Teddy Wayne - Loner

Sitting at lunch one day with the Matthews Marauders, I was furtively reading an essay from that morning’s Crimson about the author’s attempts to squelch her inborn competitiveness with her classmates over grades, summer internships, and boyfriends. (“Then I realized,” she wrote in the generously italicized and disingenuous epiphany, “that I didn’t have to be the best . I just had to be the best me .”)

“Let’s start the pregaming half an hour earlier tonight,” Kevin said. “We may as well maximize our hangout time together before classes start.”

“Fine by me — I can’t get enough of your guys’ dumb jokes,” Ivana said teasingly.

“Yeah, right,” Justin said. “You know they’re hilarious.”

I imagined one of the hulking chandeliers above us breaking free and crashing on our table in a blizzard of glass.

When I tilted my head back down, I spotted you grabbing two pears from a basket and walking to the exit, none of your private-school mafia in the vicinity. A chance to stage a seemingly random encounter.

I abandoned my partially eaten lasagna on the dishwasher track and followed you outside, maintaining a discreet distance as you cut across Harvard Yard. The chiming of the Memorial Church noon bells was drowned out by the sputtering roar of a lawn mower. A monarch butterfly juked flirtatiously in front of me. You were biting into one of the pears and heading toward Matthews. I could enter with you, make you aware that I lived in the same dorm, maybe jokingly remind you of our shared name-first, descriptor-second introductions that night in the common room.

You got waylaid by something written in chalk on the pavement. I swerved around you and over to Matthews, where I waited by the entrance, pretending to be immersed in my phone. When you approached, I pushed the door open and held it. Up close, your skin appeared like the unperturbed shell of some creamy European confection.

“Thanks,” I said, flustered, as you stepped in.

I’d mixed it up; I was the one doing something for you. I would’ve been better off making the bad pun I’d formulated during my chase: Pair of pears?

Yet the verbal blunder didn’t offset my small chivalrous gesture. You smiled at me. Not the coy smile of your Facebook photo — a genuine one, flashing the full range of your front teeth.

It was like entering Harvard Yard again on move-in day. Cue the timpani.

Not wanting to seem as if I were tailgating you upstairs, I loitered in the lobby, browsing the fliers on the bulletin board. “Stressed or sad?” one read. “Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health diagnoses among college students. Schedule an appointment with university health services today.”

“Harvard isn’t for everyone,” my guidance counselor had told me in my junior-year advising session, words I ignored as boilerplate dissuasion he dispensed to every Cambridge hopeful in hedging against the school’s stingy acceptance rate. “It’s true that it can open doors for you later, but you might well get a richer college experience elsewhere, in a place you can find yourself more easily. This is often the problem when you go somewhere primarily for its name.”

It’s convenient, in hindsight, to blame Harvard. But it wasn’t the guilty party.

The eve of Harvard’s weeklong shopping period, in which students sample classes before selecting them, I was on my bed, laptop scalding my thighs, meandering the Internet of you, looking at the photo and cycling through the same information. (“ ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to think about the world outside themselves,’ said junior Veronica Wells, representing Hungary.”)

The September breeze carried boisterous shrieks and distant music up to my open window. The Matthews Marauders were in the Yard, attending the Ice Cream Bash. (As with the A Cappella Jam, a number of social happenings attached an overblown noun that leached them of any allure: the Foreign Students Fete, the Hillel Gala.) I didn’t have it in me to go to yet another cornpone event, especially when you were unlikely to be present.

An e-mail pipped into my in-box among the deluge of university mass mailings. It was from Daniel Hallman, a charter member of my high school cafeteria table. He was reporting on his first week at the University of Wisconsin, where, he claimed, he’d gotten “wasted or high” every night and had received “blow jobs from three girls, though not at the same time… yet.”

His tone was unrecognizable, nothing like the Daniel of the previous four years, who once in a while threw in a sly remark at lunch, who had never, to my knowledge, had a real conversation with a girl outside of class. Though he was evidently a new man now, flush with alcohol in his bloodstream and treatable venereal diseases, to engage with him, albeit electronically, would be to return to that cafeteria table, an even more desperate seat than my current one in Annenberg.

Yet he was the one having the quintessential college experience, drunkenly bed-hopping, while I had locked myself up in sober solitary confinement. I thought of my childhood bedroom, the years in which no one other than family members and cleaning ladies had set foot inside it. It occurred to me that, had I not been assigned a roommate, I could die on my twin mattress and it might take weeks until someone investigated.

My phone buzzed.

“So he does know how to use that expensive device we bought him,” my mother said after I picked up.

“Sorry for not calling back.” I could hear NPR in the background. “You’re in the car?”

“We’re going out for Chinese. I didn’t feel like cooking.” She lowered the radio. “So? How are you? How’s Harvard?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Classes haven’t started yet.”

“And your roommate? What’s he like?”

“He’s fine. I don’t think we’re going to be best friends or anything.”

“No?” She sounded disappointed. To my father: “Green light.” Back to me: “Well, it takes time to get to know some people. I’m sure once classes begin you’ll make a few friends.”

“I have friends already,” I said. “There’s a bunch of us in the dorm that eat together every meal and hang out. The Matthews Marauders.”

“Really?” she asked. “That’s great. What about that nice girl we met moving in?”

“Sara,” I said. “She’s in the group, too. We talked awhile the other night.”

“Oh, good. I liked her.”

We both waited for the other to say something.

“But things are okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.” My voice cracked. I took a drink of water from a stolen Annenberg cup. “Really good, actually. I even have a nickname everyone calls me. David Defiant.”

“Anna, put your phone on silent,” she chided. “Sorry, what did you say? They call you David Definite? Why’s that?”

“Defi — it’s a long story.”

“You’ll have to tell it to me sometime,” she said. “Listen, we just got to the restaurant, but I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself.”

“I should go, too.”

“Oh? What’re you doing tonight?”

The bass from the Ice Cream Bash turned up. “I’m going to this ice cream party.”

“Sounds fun,” she said. “Remember to take your Lactaid.”

Hordes of students ate ice cream from paper cups, gabbing amiably as sanitized pop music played on speakers. While no one was looking, I swallowed one of the two lactose-intolerance pills I stored at all times in the small fifth pocket of my jeans, entered the fray, and got in line. It seemed like I was the only untethered attendee, as if everyone else knew the secret that ensured they were never alone at a party.