You are 18 years old, a month into college at a tiny school in western Illinois. You have no idea what to do or how to be here. It is Friday night, and you are a fresh person, a new underage drinker, unaware of protocol. How are you supposed to get drunk with so little money, so few friends? You have a super-nice potential boyfriend who lives in a fraternity house across campus. Are you supposed to seek him out and ask him for alcohol? Are you supposed to seek him out at all?
You give your twenty-one-year-old roommate your last 3 dollars so she can buy you a bottle of orange Mad Dog from the 7-11 down the street. She does, and then leaves. You drink most of it sitting on your bed, listening to Deep Purple’s Greatest Hits from your tape deck. You place the bottle on the tiled floor only when you light another cigarette. The streetlights outside the window grow brighter and illuminate the early, falling snow.
***
Now you are sitting on the floor of a different dorm room, this one with carpet and white walls. You think a few hours have passed. You’re not sure. Across from you, three women sit in bean bag chairs. Bob Marley posters are tacked on the wall above their heads. They drink Schaefer Beer and smoke cigarettes. Julia is vulgar and wears leather and lipstick; Belinda is funny and wears jeans and a tight tee shirt; Wendy is sexy and wears a flowing hippy skirt and no makeup. They are juniors. They are known as the Psycho Bitches. They are incredibly cool.
You have also been known as psycho, but for reasons like passing out on a bathroom floor at a party or crying in a popular Mexican restaurant as your boyfriend broke up with you. You are not brazen or confident. You never wear what you want. You don’t even know how to choose.
They ignore you as you stare. When you blink, it takes your eyes a little while to open again.
You drag from your cigarette and then sit beside Julia. Her red lipstick looks loud like an objection.
You feel a rush of brave.
“Do you like me?”
Julia frowns, as if she’s just smelled something unpleasant. Belinda and Wendy stop talking and look at you, holding cigarettes almost to their mouths, smoke shimmying up from the tips. Julia blows a perfect smoke ring; Belinda exhales through her nose. Your head is heavy on your neck and you don’t know whether it sways a little or a lot.
“Do you like me?” You hear your voice. Distant and weak, as if you’re trying to talk over a storm.
They answer one at a time and then try to resume their conversation. But you ask again.
***
Now you are in the fraternity house of your super-nice potential boyfriend. You are vomiting into a rust-colored garbage can in the corner of the second-floor hallway. Your heaves sound hollow. You wonder how you got here and who can hear you; the house is full of people. You walk down a hallway on the third floor and clutch a wooden banister at the top of the stairs.
The next morning, you wake up in his room beside a scratched coffee table. You are fully clothed and covered by a faded comforter, a pillow under your head. You are sick with hangover and shame, the distinction between the two starting to disappear.
He sits beside you and hands you a glass of water in a stained but clean coffee mug. His rug is scratchy. He says that you had asked everyone if they liked you. You slurred from person to person and grabbed arms, pulled on hands, tapped shoulders, interrupted conversations, slobbered, repeated, insisted. In every room of the house.
A package of powdered sugar donuts is open on the comforter. Sunlight glistens on the cellophane. You ask a greater being to make everyone forget they know who you are. You see your tennis shoes by the door. Your feet are bare, your toes freezing. Where are your socks?
Then he tells you what the Psycho Bitches did. And you remember.
“Yeah, I like you,” Julia said.
“Yep,” Belinda said.
“Me too,” said Wendy.
When you kept asking, Julia said, “Jesus! I like you, okay?” And then the Psycho Bitches put on their coats and walked you to the frat house. They held you steady and made sure you didn’t slip on the icy sidewalk. You said thank you. Then they turned you over to your super-nice potential boyfriend so he could take care of you.
Your mouth opens, but you don’t say you’re sorry—you discover that you cannot speak. You pull a donut from the package and take a bite, rub the dry cake into your soft palate with your tongue. You try to generate saliva, but you can’t; you sip water and wonder what to do and feel like you might be getting a cold. The window is swirled with ice. You see a blur of branches lined with soft snow. You sit up and light a cigarette, sweetness still on your tongue, and wonder how you will carry yourself through this day, the next day, the next night. The many years ahead.
For the last two decades, Anna B. Moore has been publishing creative nonfiction, essays, and short fiction in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including Shenandoah, Black Warrior Review, Brain Child, American Scholar, and most recently Entropyn and Smokelong Quarterly. She lives in Chico, CA, where she has been an adjunct professor of English since 2001. You can find more of her work at annabmoore.com.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Nenad Stojkovic
