An Off Year Page 2

  Dad asked Josh about heading to school, if he had gas in the tank, if he was all packed up, what his friends had done over the summer. I watched them talk. Neither looked in my direction. Germaine stared at me, so I looked back and blinked, hard, sort of like I Dream of Jeannie; maybe I could make her disappear. But she just kept staring, her narrow eyes a mixture of boredom and hostility. She looked kind of funny, giving me such a mean look while sitting in front of the happy, flowered lilac-and-green wallpaper, and when I started to smile, she rolled her eyes. Nice. She was in a snit because Dad had snapped at her earlier about her failure to volunteer to take on more household duties when she was home. Earlier I had made a point of offering to set the table, which Dad declined.

  After dinner, Josh helped me carry up the boxes, which I opened with a little paring knife from the kitchen. I finally felt a little regret. It seemed like such a waste of energy, all that packing and taping and carrying from the weeks before. We’d gone to an office supply store and bought boxes in three different sizes, shiny brown packing tape, and a roll of bubble wrap. There was much fun to be had with packing supplies: I had tried to get Superhero to walk across a sheet of the bubble wrap (to no avail) and liked repeatedly solving the puzzle of turning the flat pieces of cardboard into actual boxes with just a little bending and folding. I didn’t want to admit how much pleasure I had gotten out of perfectly filling those boxes and sealing them shut neatly with a big plastic tape dispenser. I had spent weeks packing, first the new stuff that I wouldn’t need until I got to Kenyon, then slowly the things from home that I wanted to take with me. It made me sad to watch my room get barer and barer as posters, pictures, and favorite books all went in the boxes.

  But it was going to be unpacked all at once.

  Unhappily I discovered that despite my precise folding, after the long day of loading and driving and unloading, my clothes were all shifted and wrinkled inside the boxes, which irritated me. I hung most things up and put the stuff that needed ironing in a separate pile on my desk. Putting things away was one of my favorite hobbies.

  Dad knocked on the door.

  “Cecily?”

  “Yes?” Here it was. Here was where I was going to have to explain what the hell was going on. I had better come up with something good, unless I could continue to avoid the whole conversation.

  He came in and closed the door behind him. He took off his black-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a corner of his shirt.

  “You’re unpacking?”

  “Yes.”

  “So . . . I suppose that means you’re not thinking we’d try this again tomorrow.”

  “No, Dad. I just can’t do this now.”

  “And you’re completely sure? Because I’m willing to try this again tomorrow, no complaining, no questions asked. Or we can see if there’s someone you can talk to at Kenyon, or anywhere else for that matter, if you’re having doubts.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Is everything okay, Cecily? This is just . . . very surprising.”

  I knew what he meant. I wasn’t a dramatic gesture kind of girl. I just wished I could explain what had happened, or say that I knew what would happen next. I still really couldn’t believe that I had done it. “Yeah, Dad. I need to figure some stuff out, I guess. I don’t know what yet.”

  He glanced around my room, and his eyes landed on a little wooden toy chest I kept in the corner to house a few old stuffed bears and rabbits from childhood that I never took out anymore but couldn’t bring myself to get rid of. “I suppose . . . I guess . . . I don’t see how it could hurt to have you stick around here for a bit longer. If you’re really not ready yet.”

  “Yes. That’s what I want. Lucky you, right?”

  “Yeah, right. Although . . .” He hesitated. “I won’t lie. It won’t be bad having you here at home for a little while longer.”

  “Especially since Josh is leaving and Germaine sucks so bad. I’m the only fun one.”

  He smiled, but he rubbed the corners of his eyes with his index fingers. He was trying to be nice but was exhausted.

  “I’m sorry I made you drive all that way for nothing.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” he said. “We have to talk to the people at Kenyon. We have tuition money to deal with. We need to figure out what exactly is coming next.”

  Suddenly that gut-sick feeling that had been absent all day came to me: I wasn’t sure if it was the realization of what I had done, or what I had almost done. My life would already be completely different if I were back in Ohio. But I couldn’t deal with that at that moment. I needed to act like I knew what I was doing.

  “Of course,” I said, “but not tonight. Is that okay?”

  He nodded, sighed, turned around, and closed the door behind him, leaving me with the boxes I still had to empty and fold up.

  When I woke up the next morning, everything felt the same as before I left. I could hear lifeguard whistles coming from the beach. My comforter smelled like clean. Superhero stuck his nose in my face. Only it was all totally different. It was like taking a sick day from school and realizing what happens at home during the day—nothing.

  I listened for the telltale signs of Dad leaving for work: the radio getting shut off, the dishwasher door slamming, the old lock turning. I went downstairs in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and ate cereal and read the paper. At that particular moment, I felt kind of smug. I wasn’t doing anything—no camp, no job, no homework, no packing for college, no unpacking at college. I knew, though, that the remorse would come soon, and then I’d soon have to justify my existence. I wondered if Mom’s advice was right: should I do something amazing with my time? I had nothing amazing planned. Unless maybe I had already done it: turning around and leaving college. Now I had who knows how long—maybe all year—to think about why and figure out what to do.

  I’d never not had a plan for myself. Or made for me.

  september

  I could only avoid my best friend, Kate, for about a week before I let her in on the big news. I felt horrible not talking to her—the only times we hadn’t spoken daily in high school were when one of us was traveling—but I was just embarrassed. She was off at college doing whatever it is you’re supposed to do. I . . . wasn’t. I missed her, was dying for someone to talk to about what I had done, and felt ashamed of avoiding her. I tried to pretend that we both needed the week to get settled. She had been e-mailing me since she got to school, but I’d just respond with a noncommittal “ha!” and smiley faces. Finally, one gorgeous day when everyone was out of the house and I couldn’t stand how bored I was, I called her.

  The funny thing was that Kate and I had a running gag prior to her leaving for school where neither of us was actually going to college. We kept pretending that we were just leaving for summer camp and that we’d be back at high school in the fall. We called it Double-Secret Senior Year.

  “Have a good time,” I said earlier that summer, lounging on the green velvet chaise in her gigantic bedroom as she packed up her clothes in boxes. “Make sure to bring your swimsuit and your bug spray.”

  “I’ll make you lots of bead bracelets,” she said.

  I didn’t know if she’d think that the fact that I actually did not go to school would be funny-ha-ha or funny-strange. I was terrified of the latter, of her discovering that all along she was too cool to be friends with me. I worried about her coming home and looking at me and laughing, realizing what a baby I was. But I had to talk to someone. It felt like I didn’t exist, almost—my dad, Josh, all my friends were taking part in that transition from summer to school year, but I was just there. I needed to talk to Kate, to feel better, to hear what life was like in the outside world, even if I didn’t want to know.

  “WELL, HELLO THERE!” she screamed into the phone when I called. I smiled.

  “Hello yourself.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, you?”

  “Cecily, it’s so weird here. I feel like I’m living on
Planet College. Like, it’s funny, it’s just like what you’d think, but WEIRDER.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, do they have you singing the school song all the time?”

  “No,” I said. I mean, it was true.

  “What is up with that? Do they think this is 1927 or something and everyone’s going to the games in their raccoon coats?” Kate briefly had an obsession with the Roaring Twenties a few years ago.

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I gotta go. My roommate and I are going to go get dinner while it’s early so we won’t have to deal with the crowded cafeteria. See you around, clown.”

  Okay, so I didn’t get to tell her right away, but I knew I would have to. I did not want to be part of some wacky movie where I had to pretend I was in college while I wasn’t. That seemed exhausting.

  Kate was off on the West Coast at a school for people who are smart enough to get into an Ivy League college but are too cool to actually go. She was an only child and a genius. Her parents, both lawyers, were also incredibly rich. Kate herself had two cars: a little white sports car for the warmer weather and a gigantic SUV for wintertime (which she enjoyed driving through empty parking lots late at night after a heavy snowfall to make fresh tracks).

  I sat next to Kate in freshman English, and on the very first day of class I decided that she was the most wonderful person I had ever met. I’m not sure what specifically it was that had indicated this to me. Maybe it was that she was wearing army green Converse All Stars that she’d decorated with Wite-Out while all the other girls were wearing new, sparkly flip-flops. Or that when the cutest guy in class said hi to her, she gave him a look like he was a fresh gob of spit on the sidewalk. Or maybe it was when Kaci Kamp whined because we had to read the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird for class the next day (one of my favorite books) and Kate passed me a note that said, simply, “She sux,” before we’d even spoken to each other. I was on her like a lamprey on a shark.

  Kate spent her weekends TP-ing houses of the many boys who adored her, walking around town adopting fake accents and talking to strangers, and organizing trips to go bowling or play miniature golf or trek out to the one remaining drive-in movie theater in the county, all while cracking jokes, inventing nonsense sayings, and performing odd dances. She was tall and pale, with a muscular build from years of swimming and sailing the little Sunfish she’d received for her thirteenth birthday. She had long, wavy auburn hair and was totally unself-conscious about her body, throwing herself around and gesticulating wildly as if nobody else in the world were watching. She even created her own dictionary, and at times I forgot if the actual word for the stuff you eat was food or shebooley. I wished I were as confident (and pretty and rich and smart) as she was.

  With no brothers or sisters, Kate enjoyed coming over and “studying” my family, pretending to interview Germaine (to her annoyance) and following Dad around the house. He adored her, and they had a running gag that he was paying her to be my friend. That didn’t seem like such a bad idea, now.

  The day after our phone conversation, I called Kate back and told her the truth. “Okay, so I had something else to tell you that I didn’t get to. I’m not at Kenyon. I got to school and turned around and went home, and I’ve been here ever since. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “I wish I had done that,” she said, after a second. “That is so awesome.”

  I smiled. “It doesn’t feel very awesome,” I said. “Yet.”

  “Well, you’ll make it awesome,” she said. “Why’d you do it, anyway?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like me, my dad said.”

  “Well, this is the new you,” she said. I liked the idea of a “new” me, but I thought that always entailed a new, empowering attitude, not to mention a new hairstyle. I had neither.

  “I made an appointment for you next week with Dr. Stern. She sounds nice,” said Dad as he folded one of the navy towels, fresh from the dryer, from Josh’s and my bathroom. I suppose that I could have done it myself, since the towels wouldn’t even be in use if I weren’t at home, but I didn’t want to interrupt him.

  “Cecily, are you listening to me?”

  “Of course, dear Dad,” I said in a robot’s voice, but really as I stood with my chin in my hands, feeling the vibrations of the washing machine through my elbows, I was staring at the intense orange of the Tide with Bleach box, which somehow reminded me of the Chip ’n’ Dale cartoon I had watched earlier that morning. I knew that it involved throwing apple cores at Donald Duck, but what was the theme?

  My father draped a sheet of lint over my head. I gagged and staggered around the laundry room.

  “Pay attention.”

  “Oh yeah, well, it’s all fun and games until somebody chokes on sweater fuzz.”

  “You know I love you. Almost as much as I love Josh and Germaine. But you have to get out of the house and at least address what happened. Please? It’s been almost a month, Cecily, and it doesn’t seem like you’ve done much more than rot your brain in front of the TV. That can’t be very helpful. Plus, it was hard to get an appointment with this woman.”

  I went back to the Tide box. Man, that’s orange.

  He continued. “I think Health and Human Services will come and take you away if we don’t at least try to figure out what went wrong. You just need to meet with her once, I promise. Nothing too intense. They’re not going to give you a lobotomy. I’ll just take care of that myself. I just need to find an ice pick.”

  “How about I just lie on the couch and talk to you? That’ll be much cheaper.”

  Dad sighed. I took that as my cue to make a grand exit and tore up the stairs from the basement to the kitchen.

  Germaine stood crying in front of the toaster.

  “Hey, Germy, why are you crying? What did the toaster ever do to you?”

  She turned around, tweezers in her hand. “The natural light’s better in here than in my bathroom.” She dabbed at her eyes with a paper towel and experimentally raised and lowered her newly defined arches. I had to admit, she did a good job—if she was aiming to look like an evil villain. She looked critically at my brows. “You know, you could use a tweezing. You’ve got good definition, you just need a cleanup.”

  My hands flew protectively to my brows. “Don’t you come near me with those things! The last time you tried to make me over, you sent me to the emergency room!”

  “It wasn’t my fault you poked yourself in the eye when you were goofing around with my eyeliner.” I couldn’t really dispute this. I was ten and wanted to look like Cleopatra but instead came home from the hospital with an eye patch, looking like a pirate.

  I pulled two slices of cinnamon raisin bread from the bag on the counter. My sister watched me as I painstakingly picked out the raisins and flicked them into the sink.

  “Why do you have Dad buy that bread if you don’t like raisins?”

  “I don’t like the raisins themselves, but their essence is important in the toast.”

  “Well, don’t make a mess, please. Conrad is coming over soon.”

  Conrad. The name filled me with intense feelings of bland-ness. I always hated Germaine’s boyfriends, and the funny thing is, I don’t think that she was too fond of them herself. She was looking for a knight in a power suit, but this one, like the others, was a rickety sideburned hipster in stale-smelling vintage shirts. He called himself a writer, which meant nothing in particular but an annoying tendency to try to be deep. However, in mannerisms and conversation, he was so unsure of himself that I felt like I could push him over at any time with my finger. And Conrad was a terrible writer. The odes he wrote about their lukewarm relationship tended to be bizarrely pornographic. Germaine kept them stashed in her makeup bag in her bathroom.

  “All right,” I said, but realized that without thinking I was already squashing the raisins in the sink with my thumb, fat and flat like dead black flies. Superhero was crammed betw
een my knees and the sink, his head down, intently watching the floor for falling treats.

  “Cecily, can you take Superhero for a walk? Conrad’s a little . . . uh . . .”

  “Impotent? Gay? Smelly?”

  Germaine glared. “He doesn’t like dogs.”

  “Then why is he going out with you?” I said. Before she could snap back at me, I dodged out the door with Superhero, onto the driveway, and down the street toward the beach.

  It had just rained, so the effect of the sunshine on the lake mixed with the dark clouds moving east painted the water a silvery iridescent color. The leaves glowed gold, and the slick blacktop on the street shined.

  One time a few years ago when I was walking Superhero on a foggy spring day, the lake was a milky jade green, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was maybe forty degrees out, but I still wanted to jump in. The sad thing about Lake Michigan photo-op moments is that the water always looks so inviting, but when you walk up to it, it’s still the same grayish brown it always is. You expect the lake to look as magical as it did from afar, but it is always a letdown.

  Dad grew up in San Francisco and was used to looking at water, so when he and my mom moved to Chicago’s North Shore after they got married, they bought a house across the street from Lake Michigan. In the summer, sandy, bawling rug rats in diapers and idiotic flat-voiced girls working on their tans dominate the beach, but in the colder seasons, it’s a nice place to wander around without being scrutinized by the high school lifeguards. Unfortunately, no matter the season, the beauty of the lake still guaranteed a healthy risk of running into people I knew from the neighborhood.

  I escaped Germaine and her tweezers only to run straight on into Mrs. Garfield, my middle school algebra teacher, who happened to live down the street. She was also the mother of my former friend Meg. Meg and I used to be inseparable, and then suddenly we weren’t for various reasons including her being a massive bitch. We hadn’t really talked since junior year, which was going to make seeing her mom nice and awkward. The thought of Meg knowing that I wasn’t at school was mortifying.