All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(88)

“Kellen. My fiancé.”

She held her hand out so I could look at the ring on her finger. I’d noticed it before, but not thought anything about it.

“You’re engaged?”

She nodded.

“Why haven’t I met him? Where is he?”

“Prison.”

“Are you serious? Why? What did he do?” I said.

“I need to study.” Wavy put the picture away and sat down at her desk. Done talking. Poof. I was invisible. She couldn’t hear me.

“So are your parents coming to visit this weekend?”

Apparently she could hear me ask that, because she shook her head.

“Why not?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh my god, that’s so sad. What happened?” That was what people always said when I told them about Jill Carmody.

“They were murdered,” Wavy said.

A soon as the words left her mouth I knew I had to take down my fake-ass shrine to Jill. You can’t milk a pretend tragedy when your roommate has a real one. It’s too pathetic.

I’d told Mrs. Newling that Wavy and I were friends, but it wasn’t true. We were just roommates, even after I knew her parents had been murdered and her fiancé was in prison for statutory rape. I saw it as some titillating soap opera.

Wavy and I didn’t become friends until our second year together in the dormitory. That was the year I did something so stupid I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. With me, that’s saying something. If it’ll make people pay attention to me, I’m perfectly willing to humiliate myself.

I slept with my German professor, and not just once, but almost the whole fall semester. It wasn’t like I did it for the grade, because I was good at German, but I was so flattered that he was attracted to me in all my chatty, airheaded, you know, fatness.

His wife eventually caught us and there was a huge scene, with the German professor saying, “It was a stupid fling. It meant nothing.”

That was me—the stupid fling that meant nothing. The * wouldn’t even give me a ride home. I cried the whole way, walking across campus from his house to the dorm.

I was an exhausted, hungry wreck. I sat at my desk, sobbing and rummaging in the drawers for anything to eat to make me feel better. Wavy got out of bed in her nightgown, took her student ID card off her desk and motioned for me to follow her. She could be so bossy.

Downstairs, the corridor to the cafeteria was closed at night by a big steel door, which Wavy unlocked in ten seconds of fiddling around with her ID card. She unlocked the door to the kitchen the same way. Inside it was dark except for the emergency exit signs glowing red like Hell, until Wavy opened the giant cooler. In the halo of its blue, misty light, she laid out food for me. Quart boxes of strawberries. A vat of chocolate pudding. An entire tray filled with little squares of lemon cake. A five-gallon bucket of rocky road ice cream and a can of whipped cream.

That’s my idea of a friend.





2

WAVY

November 1988

Renee liked to take quizzes out of women’s magazines. They were silly, but good for the same thing knitting was good for. The quizzes helped Renee empty her heart, and she filled it so quickly with the wrong things, it was no wonder she needed to empty it. Lying on our beds on Sunday nights, Renee read the quizzes out loud, and I wrote down our answers.

What’s Your Romance Style? Renee was the Bubbly Butterfly. Flirty but fickle, quick to seal the deal and move on. My score didn’t fit any of the categories, so Renee invented a new one: Wallflower Nymphomaniac.

“I don’t even understand how you could get engaged without having some kind of conversation. Did he just say, ‘Do you want to marry me?’ and you nodded?”

I nodded and Renee laughed. I looked up at Kellen’s picture, which traveled back and forth between my nightstand and my desk drawer, depending on my mood. When my heart hurt too much, I hid it in the drawer. I got out of bed and picked up the picture, intending to put it away.

Renee stopped laughing and took the picture out of my hand.

“That is one seriously beefy hunk of man,” she said to tease me.

I snorted and let her put the picture back on my nightstand. Another night before I put it away.

What I missed most about Kellen wasn’t riding behind him on the Panhead. I missed watching him eat. Renee ate in darting little bites and without chewing enough. The same way she filled her heart. Too quickly, and with too much talking and not enough feeling.

Our second year as roommates, I went home with Renee at Thanksgiving, and found out why she ate that way. The Dales lived in a neighborhood full of mansions with wrought iron gates and front lawns like public parks. They were rich, but they ate so desperately, they might as well have been stealing food from a stranger’s garbage. Even I didn’t eat like that anymore.

Mrs. Dale heaped everyone’s plate up with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. After that, pie and whipped cream. I admired the generosity of all that food. I managed to eat a few bites of turkey and some pieces of buttered dinner roll for the Dales. Small, precise things that I could put in my mouth with people watching. The mashed potatoes were yellow with butter, but they were too complicated. They reminded me of rules I was trying to forget.

“You’re not hungry, little girl?” Renee’s grandfather said.