Teddy Wayne - Loner

I borrowed my mother’s car and drove past the gated condominium communities and the gargantuan houses that looked like they’d just had cellophane peeled off them, their driveways full of SUVs and hockey nets, the lawns cleared of leaves, and arrived at the mall. An immaculately mopped retail complex with a cornucopia of national franchises to suit one’s every consumerist impulse: there was the Cheesecake Factory, where I’d celebrated my sixteenth birthday with my family; Foot Locker, purveyor of all my white sneakers; the Gap, my annual back-to-school jeans and shirts merchant; and Panda Express and Perfumania, Vitamin World and Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle, their logos as familiar as national landmarks.

And there was Applebee’s. (Why, I thought, is an Applebee’s not a s’eebelppA, nor, for that matter, an Orangebird’s?) My former classmates milled about within expected spheres. I walked past the popular kids near the front, Paul de Witt and Joel Blum and Laurel Wilcox-Richards and Heidi McMasters and their respective aides-de-camp. There wasn’t a single greeting from them, not even a nod of recognition. I could’ve been a busboy clearing away their popcorn shrimp. That was fine; they seemed so provincial now, attending their respectable second-tier institutions, continuing their alcohol and pot habits at frat parties with bourgeois predictability while, unbeknownst to them, I was doing coke at a Harvard final club.

“ID?” the bartender asked when I ordered a vodka soda.

“Shit,” I said, digging through my wallet. “I must have left it at college.”

Root beer in hand, I located my erstwhile clique, or three-fifths of it. (No one had heard from Michael Lu since he’d left for the University of Chicago.) The attention was on Daniel, who was cataloguing his adventures with blackouts and six-packs, bongs and sluts. He bragged about his hookup tally: a baker’s dozen so far this semester at Wisconsin, a number so outlandish that he couldn’t have been making it up. It took them all a moment to realize I was there and, after a round of hellos, Daniel picked up where he’d left off, breaking out his phone to show us pictures of three conquests on Facebook (surely the better-looking ones).

He polled the others on how they had fared in that department. Unwillingly celibate Paresh deflected and stammered. Perspiring like a criminal under the interrogation lights, George claimed to have gotten two blow jobs.

“What about you, David?” Daniel asked with the cocksureness of being the sexual lieutenant of our blundering platoon. “You tap any Harvard ass yet?”

I hadn’t wanted to cheapen our experience by citing it in present company, but Daniel posed the question with such slick hostility that I couldn’t resist. “A couple,” I said.

“A couple,” he repeated. “Meaning you were with a couple, like in a threesome, so now you’re bisexual?”

Titters from Paresh and George.

“Here’s one,” I said, pulling up your Facebook profile on my phone. Their greasy fingers passed you and your plaid shirt around.

“She’s hot,” Paresh said.

“Superhot,” seconded George.

“You’re boning her ?” Daniel asked, incredulous.

“Ask me at Christmas break.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s only a matter of time,” I said coolly. “On Saturday night she gave me a hand job.”

“Ooh, a hand job .” He snickered. “What is this, the eighth-grade trip to Washington, DC?”

“I’m taking it slow,” I said, regretting the disclosure. “She’s not the kind of girl who’s just another notch on your bedpost. This is serious.”

“If you’re not fucking, exactly what kind of ‘serious’ things do you do with her?”

“We go to parties at final clubs. Sometimes we do coke.”

“Coca-Cola,” George said, looking at Daniel for approval while hyperventilating with laughter.

“If you’re really hooking up with her, text her something,” Daniel challenged me.

“She’s with her family. I don’t want to bother her.”

Daniel folded his arms and grinned at the others. “He doesn’t even have her number. Because he’s taking it slow .”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll e-mail her. This is so stupid. I’m sure she’s out in Manhattan now. She lives on the Upper East Side.”

I said the last two sentences looking down at my phone, knowing without seeing their faces that they were impressed. As they bunched around the screen, I composed a Facebook message:

At high school reunion. Gag me. How is your vacation going?

I pocketed the phone and kept my hand on it in case it vibrated.

Daniel went to the bathroom and, on the return trip, with his crudely acquired sexual bravado, somehow managed to wangle a conversation with Heidi McMasters. Daniel Hallman talking to Heidi McMasters! It would have been inconceivable six months ago. As Paresh and George compared the merits of their school’s dormitories, I watched Daniel feign suaveness. My initial envy was tempered by seeing Heidi, for the first time, for what she was: just a cute suburban girl whose best years were already behind her. He strode back to us as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, deliberately not mentioning his transcendence of previously impermeable social borders so that Paresh and George would obsequiously grill him, the intrepid explorer, about the otherworldly wonders he’d glimpsed in his travels.

As the night ended, Daniel asked if my “hand-job queen” had written back.

“No,” I said. “I remembered she was going to see a movie tonight.”

“Do you even really know this girl?” he taunted. “Or do you just jerk off to her picture?”

“Of course I know her,” I said. “I see her all the time.” The only photo of us actually together also included Sara, with my arm around her, and if it came out that I’d been dating her, they’d never believe I had also hooked up with you. And the one of me at the library would provide Daniel with more ammunition — that you must have been giving me hand jobs under the table all night long while we studied.

Maybe you really were at a movie. Even so, there was no need for you to ignore me, not after what we’d done together. It was less than a week ago, but the memory was already growing fuzzy. Talking about you in the third person almost made me feel as if I’d conjured you up, a character in a dream. It’d all be better once school resumed and I saw you again. But four days was too long to wait.

After logging another sixty hours with the Federmans, on Saturday morning I told my mother I’d made plans to meet a college friend in Manhattan and would she mind dropping me off at the train station after lunch?

“Of course,” she answered, and asked when I’d be back.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “If it’s late, I’ll take a taxi home from the station.” Then, optimistically: “I may just sleep over and come back in the morning. Okay if I play it by ear?”

Most eighteen-year-olds in my position might have had to negotiate to stay out late in New York City without concrete expectation of a return. My mother couldn’t have looked more pleased I was getting out of the house. Chumless David, who’d spent his adolescence in his room, who hadn’t had so much as a sleepover past the age of nine, had not only made a close friend at school, but a Manhattan sophisticate to boot.

“Perfectly fine,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?” Anna whined. “You wouldn’t let me see Sophie tonight because you said we all have go to the Goldmans’. Why is he allowed to get out of it?”