Teddy Wayne - Loner

My “unique” essay had “rather intrigued” the Harvard admissions committee, my guidance counselor later informed me.

I waited for a lull in conversation between the baseball players. “Ekaj and lihp,” I said.

“What?” Jake asked. “A lip?”

“Your names backward.” They stared at me blankly. “Jake is ‘ekaj,’ Phil is ‘lihp.’ ”

The two of them contemplated their reversed monikers and shared a look.

“Guess we’re really at Harvard,” Phil said under his breath.

I sank back into the couch’s quicksand cushion, praying for the meeting to begin so that my silence wouldn’t be conspicuous — or, failing that, for a monumentally distracting event: burst sewage pipe, freak hurricane, the president’s been shot.

Uoy t’nac og gnorw gnieb flesruoy, I thought.

Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned around. “How was your move-in?” asked a girl standing behind the couch.

“I saw you coming into the dorm with your parents,” she said after I failed to react. “I’m Sara.”

“Oh, hi. David.”

“Nice to remeet you.”

“You, too,” I said, and I was groping for something else to add when, from the entrance behind her, in the fashion of a queen granting a balcony appearance to the rabble below, you traipsed in, the nonchalant laggard. Suddenly there was no one else in the room; for the briefest of moments, as you entered my life, I paid myself no mind either, a rare, narcotic, unself-conscious bliss.

“You’re late,” Jake hollered in your direction. “You missed the meeting.”

You glanced up from your phone. “Isn’t it at four?” you replied.

He drew out the suspense for a beat. “Just messing with you.”

You returned to your phone without any expression.

“It’s about to start, though,” he said. “Sit with us.”

“Thanks,” you said in a low, unmodulated voice. “I prefer to stand.” You crossed to the other side of the room.

I’d received nothing from those fifteen seconds, but it felt like I had; Jake and Phil’s loss was my gain. You had no truck with entitled athletes who chased openmouthed after fly balls like Labrador retrievers and assumed any girl would jump at the heliocentric opportunity to orbit their sun. Their assets from high school were liabilities here. Guess we’re really at Harvard, I wanted to scoff in their faces.

Jake, looking unscathed by rejection, whispered something to Phil, who laughed.

“Well, I should probably find a place to sit,” Sara said, and wandered off.

You sequestered yourself against a wall, arms crossed over your chest, the only student without a lanyard. You were here because it was compulsory, not to make friends. You had no interest in present company, didn’t need to manufacture an affable smile and hope some generous soul took pity on you. No, you weren’t one of us at all. You were in a tribe of your own.

How differently our lives would have unraveled over these years if the computer program generating the room assignments had started up a millisecond later, spat out another random number, and the two of us had never had a chance to meet.

If one were creating the Platonic ideal of a woman from scratch — which I could do here, manipulating the facts to serve my narrative agenda, though I’ll cleave scrupulously to the truth — she would not necessarily resemble the being who had just swept through the common room, whose features I later had time to assess in magnified detail.

To begin with, your “flaws,” a word I sandwich between petrified scare quotes. On the upper third of your forehead, as if connecting your two cerebral hemispheres, a blanched hyphen of a scar; a nose the tiniest bit crooked and long; two central incisors that outmuscled their next-tooth neighbors.

But the faces that are most compelling rarely belong to models, avatars of unblemished conventionality. They don’t possess the imperfections that highlight the nearby superlatives — the distant twin mountains of an upper lip under an elegantly concave philtrum, the cheekbones sloping like the handle of a jug. And, most salient to an eye across a room, the hair in a carelessly knotted bun, a few rogue tendrils grazing the sides of your face, chestnut flecked with mid-October hues, a newly minted penny unsullied by commerce. That would be your hair-dye lyrical subcategory: “Mid-October.” (My mother’s color of choice is the law office sensible “Medium Ash Brown.”)

My seat on the couch allowed me to study you with impunity while keeping the dorm proctor, a redheaded grad student in German philosophy, nearly in my sight line as he introduced himself. The heel of one of your leather-sandaled feet was planted against the wall. Gazelle legs encased in dark jeans; I estimated your height at a half inch shorter than mine, depending on our footwear. The spaghetti strap of a tank top climbed over lissome shoulders (a fuller bosom than your lemon-size breasts would have been incongruous—gauche, even — against your svelte torso). Adjacent to each strap was a pearly sliver of skin less touched by the sun; the rest was the tone of a patiently toasted marshmallow.

“One of the great things about college,” the proctor said as my eyes remained on you, “is how seemingly unrelated stuff starts unifying in your mind. A theory you learn in a science lecture will connect to a line of poetry in your English seminar and link to a story a friend tells at lunch. Your world is expanding and diffusing while simultaneously contracting and growing denser. Everything, in a sense, becomes one thing.”

After the abstract musings, he shifted to the practical matter of dorm rules, the details of which I would have been diligently committing to memory in my previous incarnation — the one that ended when you arrived. My concentration was broken only when the proctor, reading aloud the college’s policy on sexual misconduct, suddenly lost his vocal footing.

“… includes not only unwilling or forced vagin — vag — vag—”

His face turned a shade darker than his hair. I winced, but a few students snickered, Jake and Phil included, as he continued to trip on the word.

“—vag — vag — vag—” he stuttered, excruciatingly incapable of advancing, an oratorical Sisyphus. The poor guy, who’d likely spent years in speech therapy working to remedy a lifelong affliction, had finally decided he was ready to be in a position that required public speaking, and it was all undone with a single anatomical adjective before a room of puerile teenagers.

The more he persisted, though, the more my sympathy waned, replaced with resentment for his subjecting us all to such vicarious discomfort. Eventually he gave up, skipping the section altogether and moving on to the rules for alcohol and drugs.

I kept ogling brazenly without fear of detection until your head swiveled a few degrees from the proctor, casting, from your face to mine, an invisible string stretched taut.

It’s difficult to say for sure, since I was less bold about looking at you after that, but I believe I was the only person you made eye contact with, however fleeting.

“That about wraps it up,” the proctor said, flop-sweaty minutes after his slip-up. “Oh, whoops — I forgot the icebreaker game. Duh.”

He asked us to go around in a circle and announce our first names prefaced by another word beginning with the same letter. I came up with a few options right away, to mitigate the anxiety of any turn-based speaking program, in which you count down with dread how many people are left until you, whereupon, as everyone looks your way, you must turn the key in the ignition of your vocal cords and hope they start without a hitch, always a risk with an inveterate mumbler in the final, shaky throes of puberty.