My Last Innocent Year(50)
Bo slid over to make room for me on the banquette.
“It’s this phone number, see,” Doug was saying. “1-800-I-AM-LOST. And you can call it if you’re lost.”
“How does that work?” Jason asked.
“It uses GPS technology,” Doug said with only the hint of a duh. “It stands for Global Positioning System. Satellites determine where you are in space. So my idea is to have this phone number—”
“1-800-I-AM-LOST,” offered Bo.
“Right,” Doug said. “And there’ll be people working the phones twenty-four hours a day who can direct you where you need to go.”
“What if you’re only spiritually lost?” I asked. Doug looked confused. Bo turned to me and smiled, his snaggletooth visible. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Did you ever have braces?”
“You mean because of this?” He pointed at his tooth, and suddenly I felt bad for asking. “Nah, my parents are kind of cheap. You know, mow their own lawn, drive an old car. I guess orthodontia seemed like another frivolous expense.”
“Oh, my dad’s the same way,” I said, although he wasn’t. “He never throws anything out, washes plastic bags so he can use them again.” What I didn’t say was that Abe was frugal because he was poor and, even so, he’d never skimped on me. By all accounts, Bo’s family had money; until I came to Wilder, I’d never heard of a family with money that didn’t spend it.
The waitress dropped a pitcher of beer on the table along with a sleeve of plastic cups. Doug reached for it, but Bo pushed his hand away and poured a cup for me. It might have been the most gallant thing that had ever happened at the Knotty Pine.
We clinked our cups together. “Cheers, big ears,” Bo said.
Across the table, Kelsey was talking to Allison Etter, my freshman-year roommate. For some reason, she and I always acted like we didn’t know each other.
“The thing I don’t get,” Kelsey was saying, “is she isn’t even that pretty.”
“Or thin,” Allison said without looking at me, maybe because I was the only one at the table who knew she’d spent the summer before freshman year at fat camp.
“Who are you talking about?” Jason asked.
“Monica Lewinsky,” Kelsey whispered, as though she might be sitting nearby.
“Can you imagine going on a date with her?” Doug said, laughing. “Like, introducing her to your mom? ‘Mom, I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Monica Lewinsky.’”
The whole table tittered, including me. In the short time we’d known her, Monica had become every girl’s worst nightmare, the equivalent of having your seventh-grade diary read over the school loudspeaker or walking into class with a period stain on your pants. We identified with her, which should have made us kinder but instead made us mean. We felt more comfortable siding with guys like Doug because their side was safer. They would never admit to wanting to fuck Monica even though they would, of course they would, but if they did it would be her fault and not theirs. Her desire made her unseemly.
“I feel bad for her,” Bo said, and we all turned to look at him. “Everyone’s lying except for her, but she’s the one whose life will be ruined.”
“Well,” said Doug, “one thing I’ll say, she certainly makes watching C-SPAN more interesting.” He raised his cup and chugged it down as the band finished its sound check and started to play.
I lit a cigarette. Bo leaned over to grab a handful of nachos and the feel of his thigh against mine felt good. I wondered if he’d heard about me and Zev—then, strangely, if he knew about Connelly. I felt the sudden urge to tell him everything, to confess my sins the way he’d told me he used to at church. I pictured him as a little boy, sitting in a pew next to his grandmother, and wondered if I was the kind of girl a guy like him could introduce to his parents.
Up on stage, Tabitha had started singing. I’d always thought she was an idiot but on stage she was sexy, wrapping her hands around the microphone like it was a dick. I watched the guys at the table watch her—Doug, Bo, even Jason. It was easy to fall in love with a girl behind a microphone. I was about to whisper something about Tabitha to Bo when I looked up and saw Connelly pushing his way through the crowd, like Moses parting the goddamn Red Sea.
I’d never seen Connelly outside Stringer Hall and, as strange as it sounds, never thought of him out in the world doing mundane things like pumping gas or buying groceries. For me, he only existed in that office on the fourth floor, where dust motes hung in the soft, gray light. And yet, there he was in the Knotty fucking Pine, wearing a puffy black jacket and a wool hat. I saw people staring at him—how could they not? The man was too handsome for his own good, I thought, as he pulled off his hat and ran a hand through that hair, aware of the impression he made. It was, perhaps, his greatest fault, and yet I couldn’t help but watch him too, amazed that out of all the people in this crowded bar, he had chosen me. I thought of a line from The Age of Innocence, something Newland Archer says to Ellen when he sees her for the first time in a long while: “Each time you happen to me all over again.” I felt a blush run through me, from the base of my spine to the hidden part of my scalp. I brought my cigarette slowly to my lips, then my gaze shifted and I saw the woman he was with.