Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [35]
“It’s not really a matter of believing.” Nick sat down beside her and picked up the zen meditations book. “It’s like learning an instrument. I’m not very good at it yet, but if I practice these…these simple truths, they’ll eventually become part of my everyday existence, and I’ll achieve zen.”
Eliza rolled her eyes. “Good luck with that.”
Nick pulled his bag of pot and Zig-Zag rolling papers out of his pocket, sneezed five times in succession, and rolled himself another joint. He was still starving, but he’d just have to make do with getting high. “So, what do you think?” He sneezed again and gestured at the yurt’s bent wood walls. “Like it?”
Eliza lay on her back with her head in her hands and gazed up at the yurt’s half-finished roof. She flipped the hood up on her wool army jacket to keep the spiders out of her hair. “You need something to sit on, like a futon or at least some pillows. And it might be nice to have one of those little cooking stoves, and a cooler for food. I don’t know about you, but all this fresh air all the time has really fucked with my metabolism. I should just attach a bag of Cap’n Crunch to my gut and keep it pumping all day, like a reverse colostomy.”
Nick licked the joint and tamped down the ends. “Soon as I get the roof done, I’ll bring my sleeping bag out here.” He lit one end of the joint and offered it to Eliza, but she waved it away.
“Did I ever tell you about my toilet seat back home?” she asked when she realized the yurt did not have a bathroom. She didn’t wait for Nick to answer. Since Shipley and Tom had paired off and Nick had started building his yurt in earnest, their little orientation gang had entirely dispersed. Nick didn’t know any more about her than what he’d learned the first week of school.
“My mom has a Disney fetish. Anytime they have a sale at Kmart or Penney’s or Sears, she’ll buy anything with a princess on it. Our whole house is like a Disney shrine. My toilet seat is yellow with light blue flowers on it, and when you put up the lid, it sings that song from Snow White, you know: ‘Whistle while you work!’
“My parents have an office over the garage. They rent real estate in beautiful Erie, Pennsylvania, where no one in their right mind would want to live. When I was little, like, before I could go to school, they’d park me in front of a Disney movie and head out to the garage. When the movie ended I’d tap on the window and one of them would come back inside and flip me a Rice Krispie treat or a fruit roll-up and stick in another video. I didn’t fucking care. Kids get molested and abused at day care. I always was a little scared of that toilet seat though. Sometimes I’d pee in the bathtub just so I didn’t have to listen to it.”
Nick continued to smoke his joint, unsure of what to say. Eliza’s story was sad and he was pretty depressed already. He tried to remember what the guy in the Dumpster had said about cells just wanting to survive. Then he tried to think of an uplifting zen meditation to lighten the mood. But his mind was a blank.
Eliza continued her depressing monologue. “I almost offed myself once, when I was around eleven. Or no, I guess I was thirteen. I think I was just lonely, and I’d been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath. I drank a whole bunch of aspirin and Scope and sat in the kitchen with the oven on. My mom came over from the garage to get a sweater and wound up taking me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. I probably wouldn’t have died anyway. I would’ve just shat bluey green for about a month. Anyway I was okay once I discovered sex—not that I’ve had any lately.” She shot him a meaningful glance. “But at least I’ve got my lucky rabbit