You Think It, I'll Say It(14)
Rae slipped a cassette into the dashboard tape deck before backing out of the driveway, and the Indigo Girls’ song “Joking” erupted into the car; when it ended, she said, “Can you rewind it?” At her request, I did this so many times as we drove east on 101 that I soon knew precisely how long to hold down the button in order to get back to the song’s start. “Joking” was on an album I’d heard in Rae’s room, and though I wasn’t certain what made this song a personal anthem for her—it started with intense guitar strumming—I understood the impulse behind it, the craving.
We’d been driving for twenty minutes when Rae slapped her right hand against the steering wheel and said, “Fuck!”
I glanced across the front seat.
“I forgot the pot,” Rae said. “And Noah reminded me, like, three times.”
I did not feel optimistic about Rae’s reunion with Noah, or about my own ability to comfort her if the reunion was unsuccessful. “Do you want to turn back?”
She thought for a few seconds, then said, “There’s not time. He has choir practice at eight.”
Hot, pot-smoking Noah Bishop was in the choir?
I had been intrigued by the prospect of visiting an elite boarding school, but I couldn’t see much as we arrived under darkness at what seemed to be the back side of a vast concrete gym. A boy in a down vest, a plaid flannel shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers was standing with his back to the gym, under a light, and Rae unrolled her window and wolf-whistled at him.
“Do you have it?” he asked.
“Fuck you,” she said out the window. “That’s not how you greet me.”
She parked in an otherwise empty lot, and we both climbed from the car. Gratifyingly, Noah Bishop was even handsomer than he looked in photographs. She approached him, placed both hands on his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth. When she pulled away, she said, “That’s how you greet me.”
He gestured toward me. “Who’s that?”
“My friend Dana,” Rae said.
Noah nodded once and said, “Yo, my friend Dana.”
I knew that when Noah ejaculated, he made a whimpering noise, like a baby; that when Rae gave him hand jobs, he liked her to use Jergens lotion; that the first woman he’d ever masturbated to had been Kelly LeBrock, after he saw the movie Weird Science; and that his father had been investigated by the SEC and found innocent of wrongdoing, though Noah himself suspected that his father was guilty. I also knew that sometimes Rae knelt on the floor of her Dartmouth dorm room, clasped her hands together, and, addressing the phone on her desk, said, “Call me, Noah. Just please fucking call me right now.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Did you get the key?” Rae asked Noah, and he said, “Yeah. Did you get the weed?”
“There were complications,” she said.
I cleared my throat. “Is town that way? Maybe I’ll go eat dinner. I should be back by, what, eight, Rae? Or eight-fifteen?”
“Sure,” she said, and I could tell she was barely paying attention.
* * *
—
Even though I made a couple of wrong turns, I reached the town of Exeter within fifteen minutes and kept walking until I found a place where I could buy a meatball sub and a Diet Coke. A handful of kids who looked like students came in, and I reminded myself that the unease I felt about eating alone at Dartmouth was irrelevant here. When I finished, I walked along Water Street, not entirely sure what to do. I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.
The stores, most of which were closed, were brick, with awnings or quaint wooden signs outside. I entered a pharmacy. When I found myself in the “family planning” aisle, I decided, just as an experiment, to buy a pack of condoms. Would I plausibly seem to the cashier like a person who was having sex? The wide array—lubricated and ribbed and ultra-thin—bewildered me, so I went with what was cheapest. I also picked up a bag of Twizzlers and some lip balm, for camouflage. My heart was beating quickly as I waited to pay, but when it was my turn, the cashier seemed as uninterested in me as Noah had. By then, it was almost eight, so I walked back to the gym swinging the plastic bag with my purchases in it.
At first, I thought my timing was perfect, because as I approached the gym, Rae was pulling the Honda out of its parking space. Then I realized she was pulling out alarmingly quickly; her tires squealed in a way I had rarely heard in real life. When the front of the car was pointed toward the road, she revved the gas and almost ran me over as she sped past. “Rae!” I yelled. “Rae!”
But the car didn’t stop, and its taillights had soon disappeared.
“I guess you’re screwed,” someone said, and I turned and saw that Noah stood about twenty feet away, smirking.
I walked toward him. “Where’s she going?”
He shrugged.
“Is she coming back?”
“Hard to say.”
“Did she say she was going to find me?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Did you guys have a fight?” This was a nosier question than I’d have asked under normal circumstances, especially of a good-looking guy, but he was still in high school. Plus, Rae was or had been his girlfriend, and she wasn’t prettier than I was. And then I understood, with a weird revelatory kind of internal kick, what had drawn me to Rae in the post office. Since arriving at Dartmouth, I’d felt my own lack of prettiness as a humming, low-level failure. I wasn’t singularly unattractive, my existence wasn’t a crime. But I also wasn’t, in an environment of youth and affluence, fulfilling my part of the social contract—the thing it mattered the most if I was, I wasn’t. And yet Rae wasn’t really fulfilling it, either; Rae wasn’t beautiful or blond or thin or charming, and she didn’t seem apologetic. Even having lost some of my original respect for her, I still envied her confidence.