Chapter 51
— Chapter 51 —
My second semester at Purchase, I started dating a guy from my biology class. After the lecture one day, Ted asked if I wanted to have lunch, and I was tired of sitting alone, so I said yes. I’d gotten along nicely with my roommate first semester, but over the holidays she decided to transfer to Pratt, and Jam was so busy with school that I was lucky if I got to see him for an hour or two every few months.
Ted talked a lot, so I didn’t have to. He was writing a screenplay. He was an English major but planning to switch to film. He wore a Kangol hat, because Quentin Tarantino had been photographed wearing one, and when he talked, he fiddled with it in a way that made me think he really wanted people to notice his hat. After a few weeks of lunches, Ted assumed we were dating, and it seemed like a lot of work to tell him otherwise. Aside from being overeager, there was nothing drastically unlikable about him, and it was nice to have someone, even if he wasn’t my soulmate.
On weekends, Ted and his friends made weird little Super 8 movies, and they always talked me into playing “the girl.” My casting seemed closely related to the fact that they couldn’t get any other girls to hang out with them, but they were sweet and dorky, and it gave me something to do. So I kept dating Ted, even after I dropped out of school. On the nights I wasn’t working at The Aster, I slept over in his dorm room, because it was better than going home. Plus, breaking up with Ted would mean breaking up with his guys too, and I wasn’t ready to lose my entire social life in one go.
One Saturday night, Ted and the guys had just gotten back from winter break, and we were crowded into a booth at City Limits Diner in White Plains, eating cheese fries. They were hashing out details on their summer plan to sublet a house near campus so they could use school equipment to shoot a full-length horror movie. I was supposed to play a girl who gets stabbed to death by a man in a grim reaper costume, and then, wearing a blond wig, I would play another girl getting eaten alive by the actual grim reaper. I had not agreed to this. My participation was assumed. The fact that they didn’t have to equate their time to money had already been wearing on me, and I wasn’t keen to spend my days off covered in blood, screaming.
“Hey, Frey, you want in on the house?” Ted’s friend Mick asked, pointing at me with a french fry, dripping gravy on the table. “Rent is four fifty each, but if you and Ted share a room, you can split it.”
“Yeah, that sounds good. Let me think on it?” I said to give myself space. Even though I desperately wanted out of my parents’ house, I couldn’t move in with a guy I only kinda liked and his five closest friends. But I didn’t want to embarrass Ted by saying no in front of everyone.
Ted flashed me a funny look and tossed a twenty on the table. “That’s for us, Mick.” Then he pointed to me and said, “Can I talk to you?”
By the time we got to the parking lot, he was bursting. “Why would you do that?” he shouted. He tapped the brim of his hat, pulling it down, then pushed it back from his forehead. The streetlight shone perfectly on his face and I wondered if he was setting his angles on purpose.
“I’m really sorry, Ted!” I said, feeling awful for bruising his ego in front of his friends. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us—”
“You just invite yourself into everything! God! You don’t even go here anymore and you’re like always here!”
My cheeks burned. I wanted the asphalt to open up and swallow me into the underworld of White Plains. If I had dumped him, I would have felt relieved, but the rejection was physically painful.
“I didn’t realize you don’t want me around,” I said, looking up at the light, chest aching. I knew he was going to write this moment into one of his films. I wondered who would play me.
Ted flipped his hat around backwards. “I just… you know, I’m a film major now. With the new movie… and my cowboy script is almost done, like girls are paying attention to me. I have a lot of opportunities, you know?”
I nodded, wiped tears from my chin. I was so mad at myself for crying. For caring at all.
He deflated a little. “I mean, you don’t even go here anymore,” he said, in a gentler tone this time, as if he were offering me help and kindness. “What are you even gonna do with your life? I can’t let you drag me down.”
So, by the time I got to the bar by the Somers post office, I had a desperate need to drown my embarrassment.
I was two drinks in, and the awful Grateful Dead cover band still seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of Shakedown Street . There was a guy in a Yankees cap at the end of the bar who kept looking up from his buddies to smile at me, and I was sitting there, trying to figure out if I was the kind of person who had rebound sex, when I felt the tap on my shoulder.
“Hey, little sister. Who’s the dumbass serving you?”
“Your mom,” I said, without turning around, and I laughed, picturing Mrs. Wells in one of her Chanel suits, double pouring behind the bar.
“What, we’re not friends anymore?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t seen Charlie since Babbo’s funeral three months earlier. Even then, I managed to keep my distance. Over the past few years, I’d gotten very good at maneuvering out of situations where I might be left alone with Charlie. My mother was hell-bent on preventing that from happening too, which was the only way she’d ever made any part of my life easier.
“Well, let me buy your next drink at least,” Charlie said, leaning in front of me, raising his hand to get the bartender’s attention. He was wearing a blue and white striped dress shirt, tie loosened, sleeves rolled. He’d gotten his hair cut shorter on the sides, bangs swept across his forehead. It made him look younger. Less like a reigning relic of the eighties and more like he belonged in this very moment.
“Save my seat. I gotta pee,” I said, smacking the bar, my foot catching the stool as I stood. It tipped, but I managed to right it.
Charlie laughed. “That boyfriend of yours is one lucky guy.”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
When I got back from the bathroom, Charlie’s jacket was draped over my barstool, and he’d taken the seat next to it. There was a Long Island Iced Tea waiting for me.
“That’s not what I was drinking,” I told him.
“You’re too young to be drinking like a fifty-year-old man,” Charlie said. His eyes were extra sparkly.
I sat down. His jacket smelled like vetiver and musk.
“What kind of stupid guy lets you get away?” he said, smiling.
I felt myself blush. In all my time avoiding Charlie, I’d forgotten how intoxicating it could be to have his focused attention.
“Yeah, he wasn’t great.” I took a long sip of my drink and grabbed a handful of peanuts.
“In bed?”
“In general,” I said, trying to skirt the awkwardness of his question. “He was writing a screenplay about a grizzly old cowboy who starts robbing stagecoaches to avenge his sister’s death.”
Charlie laughed. “Clearly, riveting.”
“Ted is from Staten! He’s never been further west than Pittsburgh.”
“To be fair,” Charlie said, “a lot of Staten Island guys could probably rob a stagecoach.”
“Do you think old timey cowboys really said howdy all the time?” I asked like it was a joke, but it felt like a problem I needed to solve. Ted was assured of his talent, but I thought his screenplay was awful. I had always believed Ted was my charity case, but he thought I was his. I kept looping through all the little details of our relationship, and I was convinced that if I could figure out whether Ted was a good writer or a bad writer, all of it would make sense to me.
“I can’t say I know much about cowboys,” Charlie said.
“Every other word in that screenplay is howdy .”
“Well, then good riddance to Ted.” Charlie grinned, tipping his glass to toast to the demise of my relationship.
“He has the same scar as his mother.”
“Ted?”
“No, the cowboy. And it’s not—they weren’t branded or anything. She passed the scar down to her son ! Like in birth! That’s not how scars work. Right?” As soon as I said it with assurance, I was unsure. I had to think really hard about staying on my barstool. It no longer felt like a given that gravity would keep me in place. “Right?”
“Whew,” Charlie said. “I hope Ted fucks better than he writes.”
“That’s weird, dude. You’re like my brother.”
I remember him flinching when I said that. I remember that my shirt had these tiny buttons, and the buttonholes were cut too big and the top one had slipped through, and I caught Charlie looking. My sister was the one with the big perky boobs. I was the one who still looked like I was waiting for puberty. But I had this black demi-cup bra that made me feel sexy and I had worn it hoping Ted would kick his roommate out for the night. The way the wire dug into my rib cage made me so aware of my breasts. I was so aware of Charlie being aware of my breasts. I loved it and hated it. I loved him and hated him too.