetry at ‘The Pillow Room,’ but I thought I’d give this place a try. Big mistake.” She laughed.
“I think they’re into stuff that’s a little more… edgy,” Walker offered by way of explanation. Onstage, a man in an ape suit was standing in front of a full-length mirror with a video camera, apparently recording the camera’s reflection.
“Yeah,” Genevieve agreed. “Maybe next time I’ll get a midget to drag me around by my nipple rings.”
Walker laughed. Then he felt the need for clarification and asked, “You don’t really have nipple rings, do you?”
Genevieve laughed and shook her head no.
Suddenly, Pike returned. He was alone, but thoroughly stoned. He saw Genevieve and thought he recognized her. “Hey, aren’t you the girl from our school who makes her own clothes?”
Genevieve just smiled and replied, “Hi. Genevieve.” She offered a hand and Pike shook it. Pike grabbed a chair from a nearby table and sat down with them.
“Where’s Haley?” Walker asked.
“Taking the Browns to the Superbowl,” Pike replied colorfully.
Walker rolled his eyes at Pike then turned back to Genevieve. “So where are you going next year?”
“Harvard,” Genevieve replied matter-of-factly.
“Seriously?” Walker was thoroughly impressed.
Genevieve smiled. “Yeah. Why? Are you surprised?”
“Yeah,” Walker admitted, before backtracking, “I mean, not that you’re going there. You seem really smart. It’s just… how did we never cross paths before?”
Genevieve leaned in and looked Walker in the eye. “We have A.P. Calculus together…�
� she felt insulted to have to remind him.
“I’m sorry. That’s right,” Walker said before quickly moving on to, “Well, I’m going to be in Boston, too. Just outside. Brandeis.” Then he uttered his trademark line, “We should exchange emails.”
Genevieve just stared at Walker for a second, then laughed in his face. Not in a terribly insulting way, just an honest reaction to what she correctly perceived as an incredibly dorky pick-up line.
She turned to Pike. “What about you, Pike? Where are you going next year?”
Pike smiled broadly, the same smug way he always did when he envisioned his future as a professional suntan-lotion applier. “University of the Pacific. Nothing but sand and surf.”
But Genevieve looked confused. “University of the Pacific in California?”
“Is there another one?” Pike gloated. “Gonna major in bikini inspecting.”
Genevieve raised an eyebrow. “You know that it’s not actually on the ocean, right?”
“Yes, it is,” Pike corrected her. “They have classes on surfing and a graduate lifeguard school.”
“May be,” Genevieve conceded, “but the University of the Pacific is in Stockton, near Sacramento. That’s northern California. About two hours from the water.”
Walker was really starting to enjoy this.
Pike shook his head. “No. That’s not right.”
“Yeah, it is,” Genevieve said with certainty. “My cousin went there.”
Pike looked crestfallen.
Genevieve was amazed at this oversight and asked, “Didn’t you visit the school?”
“No,” Pike admitted, “but in the catalog…”
Pike never finished that sentence. Instead, he just slumped down into his chair and muttered, “Fuck.”
Genevieve put a sympathetic hand on Pike’s shoulder. “You poor dumb bastard.”
She smiled at Pike, and in that instant, Walker knew he was in love.
Walker uncharacteristically manned up, asking, “Hey, listen, do you want to go to a party with us?”
“Sure,” Genevieve accepted the offer casually, adding the caveat, “as long as there’s no dramatic haircutting involved.”
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