An Off Year Read online

  “And what happens next?” I asked.

  “We’ll see when we meet,” she said. “See you later.”

  I had to admit I liked Jane, despite her giving me assignments. Or maybe because she was giving me assignments. It was hard to believe that we had to pay someone to tell me to look up my friends, but I must have done something to deserve needing a professional to remind me to do it instead of sitting at home waiting for Simpsons reruns to come on and petting Superhero. I certainly liked Jane more than I liked Gina, who simply left my reminder card on the reception desk and didn’t say anything. I slid the card off the counter and headed out without saying anything to her, either.

  Dad was at work when I got home. I went to my room and pinned Jane’s “prescription” to my bulletin board, which I had totally cleared off before leaving for college. It felt good to have something up there again. But something was churning in the pit of my stomach, and it was that even though Jane was right about me seeing my friends, I was worried about things with Kate. I had called to complain to her a few times over the past few weeks about how bored I was, and I think she was getting a little sick of me.

  “Cecily, it’s hot. Everyone here knows someone who decided to take a gap year,” Kate had said. “They go build shelters in Africa or promise to write in a journal every day or work on a pot farm or whatever. And then they’re supposed to come back like all worldly and whatnot. Hey, I gotta go, we’re heading to the gym.”

  The gym? Since when did Kate go to the gym? When we were in high school, we competed for who could get the slower time on the mile run. I had a feeling she wasn’t listening to me anyway. I would have felt better if it were “a gap year” and I had some noble pursuit I was going to follow for a year, something to show for myself, something that I knew would make me a more mature person. But I had no idea what I was going to do, and I wasn’t sure if I was maybe becoming less mature by the minute.

  As I stared at the bulletin board now, I thought about how calling Mike would go. I didn’t want to call him just to sound stupid—I especially didn’t want to have him think I had a crush on him or something. This had never worried me before, but now he had a long-distance girlfriend and I was home alone. To get the image out of my head of me stammering on the phone while he and all his college friends (who would be listening in, for some reason) laughed at me, I went into the hall and tossed a tennis ball against Germaine’s door until she came out and yelled at me.

  I knew Kate would be coming home for Thanksgiving break, and I wanted to see her, just talk to her and feel normal again. After Germaine kicked me out of the hallway, I finally turned on my cell phone (which I had been keeping off lately) and gave Kate a call. I had always assumed that we’d be best friends until we were withered and old and throwing things at young people from our wheelchairs. I worried that the friendship was weakening.

  “A-wooga, a-wooga,” she said when she picked up the phone. “Where have you been?”

  “Literally?”

  “Sure.”

  “At the shrink’s.”

  “Whoa. What was that like?”

  “Not as fun as you would think.”

  “Anybody want a peanut?” Kate said, a line from The Princess Bride that we always used when one of us accidentally rhymed. “Anyway, what did he say? Did he send you to an institution? Is he giving you a lobotomy? Are you taking pills? Did you meet a giant Indian who threw a sink out the window?”

  “She said I’m taking this year off because I have some issues and maybe I can work them out.”

  “Issues of what? Magazines? That doesn’t seem very fair.” I heard a guy yelling in the background and then a muffling sound like she was covering up the phone with her hand. “You better put that away, dickhead, before I call the cops on you! Get out!” Some giggling. Then the muffling sound again. “Sorry,” she said. “Neighbor issues. Seriously, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, patting Superhero, who had just trotted up. “I guess my biggest problem is that I just don’t know why exactly all this went down. If I needed to explore the world, then I could go do that. If I needed to start off at a community college, I could do that. But I don’t know what I need yet.”

  “Well,” she said, and her voice changed awkwardly, as it did when she was being serious. “I’m here for you.”

  “I know,” I said. “So what’s going on with you?”

  “Actually,” she said, “I have to get to class. But I’m coming home in a few days and I want to see you. I’ll give you a call when I’m in. See you in hell.” She hung up, and I smiled at the phone.

  I felt so much better that I put on my coat and went out to the movies by myself, something I’d never done before. I was disappointed that Dad was at work, because I was excited to show him how carefree and independent I was, how I was enjoying my time off and not just lying around the house. When I got to the theater, though, I realized I had been so focused on the task at hand that I had forgotten to see what was playing. I ended up seeing some romantic comedy about a woman who loves a man, but he has to go to the moon on a mission. It was pretty awful.

  I wasn’t sure when, but sometime over the last few years the coffeehouses in town had turned into impromptu day cares. The moms had pushed out even the college kids who came with their white laptops to pretend to study even though they were all looking at porn. When I got to the café where I was going to meet Kate, I had to pick my way around toys scattered on the floor and ignore a three-year-old who accidentally tugged on my peacoat and called me “Mommy” as I ordered, before he realized his error and ran off. It was a miracle that I found an open couch that wasn’t being used for story time or changing diapers.

  I plopped down and started to read an Us Weekly magazine I had splurged on. I loved being told how celebrities were just like me. Apparently they leaned on fences, drank coffee, even obeyed the laws of gravity, just like little old me!

  “Excuse me, but do you mind if I breast-feed here?” I looked up.

  There was Kate. She looked the same, yet different. It took me a second to figure out what it was. She was wearing some makeup, and her clothes were hugging her body a little bit more than they used to. She was wearing a short white puffy parka instead of her old olive wool military topcoat.

  “Only if I can watch.” I stood up and gave her a hug, and she almost squeezed the life out of me. I’d forgotten how good and tight her hugs could be, not those floppy one-armed things that most girls gave one another. She set down her drink and sat down with a dramatic sigh. A few actual breast-feeders looked our way, irritated.

  “So?” I asked. “How was Thanksgiving? How’s your family?”

  “Awful,” she said. “My parents have been fighting the whole time. They’re going to get divorced now that I’m in school. They don’t need to hold it together anymore.”

  “Wow, that’s terrible. How are you dealing with it?”

  She shrugged. “It’s no surprise. They’ve been like this for a while. I’m just taking it as it comes, you know? I can’t predict what’s going to happen. Maybe they’ll actually just stay together and fight for the rest of their lives.”

  “That’d be lots of fun,” I said.

  “You know it. So what is going on with you?”

  “What’s going on with you?” I asked, not-so-subtly dodging her question. “What are you taking? What’s your roommate like? How’s your dorm? How’s the West Coast? All roller skates and avocado?”

  “I’m taking taxidermy, fly-fishing, and home ec,” she said. “My roommate is a little gnome from Belgravia, and my dorm is actually a cardboard box. We have an earthquake every day.”

  “Much more interesting than I would have expected.”

  “Actually, I’m pre-med,” she said. “It sucks.”

  “Since when were you going to be pre-med?” Of all the classes we’d ditch in high school, Kate enjoyed blowing off science the most.

  She shrugged. “It was some weird whim. But I
’m enjoying it. There’s this one class next year, organic chemistry, that makes everyone cry. Everyone. People are lucky to pass with a D in it. I can’t wait.”

  “Well, good luck with that. You’re not operating on me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re inoperable anyway.” She started rummaging around in her purse, which had begun buzzing, a big cable-knit thing that looked like a sweater with a zipper on it. She pulled out her cell phone, which was actually more like a mini computer. I recognized it from TV commercials.

  “Hold on one second,” she instructed me and put the device to her ear. “Hey, rock star. What’s up? What happened with—are you serious? No way. Well, fuck him, then. Yeah. Listen, can I call you back? I’m out right now. Okay. Bye!” I looked around the coffeehouse while she talked. I didn’t know if it was rude for me to stare at her while she had her other conversation or whatever.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, shoving her device back in her bag. “That was my roommate, Liz. Guy stuff.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s your roommate like?’

  “She’s great.”

  “Good!” I hoped I sounded sincere. I would have rather heard stories about a horrible roommate, one who made her own granola and washed her underwear in the sink and hung it to dry all over the room. Or, better yet, a cheerleader. I felt bad wishing that I could hear a few complaining stories from Kate, but it would have made me feel better to offer her some comfort too than to just sit there and listen to how awesome everything was.

  “I didn’t think I’d like her when we first met. She’s from New York, and at first she seemed, I dunno, Miss Popularity. She already knew, like, twenty people on our floor, and she brought a case of beer with her. I was, like, the two of us have nothing in common. But we got to know each other a little bit more and now she’s awesome. Really fun, really smart. We have a good time. I might go with her to her house in the Hamptons this summer.”

  “Good!” I said again, and suddenly felt a little self-conscious about how greasy my dirty hair felt and the ink stain on my jeans. I crossed one leg under the other. I wished I had something to say that was better than “Well, my roommate has a car and cooks dinner every night” (but Kate already knew that about my dad).

  I ended up telling the truth instead of trying to be upbeat and act like things were great. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Kate. I don’t know what happened. I have no plan. This was not very well thought out. I’m sure that twenty years from now, I’ll wish I had learned to play the harmonium or written a book or gone backpacking, but I don’t have any desire to do anything. That’s what worries me.” While I was talking, she pulled a small white patent leather cosmetics case out of her bag and, from that, a white plastic box, which she opened up. She pushed a tiny blue pill through a foil blister pack. She and Germaine looked like they were on the same brand of pill.

  “Seeing anyone special?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I have to take these the same time every day and I’m never up early enough to take them in the morning.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  “And no, not any one particular person,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said. I really didn’t feel like talking about boys.

  “So anyway, you’re too cool for school,” she said. “Literally. That’s what I think.”

  “I don’t think I’m too anything for school,” I said.

  “Don’t overthink it,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I think you’ll be fine.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You should come visit me.”

  “I should.” That would be fun, although I got the impression she didn’t totally mean it. Usually when we made plans, it was “Let’s go to the House on the Rock next week, let’s meet at the coffeehouse tomorrow, let’s hang out in an hour.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said again. “You seem fine to me.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I miss you.”

  “Hey, remember that time we poured glitter on Hank Thedford’s car after he pushed me in the pool senior year?” she asked.

  “He was so pissed.”

  “And his friends called it the FairyMobile.” We laughed, but something about this sudden reminiscing felt strange. That had only happened a year ago.

  “Hey, that’s crazy about Mike, don’t you think?” she asked, after a second.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I saw him a few nights ago.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Cellar.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Everyone from high school was there the night before Thanksgiving,” she said. I looked hard at her.

  “Everyone?” Everyone used to describe a group of people was one of my pet peeves. Whenever anybody said Everyone is going or Everyone was there, I was not a part of that Everyone.

  “Everyone with a fake I.D.,” she said, taking a sip from her drink so she didn’t have to look at me. My face grew hot, but I guess I couldn’t really feel that left out. I wouldn’t have been able to get in the stupid bar even if I had wanted to. And I hadn’t. But why did Kate even want to go, let alone have an I.D.?

  “You have one now?” I asked.

  “It’s the worst ever. I think that the guys at the bar just let me in because they’d never seen me before.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “I lent it to Meg for the rest of the weekend,” she said. “Sorry.”

  One of the reasons I hadn’t talked to Meg since junior year was that she accused me of pathetically following Mike around like a puppy. I said, “At least I’m a puppy, not a cow,” and we never spoke again. Kate had thought it was pretty funny at the time, especially since she was the one who originally said that Meg seemed sort of cowlike as she moved slowly through the halls at school, making sure everyone got a good look at her huge, braless boobs. I guessed they were friends now.

  “Sounds fun,” I said, taking a sip of my frothy maple coffee concoction. It was cold by then.

  “Anyway, Mike’s transferring schools,” she said. “The University of Kansas.”

  “What? Why?”

  “To be with Wendy. She goes there.”

  “He’s still with Wendy Maloney?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” I said. “He’s transferring from Harvard to . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “For a girl. From our high school.” I could see doing something like that for a really special girl, like maybe a princess, or Oprah, but not old Wendy Maloney. I didn’t actually know anything that was technically wrong with Wendy, but I wouldn’t leave Harvard to move to Kansas for her.

  “Yeah,” she said, taking another sip of her drink. “It’s sort of romantic.”

  “Get the fuck out of here! That’s not romantic at all! It’s stupid,” was what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I just took another sip of my cold drink and wondered that maybe since he was also doing something colossally dumb, it wouldn’t be that strange talking to Mike after all. It couldn’t have felt any odder than talking to Kate, who seemed to have suddenly become possessed. Bits of the old Kate still poked through, but there was something else in there as well.

  When we left, she gave me the one-armed hug but also knocked over some kid’s Jenga tower, pretending it was an accident. Usually after I hung out with Kate, I felt refreshed, renewed, even inspired to go do something. I felt half empty this time, though.

  december

  I had to admit, the news about Mike intrigued me. Declining to go to college for no good reason seemed like a dumb idea, but transferring from Harvard to the University of Kansas—for a girl—seemed pretty dumb as well. I wondered what was going through Mike’s mind. Maybe he needed me as a friend. Maybe I also just needed to talk to him, because I was bored, because I was lonely, because Jane had told me to, because some part of me had to see if what was happening to Kate was also happening to Mike. Each time we’d talk
ed since Thanksgiving, she mentioned some new guy that she had a crush on or was hooking up with (and I learned that “hooking up” in college means “having sex” and not “kissing or anything else” the way it did in high school). It seemed to be a different guy each week. I was having a hard time telling the difference between these guys—or caring. If Mike was also turning into a college clone, then I wouldn’t have to think about him anymore.

  One day, when both Dad and Germaine were out of the house, I sat down at the desk that was in the dark corner of our kitchen. I needed the quiet to think. I stared at the computer screen hard until I got mad at it for not giving me a sign one way or another what I should do. Then I let my eyes go out of focus as I debated. My brain hurt. It felt like I hadn’t really had to think that hard about anything for a while.

  Finally, I opened up a new e-mail. Hey, I typed. What’s up?

  I hit send before I had time to rethink it. So I wasn’t exactly spilling my guts out. But I had finally e-mailed Mike. Now I could quit worrying about whether to e-mail him and start worrying about whether he would write me back, whether he would get the e-mail, or whether he would ignore the e-mail.

  Other than the painful-yet-admittedly-kind-of-fun anticipation of waiting to see if Mike would write me back, Christmas was crappy. I honestly don’t know why I would have expected it to be otherwise; it wasn’t like I had done anything to deserve much more than a lump of coal in my stocking. The year before, I had received lots of stuff to take to college: a new laptop (which Josh ended up appropriating), some reference books that I’d probably never use, little knickknacks for my dorm room. This year, Dad got me a college guide.

  “Are you serious?” I asked after I opened the present. We’d had our usual Christmas dinner of Popeye’s fried chicken around the dining table and now we were upstairs in the family room, sitting on the couches by the tree (which I had decorated this year in shades of purple and gold) and listening to the cheesy Christmas carols radio station while Superhero went nuts with a pig-ear chew toy. I’d gotten the same book junior year. Only now I had a more up-to-date version. I was rarely that rude, but I couldn’t help myself.