Teddy Wayne - Loner

“Hello?” The Crimson Key member wielding the scooper was looking at me with hostile impatience under his perky mask. “What can I get you?”

I quickly asked for vanilla. “No, wait,” I said as he plunged his arm into the bucket. Vanilla was what I always picked, the gastrointestinally safe base that deferred flavor to its toppings.

“Chocolate,” I revised. “With rainbow sprinkles, please.”

I was tucking into my audacious dessert, wondering how long I could last without speaking to anyone, when Sara materialized in another well-timed intervention. She wore a capacious L.L.Bean backpack and was empty-handed.

“No ice cream?” I asked.

“I was hoping there’d be sorbet. I’m pretty lactose intolerant.” She added, with mock solemnity, “We all have our crosses to bear.”

The spare lactase-enzyme supplement bulged in my pocket. I reached in and fingered its single-serving packet. To offer it to her would be an admission that we together were fragile Jews in the crowd, unable to stomach a treat little kids gobbled unthinkingly.

“Here,” I said quietly, handing her the packet as if making a drug deal. She recognized what it was and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said, tearing it open and depositing the pill on her tongue. I felt a curious surge of warmth toward her.

We drifted back to the ice cream table. “So, a fellow digestively challenged Ashkenazi,” she said. “You are Jewish, right? Your last name sounds like you’re a member of the tribe.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “You haven’t been around in a while. Were you in hiding?”

“Ah, you’ve seen through my facade,” she said. “Underneath this pleasant exterior lies a deeply antisocial personality. I’m a closet sociopath. Or psychopath, I mean. I always confuse them.”

She chuckled. I spooned some ice cream into my mouth and nodded.

“Groups aren’t my thing,” she went on, waving her hand at the masses around us. “I’m an extroverted introvert at best. But everyone says that, right? They want to claim the best parts of each — that they can be charming when they need to, but they really prefer solitude. No one’s ever, like, ‘I have the neediness of an extrovert and the poor social skills of the introvert.’ Sorry I’m talking so much. I’ve been in the library all day prepping for my freshman seminar.”

“I’m not that good in groups, either,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Rice’s letter of recommendation. “Or one-on-one.”

She laughed authentically.

“Like, when it’s just Steven and me in the room, I’m not any more comfortable than I am here.” It was a clunky segue to my next question. “Who’s your roommate?”

“Veronica Wells? The really pretty girl?”

Feigning ignorance, I shook my head. “I haven’t been paying much attention to the people in our dorm. Is she nice?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Sara said. “I’ve seen her maybe five times. I think the last conversation we had was when she turned on the light at four in the morning and said, ‘Sorry.’ ”

“Oh, you’re also in the front room,” I said. “That’s annoying, huh?”

She shrugged.

“So do you have any sense of her?” I was leading the witness ham-fistedly, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Not really. She and her crowd seem a bit too-cool-for-school.”

“Does she have gatherings in your room?”

“No, thank God.”

A spastic “Hey, guys!” interrupted us. It was Steven, in the second physics-pun T-shirt he’d worn that week ( MAY THE MA BE WITH YOU).

With breathless excitement, he informed us that there was a proctor in Grays who wasn’t cracking down on freshman parties, and they were having a big one tonight, the other Marauders were being lame, but did we want to come?

“I’d better stay in,” Sara said, taking a skittish step back.

You and your too-cool-for-school friends might be there, at an unsanctioned event. Sara and you clearly weren’t friends, but she could nevertheless provide a bridge, rickety though it was. And thus far hardly anyone else was even talking to me.

“C’mon,” I said. “I thought groups were your thing. What are you, a closet psychopath?”

The reference was just enough of a gesture toward intimacy to elicit a giggle. Parroting something a person had previously said in a different context, I was figuring out, was a winning tactic. The subject is flattered you paid such close attention in the first place and commends her own intelligence for catching the allusion.

“When in Rome,” she said, hands clenching the straps of her backpack like a soldier preparing to parachute into enemy territory.

Inside the rain forest fug of the dorm room, we leaked through a strainer of bodies toward a desk that had been transformed into a bar. I poured myself half a cup of gin and glazed it with tonic water; Sara reached into a cooler of beer cans bobbing in a slushy bath. A poster of Bob Marley exhaling miasmically presided over the festivities. Clubby music blared a beat resembling a spaceship’s self-destruct alarm.

I scanned the room. You weren’t there. But it was early.

Steven ambled off to find some people he knew; he had already gotten himself elected mayor of Harvard’s nerdy township, of which the Matthews Marauders was one of many districts.

Sara and I were left alone. In between baby sips of her beer, she confessed she’d hardly drunk alcohol before this week.

“I wasn’t what you’d call Miss Popular in high school.” She wiggled the tab on her beer can like a loose tooth. “Unless ‘mispopular’ became a word. Thank God for Becky and Ruma. Those were my two best friends.”

I had always envied the depth of female friendships — even the abjectly ostracized seemed to have a soul mate on the margins with them. I’d have traded that for my tenuous coterie of fools.

“I was sort of the same,” I said. “I had two hundred classmates, and I bet half of them wouldn’t even remember me.”

The tab on Sara’s can snapped off and, with no garbage nearby, she slipped it into her pocket. “But the anonymity is kind of nice,” she reflected. “I always felt a little sorry for the kids at the top. Everyone’s watching them. That can’t be easy. If no one’s paying attention to you, at least you can be yourself, do your own thing.”

I was about to counter that whatever things the anonymous accomplished, they were of little consequence, since nobody noticed. But she had a point. Unseen, you could take your time, slowly amass knowledge and skills. For years everyone could believe you were a faceless foot soldier; they hadn’t investigated more closely, or they simply lacked the necessary powers of discernment. Then, in a single stroke, you could prove them all wrong.

Someone jostled my arm as he passed, spilling gin and tonic on my wrist.

“No one paying attention to you.” I licked my sticky skin like a cat. “I guess that’s something I identify with.”

“Something with which you identify,” she said playfully. “Aren’t you glad you’re talking to that fun girl at the party who reminds you to never end a sentence on a preposition?”

“You should also try to never split an infinitive,” I said, but whoever was manning the volume control cranked it up and she didn’t hear me.

“Just one request, please,” the rapper boomed from the speakers, and everyone in the room pumped their fists and chanted along to the next line: “ That all y’all suckers can choke on these! ”

The volume was lowered. “I hope to play that at my wedding someday,” I said with a nervous laugh.

“What a coincidence,” Sara said. “I was saving it for my father-daughter dance.”