Teddy Wayne - Loner

A moment later the ID checker asked for your card. You were still in your stupor, and one of your friends nudged you. You snapped out of it with a halfhearted laugh. I then understood. Maybe you wouldn’t admit to it, maybe you didn’t even know it yet, but you were also faking it. Somewhat of a loner, too.

Justin and Kevin were hosting a gathering in their suite that night. When Steven was ready to go, I told him that, actually, I was pretty exhausted.

He insisted I come. “You don’t want to miss out on the first night,” he said. “Someday we’ll all reminisce about it.”

Precisely. But the immediate terror of staying in while everyone else on campus drank alcohol together and hooked up — my four years of high school compressed to one joyless evening — began to eclipse my fears of the long-term consequences.

“Maybe for a bit,” I said.

Crudely Scotch-taped to the walls of Kevin’s bedroom was a gallery of posters for comedies and gangster movies starring all-male ensembles. A purple tapestry tacked to the ceiling cast everything in a dank submarine light.

Justin’s height — a slouch-shouldered six foot five — and fake Idaho ID had enabled him to purchase thirty-six cans of beer and two plastic jugs of vodka from a liquor store in Central Square. I splashed orange juice into my cup of vodka and took a sip. An acrid corruption of my breakfast beverage of youth. I’d have to find something more palatable, a signature drink.

Everyone was more reserved in the cloistered intimacy of a dorm room. When the conversation remained stilted, Ivana suggested we play the drinking game Never Have I Ever.

“Never have I ever blacked out from drinking,” she said after a cursory review of the rules.

“I’m confused,” Steven piped up, unashamed to put his ignorance on display. “You haven’t blacked out yourself, but if someone else has, they drink?”

Justin and Kevin nodded and swigged from their cups with lupine grins of self-satisfaction, conquests masquerading as confessions.

On Carla’s turn, she brought up marijuana use. Kevin, Justin, and Ivana all drank. I’d seen it just once in person, when a drum-playing skater had passed a green baggie to his friend under a desk before history class.

“Never have I ever been fingered by someone,” said Kevin.

The sudden swing into the crassly sexual startled us all, except Ivana, who tipped her cup, emboldening Carla to follow suit and rendering Sara the female holdout. She peered into the opening of her beer can while everyone else stayed silent.

My lower back prickled with perspiration. I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet, an abyss of experience I’d hoped never to reveal at all in college, and certainly not on the first night.

My turn. To head off any further declarations of carnal milestones, I said, “Never have I ever been convicted of a felony,” knowing that none of us teachers’ pets had ever run afoul of the law and hoping it would act as a reset button which, as an ancillary benefit, would shift the focus from Sara’s contagious embarrassment. No one drank. From there things amplified into the absurd: orgies, snorting cocaine off strippers’ breasts, unsolved homicides. The game petered out, followed by a card trick from Steven (he’d brought his own deck).

We split up into factions. Sara ended up next to me on the bony futon and we traded getting-to-know-you questions. She was planning to concentrate in Latin American history; she’d gone to a magnet school in Cleveland; she had an older brother and younger sister.

I didn’t have much to say about my sisters when Sara asked. Miriam had been genuinely apathetic to me growing up and had recently decamped across the country for law school, cohabitating with the boyfriend she’d had since college. Anna spent all her time socializing; when she and I overlapped in my senior year at Hobart High, I tacitly agreed never to speak to her in the hall lest I betray our relation. I’d always envied the brothers and sisters whose last names were legendary among the student body — those handsome Wilson boys, the wild Capalleri sisters. The entirety of Anna’s farewell to me the morning I left for college, after my parents woke her, was an irritable “Bye” shouted from her bed. Those crazy three-to-four-years-apart Federman siblings.

“My older sister’s in law school and my younger one’s in high school,” I told Sara.

“How old are they, exactly?” Before I could answer, she laughed. “I’m the worst at small talk. You must be so bored. Hey, here’s a fun fact: I spell my name without an h .”

“I spell David with two d ’s,” I said. “I’m even worse at small talk.”

“No.” Then, with robotic caesurae and emotionless inflection: “I — am — worse.”

“I believe — I am — in fact — worse,” I said in the same voice.

“I — dis — a—gree,” said Sara. “De — fi — ant — ly.”

Defiant : my nominal adjective. I tried to remember hers— short? sensitive? shy ! — but her phone rang. “Sorry,” she said before picking it up and leaving the room. “My parents.”

On the floor by my feet, poking out under a men’s magazine promising its reader guns for biceps, was Harvard’s Freshman Register , known as the Facebook, onetime inspiration for the digital Goliath. I hadn’t picked up my copy yet. I flipped through the F s.

There he was: David Alan Federman, wearing a white dress shirt, tie, and yearbook-photographer-mandated smile — a rectangular vacuum of charisma. My hair the drabbest of browns, destined to desaturate without distinction, parted like a small-market weatherman’s. My complexion was barely contrastable from the shirt and white space bordering the frame. Features that neither enticed nor repelled. A body sixty-eight and three-quarters inches long and 146 pounds at my last checkup, outwardly average in all respects.

The museum card next to the artwork: Garret Hobart High School, 152 Midvale Ln. , my hometown, the humiliating two letters of NJ .

Turning to the first-name index in the back, I found two Veronicas. The first wasn’t you. The second was in the middle of the W ’s, above a spare Park Avenue address and The Chapin School , a faceted blue sapphire among the round gray pebbles:

Veronica Morgan Wells.

Careless sunglasses half hidden in windswept hair, a collared shirt with just enough pearl-snap buttons unfastened to make your décolletage inviting but not tawdry. Behind you, an indeterminate bifurcation of sea and sky, your serenely unimpressed smile implying the background was a perennial vacation spot rather than a one-off outing. You had wrapped up a day of lounging in a secluded cove on a private beach, reading a Russian novel from a clothbound volume, wondering how you could feel so lonely in such a beautiful place — you’d always worried there was something defective about you, were scared people wouldn’t like you when they got to know the real you, maybe you’d meet someone at Harvard who would accept you for who you were, and next summer you could take him back here.

(I’d spent July and August interning at my father’s law office in a squat brick building that shared a lobby with Dr. Irving Jomsky, chiropractor.)

Sara came back and I casually tossed the Register on the floor. Carla joined us and talked about Freshman Week activities, but all I could think about, running in a loop, was Veronica Morgan Wells, Veronica Morgan Wells, Veronica Morgan Wells. The quadrisyllable that halves its beats at the middle name, dividing again at its pluralized terminus of subterranean depths. The percussively alert c drowsily succumbing to the dozing s . Perfectly symmetrical initials, the V found twice upside-down in the M , inverted once more in the W , and, if spoken, easily confused with a German luxury automaker.