Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [31]
She slipped beneath the covers while Tom lit one of Nick’s candles and put on his favorite Steve Miller Band tape. Then he tore off his clothes, threw them onto the floor on Nick’s side of the room, and grabbed a Trojan from his toiletry kit.
Shipley lifted up the covers to welcome him in. “I knew you were the right man for the job,” she giggled nervously as Tom took her in his arms and began the quick work of deflowering her. As is the way with all rites of passage, it seemed to be over almost as soon as it had begun. It was inelegant, thrilling, and routinely monumental.
Afterward, they fell asleep in each other’s arms. They were sleeping still when Nick crept in around one in the morning, eyes strained from reading up on yurts in the library, grateful for the cozy warmth of his sleeping bag.
Cut to October. The air was nippy and the foliage was on fire. Dexter College had never looked finer, a shoo-in for every prettiest college campus award in the country. So far no one had fallen from an upstairs window after taking too much acid, or driven into a tree. No professor had molested a student. The president of the college hadn’t had a stroke, or been arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a saloon downtown. Not a blade of grass was out of place. The errant black Mercedes with Connecticut plates did occasionally disappear from the parking lot, but it was always returned, albeit with an empty gas tank.
Most nights, Shipley slept in Tom and Nick’s room. She even kept a few outfits in Tom’s closet to avoid the morning Walk of Shame back to her dorm. There was nothing shameful about her and Tom. By now they were practically married.
Nick was well on his way to finishing his yurt. He’d researched the construction carefully. Hundreds of pamphlets on yurt-building had been published on the World Wide Web, and scrolling through them had actually been fun. One yurt builder extolled the virtues of yurt dwelling in such a seductive way that Nick was sure he was onto something:
“On clear nights you can lie inside the yurt and see the stars through the open crown. In poor weather there is plenty of room for you and your friends to sit comfortably around a warm stove, listening to the storm rage. From outside, the yurt radiates a welcoming glow….”
It didn’t have to be big. Just big enough to lie down in and entertain a visitor or two. And the smaller it was, the easier it would be to erect. Nick was no carpenter. The most complex structure he’d ever put together was a balsa wood airplane.
At last he discovered an outfitter in Colorado who sold yurt kits with the timber cut to size, the screw holes already drilled, and a weighted wax canvas cover and flap door that Velcroed on and off. The company claimed it would only take six hours to put it together. Nick ordered the fourteen-footer—the smallest and most inexpensive kit they offered. He used his mom’s credit card number, promising to pay her back with the earnings from his AV job. Three days later, the giant box arrived via Federal Express.
He’d borrowed a stepladder and tools from the guys at Buildings and Grounds, found the perfect building site bordering the woods behind Root, and followed the kit’s simple instructions. Six days later, it was still a wobbly work in progress and his hands were blistered from hammering, but he was determined to get it done. Once it was complete, he could sleep there instead of staying up late reading in the library or watching TV in the common room until Shipley and Tom had finished fooling around and gone to sleep.
This was just such a night. From outside the door, Nick could hear Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” playing on repeat, a good sign that Tom and Shipley were still naked. Nick wandered down the hall to Root’s ample kitchen, where Grover, Liam, and Wills, the juniors who made up the Grannies, were making curry. Unlike the residents