An Off Year Page 11

  Dad would be farming me out for odd jobs around the department offices for a few days each week. To start off, I’d be filing for him. He had implemented a new filing system, finally, but he didn’t want to inflict the pain of reorganizing everything on his personal assistant, Sue, so he was going to inflict it on me for ten dollars an hour.

  We drove to his office. Dad showed me how the new system would work, and I sat on my butt on the floor, reorganizing in the history department’s cozy reception area. I worked like this, in silence, for three hours. I didn’t mind it, really. I liked organizing things. It brought hope to whatever I was working on at that moment, like everything would be new and clean and ready for the future. Every once in a while, Hugo, the snippy receptionist, would clear his throat in a way that seemed like he was hinting at something, but I’d look up and he’d still be looking at the computer. Hugo always pretended not to know who I was anytime I came by to visit or called Dad’s office. For some reason, he seemed like he hated me, and that was fine. It probably would be a lot more boring in the office without someone to hate.

  “Cecily,” Dad said, popping his head out eventually, “I have some meetings at lunchtime, so I can’t eat with you. Is that okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I understand you don’t want me to cramp your style.”

  “Here’s some money,” he said. “You know where the food court is, right? Hugo can show you.”

  “I know where it is,” I said. I didn’t want to have to make small talk with Hugo, and I’m sure he felt the same way.

  A chilly wind was blowing off the lake, making campus inhospitable, so I decided to avoid the food court and walk to Kafein, a dark and cozy café a few blocks away, where I could hide in a booth.

  “’Scuse me,” said a girl walking past me on a cobblestone path that was typically shaded by trees in the summer. She looked about Germaine’s age, maybe a little older. “Do you know where Kedzie Hall is?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t go here.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking annoyed. “Thanks.” I couldn’t really blame her for being annoyed. I probably looked like I went there. Otherwise, why would I just be running around on campus, unleashed?

  At lunch, I had a tuna salad sandwich on a pita and some potato chips and read one of the many free weekly papers that were spread carelessly throughout the coffee shop. Life in the city. It was sort of a mystery to me. Of course, we went into town all the time for dinner or plays or museum exhibits or baseball games, but we always came back home. Growing up and moving into a high-rise, walking to the grocery store, taking the bus a few blocks to listen to a concert? It seemed as attainable to me as becoming a professional skier.

  I took a hot chocolate to go, walked back, and sat on one of the many cold marble benches that were scattered around campus—they all had dates stamped in the stone, for the class that had donated them. You’d think an entire class could afford to donate more than just a bench, but maybe they were more expensive than they looked. I felt like a spy, blending in with these other kids. I played a game—could I see myself among these students? Was I one of them, just waiting to bloom? Or was I really just not cut out for college? My hypothesis was that I’d find 75 percent of the people who left or entered the building repellent in some way.

  At first I was pleased. A bunch of girls exited a dorm looking like the Louis Vuitton Mafia: they all wore expensive winter ski coats and carried big purses on their arms and sported jeans that I recognized from Germaine’s closet as costing close to two hundred dollars a pair. They seemed to be giggling about something, probably guys. And, as they passed by me, I saw their eyes glance over me, just quickly enough to know that they were evaluating me somehow. To be honest, I would have thought they were bitches even if they hadn’t looked at me.

  But then classes must have let out, because dozens of kids suddenly came pouring out of the nearby classroom buildings. I saw all different kinds of people at once—nerds, athletes, weirdos, but mostly people who I couldn’t really categorize, people in jeans and backpacks and gym shoes. I got cold, and the game grew boring.

  Dad also liked Jane’s idea of me taking a class, so he arranged for me to audit an introduction to art history. It was a lecture, so I wouldn’t have to participate and I wouldn’t have to take the final or even do homework if I didn’t want to.

  “What’s the point, then?” I asked when he told me on the drive home from campus, and I instantly regretted it, because I already knew what he’d say.

  “Are you really asking me this question?” he said. “This is what I do for a living. What’s the point? Oh, I don’t know, how about to learn?” he said, his voice rising. “To sit around with people your own age and do what people your age do? Or maybe I’m just trying to torture you.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” I said.

  He was quiet for a second. “If you really don’t want to do this, then don’t, Cecily,” Dad said. “But I’m trying to help you. I’m not really sure how to help you right now, so you either need to give me input or just give me a break.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go.” I couldn’t really explain to him that I was terrified about going and sitting in a classroom with a bunch of other kids for some reason. Walking by them on campus, even sitting by them in the cafeteria, was a strange but usually tolerable experience. But sitting with them in a lecture hall for an hour, I’d be trapped. They’d immediately pick me out as a poseur the second I opened my mouth.

  I didn’t know what to expect, really. I had liked the art history classes I had taken in high school, but I didn’t know what to expect from a college course. I wasn’t sure my brain would be up for any challenge.

  The first day of class, I woke up with that first-day-of-school feeling, which made me feel immediately embarrassed, and then I felt embarrassed for feeling embarrassed in my own bedroom. Since I’d started working, I had to dress a little more presentably—not anything very formal, but sweaters instead of sweatshirts. I actually even broke out the ancient, crusty tube of mascara in my bathroom and put on a little bit of makeup. I wasn’t sure why; I was pretty certain that the majority of class would be spent in the dark, looking at slides.

  “You look nice,” Germaine said that morning over our cereal bowls.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. I rarely drank coffee, but I was already on my second cup. I felt jittery.

  “It secretly means you look awful,” she said. “What do you think it means?”

  As I crossed the quad later that day to get to the building where the class was held, I remembered what Mike had said about how I could be mysterious if I wanted to. While I didn’t necessarily feel like trying to be an exotic nonstudent, I realized that nobody on campus knew who I was. Nobody here could look at me and tell I wasn’t a student—that I had taken the year off, that I barely had any friends anymore, that I lived at home. For all they knew, I was the daughter of a famous person (Germaine had gone to school with one of Donald Trump’s kids). Maybe it was a cool thing, and not a terrifying thing, that I was going into the situation with a totally clean slate, and no one around to say, “Oh yeah, that’s Cecily: she fights with her sister, her hair looks like a Brillo pad when she wakes up in the morning, and she’s had to see two professionals just to get here.”

  I was going to be whoever I wanted to be. I was determined to be optimistic about this.

  I hiked up to the third floor of the building and found the classroom. It was hard to feel independent and confident when I was wheezing and my sweater was sticking to my back, but I purposefully chose a seat in the middle of a half-occupied row. The room was shaped like a small auditorium, and I looked straight ahead as I walked down the steps to my desk, instead of burying my chin in my chest.

  I sat down, put my winter coat on the back of my chair, pulled a brand-new steno pad out of my messenger bag and a pen I’d stolen from Dad’s office, and lined everything up on my desk. I looked arou
nd, trying not to crane my neck too much. There were about twenty other students in the classroom, all silent. Some text-messaged, some riffled through their backpacks, some stared off into space. There was nothing on the projector screen in front of us, no teacher at the podium. It would be difficult to be the brand-new Cecily Powell if I wasn’t even in the right place.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a striking black girl with short hair sitting to my right, who was entertaining herself by staring at her furry boots. “Is this Intro to Art History?”

  She looked at me and nodded. Not friendly or unfriendly. Just answering my question. I nodded back. The New Cecily asked questions and got answers.

  “Hi, everyone, sorry I’m a little late,” said the blond, mustachioed man who walked in and hurried down the stairs. “I’m Professor Gunderson. This is Intro to Art History. Let me just check on the slides and we’ll get started.”

  The lights were shut off, I was bathed in a beautiful, colorful glow from what I think was a Picasso, and Professor Gunderson started talking. No attendance-taking or announcement-making, just talking about how he actually hated Picasso, but it was okay because he had reasons why, and here they were, and we shouldn’t be afraid to dislike something, even if it’s famous, as long as we could say why. I wasn’t sure if I should take notes or what, but it felt nice to sit there in the dark and just listen.

  april

  Work was boring, but I enjoyed watching the first hints of spring appear through the windows of Dad’s office every day. Buds started to bloom on the trees, and the wildlife (squirrels, that is) started making more of an appearance on campus. One fluke day it hit sixty degrees, and half of the student body was out in shorts.

  And I enjoyed going to class. I wished that I could just take one at a time for the rest of my life, although I knew if I did, I would graduate about the same time I was supposed to retire. I never ended up getting to know any of the kids in the class; it was hard when so much of it involved sitting in the dark being talked at, but it didn’t stop Dad. He was on a roll. He was convinced if he could simulate the college experience for me enough, it wouldn’t be that hard to actually get me going.

  “I’m thinking you should go visit your brother at Madison,” he said one day on the way home from work.

  “Why is that?” I asked. “I’m here, spending time on campus.”

  “Josh can show you around, show you what it’s actually like to be a student,” Dad said. “And I think living on a campus for a few days might help . . . unless you’d rather go visit some other schools.” Dad had done this with Germaine back when she was looking at colleges: they packed up the car and looked at twelve schools in ten days. I don’t know what went on during that trip, but I know that when they got back, they didn’t speak to each other for two weeks, and Germaine ended up going to a school they never visited.

  So it was decided. After checking schedules, I would go visit Josh in the first weekend of May, before he had to start studying for finals. “Don’t worry, we’re going to have a lot of fun, I promise,” said Josh on the phone, as we solidified the plans.

  “Cool,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I like fun.” But truthfully I was nervous. I didn’t mind spending a few hours on campus a few days a week, but that seemed like day camp compared to sleepaway camp. I was worried I was going to hate it and Josh and I would fight and I would come home and be less, not more, ready to move on.

  “We’re definitely going to have a party, so just make sure you look good,” Josh said.

  “I already look good,” I said, looking at myself in the toaster. I was wearing a red hoodie, and I had the hood up around my face like Elliott from E.T., although I could barely fit all my hair under it.

  “Right,” he said. And hung up.

  A new challenge had been presented. Since I hadn’t ventured out in public much since coming home over the summer, I’d paid very little attention to my looks other than my recent adventures in mascara. Back in high school, I wasn’t, like, a fashion plate or anything. But I cared enough to know that I looked cute in little pretend-retro T-shirts, and while I hadn’t inherited Mom’s height, I had gotten her decent legs, so I tried to wear a skirt every now and then. I was putting a little more effort into what I wore lately just because I was on campus, but I hadn’t purposefully tried to look cute since high school. There was no point in putting on makeup or picking out special outfits just to impress Germaine and Dad. Sometimes Germaine tried to shame me into taking care of myself a little bit more.

  “I haven’t seen that sweatshirt in a while,” she’d say at breakfast. “I can barely remember the last time you wore it. Was it yesterday?”

  “Leave her alone,” Dad would say. She was probably just mad because she had to wear suits for work now. I was mostly relieved that somehow my sporadic attempts at exercise were keeping me from getting fat. I could still fit into my pants, so that was good.

  But just because I didn’t care what Dad and Germaine thought of my clothes didn’t mean that I didn’t care what a bunch of college kids would think. I was already going to feel out of place just by being there—I didn’t want to look wrong on top of it.

  There were three bathrooms on the second floor of the house. Dad had one attached to his bedroom and Josh and I shared another, since neither of us really cared about that sort of thing. But Germaine’s bathroom was her sanctuary. I didn’t even really know what it looked like, since I swear she had set up bear traps and laser-beam triggers in there to keep us out. The last time I had set foot in it was when I was about ten: Meg had dared me to shave my legs, and I sneaked in to grab a razor. I must have replaced the razor about a millimeter off the mark, because Germaine smacked me in the back of the head when she found it out of place.

  This, however, was an emergency. I was going to have to look hot. My own stupid brother had told me so. Josh’s and my bathroom was disturbingly low on hot-making devices. I think motel bathrooms offered more amenities than ours, where the sole aim was simply not to stink. I owned a few bits of makeup—blush, some mascara—but I was always ashamed that they didn’t seem to multiply in boxes and drawers the way they seemed to so naturally for other girls. I put my hands on my hips and glared at the ancient lipstick in our medicine cabinet, willing it to reproduce and provide me with liner and lip gloss on its own, but it just sat there, aging and drying out.

  Kate had sent me photos of her and her friends “going out.” That was the phrase she used: “going out,” as if being outside didn’t really count unless you were at a bar and wearing a pair of black pants. I thought that in college, you rolled out of bed in your pajamas and slunk around campus like that. Not these girls, anyway. They were all wearing the same pair of tight black pants, it seemed, the same skimpy little tank top in different bright shades, towering platform shoes, and lip gloss so shiny the flash bounced off their mouths. Their hair looked like it was parted with a knife and hung down around their faces. Two girls had curly hair that seemed like it was still wet, and three others, including Kate, had hair so stick-straight and dry that it looked like it could catch on fire at any moment. Their eyes were all wide, their smiles even and white and brilliant. I examined Kate to see if she was secretly rolling one eye or flaring her nostrils or something, but as far as I could tell she blended in with the others. Not that I blamed her for it. I wouldn’t have minded having fun group photos to stick up around my room, to prove I did indeed have friends that I could be adorable with. Most of my cute photos were from high school graduation, and I had taken those down a couple months ago, although I had been fond of a picture of Mike and me picking each other’s noses with our mortarboards.

  Germaine had gone out with Conrad, so I cracked open the door to her bathroom. Sunlight poured in through the window as if it were some sort of holy shrine. Near the shower, a rainbow of bath gels and lotions and scrubs lined the shelf. I crept in, looking back behind me to make sure she wasn’t actually at home, ready to spring on me. I examined the different
varieties. Enchanted Apple. Sultry Musk. Sweet Pear. Ravishing Roseberry. I had no idea that fruit could be so slutty. And what the hell was a roseberry anyway?

  I lifted the top off a lotion called Stem. It smelled sort of like cut flowers, very green and clean. I made a mental note to steal that when I left, but not until then or else Germaine would hunt me down and scalp me.

  I stood at the sink and flicked on her cosmetics mirror, which lit up with about two thousand watts. You could practically see pimples that wouldn’t even be arriving for another month. I opened Germaine’s medicine cabinet and was impressed by the sheer organization of it all. A bouquet of Q-tips sprang from a tiny glass jar, so perfect and small I couldn’t even imagine what its original purpose must have been. I couldn’t figure out why one would need five identical hairbrushes, but they leaned out of a container I normally would have used to hold pencils. Lipsticks stood neatly on end in a long box. Eyeshadow boxes lay perfectly stacked on top of each other. I grabbed a few items that looked like they wouldn’t be missed.