Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [29]
Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double,
pays my ticket when I speed…!”
The singer’s dirty blond hair hung over his shoulders in matted dreadlocks. His voice was raspy, his blue eyes wide and excited. Tom stood to Shipley’s right, wolfing down his food. Shipley was glad she’d taken the time to brush her hair and change into her pretty white sundress from Martinique. She loved how soapy and clean Tom smelled most of the time, and how big he was. She felt safe with him. Since his arrival at the barbecue she’d paid no attention whatsoever to Adam, who stood to her left, quietly munching his hot dog.
Nick had run out of pot. He ate his condiment-filled bun with forlorn sobriety, pretending not to care that Shipley’s attention was being monopolized. If Shipley were to choose either one of the others, Nick preferred Adam, but he could tell by the way she kept looking up at Tom between her long blond eyelashes that she was smitten with him. How she could like a guy who could eat a whole sausage pizza between dinner and bedtime and burp the national anthem he simply could not understand.
“This music sucks,” Eliza noted to no one in particular. Mustard dripped down her chin, but she left it there on purpose.
“I like it,” Shipley told her defiantly.
“You would,” Eliza shot back.
“Brewski anyone?”
Sea Bass and Damascus danced over to them and passed out plastic cups full of Busch beer. A yellow bandanna was tied around Damascus’s unruly black curls. His wobbly stomach poked out above the waistband of his jeans. Sea Bass had done something to his sideburns. Their shape was more severe now, like sled runners zooming across his cheekbones toward his nostrils.
“Marry me?” Sea Bass asked as he handed Shipley a beer.
“Sorry, but she’s already spoken for.” Tom reached for a cup and downed most of it in one go. It had taken him all of a week to notice what everyone had seen from the start: Shipley was the best-looking girl on campus. And it wasn’t like they had to spend a lot of time getting to know each other. They were practically from the same town. They even went to the same dentist—Dr. Green, in Armonk.
I’ll be damned if any of these clowns is going to nab her first, Tom thought. It would only be a matter of days before she’d be burning patchouli incense out of her belly button and dancing around topless in the grass. He could think of better things to do with her topless. He dropped his plate on the ground and slipped his arm around Shipley’s waist, claiming her before anyone else could.
“Tom?” Shipley demanded. “What are you doing?”
Tom pulled her toward him. He liked how small she was, how neat her waist felt under her thin dress. He yanked her plate out of her hands and dropped it on the grass. The fact that Damascus and Sea Bass and Nick and Adam and Eliza and half the campus were staring at him enviously increased the size of his balls. “Kissing you,” he announced before kissing her.
Shipley had been kissed a few times during party games in ninth and tenth grade, but as she got older and more concerned with propriety—in the face of her brother’s impropriety—she’d stopped going to parties. She kissed Tom back eagerly, even daring to press her fingernails into his back. Tom smelled so manly. Kissing him made her feel like the star of a movie, except it was better than a movie because it was real. Her first week of college and she already had a boyfriend.
“Look how cute they are together,” Eliza commented with disgust. “I heard while I was waiting on line in the employment office today that some insane number of Dexter students wind up marrying each other. Like sixty percent. Guess there’s not much else to do here besides fall in love.” She retrieved the dirty plates from the ground and stalked off to dump them in the trash.
Adam sipped his beer without tasting it. He shouldn’t have come. He certainly wasn’t going to get any “action,” as his sister so aptly put it. Not that he’d wanted any. He just wanted to talk to Shipley, and maybe hold her hand.
“And it’s just a box of rain, I don’t know who put it there.