The photo was of a big guy sitting on a motorcycle in front of an open garage door. He had pitch-black hair that was too long, and his shirt was off, showing tattoos on his arms and chest. He was mostly muscle, but he was carrying some extra weight around the middle. That’s my problem, too. It was a sunny day and he was laughing, having fun with the person behind the camera. Who was he?
Right then, I realized I’d been going about things the wrong way. You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.
* * *
When Wavy came back from giving her aunt a tour of campus, she sat down to study. On a Friday night. There was no other way, so I said, “When I got home, your aunt was snooping in your desk. Is there anything in there you wouldn’t want her to find?”
Nailed it in one. Wavy jerked open the drawer and grabbed the picture. With a crazy pissed off look on her face, she polished the glass with the hem of her skirt.
I stepped closer, pretending I was seeing it for the first time.
“That’s a cool motorcycle. Who is that?”
Considering how eager I was to blurt out my fake tragedy, I couldn’t believe Wavy didn’t want to tell me, but she looked me over, evaluating whether I could be trusted.
“I just wondered, because your aunt seemed pretty upset about finding it. So who is he?”
“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 asshole 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.