“No kidding.” She sighs with envy.
Well, I think. So much for college being a place fraught with irony.
By the end of the week, I’m in a bad funk. Thanks to the combination of Tiff’s big mouth, plus the CONGRATULATION$ EMMA! on our door, everyone in our dorm and half the people on campus know what happened to me. “Hey, you’re the millionaire!” perfect strangers say in the lounge or dining hall. Or bathroom, for that matter. Or walking through Ballantine Hall.
Worse, people start hitting me up for money. Not for themselves, nobody’s quite as crass as that, but for a thousand and one good causes. Welfare mothers, migrant workers, innocent men on death row need my help. There are Afghan women trapped in burkhas, starving children in Darfur. Great white whales are nearly extinct; rain forests are dying.
People I’ve never met—and some I have—accost me on my way to class, petition me by phone or e-mail, stuff flyers in my mailbox, slide them underneath my door. Some are polite, even apologetic; some try to lay a guilt trip on me; some are rude, some pathetic. Once, in a study carrel at the library, I’m startled by a pale, earnest girl who thrusts a photograph of baby seals being clubbed before me and bursts into tears. Not the worst strategy, since I write a check for fifty dollars, just to make her go away.
After another whole week of this kind of crap, it gets so that every time I approach our room and see CONGRATULATION$ EMMA on our door, I feel sick at heart. The Friday before Thanksgiving break, I snap. I walk right past our room, on through the hall, down the stairs, and drive to the mall, where I buy the tackiest door-sized Thanksgiving turkey decoration I can find. I could buy two CDs for what I pay for it. But then I could buy two CDs and the door decoration if I felt like it. Or twelve CDs and the decoration. Or twelve CDs and the decoration and a yacht.
In any case, stealthily, guilt-ridden, I dismantle Tiffany’s tribute and install the turkey in its place. I stack the green letters and the magazine pictures neatly, fold the money toilet paper, and put it all on her desk. Who knows what incarnation we’ll see them in next?
I should study. Instead, I put Alanis Morissette on the stereo and throw myself on the bed in a funk that deepens considerably when Tiffany bursts into the room like a character from It’s a Wonderful Life.
“It’s fabulous,” she says. “It’s so perfect! Our door. Oh, Emma, I was so stressed out walking back from my history test. It was a total bitch, and I’m dreading the final. It made me so happy when I saw the turkey on our door! In no time, my mom and I will be baking pumpkin pies together. Matt and I will do nothing but hang out every day. Seeing that silly turkey just put everything right in its place!”
She plunks down on the bed beside me, hugs me despite my fetal position. “Emma, I mean it, you’re the best. And guess what!” she rattles on. “This friend of Matt’s, Gabe Parker—well, his fraternity brother really. Anyway. He’s a journalism major and when Matt told him about you guys winning the lottery, he said it would make a cool story for the Daily Student. So he’s going to call you.” She leers at me. “He’s very cute,” she says. “Very. Very. Cute. He’s going home this weekend, but he’ll call you Monday, he said. So you can talk before Thanksgiving break.” She segues in her mind-boggling fashion to some tidbit of dorm gossip, and I do my usual “mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” all the while having a complete and total anxiety attack.
He knows Josh, I think. How could he not know him? They live in the same house together. Shit. For all I know, the two of them are talking about me right this minute.
Josh: You’re interviewing Emma Hammond?
Gabe: I’m doing a story on her for the IDS. You know, about her family winning all that money. Do you know her?
Josh: (Shrug.) I went to high school with her.
Gabe: Yeah? What’s she like?
Josh: Guffaw.
“He’ll like you,” Tiffany says. “Gabe. Why wouldn’t he like you? He told Matt he really wants to meet you.”
“He wants to meet the story,” I say. “Not me.”
Which makes me feel pissed off at him. Totally irrational, since we’ve never even met. Nonetheless, I get so worked up over the whole thing that I act like a spoiled brat when he calls on Monday. “I really don’t see why you want to interview me,” I say. “I didn’t win anything.”
“Come on,” he says cheerfully. “Matt told me about the psychology goose. That’s definitely a story people on campus would want to hear. So can we meet? Go get coffee?”
I don’t want to be in the Indiana Daily Student, I hate coffee, I’m unfit for civilized company. But Tiff will be crushed if I don’t go. And, okay. While I’m over the idea of love at first sight, part of me wants the illusion of having a coffee date with a fraternity guy. “Yeah, okay, I guess,” I say, against my better judgment.
Tiff is positively beatific when she hears we’re having coffee on Wednesday afternoon. “I just knew it would work out,” she says. “My God. What should you wear?”
Before I can argue that it doesn’t really matter what I wear—it’s an interview for the IDS, for God’s sake, it’s not like he asked me to the prom—she opens my closet and stands there, tapping one foot, staring at my clothes with a pensive expression. Even with the addition of my LOTTO CASH purchases, there aren’t many options. Jeans and cargo pants, shirts and sweaters. There’s the one skirt my mom made me bring, black wool, its Nordstrom tags still attached. Tiff plucks it from the rod.
“You can wear this with black tights,” she says. “And your black Doc Martens. That’ll be cool.” She rummages some more and finds a stretchy gray and black striped rib-knit top I bought last summer in a hopeful mode.
“I’m not wearing that,” I say. “It makes me look fat.”
“Emma, you’re not fat. Here, try it on and you’ll see.”
Actually, it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would. It’s just that I’m used to baggy clothes, and this sweater makes me feel—exposed. The skirt looks decent, too. And the clunky Docs have a slimming effect on my legs, which makes me hate them less than usual.
But I just shrug when Tiff says, “See? I told you.”
She gives me a crash course in makeup, or tries to. But I stab myself with the mascara wand three times and make such a mess of the eye shadow that she says she’d better do my makeup herself for the actual date.
“It’s not a date,” I remind her.
“Whatever,” she says. Oblivious.
Six
“I feel like Barbie,” I say, when Tiffany’s dressing me on the actual day I’m going to meet Gabe Parker for coffee. “All I need is a pair of those teensy weensy spike heels.”
“Ha,” Tiff says. “You would kill yourself on any spike heels. Even I am not that hopeful about your feminine potential.”
“Hey!” I say.
Tiff raises an eyebrow. “Focus, Emma,” she says.
The “date,” as she persists in calling it, is still three hours away. But we both have class in an hour, so she’s getting me ready now. It won’t hurt for me to go to class dressed up for a change, she says. And who knows who might notice me walking through campus and think, who’s that girl?
She straightens my skirt, polishes a scuff on my Docs with a Kleenex, then steps away from me, head tilted, lips pursed, assessing. Then she comes back at me with a dab of eye shadow, spritzes an errant curl. Moments later we set out together, Tiff chattering as we go. When we get to the place where we’ll split to go our separate ways, we stop and she puts her hand on my arm. “You look beautiful, Emma. You really do. Just be yourself, okay? It’ll be fine. And e-mail me about how it goes, okay? Matt and I are leaving for home right after my class, so I’ll be gone when you get back.”
I salute, which makes her laugh and roll her eyes.
“Have a great Thanksgiving!” I call out as she walks away.
I head toward Ballantine, like I’m heading for my class, but as soon as I know Tiff can’t see me I turn and take a path through the trees back to the dorm. I can’t wear all this makeup. It feels like a mask on my face. I wash it off, and there I am again, in the mirror. But now my hair doesn’t look right. I don’t mean it doesn’t look good—Tiff made me wear it down and did something amazing with a round brush to make it curl at my shoulders. I mean it looks, well, like I took too much trouble with it. Like this so-called date is a big deal to me. So I pull it back in a ponytail, the way I usually wear it.
By the time I leave for the Daily Grind, I’ve talked myself out of the skirt and sweater, too. They’re folded up at the bottom of my laundry bag, replaced by jeans and a baggy sweater. My only hope now is that Tiffany was wrong about how cute this Gabe guy is. Maybe he looks like Matt, who she obviously thinks is cute, but in my opinion is kind of bland. Not that it matters, I remind myself. This is not a date. It’s a stupid college newspaper interview.
Unfortunately, however, Tiff was dead-on about him. Gabe Parker has dark curly hair and chocolate brown eyes. That olive skin that makes you look tan, even in the winter. He’s sturdy, like my dad. He’s wearing a gray Phi Delt sweatshirt—that’s how I know him.
“Gabe?” I say, to be sure.
“Yep.” He smiles. “Emma?”
I nod, then stand there like a dork until he gestures toward the chair across from him.
“Oh,” I say, and sit down so fast I bounce.
I have this weird feeling in my stomach. I feel light-headed. Plus, it’s like someone just turned up the treadmill of my heart. Is this how Dad felt the first time he saw Mom, I wonder—then immediately think, shit, shit, shit, do not even go there. And try to concentrate on my surroundings.
The Daily Grind is a dark, battered kind of place, nothing like the cheery Starbucks up the street. The barista looks like a vampire, the clientele looks seriously underfed. What little light there is filters in through the posters and notices taped to the grimy windows. I’ve only been here once before. Early this fall, I went to a reading with a gloomy, poetic girl from my dorm. I thought maybe I’d meet someone who liked to talk about books, maybe even get inspired to write down some of the stuff floating around in my head. But it was incredibly tiresome: a bunch of intense, humorless people wearing black, sitting around smoking and drinking espresso. Then this anorexic grad student read a bunch of really bad poems about the six months she spent in a mental institution.
I’m having a total flashback, and before I know it I’m telling Gabe Parker all about it. “One of those brain-scan poets,” I say. “You know. Thank you for sharing your derivative anger and the shock therapy you had as a result of it. Jesus. When she was finished, the conversation naturally turned to Kafka. Doesn’t it always? The Metamorphosis. I mean, what’s to say? It’s about a fucking cockroach.”
Gabe laughs. “Matt told me you were funny.”
That stops me cold. What else did Matt say about me, I wonder? Or, worse, Josh Morgan. Not to mention the fact that I’ve just been making fun of the place Gabe chose. He probably comes here all the time, I think. He was probably at that poetry reading and loved it. Jeez. He probably writes poetry.
Which, unfortunately, when added to his fraternity creds, only makes him seem more attractive.
“So,” he says. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“Latte,” I say. Because I know it’s the kind with the most milk in it. I take out my wallet to give him some money, but he raises his hand to stop me.
“Expense account,” he says.
An obvious lie. But his tone of voice tells me there’s no point arguing. So I just sit there, breathing in the smell of coffee, listening to the hiss of the espresso machine, trying to calm myself down while he’s at the counter ordering. Okay, I fantasize a little, too—about how people glancing in the window might see him bringing me a cup of latte and assume he’s my boyfriend.
Gabe sets the latte down in front of me and I dump a couple of sugars in it, then raise the cup to my lips, hoping not to grimace with the first sip. My mom never liked coffee till the first time she went to Europe, I remember. Maybe travel would turn me on to it, too—and help my image. Espresso at a coffeehouse in Vienna. Café au lait in a Paris café. Preferably with a large chocolate mousse. I make a mental note to add the Grand Tour to my impending plans for self-improvement.
Okay. Pay attention, Emma, I tell myself. Be here now. I look at Gabe, sitting across from me, an inquisitive expression on his face. He has regular coffee, black. A jumbo cup of it.
“I’m kind of a coffee junkie,” he says, gulping some down. “I smoke, too.”
Is he apologizing? Making a joke? Asking if I care if he smokes now? Clearly, I have the social skills of a newt. All I can think to do is push the ashtray toward him.
“Thanks,” he says, and lights up—then pushes the pack toward me.
I wave it away with a spastic gesture that mirrors exactly my state of mind.
He grins. “My plan is to quit when I’m old. You know. Thirty.”
Which makes me laugh, in spite of my discomposure.
“Okay.” He flips open his notebook, trades the cigarette for a pencil. “What slant should we take here? Poultry Rescue Brings Cosmic Result?”
I can’t help it. I groan. “You realize,” I say, “that no matter how you write what happened, I’m going to sound like a crazy person.”
“It’s a great story,” he says. “You’ll sound funny, that’s all.”
“No, I’ll sound like a crazy person. But I said you could do the story. So, okay—” I shrug. “What do you want to know?”
He’s quiet a moment, then sets his pencil down. He takes a drag from his cigarette, and I can’t quit looking at the bluntness of his fingers on it, the dark hairs curling around his wrist. “Emma, we don’t have to do the story if you’re going to be embarrassed by it,” he says. “Really. It’s not that big a deal to me. We can just sit here and drink coffee. Talk about something else.” He grins again. “Kafka—?”
“No way,” I say. “The last thing I need is someone overhearing me say I think Kafka is hilarious. Major collegiate faux pas.”
He laughs. “Okay then, we’ll do the traditional thing. What’s your major?”
“English,” I say. “I’m a totally self-indulgent person, with no serious life goal other than to figure out how to spend as much time as possible immersed in novels—which, looking on the bright side, isn’t quite the serious character deficiency it was before I got fabulously wealthy. That’s off the record, by the way. My bad character.”
“You don’t seem so bad to me,” he says.
I feel my face flush, realizing he probably thought I was fishing for a compliment. I rush into telling him the funny story he’s come to hear. It seems better, easier, than attempting a real conversation.
“It must be weird,” he says when I’m through. “It would make a great reality show, you know? Give people a huge chunk of change like that and—”
“What?” I ask. “Watch them all self-destruct?”
He looks mortified. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Just that it must be … interesting when something like that happens all of a sudden. Is it? Has anything changed because of it? Or maybe that’s too personal a question—”
I shrug. “Nothing’s changed. Not really. Nothing that matters, anyway. It’s weird, mainly. I mean, it’s so much. If I try to imagine the actual money, I see those bank robbery movies. You know, guys opening suitcases stacked full of it. Like green bricks.
“And it’s awful how everyone knows about it. You wouldn’t believe how many people have hit me up for every kind of cause. Save the Whales. Save the—whatever. God, sometimes I get the feeling it’s all anyone is thinking about when they’re with me. I don’t mean you,” I add quickly,
blushing again.
Gabe waits for me to go on. He’s closed his notebook, stubbed out his cigarette, and is leaning toward me as if we’re having that real conversation I decided to avoid. The thing is, I really want to tell him how freaked out I am about the money. About everything. I believe what he said about not caring about the story. But I’m scared of him, scared of how he’s making me feel.
So I shrug again. “I don’t know. Probably it’s too soon to tell what being rich is really going to be like. But, hey? Don’t you want to know what I’m going to do with all that money? That’s the question most people ask.”
“Sure,” he says. “What?”
“Beats me,” I say. “I don’t have a clue.”
I meant to be funny, but my voice came out all wrong. Worse, I know that if I say one more word I’m going to start crying.
“Are you okay?” Gabe asks. “Emma?”
I nod. I drink down the last of my latte. Look at the pack of cigarettes on the table and consider taking up smoking. Anything to keep from having to try to talk to him anymore.
He talks at me for a while. He probably wouldn’t know what to do with all that money either, he says. He’s really not that into stuff. It would be cool to take off for Nepal, hang around in Katmandu a while, climb to the base camp of Everest. Or maybe hitchhike through Europe.
He shrugs. “But wherever you go, you’re still you, right? Eventually, you have to come home to your real life.”
Fine for you, I want to say. But what if “you” is me? What then?
But I can’t say that, and we fall into an anxious silence.
Finally, Gabe glances at his watch. “Well. It’s after five,” he says. “I guess we should go?”
Who can blame him, I think. I wouldn’t want to deal with me either. I stand and take a deep breath, hoping my voice won’t go south on me again. “It was nice meeting you,” I say.
“Hey, hold it.” He grabs his jacket. “I’ll walk with you.”
Everything You Want Page 4